Tony Cragg at the Lisson Gallery / Vispo-collage: And Reveal / Talking about your art & talking bollocks / Sex Pistols

 

Reflections at an exhibition - Tony Cragg at the Lisson Gallery. We sat on the low white wall in the courtyard and ate some cake. LJ thought the sculptures would be easy to steal, looking at how low the boundary wall was. But we wondered how heavy they were. Too heavy to lift? And how would they be sold? 

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And Reveal, RTomens 2025

Another collage of old vispo pieces, this time against type on a photo of material found in the street. Sometimes I would like to say more about my work but perhaps that is only the effect of the idea that artists should say/be able to say something about their work - something...profoundly illuminating, perhaps? But I am not in the Art world. I am not in the academic world, that's for sure. Do I play dumb, like Warhol, or am I really dumb? 

All I can talk about right now...no...not even talk, only mention, is the poor performance by Chelsea last night in losing to Arsenal with barely a shot on target. That and the fact that this morning, at 11.04, my mind is asleep and my eyelids yearning to close so I stare into space frequently, out the window at the rare occurrence of sunlight illuminating the houses opposite and really I should be outside in that sunlight, preferably on a clifftop with the cool sea breeze on my face instead of hunched over this keyboard in the city...

Someone leaves a comment on my FB post of a recent artwork but it is an obscure (to me) reference which I don't understand, possibly because I am dumb, or because he is a lot younger and is saying something only under-25s would understand. Which reminds me, when I said 'bollocks' as we walked down the road the other day I wondered if Young People would even know what that means/refers to. It feels like such a 70s word, even though I think it's still commonly used (amongst men) today in the UK. Americans never say 'bollocks', do they?  Now I think of the Sex Pistols album, Never Mind The Bollocks and realise that it must, to some degree, have introduced the word to a previously ignorant world, although not to the extent that it then became part of their language. The thought of people all around the world puzzling over the word in 1977 amuses me.

I presume it's common to talk bollocks about either someone else's art (hello critics!) or your own. That's a stupid sentence. 

I mean...

...artspeak is widely recognised as bollocks and artists either willingly puff up their work with pretentious bollocks or are encouraged to do so by galleries. Perhaps I'm envious of their vocabularies being greater than mine, along with their ability to concoct clever-sounding sentences in relation to their art.

Or perhaps I'm just...a...lazy sod!

Vispo: You're Mad! / Peter Finch typewriter poems book update / James Sallis RIP

You're Mad!, RTomens 2026

It's a mad, mad, mad etc world, yes. Hasn't it always been so? 

Each side of every political divide views the other as mad.

Bowie sang he 'would rather stay here with all the madmen / Than perish with the sad men roaming free' (All The Madmen). Perhaps it is better to be mad...

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I've updated the Peter Finch Typewriter Poems book page having discovered that the images had disappeared. See some pages from this little gem here. 

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Saddened to hear that James Sallis is now sleeping The Big Sleep. I first discovered him as a crime writer in the 90s with a series of novels that broke the genre mold. At the time I was writing fiction, attempting novels that merged noir and sci-fi. I emailed a sample to Sallis and to my surprise he actually replied with some positive feedback. Despite his encouragement, I was unable to finish anything that I was really satisfied with. He worked on the new New Worlds magazine for a while in the late-60s and it was there that his first sci-fi short story was published. The editor, Michael Moorcock, introduced Sallis to the hardboiled crime classics which eventually lead him to writing novels that presumably made him money (Drive in particular) unlike the sci-fi. His sci-fi shorts are collected in Time's Hammers which has a fantastic introductory essay written by the man himself.

Dreamachine / Book-buying highs / Archigram and the material world / Vispo: Psychological Compromise

 

I went to see Typewriter Jim about some vintage paper he might have that I could buy. The first thing he showed me was this Dreamachine which he got from a friend who's friend had it built as a project. "Over-engineered," Jim said. I wouldn't have noticed. The outer shell is also the wrong colour. It should be dark, to increase the 'strobe' light effect. Yes, that made sense. He turned it on. I watched it rotating for a while, but looked away for fear of entering a hypnagogic state. 

