China Flash: ABS Crew: graffiti artists on legal, semi-legal and illegal street art

This is an expanded version of an article which first appeared in Time Out Beijing. All images by and (c) ABS Crew

Deep in the corporate heart of the Central Business District, under the approving eye of a strangely young government representative, a gang of guys in white jumpsuits, industrial respiratory masks and black rubber gloves is painting fierce designs onto ten of the city’s free shuttle buses while an increasing crowd of workers on their lunch break take photos and film their work.

The gang is Beijing’s ABS Crew, who since 2007 have been bringing graffiti culture, hip-hop, film-making and breakdancing together in a successful and classically Chinese combination of countercultural styling underscored by mainstream business acumen. ABS Crew - who go by the names ANDC, Scar, Noise and Seven- own a shop, host cultural events, work with major companies on corporate branding and graphic design, consult with big business and undertake public art commissions. They even sell ABS Crew merchandise. In the next few months alone they’ll be painting at a major music festival and working on a commission in Sanlitun.

Crew member ANDC explains, “Graffiti is very new in China, maybe only ten years old. Young people had to research and seek out the work by studying other countries’ graffiti culture online. When we started, we had no spray cans, just factory grade stuff you couldn’t paint with. We started off in different cities and found each other by uploading our work on the Internet.

But now, young guys are into it, more people are joining in. When we started out, we were studying at university and spent half our time working [in unrelated jobs] for big companies and the other half of our time doing graffiti. Now we do it full time. But we need more money for the culture, because more people want to learn how to do it, but don’t know how. We use business money to create a real culture and we make it available for everyone. We have a lot of plans. In China, if you know a lot of people, you get a lot of business.”

ANDC points out that graffiti occupies a rare position in China: “It’s harder and more illegal in other countries – graffiti-ing buses is illegal in Europe. But in China graffiti is half legal, half-illegal. There are certain areas where it’s okay to do it. This bus project is for the Central Business District’s art festival. We know the government leader for the festival and he’s very young, he’s not an old man, so we were talking with him about how to do fresher projects [and he agreed].”

This appearance of cultural openness is somewhat misleading. I’m talking to ANDC less than 2 hours after the police raided a major Japanese company’s annual sushi-and-cocktails party in epicentre-of-Beijing-cool Sanlitun, saying it was too noisy (but possibly just seeking a kickback) and a week after they raided a music venue, forced gig-goers to undergo mandatory urine tests for drugs and deported any foreigners who tested positive. Two nights ago, groups of silent, uniformed guards appeared at each corner of the intersection closest to my house, armed with machine guns.

While ABS Crew may be pursuing a lucrative corporate strategy these days, ANDC still makes sly reference to their shadier work, done “on a real street, in the night. It’s about wanting to tell people something. We do artwork that’s a social commentary and we add our crew’s name.”

To read my China Flash series of articles about contemporary China, please click here. or explore some of the links below:

• Lean In Beijing on the new sexism, corporate ambition, marital choices and awesome girls in China
• Film-maker Jenny Man Wu on contemporary Chinese women’s wit, pain and ambivalence
• Benedicte Bro-Cassard, Beijing fashion photographer, on luxury, sugar daddies and sugar daughters
• Kong Lingnan, Beijing painter, on natural beauty and human ugliness
• Writer Kerry Brown on the seven elite men who rule a country with Communist roots and capitalist shoots
• Writer Zhang Chao on media misogyny, social changes and the pressures facing young Chinese women
• ABS Crew: Beijing graffiti artists on legal, semi legal and illegal Chinese street art
• My friend writes me a delicate poem to explain the intense Beijing seasons
• Even afternoon tea says something about modern, monetised China
• Porcelain dolls, bad Samaritans and the law

China Flash: Even afternoon tea says something about modern, monetised Beijng

Afternoon tea at The Opposite House, in association with Jo Malone

This is a greatly expanded version of a short write-up which first appeared in Time Out Beijing where I did a brief stint as Deputy Editor. To read my China Flash series of articles about contemporary China, please click here.

