Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project (17 page)

Professor Chris French, Head of the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit at Goldsmiths College, invited to comment on the responses, remarked that ‘supernatural beliefs do have significance for a number of issues that politicians may be asked to act upon’.

Matthew Coggins, Conservative, recalls a house in Stoke Newington where temperature and smell change dramatically and unexpectedly. ‘Just a curiosity,’ he said.

Julius Nkafu, Labour, believes in the ‘HOLY ghost’ and knows of ‘many instances of the Lord’s divine interventions to our everyday lives’.

Michael Desmond, Labour, turned on a tap. Rickety plumbing gushed with words as well as water: ‘Get away from here! Get away from here.’ The phenomenon convinced him not to become an accountant.

Ian Sharer, Lib Dem, admitted to being ‘open to views on these things’. Jewish books he had studied warned that ‘if you could see what was standing next to you, you would die with fright’.

Mischa Borris, Green Party, was convinced that ghosts were ‘some kind of blip in the time continuum’.

Michael Levy, Conservative Chief Whip, had enough on his plate without ‘having to delve into the unknown’.

Meg Hillier, Labour, on maternity leave, was excused an opinion.

Diane Abbott, Labour, left it to her researcher to discover that, unfortunately, she had no comment to make.

Jules Pipe, Labour, stated: ‘I am happy to confirm that I have never felt the need to attribute any event to “supernatural” causes. Whilst I accept that people are entitled to hold whatever beliefs they like – as long as this causes no harm to others – this is not a subject to which I would ascribe any significance, nor which I would wish to see taken any more seriously than it already is.’

Mackinlay, assessing the responses to his questionnaire, concludes that the people of Hackney take the topic far more seriously than the politicians. Council policy, to an outside eye, can only be attributed to occult forces, possession by the demonic spirit of capital, future world visions. Sacrifices conducted in pyramidical block-buildings by a priestly caste. There is an intimate relationship between financial adventurism and ritual blood-letting.

The report concludes with a cameo from a court case in Essex.

Stepping outside for a breath of air, I met a neighbour at the garden gate. ‘An ambulance has been stoned on Mare Street,’ she said. ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘Why not? There are 149 kids out there denied secondary-school places and plenty of others roaming about on the loose. Some people moan about barbecue trays scorching the grass on London Fields, others are dodging bullets. There have been so many raids lately, they’re calling it concerted harassment. It’s going to kick off very soon, mark my words, just like the ’80s.’

We were walking the wrong way down the canal, west, towards the King’s Cross development zone with its karma of ill fortune, underground fires, premeditated attacks by religious and investment-capital fundamentalists. The swirl of malevolent energies was palpable and had been for years, as faceless ghosts struggled to wrestle the truth of this place out of history and away from geological absolutes, buried rivers, disturbed burial mounds. That great collision of railway terminals – King’s Cross, St Pancras, Euston – formed another geological fact, embedded in the matter of London. Having demolished and dispersed the Euston Arch, losing the inconvenient rubble in the backrivers of the future Olympic Park, there were grand project (GP) plans afoot to retrieve and reassemble the former obstacle: as a heritage quotation made serious by the huge bill for this exercise. Here was another futile attempt to rewrite the mistakes of the past: as with the return of Christopher Wren’s Temple Bar to a place it had never been, Paternoster Square. To be lost among naked pastiches and jumbled statuary in a phoney Italian piazza, a project waved through on the strength of its avoidance of concrete brutality and late-modernist self-regard.

Dominant colours: dirt-rose, morbid soot, pigeon shit. The railway stations have been around so long they have become accepted natural features. Like cliffs or mountains. London grows its fossils by accretions of indifference. Vagrants return, nodding and ducking like cormorants, to the same perches and hollows.

The faces of travellers are pinched. They know about the bad thing. And all the forms it takes: viral, carnal, feral. Inevitable. They have seen the bad thing, felt its breath. And they dream it. With eyes wide open. Waiting and watching. Waiting for the bus, the lights, the mirror-flash of the speed-camera. The nudge of the petty thief at the cash machine. The spray of a fellow sufferer’s germ donation wet on your neck. The thrust, into your midriff, of that free newspaper which is not free, but a minor contamination. The agreement that you are too tired to graze on anything better than television promos, football rage, war-horror blamed on someone else. Scapegoating. Flower-draped returns of the flying dead.