I have a fear of any mind-altering experience, perhaps because I consider my mind already 'altered' since birth and further changes could be distressing. So I have never dabbled in mind-altering drugs. The nearest I've been to that kind of 'high' was when smoking a joint given to me whilst staying at my then girlfriend's flat. I smoked it on the balcony and didn't enjoy the feeling of my mind floating free from it's natural home..

These days I get high from buying books. There are several kinds of high involved, of course. The surprise bargain find in a charity shop, the online hunt and capture, the high street hunt and capture, the book fair find and the unexpected online find, such as the one pictured below. It's a box containing facsimiles of every issue of the Archigram magazine. I didn't know of its existence until a couple of weeks ago. It was published in November of last year. The high experienced when opening the package was just about the greatest possible when it comes to buying books, or in this case, magazines.

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I've always had an aversion to adverts. I'm not saying they shouldn't exist, just that they have always irritated me. From way back in the days of watching television I would do anything but endure adverts - look away, get up, close my eyes etc. It's as if, from a young age, I had an inkling that I would never be a great customer, a person susceptible to the seductive art of the advertising 'creatives'. Why? Because I would never be materialistic enough? Because I've never liked being told what to do either with my money or, to be honest, anything else. 

All attempts to sell anything from a brand of baked beans to the latest car were wasted on me. That said, adverts of old now have a charm, don't they? Of course they do, being snapshots of what feels like an ancient civilisation; relics of consumerism past. At least those adverts from British TV were just that, British. Today, on YouTube, for instance, I'm plagued by American female voiceovers. I don't know why I find the chosen voices so irritating. It's not as if I have anything against Americans. But..."Grammarly" - ugh!

Most adverts today supposedly aimed at the British look as if they portray another country. They always have to me, in a way. Those homes, those lifestyles...yes, I was raised in a normal council house environment but upon leaving home I went in a different direction, one which did not take the supposedly 'normal' route known commonly as 'progress' from bedsit to house and family etc.

You'll know if you're a regular reader that I'm certainly not 'anti-consumerism' in the classic sense. Look at all the books I buy, some of which are quite expensive. The Archigram box was not cheap. One of the things I like about Archigram's collective ethos is a celebration of the material Pop world and even it's disposability. That is not fashionable nowadays nor, one could say, is it responsible regarding the welfare of the planet. But that was the 60s and working out of the epicentre of the Swinging world, London, who could blame them for celebrating the products of that golden age?  

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Psychological Compromise, RTomens 2026

More work with ink pens. I'm enjoying drawing the lines which dictate the course of the typing, perhaps because it means I have one decision less to make, namely where to begin with a blank canvas.

TTFN!

Vispo: Dreaming Ground / In the mood with Cecil Taylor

Dreaming Ground, RTomens 2026

Some days that mood just comes over you, doesn't it? You know the one...you're in the mood for some Cecil Taylor. So it was for me this morning, to accompany my typing and drawing...

...the album is Nefertiti, the Beautiful One Has Come. 

What could be more appropriate to my improvisational key-tapping than Cecil Taylor 'tapping' his? As his fingers wander, so do mine. If only I could tap into the maverick's genius for variations hammered out of the eighty-eights! Sadly, I can't. Never mind. Could Cecil make visual poetry? Probably, if he had put his mind to it. I've long felt that his Excursion On A Wobbly Rail is a perfect title for not only my typed wandering but also my life.

Vispo: Just About / A5 vs A4 paper as canvas

Just About, RTomens 2026

Size isn't everything, as the actress said to the bishop, but this morning I was thinking about A4 compared to A5-sized paper and how much I'm enjoying the latter whereas I used to mostly use A4. The smaller space seems to focus the mind, you know, the way you really have to look at that spot on your face but that bruise requires little examination - like that.