Finally, an afternoon tea that smells as good as it looks. Opposite House, the chic Sanlitun hotel, is launching a month long celebration of perfume and pastries, scent and scones. In association with British lifestyle brand Jo Malone, the hotel will be serving an afternoon tea inspired by Jo Malone’s Peony and Blush Suede collection at 3pm every day from 22^nd September until 24^th October. Hosted at their sleek, warm-toned Mediterranean restaurant Sureño and designed for elegant ‘ladies’ who care as much about fashion taste as food taste, the experience includes a vial of Peony and Blush Suede perfume and a voucher for an arm and hand massage at Jo Malone’s Beijing boutique. 

Obviously it feels nice to spend a couple of hours slotting flavour-bomb pastries into one’s mouth in a flatteringly lit restaurant at a hotel full of attentive staff and beautiful patrons while a shoot for an international fashion magazine goes on upstairs, as it was the day I went.

The tea itself is as classy and considered as the fragrances and scented candles Jo Malone is famous for. I am treated to delicately sliced sandwiches whose bread is baked on-site, filled with tender crab, gutsy smoked salmon and creamy mozzarella; a colourful assortment of miniature cakes including a delicious macaroon that melts into a crush of crumbs and strawberry goo and a bright drum of citron tart; a soft peony-infused cream pot that comes with its own little bone china teacup and edible flower; and best of all, the golden, home-baked scones sitting like a line of tanned knees, rugged on the outside, soft on the inside, served with strawberry rose jam (again made on-site), organic acacia honey and Devonshire clotted cream. My cream was as runny as petrol, but never mind. The whole thing was fab.

“Everything is imported,” the Chinese person I’m with assures me. That is the new China: everything is imported. The country which is famous for its manufacturing and export for foreign companies has absorbed and internalised the value those brands place on themselves. What is considered good in China is foreign.

Afternoon tea is part of a Beijing trend for dainty, English-style pastimes. Or not so dainty: I am considering running a campaign against the cheap, sugar-reeking patisserie and bakery places that have opened up across the city, their displays piled with breads, brioches, biscuits, cakes and tarts all of exactly the same beige carb colour. Like the rest of the world, China’s youth are taking on an American style processed diet of over-refined, high carb, high sugar, high corn syrup, sponge-textured junk that’s making them fat and giving them heart disease and diabetes in the space of a single generation, assisted by an increasingly sedentary lifestyle plugged up with video games, Net surfing and mobile phone chatting.

Back to the tea.

“The hotels don’t [usually] do bilingual flyers,” says my companion, showing me a leaflet for the afternoon tea, which is in both Mandarin and English. “In Beijing it used to be the foreigners that had the money. Now it’s the Chinese that have it. Beijing has the richest people in China.”

“Where does the money come from?” I ask.

“A lot of it’s new money. There are provinces with coal.”

“You’re talking about land sales and the licensing of mining rights.”

My companion nods.

“They make money like water flowing,” she says.

The afternoon tea sits alongside a relatively recent fad for heavily iced multi tier cakes and Disney princess wedding dresses, usually combined with plasticky perfect, unwittingly kitsch Stepford photo shoots to prove that an immaculate investment – I mean a momentous sacrifice – I mean a loving union – is taking place. The era and customs these trends reference never existed. It’s all a cartoon, an inauthentic, retrogressively feminine, Americanised fantasy about a historically hazy England where decorum ruled and social rank was set, stable and (in reality) stifling.

There is also a roaring trend for highly trained ‘English butlers’ over here. That’s one of the most lucrative of these ‘lifestyle’ jobs. I quite like the idea of the rich Chinese employing Little Englanders (ordinary Joes from bog standard Brit towns) to apparently confer some class and style but actually to be their dogsbodies.

“You have to understand that even ten years ago, Beijing was completely different,” says my companion. “These malls you see are being built after the hutong [traditional neighbourhoods with narrow lanes and black curved-slate tiled roofs] were demolished. I was here when the last family was evicted to make this development. That’s happening all over the city. It’s not a question of whether the hutong are beautiful, or characterful, or not. This development is ‘progress’.”

