London Calling (52 page)

The team of people who had resigned from the old Drury Lane Arts Lab remerged in the middle of the summer of 1969 with a brand
new Lab (the old one had closed nine months after they left). Called the New Arts Lab, it was the result of heavy politicking
and the enthusiasm of a Camden councillor, Christine Stewart Monro. Camden Council gave them a four-storey one-time pharmaceutical
warehouse at 1 Robert Street, on the south-west corner of Hampstead Road, on a short-term, rent-free lease. Its official name
was the Institute for Research in Art and Technology (I RA T) and had thirteen directors, including Hoppy, Fred Drummond,
David Curtis, Pamela Zoline and Biddy Peppin, who was company secretary. The patron was Lord Harlech, with Lord Burgh as sponsor,
and among a long list of trustees – or ‘trustys’, as Hoppy called them – were the artist Joe Tilson, the architectural historian
Reyner Banham and J. G. Ballard, who remarked that its open concrete floors were ‘the perfect setting for its brutalist happenings
and exhibitions, its huge ventilation shafts purpose-built to evacuate the last breath of pot smoke in the event of a drugs
raid’.
¹⁷

The ground floor cinema was run by David Curtis and held 100 people and could project both 16mm and 8mm films. Open screenings
for film-makers were held on Tuesdays, the New Cinema Club on Wednesday, London Film-Makers Co-op shows on Thursdays and programmed
attractions at weekends. Dave Curtis:

From 1969 to 1971… we ran three programmes a night seven days a week then and it was a very remarkable programme that we did.
It was almost entirely
avant-garde – we did occasional classic features as late night features but apart from that it was simply avant-garde programming
without any subsidy at all.
¹⁸

Carla Liss and Malcolm Le Grice ran the London Film-Makers Co-op film distribution office from the New Lab. Sharing the ground
floor was the art gallery directed by Biddy Peppin and Pamela Zoline, which was also used for poetry readings, light shows
and other events. Victor Herbert donated equipment so that black-and-white film could be developed on the premises. Hoppy,
writing in
Friends
, enthused: ‘This means that at last the bottom is knocked out of the film processing/censoring price fixing racket.’
¹⁹
The Arts Council donated £150 towards a darkroom, which was used by photographers in three four-hour shifts seven days a
week at low cost. They had to supply their own paper and chemicals. At Christmas, 1969, a screen-printing department opened
where posters could be made. There was also a duplicator for flyers and press releases and Hoppy intended to install an offset
litho press.

Roland Miller, later Martin Russell, ran the theatre on the first floor and there was also a rehearsal room that was a good
deal cheaper than renting in the West End. The theatre was also used by the Asia Music Centre and Will Spoor, who did mime.
Martin Shann, later Bernard Rhodes, ran a plastics workshop, and John and Dianne Lifton ran an electronics and cybernetics
workshop. Hoppy had his own TVX video workshop in the lab and by March 1970 had a nucleus of fifteen people in the video
co-op. There was a coffee bar serving macrobiotic food, a small bookshop, and a family room at the top of the building where
people could meet and talk. It took the team about six months to complete the installation of walls, telephones, heating and
electricity, but some departments, like the Art Gallery, opened earlier. Their approach was very different to Jim Haynes’s
original Lab, which was based very much around his personality and contacts; the New Arts Lab was community-based and saw
itself as providing a service to the arts community in a very real way.

From 4 until 28 April 1970, Pamela Zoline arranged for Ballard to exhibit three crashed cars at the New Arts Lab under the
heading
New Sculpture
. It was a very easy show to install: the gallery was on the ground floor and the technology for moving cars around is very
advanced. He paid for the floor to be painted black and had Charles Symmonds’s Motor Crash Repairs deliver three carefully
chosen wrecks. There was a crashed Mini Minor, the symbol of the swinging fun-loving sixties, and its antithesis, an Austin
Cambridge A60, the solid family saloon sometimes used by the police. The third car was
a 1950s Pontiac from Detroit’s mannerist phase which had been in a massive front-end collision.
²⁰
In conversation with Frank Whitford and Eduardo Paolozzi
²¹
(who had himself made a sculpture called
Crash
in 1964 from a pile of cylinders and pipes), Ballard described the car as being from ‘that last grand period of American
automobile styling, around the middle 50s. Huge flared tailfins and a maximum of iconographic display.’ In the handout accompanying
the show, Ballard wrote:

Each of these sculptures is a memorial to a unique collision between man and his technology. However tragic they are, automobile
crashes play very different roles from the ones we assign them. Behind our horror lies an undeni able fascination and excitement,
most clearly revealed by the deaths of the famous: Jayne Mansfield and James Dean, Albert Camus and John F. Kennedy. The 20th
century has Given birth to a vast range of machines – computers, pilotless planes, thermonuclear weapons – where the latent
identity of the machine is ambiguous. An understanding of this identity can be found in a study of the automobile, which dominates
the vectors of speed, aggression, violence and desire.

In particular, the automobile crash contains a crucial image of the machine as conceptualized psychopathology. Apart from
its function of redefining the elements of space and time in terms of our most potent consumer durable, the car crash may
be perceived unconsciously as a fertilizing rather than a destructive event – a liberation of sexual energy – meditating the
asexuality [
sic
] of those who have died with an intensity impossible in any other form. In 20th century terms the crucifixion would be enacted
as a conceptual car crash.

At the opening there was a strange edgy atmosphere. Ballard had hired a girl to interview people on closed circuit television.
He originally intended her to be naked but on seeing the exhibition she would only appear topless. Ballard: ‘She saw the sexual
connection.’
²²
Nonetheless, the members of the audience could see themselves on a TV screen with a topless girl, surrounded by crashed cars;
all three powerful sixties icons. Ballard: ‘This was clearly too much. I was the only sober person there. Wine was poured
over the crashed cars, glasses were broken, the topless girl was nearly raped in the back seat of the Pontiac by some self-aggrandizing
character.’
²³
He had never seen a hundred people get drunk so quickly. In the weeks that the show was open the cars attracted massive hostility
from the public. They were attacked, those windows that weren’t already broken were smashed, one of the cars was up-ended,
another splashed with white paint. Ballard:

I had speculated in my book [
The Atrocity Exhibition
] about how the people might behave. And in the real show, the guests at the party and the visitors later behaved in pretty
much the way I had anticipated. It was not so much an exhibition of sculpture as almost of experimental psychology using the
medium of the fine art show. People were unnerved, you see. There was enormous hostility.
²⁴

The topless model was Jo Stanley, who reported in
Friends
:

On 3rd april he held a private view at the lab in robert Street – flashing promises and wine and a semi-naked chick (me) in
the faces of the establishment media unfreaks – who remained completely undazzled… the scene was really friendlying up all
around (like all around my tits, plus a kind offer to fuck me in the foyer (!)). Other people thought they might undress and
groove around too but – well – it
was
pretty cold there.
²⁵

She thought that his £3,000 asking price for the complete installation was outrageous. According to Simon Ford, Ballard later
changed his position on
Crash!
and came to recognize that perhaps it was not a cautionary tale after all: ‘
Crash!
is what it appears to be. It is a psychopathic hymn.’
²⁶

The public reaction proved to Ballard that his theory was right and that there was a tremendous amount of sexual energy and
violence embedded in people’s relationship to cars which was released through car crashes. He knew he could use this. He told
Iain Sinclair: ‘“It’s the green light, Ballard” I said. “You can get straight down to work.” That was when Crash really began:
the Lab experiment, the test drive, had proved my point. Had people been bored I might have had different thoughts.’
²⁷
He had been working on
Crash!
since 1970, but now had concrete material to work with.
Crash!
was published in 1973.