Hemmingway said if you include a gun on the wall in your short story, make sure someone uses it. Wise old bird, wasn't he? Well, he didn't get to be so old because he did use a gun...so...anyway, the wisdom may be applied to a small canvas on which each mark means more.

The smaller the 'canvas', the more intimate it feels to both the creator and the viewer. Obvious. Isn't it? If you share work online, viewers can appreciate the detail more easily. That's it, spread those fingers, zoom in a...look at that! 

After a few months of frequent A5 usage, A4 feels massive - all that space to cover! Us typists work with such small marks, unlike the Abstract Expressionists dragging large brushes over a canvas we tick-tack away creating letters and symbols. There's always minimalism, of course, but I've never been drawn to it. Perhaps if I used posh A3 paper and typed only one or two marks it might look more like art and I could sell my work to galleries and...etc...

Just About lay abandoned until, stuck over another piece which included ink pen drawing, I turned the pens to it and laid on the red as a fix it or fuck-it-up measure. OK, that wasn't bad - livened it up anyway. Then black outlining the shapes within the overall structure. Yes, that's better. Finally, fill in some parts totally and type over the red, which had virtually obscured the type underneath. At last I thought it was presentable.

 

 

Vispo: Dancer At The End Of Time / Fred Astaire in Hard Core Horror / Horror films / British Murder Boys

 

Dancer At The End Of Time, RTomens 2026

The title is stolen from Michael Moorcock, as I'm sure you know. The dancer in my piece is Fred Astaire, minus his cane because that would have proved impossible to cut out. A few hours after making this piece I picked up a copy of Hard Core Horror (No.2) just for a flick through, and where should I land but on a page featuring Fred Astaire. 

You may be wondering what the hell Fred is doing in a comic strip with a title like that and I would explain but life really is too short so I suggest you buy the Hard Core series, then everything else published by Savoy. That should keep you occupied for most of the year.

Alain Resnais' Last Year in Marienbad is an exquisite film, isn't it? Dreamlike. Yes...but I think I'll be watching Predator next - ha-ha. Starship Troopers seems to have set me on the trashy monster movie path. But is it trashy? Perhaps. It's a no-brainer! Alien, on the other hand, is almost 'art'. It creates tension, a claustrophobic atmosphere on the brilliantly designed Nostromo....etc...you know all about it.

Fear of The Alien was palpable in the cinema, as I recall. The only scary monster that had a similar effect in my cinematic experience was Dennis Hopper's Frank in Blue Velvet.  I'm not one for Horror films, generally. It's not my favourite genre. That said, The Haunting (1963) and The Shining are two of my very favourite films. Truth is I'm a lightweight who scares easily and hates the site of onscreen buckets of blood. I have an overactive imagination, perhaps. As a kid, native Americans whooping around a campfire in an old Hollywood film would have me terrified in bed at night, thinking they might come creeping into my bedroom for my young scalp. I should take the British Murder Boys advice...

Collage: Another Space Age Advance / Film: Starship Troopers

 

Another Space Age Advance, RTomens 2020

Here's a postcard I made and sold whilst working in the bookshop. Science fiction is a frequent source of inspiration to both my collages and visual poetry. That's obvious in the collages, but not always so in many vispo pieces where I've used texts from sci-fi stories which don't necessarily shout 'sci-fi', although sometimes they do. I think I may be the first space age visual poet. In July of last year I printed a booklet called Back To Earth, my only full project that's totally sci-fi influenced.

Now I have a confession: I'm watching Starship Troopers...again. I love it! Yes, I can see why some think it's rubbish. I can't see why it gets called 'fascist' - or maybe I can because, as you know, virtually anything that isn't promoting 'progressive' values gets called fascist. 