The Opposite House opened six years ago, the same day as the Beijing Olympics. It’s part of the new Beijing, the one that will probably become a single huge mall with internal streets and its own subway system. The hotel is in what is known locally, with heavy euphemism, as ‘the village’ – an enormous luxury shopping, food and lifestyle complex whose formal name is Taikoo Li. There are Balmain, Alexander McQueen, Carven, Balenciaga, Versace and Miu Miu boutiques. All empty. A 24 hour Starbucks. Beautiful girls everywhere, clicking on their phones, wonderfully dressed but with nothing to say, sugar daughters waiting for sugar daddies.

“I find the sight of these girls so depressing,” I say. “They’re so wonderful, so beautiful, so well-dressed. But I don’t see them laughing or joking. They don’t look like they’re having a good time. I don’t get it. And what do they do all day?”

“You only have to look at China’s history. Concubines.”

I say nothing. The Orientalist obsession with forbidden cities, palace compounds and the concubine system of institutionalised sexual exploitation neatly skips over the ‘revolution’ that was designed, deliberately, to break down the idea that women were objects to be bought, reared, sold, used and exchanged for sexual labour. Instead it put forward the idea that women could be used for any labour whatsoever.

“A lot of the girls in universities are being kept,” says my companion.

Again, I say nothing. It is not true that “a lot” of female university students are being sexually used, dressed, accessorised and paid for by the exploitative men they believe are their boyfriends and providers. But there is certainly a minority of younger women, highly visible around Sanlitun in particular who are like beautiful, precious-breed strays sniffing around melancholically for a new owner. The fact that they are visually striking makes them seem more numerous than they really are. The truth is that the majority of Chinese girls and women study and work and work and work, while withstanding pressure to court and marry and breed. And then they work and work and work at being a wife and mother and daughter and daughter-in-law, in addition to their other work.

“You know the new trend is for etiquette classes?” says my companion. “Even three week courses at finishing schools in Switzerland? Because the new Chinese rich are not sophisticates. They have to learn it all. They have no manners. They don’t know how to do anything.”

In this new world anything, even social skills, can be monetised and sold back to you. I have a (Chinese) friend whose cruel but lucrative side business is to give extremely over-priced wine and gourmet food tutorials to her newly wealthy compatriots, who believe anything she tells them.

At Taikoo Li there’s an Apple store whose glowing Old Testament apple logo (Eve bit the apple of temptation and iPods poured out, damning humankind and blighting the earth) is so aggressively huge, hanging heavily over the complex, that I often mistake it for the moon when I’m walking home. Opposite Taikoo Li is a stretch of nasty-looking bars with skinny young men outside, hair spiked, dressed sharply in Korean pop style shrunken suits, trying to entice people inside. Next to the bars is a mammoth zone of international embassies with fierce young guards keeping watch, clicking their heels together, chests out, buttocks taut. This morning I saw just three of them marching down a regular street in odd-numbered formation, silently, left, right, left, right, legs straight and high and in time, eyes ahead, like automata.

There’s also a Soviet era diplomatic residence compound that’s like a suburb in itself, housing the families of the diplomatic staff attached to all the different countries’ embassies. It’s built along classic Chinese/Russian communist-chic lines: huge boxy living room, high ceilings, oddly thick walls between the master bedroom and the adjoining room, either for sexual discretion or to contain the bundled wires and strategically threaded mics needed for clear tapping and surveillance.

“The place is enormous,” says my friend from [Feministania], “yet whenever there’s another family also from Feministania they put us in the same tower of the same block. They want us to talk to each other. With the families from all the other different countries, we are polite, we talk about the weather. With other people from Feministania of course we talk about politics.”

“Assume everything you’re saying is being heard. That’s what I was told when I arrived at my office,” said another friend, who works across politics and global finance.