When Alan Moore scripted a comic-strip version of one of my fictional characters (looking alarmingly like his creator), in the 1910 cityscape of
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
, this balding Nazi dentist in the long green coat mutters, ‘King’s Cross though … I’d advise you to be careful. The place is a myth-sump, invites apocalyptic thinking, dangerous agendas hurrying to make their connection.’

Renchi Bicknell and Steve Dilworth barely connect. They are in discrete but parallel stories: that they are both artists, practitioners, only emphasizes the space between them. The weight of Steve’s potential commissions and his cynical (or innocent) interplay with the realpolitik of GP funding are matters Renchi struggles to comprehend. The Glastonbury man walks and he waits. He solicits necessary difficulty, learning the etching process to undertake a series blending his own pilgrimages across England with a commentary on Blake’s interpretation of Bunyan.

Both of the artists, the painter and the sculptor, chose to position themselves at a distance from London; one in the West Country, the other in the Hebrides. So this towpath excursion is undertaken on neutral ground. They have been sucked inwards by the gravity of the monumental schemes of land revision in the Lower Lea Valley. Renchi, playing off 2012 Mayan prophecies, fills his pockets with crushed glass from breakers’ yards in Hackney Wick. He photographs wall art – crocodiles, skulls, teeth – which he sees as representing a spirit of opposition to the blue fence and its CGI-visions. Paint itself, dripping, smeared, is truth. Guerrilla artists, whatever their motives, collaborate with the architecture of ruin. Living arms and hands intertwine with bindweed and yarrow. Pink-gummed mouths grin on concrete stumps.

Back home, Renchi made his paintings. But he returned to London, several times a year, to loop the Olympic Park and to extend the catalogue of loss. Banks of wild flowers, messages sprayed on a waste pipe. He registered disappearance and the pace of evolution, by weather, season, human intervention, from the period of his work as a Chobham Farm labourer, a gardener in Victoria Park, to the speedy present of GP invasion technology.

But the story is never so simple. Sweet Toof, one of the most prolific of the Hackney Wick muralists, achieved his transfer. I walked down Brick Lane, wondering at the pace with which territory cannibalizes itself, until there is literally nothing there, beyond the captive shadow, the eidolon. A stencilled name on the window of one of the new galleries caught my eye. On Fournier Street, Gilbert (or George), stepping out to post a letter, has to consider how much the act is a performance: how deep do they have to go to brush their naked toes against reality, whatever was here, forty years ago, before they put themselves up for sale, as prints of prints (and functioning humans also)? Tracey Emin, polite but confused, challenges a film crew in Princelet Street: why aren’t they shooting
her
? Existence for a name artist is confirmed by regular infusions of publicity. He or she is a celebrity diabetic waiting for that insulin hit, the appearance of the latest diary extract, the photograph telling them just where they were last night. Accepting and sustaining a career fat with the illusion of success is a noble and self-sacrificing destiny. Wealth and fame are insufficient rewards for the pains and renunciations attendant on remaining an artist beyond art. When you are no longer visible in the magazines, the broadsheets, you are nowhere. A conical heap of mouse-dirt in an empty Whitechapel attic. Look at the fear engraved on those brave and troubled faces.

Sweet Toof had come indoors. They found him. At the precise moment when pressure hoses and industrial scouring agents were stripping paint from the concrete pillbox on the Greenway, reducing untold layers of graffiti to grey, the leading Hackney Wick bandit was a name on a window in Brick Lane. I kept going. I didn’t check out the show. There’s altogether too much art noise. I’m beginning to think that Gustav Metzger was right with his proposed strike: show nothing, make nothing, until the world changes. Taking a ride, back from the Wick, my companion pointed out an elderly man on Roman Road, encumbered with plastic bags, narrowly failing to persuade the bus to stop. ‘It happens every day. Gustav Metzger. The driver takes a perverse pleasure in judging just how close he is going to let him get, before he pulls away.’