It is, in part, a revolting spectacle. Casper Van Dien and Denise Richards as the lead characters in the romance are all dazzling teeth and perfect skin, like somebody's idea of 'perfect' androids. You could say the acting is android-like too, but the script doesn't exactly demand 'the method'. I think they're perfect. They are all-American model material. That's the point. You don't get the point? It's satire. This film sets up 'the dream' (military) only to have it destroyed in the expert blood-soaked hands of director,  Paul Verhoeven, who knows how to do violence. Decapitation, limbs torn off, bodies sliced in two and pierced by bug pincers; he doesn't hold back. Anyone who thinks this film glorifies the military hasn't actually seen it.  

Renowned critic Roger Ebert called it 'totalitarian'. He also said: 'What’s lacking is exhilaration and sheer entertainment. Unlike the “Star Wars” movies, which embraced a joyous vision and great comic invention, “Starship Troopers” doesn’t resonate.' Pah! What a wuss! He was missing the point entirely. Every shallow gesture towards emotional resonance is just that in Starship Troopers. It's a B-movie par excellence, wasting little time dwelling on 'likeable' characters, or even characterisation. Humans here have one job: kill bugs. This film is total entertainment! 

Sleep tight. Don't let the bed bugs bite.

Vispo: The Wrong Idea / Silence and inactivism / Apocalypse Then - Ken Russell's 'The Lonely Shore' speculative film

The Wrong Idea, RTomens 2026

Yes, it's vey easy to get the wrong idea, which is different from having a wrong idea, isn't it? Or is it? You can have wrong ideas about what colour scheme to choose when the room needs a fresh paint job. You can have a wrong idea then of standing on an unstable object to reach the top of the wall with the paint brush, resulting in physical harm. DIY is a wrong idea full stop to me. As LJ often reminds me, left to my own devices, I would be inhabiting a place of peeling wallpaper, cracked paint and threadbare carpets. 

Remaining silent on controversial subjects is, on the whole, a good idea, I think. That (un)said, if everyone did that we would never read an opinion. But perhaps that would be good. The internet being clogged up with chatter and megaphone declarations regarding politics, it's easy to find yourself swimming in a sewer of toxicity and, as you know with swimming, opening your gob at the wrong time can be most unpleasant. 

In an age when activism is encouraged, I suggest inactivism as a beneficial alternative. That's right, sit down and shut up. Make yourself a hot drink, read a book. The world will continue to spin without you getting hot under the collar and spouting off. It will continue to be in flux, just as nature creates earthquakes, floods etc. Of course there are causes worth getting active about. Take cereal box packaging. have you experienced the weakening of the cardboard used? HAVE YOU?!!! Does it not infuriate you, first when you try to open the new box cleanly, only to find it tearing, then close it using the supposedly handy slit, only to find it impossible due to the flimsy cardboard? If that's not worth protesting about, I don't know what is.

Such flimsy products will not survive the apocalypse, but what will? Here's a 1962 film made for the BBC's Monitor series, directed by Ken Russell, script by archaeologist, Jacquetta Hawkes. An 'infection' seems to have killed off most of humanity, which reminds me that I saw two women wearing masks in a cafe yesterday, happily talking through them over their open laptops, as if mask-wearing was the most natural thing in the world. The fact that they were American may or may not be relevant. Perhaps, when not relaxing in a cafe, they were out on the street with other mask-wearers, being activists about something. Perhaps they had see The Lonely Shore and it panicked them into wearing masks...

The film raises the question: how are 'we', in the present tense of the commentator, living to be so dismissive of those 'first world' worshippers of indestructible goods? Post-catastrophe, are we devoid of materialism? Apparently people had 'too much ownership' and people now 'would not wish for such a burden'. Aside from the everyday objects, some vases on the shore are deemed so 'delightful in shape and colour' that they could not have been made by the British, but rather by 'invaders' or 'refugees'. Oh, a nice level of irony there. In fact, the whole film treads a thin line between condemnation of the modern world and celebration of it's oddities. 

Considering that Hawkes was one of the co-founders of CND a few years earlier, it's likely that her fears of impending doom for the planet informed this post-apocalyptic vision. Her Left-leaning (?) politics may also have fed into the notion that material goods were somehow corrupting, rather than beneficial.