To walk through Beijing today is to negotiate an ever-spreading grid of malls filled with Western European and Scandinavian lifestyle brands, nearly all of them associated with making over the body in some way. They offer clothes and jewellery, scent and makeup, all priced painfully high to accommodate the luxury goods tax. Nearly all the creams and body lotions, including underarm deodorant, contain whitening products and are called Lunar Glow or Pearl Shine or Moon Caress or somesuch. It’s best to look pale, untouched, dewy, delicate: a conflation of racial and gender judgements. Darkness is ugly, it means hard unfeminine work in rural areas, it means you’re not the preferred Han ethnicity but one of China’s many racial minorities from a far-off region, here to do menial or manual labour, having zipped everything you own into a checked plastic cube-bag and brought it on the train from one of the western border areas that bleeds into India or Nepal or even one of the mysterious barbarian –stans.

“You’re dark and you have tattoos,” said someone to me when I arrived. “Here, that means you’re poor. Provincial poor.”

Before I get to the Apple store in Sanlitun on my way home I pass one of the slickest buildings near my office. When I first saw it I thought it was a nightclub or a karaoke place. It’s a plastic surgery clinic called My Like. Its logo is the outline of a mermaid swimming up the side of the white building, with big bazongas and flowing hair. China’s one of the largest markets for plastic surgery globally, alongside Brazil and Korea. When the sun sets the gleaming white clinic lights up with lines of blazing neon pink.

Back to the tea.

Those aspects of the afternoon tea experience which were not directly within The Opposite House’s immaculate control fell short. To be blunt: the Jo Malone fragrance was laughably small. It was exactly the same as a sample you can beg from any woman at any beauty counter at any bog-standard outlet from Chengdu Airport to an Idaho mall. When I got home, me and my roommate – a lifestyle photographer who has a wine fridge filled with rare perfumes worth tens of thousands of dollars – screamed with mirth when inside my ribbon-tied Jo Malone bag we discovered….another, much tinier ribbon-tied Jo Malone bag, which contained….what looked like a Jo Malone matchbox… which contained what could only be called a ‘vial’ of perfume if looked at through rose-tinted binoculars by a pathological liar.

I had been a longtime admirer of Jo Malone, both the woman and the brand she built single-handed. I am shocked that a marque of such apparent sophistication would do something so unstylishly tight-fisted that my disgust is superseded by ridicule. The lavish booklet that accompanies the ‘vial’ (written, tellingly, all in Chinese apart from its headings, to court that new young rich generation of capitalist aspirants) actually has an entire page entitled ‘The Art of Gift Giving’, showing a male model holding an abundance of normal-sized boxes filled with goodies. If only someone at Jo Malone had followed their own advice.

My favourite Jo Malone scents are Pomegranate Noir, 154 and Red Roses but everyone will have their preferences. I would suggest that any fragrance brand wanting to match the culinary skill and presentational dedication of the Opposite House offer either a genuinely medium-sized wardrobe of multiple scents or a single large perfume of choice to customers who have paid for something special. They – we – are not to sign up, pay up and then be palmed off with something a princessy toddler would get in a novelty gift bag at going-home time.

Looking at the insultingly small offering, I wonder if there is some cultural disdain behind it. Do companies think they can fob off the Chinese with these minuscule trinkets because the Chinese will be happy to get their hands on something, anything, a Western brand gives them, no matter how meagre? Do they think the Chinese are so stupid and so desperate for a little acknowledgement by an English-branded company (which is actually American-owned: Jo Malone was bought by Estée Lauder in 1999) that they’ll be grateful for this pathetic sop? Equally, is China so in thrall to a fantasy version of the Western ‘lifestyle’ that it will overlook homegrown enterprises, no matter how nascent, to court an established brand that does not reciprocate its interest or its appreciation?

