The picture references Van Gogh's still life with orleanders and Émile Zola's La joie de vivre but with Tigs fake flowers and Brian Holmes' Escape the Overcode: Activist Art in the Control Society. And now, just like that, we have something to talk about. And something to look at, something to show, something to stand with and something that begins to tackle our ideas more directly. 

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You know this Tig has the forehead of a bull, a type that screams 1970's Britton. 

Escape the Overcode adresses the full complexity of our predicament in our aim to make a radical art today. It is difficult and challenging. What does it mean to represent it in a medium and method that is surely the antithisis of what is thought to be contemporary critical art strategy. Well, in a sense not much, one can merely say 'good luck to him' and move along. But what we are cooking up has a few more ingredients. So, what does it mean to paint this book in the context of our humble project?

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That needs an answer to be sure. Are we making a negative, conservative point here? 'Lets go back to the old days' when 'art was art' etc. No,no. It is instead a juxtaposition designed to illustrate our logic of breakage, which is very positive: we have one of the most advanced studies in activist art that looks deep into the rabbit hole, dragged back into a early modern style of painting and of constructing meaning (pictorial symbolism), in the style refferencing one of the most famous art genious myths, and all this I have done as part of my work with the TAS which one fine day an unsuspecting member3 will come across I have no doubt. And when they do they will take in all our ingredients at once and yes, it is our rationale of breakage that is the meal on offer. Break from capitalism, break from established forms of critique, break from contemporaneity; is that not our program? Look here, we must never forget; the world ended in 2011 - lets start again from there with our memory in tact. Lets keep this break as the mythical origins of a new world, lets use it as phycological foundations to justify new and experimental doing, new forms of community. It may sound very Ballardian to build our world on a foundation of ashes4 but there you go. Ballard is on to something. Hell, why not commemorate the whole business as if we were engaged in some good old fashioned nation building - statues, parades, minutes silence (or applause), wreaths. Could you manage to send some more hog brushes of this size5.

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At the very least I think the events of 2011 need to be marked but especially in the UK. We must have a basis, a framework, something phychological to fall back on and 2011 is a wise choice for two reasons: 1. It was a momentous year of protest against capitalism and repression all over the world. 2. The redrawing of the lines of battle brought about by the sudden switch in governance in the UK from neoliberal social/personal/consumer frenzy to austerity politics: the machine changes the critique must change also. Did not 2011 gave birth to a very different form of neoliberalism to what we had been enduring over the previous decade. It was much more authoritarian and thugish. Gone was all that devious new labour style co-opting of the arts which had been so much a consideration in our critique, gone were the 'social benefits' of the arts, gone was any talk of the creative class, gone was the knowledge economy, gone was the ubiquitous neoliberal enterprise culture. Much changed very quickly and I'll bet my last squeeze of ochre that whatever farce we are treated to in the coming years could be traced back to the 2011 break and that handful of mega octane eton toffs let out of the traps like a pack of hunting dogs.

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Yes yes, we must now concede that 2011 closed the book on much of the hard thought strategies for critique and resistance against neoliberal capitalism but in addition to all that booknotion you'll see also that I have done my duty with regard to the clash of complimentaries and bold handling. How does he make the energy though? It may well sound counter intuitive but more and more I feel that energy is about balance and self-control in the painting process, speed yes but those other things to. But how to get at that in our time frame? Cornwall is full of mediums...maybe I can channel that old brute! Or more reasonably we must look again and again at his work and try to find out a bit more about what we mean by 'energy'. When we have a better idea of what it is we can look to see if we find 'energy' in particular periods or works? Is it in the handling only or does the colour help give the painting this mystery 'energy'? When we know more we can ask whether 'energy' appears to be something he himself strived for or is it merely a by-product of other aesthetic and metholodical concerns of the day? Do any other artists posses this quality? Is what we term energy akin to the aesthetic of ugliness  that defined early modernism? And crucially if we were to achieve a modecum of 'energy' in the paint how would this speak to our political goals? 

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As before,

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John

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PS. contrast todays use of Escape the Overcode with the way the book featured in The Open Council. You will find it on the website of the Open Council in the news section under the heading New Anti Terror Poster. Its a link at the very bottom of the page if memory survives, it was so long ago...a world away you might say.