As if to steal from Pop Art and in particular Richard Hamilton, you'll note that it's an American car on the beach. Russell made the famous film, Pop Goes The Easel, also for Monitor, in the same year. I wondered that scene reminded me of and then remembered Hamilton's cover, created a year later for Living Arts magazine.

Well, here's the film, be it a critique of consumerism or just a good sci-fi short.

A old cop car, Edwin Lutyens' churches and Central Square / My adventurous life / Vispo: Frontiers

 

Everything was better in the old days...(he says, only half-joking), even police cars. Look at this little beauty, parked outside a dealership in Golders Green. It's so...modest...you can't imagine it being used to chase villains but instead, simply pulled over to the roadside so that the copper could get out and ask old Hamish, who had been seen riding unsteadily, if he was OK. It turns out he's just had a few drinks at the The Clachaig Inn. 

We had just disembarked from a hail and ride bus coming back from Hampstead Garden Suburb. Yes, when in the Suburb, you can actually hail the bus! Unbelievable, right? In London anyway. I'd never seen such a thing. What a novelty. Being knackered and old, we were damned glad of that service, having already wound our way up the hill from Golders Green to the Suburb. Thought we have a look, see what it's about. The highlight was Sir Edwin Lutyens' Central Square, flanked either side by St Jude's (below) and the Free Church (next down), both designed by Lutyens.

There's nothing fancy about the Central Square, but the simplicity and arrangement of the trees make it a great breathing space, elevated as it is on a hill from which little of the city below can be seen, except from certain vantage points; it feels like another world, impervious to the noise and traffic below. 

Now I'd like to demonstrate to you how adventurous I can be. My life is full of such exploits, I assure you. I haven't rested on my laurels since retiring from Work, oh no. 

Our return journey from Golders Green involves a bus change at Archway. You couldn't get a much greater contrast than Archway and Hampstead Garden Suburb. One is posh, quiet and civilised, the other is...Archway. Anyway, check the bus stop read-out - 11mins til the bus is due. But these buses and the predicted times are notoriously unreliable. Would it really be eleven minutes? There's a charity shop right there. OK, LJ volunteered to wait outside and watch for the bus whilst I browsed the books. It was a risk. London buses have a habit of crawling when you're in a hurry and speeding up stealthily catching you off guard whilst you snooze at a bus stop wondering what went wrong in your life and why you weren't driving like other people. I went in. Not many books. Listen out for LJ (she'd make herself heard anyway because she likes to shout my name across a crowded charity shop if she's found a jumper that might fit me (in the Ladies section, because all men's jumpers are designed for giants and despite having grown a belly with the aid of mince pies over Xmas I'm not that big)). I was pushing it. I lingered, as if teasing fate, daring the bus company to try and outwit me. Then I left the shop and the bus came straight away, a little early. Phew. Now don't tell me I lead a dull life.

In order to get out of the flat early enough to capitalise on the sunny morning I had to forgo my morning typing session. No problem. Yes, I type regularly, every morning unless we're going out of town for the day. It's good to have a break, even from making visual poetry.  Frontiers was made the day before. 

Frontiers, RTomens, 2026

That's all for now. Ta-ta.

Collage: The Pupal Case / Obnoxious flies / The Cramps and Kris Guidio

The Pupal Case, RTomens, 2026

Parts of the collage were cut from The Pictorial Encyclopedia Of The Animal Kingdom (1963) in which author V.J. Stanek does not hold back regarding flies...

...can you imagine anyone writing that today? You can't label flies 'obnoxious'! It is funny though, in retrospect. Most people now probably don't like flies much but, you know, a book on the animal kingdom wouldn't be allowed such a judgemental opinion. 

Human Fly...

Savoy Books' Kris Guidio monograph, Sinister Legends. 1988. He was a big fan of The Cramps. There's a cheap copy for sale here. It contains an interview and a lot more of his art. Recommended!

Interview with Kris...