His art strike abandoned, Metzger’s work was everywhere I travelled: Bexhill-on-Sea, Manchester, Edinburgh. Be as intransigent as you like, as much of a purist, they will search you out, the curators and promoters. Nothing is more seductive than the myth of abdication, silence. Nothing succeeds like well-managed failure. We live in an age of compulsory retrieval, exposure, downloading. With the boxed set of CDs as the final humiliation.

Steve Dilworth was in London for a reason. He had been shortlisted by Westfield to produce a suitable work of public art for the monster mall at the edge of the Olympic Park. When I met him, soon after I left Chobham Farm, in the early 1970s, Steve was the fiercest, truest to raw material, sculptor/maker I had encountered. In Cheltenham, I saw (smelt, felt) the crows he squashed, in some oily solution, between sheets of glass. I believe that, within weeks, they leaked and disintegrated. Dilworth was a scavenger and poacher, tolerated as gardener or handyman in a cottage on a private estate. He had grown up in Hull, and retained an icy, axe-carved Nordic profile, emphasized by beetling ginger brows: as he roamed and ravaged, settling anywhere but the home town from which he had escaped.

Dilworth was the kind of ecologist who kills and cooks and eats: no theory beyond action. He wove curtains of glossy, reeking eels. He stitched salted pigskin figures. He carved elaborate caskets of whalebone, to contain – take his word for it – stormwater taken at midnight from the bay.

He removed, with his family, to a house on the edge of the sea, on the Isle of Harris: to enjoy a harsh subsistence life, scouring the shore for molluscs for the evening cauldron, and dead things, birds, hares, even cats, for his shamanic practice. The whole business, as he stuck with it for so many years, was unexploitable. Some of the smaller stones, polished and crafted, were seductive: as pipes, whistles, fetish objects. But everything was conducted on his own terms. The difficulties, the hardship, the muscular energy contained within his necrophile art. There were no workshop assistants, no explainers. A rusty old deep-freeze unit stuffed with ex-seagulls, roadkill, the battered detritus of the Atlantic.

Steve’s hospitality was legendary. A table for discussion, anecdote, drink and talk, through the long, dank, dripping afternoons of the Hebridean winter. The island, in its tribal allegiances and attitudes, as well as its geology, was spectacularly other. Steve told me that Stanley Kubrick, with the use of judicious red filters, discovered in the rock fields of Harris a convincing equivalent for Jupiter, for his film
2001: A Space Odyssey.
I never saw so many car wrecks alongside twisting ribbon-roads in a landscape that had no use for twentieth-century frivolity. Dilworth, restless and driven, was in the right place. However furiously he worked, he was out-sculpted by the processes of weather, a place where time was just beginning.

After a lucky find on the beach, Steve proposed an arch made from a whale’s jaw. The plan was accepted by sponsors, before being blocked by local opposition, caught up in family feuds going back to the Jacobites and beyond. But his work started to appear in sculpture parks and gardens. Never tamed, aerodynamic in polished bronze, the Dilworth beast-boxes were exposed in London galleries, and described in the formal language of Arp and Brancusi. That’s why we were walking down the canal in the direction of King’s Cross.

Coming off the water, the revised topography around the King’s Place development, at the back of the great railway terminal, was disorientating: resistant glass blocks, swirling winds wrapping debris around the legs. There is no obvious access to any of these revamped warehouses and architectural calling-cards. No sense of the function they perform. Twenty minutes inside King’s Place, Renchi decided, was the outer limit of human endurance. There is a low-level electronic hum, enough to keep the nerves on edge, before stoking them with a caffeine hit at the coffee franchise where shifty transients are trying to look as if they belong. Temperature is cranked that notch too high: the building doesn’t need you, keep moving. Open-plan newspaper offices. Corridors that are galleries. Galleries that are corridors. Subterranean seminar facilities for cultural pep talks, presentations, performances. And two pieces by Steve Dilworth. One of which, a brazen bug-on-its-back out of Kafka, has been sited right beside the down escalator. The Hebridean imperative, frozen in corporate ennui, fights to assert itself: as a structure independent of its environment. Culture clients are tempted to treat the smooth bowl as a receptacle for polystyrene cups and greasy wrappings. Anything left lying about is cast in silver and displayed in a glass cabinet.