Charles Marowitz’s Open Space Theatre was tight on funds – its Arts Council grant was a mere £1,500 a year, £32,500 less than
the kitchens at Covent Garden received – with one of the problems being that it had no source of income while it was rehearsing
a new play. John Trevelyan, the Secretary of the British Board of Film Censors, sought to rectify this by suggesting that
it screen Andy Warhol’s latest movie,
Flesh
, and introduced Marowitz to its distributor, Jimmy Vaughan, who specialized in avant-garde and underground films. Trevelyan
thought they were both interested in exploring the same territory.
Flesh
was actually directed by Paul Morrissey but it emanated from the Factory and had Andy’s name on it. It starred Joe Dallesandro
as a
male hustler and did surprisingly well, screening three or four times a day, attracting an audience that was, in part, the
porn cinema crowd from nearby Soho. Then, on 3 February 1970, just before the film ended, thirty-two police constables accompanied
by a superintendent from Scotland Yard rushed in, stopped the film and proceeded to take down the names and addresses of all
seventy-five people in the audience. The film, projector, club books, receipts and paperwork were all confiscated in the usual
heavy-handed manner.

At the onset of the raid Marowitz had contacted John Trevelyan on the phone and he immediately rushed to the theatre, two
blocks away from his office in Soho Square. He told the gathered press: ‘I cannot understand why it should be raided. This
is a intellectual film for a specialized audience. I have seen it, and though it is not my cup of tea, there is nothing corrupting
about it.’ Even the press were puzzled why a small Arts Council-subsidized theatre in the West End that specialized in non-commercial,
experimental drama should merit a raid by thirty-two policemen. Questions were asked in the House, but the Labour Home Secretary,
James Callaghan – (known as ‘Jim, the Policemen’s Friend’ after being a lobbyist for the Police Federation) – said he would
support the police whenever they investigated complaints about pornography from the public. This was quite often because of
Mary Whitehouse, the right-wing Christian self-appointed guardian of public morality, who complained constantly. She even
counted how many times the word ‘bloody’ occurred in the TV show
Till Death Do Us Part
, in order to complain about it on a weekly basis even though it was the most popular programme on television.

There had been a lot of attacks on art by then, for instance John Lennon’s
Bag One
series of lithographs, on exhibition at the London Arts Gallery, had been prosecuted for ‘exhibiting indecent material’.
This moved the Labour MP for Vauxhall, George Strauss, to ask if the recent seizures were carried out with the Home Secretary’s
authorization. Callaghan tried to evade the question, saying: ‘These are matters for the police, not for me.’ Strauss continued
his questioning:

Does not the Home Secretary consider it ridiculous that the Metropolitan police, who are understaffed and overworked with
the increasing crime problem on their hands, should send a force of 32 constables to a small experimental theatre which received
an Arts Council grant to seize a film suggested to them by the British Board of Film Censors and seize the projector and the
screen? Can he give an assurance that this was a regrettable isolated incident
and does not mean that there is to be a campaign to restrict this sort of thing: a repressive, Mrs. Grundy-campaign in London?
²⁸

This was greeted by cheers from his fellow MPs but Callaghan stuck to his guns in the face of considerable opposition. Jim
was a cop at heart. The police did not prosecute and Marowitz, being American and believing in British justice, applied for
a High Court writ against the superintendent who conducted the raid to attempt to get back their film, projector, books and
paperwork. Within a few weeks
Flesh
was showing again and the attendant publicity meant it played to consistently full houses, solving the Open Space’s financial
problems. Even Lord Snowdon telephoned to see if a copy of the film could be sent to Kensington Palace.
²⁹

The Open Space, was also the venue where William Burroughs made one of his rare public appearances when he played President
Nixon in David Z. Mairowitz’s
Flash Gordon and the Angels
in December 1970. In the play, the comic book character Flash Gordon is brought up to date and made into an astronaut. Mairowitz:
‘He’s become a send up of Neil Armstrong, and the kind of half human, half robot people that he represents.’
³⁰
Burroughs appears on a monitor in the spaceship and gives a malignant snarling performance as the President, terminating
the mission because Gordon’s been showing too many human characteristics: ‘We think you’ve been playing with us… you’ve been
running strange… you’ve let us down… poisoned our trust.’
³¹
‘Surely no-one could fail to enjoy William S. Burroughs’s performance as the 38th president of the US,’ enthused the
Financial Times
. Burroughs later told me that he had to have quite a few drinks to ‘bring out the ugly American’
³²
in him, a fact confirmed by Mairowitz, who was anxious that Burroughs had entered the role so enthusiastically that he might
not be able to perform at all.
³³