Concrete Poem: Breach Of Security (for sale) / observing politics / 1984: Orwell's grubby future

RTomens, 2021

 This typewriter art is for sale. price: £45 + 2.50 postage. A4 on Ivory paper (90gsm)

Careful...don't get too political! You can interpret this typewriter art any way you like. I made it this morning, first by drawing the random lines, then adding random letter 'bursts'...and as I did so, an intentional inward 'attack' pattern in mind suggested an invasion of the two inner spaces. The darker space is blue and looks more blue in the original but came out dark in the scan, unfortunately. 

It's hard not to be aware of politics these days and in particular at this time. There are, of course, several levels of awareness, from the casual observer of headlines to deep analysis and biased thoughts. I'm not sure that those two can be different at the end of the day. I rarely read anything that doesn't display a bias one way or the other. Sometimes what's not said displays the bias. Just as spaces in art can mean as much as objects, the same applies to the media. 

I am an interested observer of American politics, as much from a sociological viewpoint as a purely political one. If that makes sense. The fanaticism, allegiances, actions and sloganeering of the various tribes fascinate me. Likewise UK politics, of course. 

Big Tech power, censorship, shadow banning, figures silhouetted by flames from burning buildings, prayers held at rallies, reverse McCarthyism, fringe figures in mad costumes catapulted into the limelight, conspiracy theories, masks to hide identities, masks to signal virtue, masks worn in genuine fear, defiant maskless faces...reality is, as they say, stranger than fiction. 

Talking of fiction, I'm rereading Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. I bet it's a hot seller these days and probably has been for years now as each new generation discovers it. I hadn't read it for over thirty years. One thing that struck me this time was the grubby, very English nature of the environment. You can tell when a film was made, roughly, even when it's set in the past or future. We laughed the other day at Shirley MacLaine's false eyelashes in Two Mules For Sister Sara. She was very 'fashion forward for the mid-19th century. 

Likewise, Orwell's time of writing (late-Forties) is all over his future vision, from the general deprivation to the dilapidated, bombed-out buildings. This, intentionally or otherwise, is partly the genius of his unique take on science-fiction. By setting his future in a time of war he was able, naturally, to mirror his own post-war environment. The rest, his creation of a totalitarian world, is history, as they say, literally and in the literary sense. Street cameras were once looked on as being very 'Big Brother', but Orwell's greatness in the novel was to go far deeper than surveillance to the point of rewriting history and controlling minds.

Whilst it may be a cliché to constantly refer to Nineteen Eighty-Four in relation to any authoritarian measures, we'd do well to be wary of those today who would rewrite or erase history and control the narrative via the mainstream media.