The Opposite House are already in talks with a range of (Western) brands to work on collaborations for 2015, while gearing up for a second major pairing this autumn: from October 13^th to October 24^th they partner with Brit designer Paul Smith for a business set lunch, also at Sureño, with a menu devised by prodigal chef Laia Pons Gonzalez. Paul Smith will be giving away a typically quirky notebook patterned with musical notes, a key motif in the label’s collection at this year’s Paris Fashion Week.

It’s a good idea for The Opposite House to host experiences alongside fashion and beauty brands who match their standards and style. However, those brands will have to step up instead of donating some samples they found in the back of the cupboard and putting them in fancy bags with a ton of marketing material thrown in to add insult to injury. The people who come to The Opposite House are chic and wealthy enough to have entire shelves of properly packaged, full-sized products by brands even more elevated than Jo Malone and Paul Smith. Those same people are well-connected if not outright famous in the very sectors in which the brands wish to maintain prestige; if an experience fails to live up to promises or expectations, they’ll walk. 

The Opposite House host a non-branded afternoon tea throughout the year. Although the flavours are slightly different it’s just as sumptuous, just as delicious, just as stylish and just as affordable as the Jo Malone collaboration. Western lifestyle brands who want to get in on the 21^st century capitalist China act must match The Opposite House’s quality and generosity or risk looking commercially cheap and culturally nasty by comparison.

Tracing the inkline of beauty and history: Delhi Old And New by Kavita Iyengar

• Delhi Old and New by Kavita Iyengar is available on Amazon here.
• Time Out Delhi have covered Delhi Old and New here

I've just discovered a new, absolutely beautiful artist's tribute to Delhi, one of India's most historic, complex, vibrant and inspiring cities. Kavita Iyengar's Delhi: Old and New is a stunning edition of original, fiercely observed and intricately traced images of the city, at once delicate and utterly fresh. Iyengar's images give the reader a strong visual tour of Delhi, yet are themselves so crisp and classy that the book feels timeless, lifted out of the daily bustle of cosmopolitan life. It does so by focusing on representing multiple Delhis through the centuries, via those architectural and cityscaped parts that still remain, from ancient temples to mosques, forts, palaces, colonial buildings (thanks, chaps) and the "New New Delhi" of post-Independence India. In Delhi, Old and New the vast weight of history is here made both accessible and inexpressibly gorgeous.

Full cover spread - click to enlarge

This is a book for everyone who loves art, or loves India, or both. And for those who want more of the exquisite works, here's a privileged look:

All images by Kavita Iyengar

Beyond the Wall: Writing a Path Through Palestine

"An unflinching portrait of life in the West Bank in the 21st Century."

Andrew Kelly, The Observer

Updated 25th October 2013

I am delighted to celebrate the publication of my fourth book, Beyond the Wall: Writing A Path Through Palestine (Seagull Books/Chicago University Press), which I discuss in a long interview with For Books' Sake. Read Part One here, read Part Two here and Part Three here. There's also a long interview on TYCI and another, by Julie Tomlin, on Digital Women. Further press mentions, hat-tips and interviews have included The New Statesman, World Literature Today, The Mancunion, The List, Platform 51, La Carpa del Feo, Book Elf, The Boar, film-maker and writer Simon Guerrier's site, New Humanist, Ideas Tap, The Asian Writer, Variety, The Student Journals, Spiked, Newsclick India, Women's Views on News and The Observer.

Beyond the Wall was launched with a panel event at The Mosaic Rooms, entitled Writing A Path Through International Affairs. Journalist Susannah Tarbush has written an excellent report on the event, here. I was joined by Anna Blundy, former Times Moscow correspondent and author of a series of novels about war correspondent Faith Zanetti, inspired by Marie Colvin; poet, economist and novelist Nitasha Kaul, whose debut novel ‘Residue’ was shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize and who has written extensively about global economics, Kashmir, India and Bhutan; and Rosie Garthwaite, who began her reporting career straight out of university and the army in Basra, Iraq, and has worked as a reporter and producer for the BBC, Reuters and Al-Jazeera. Her book How to Avoid Being Killed in a Warzone is a survivors’ guide to staying alive in combat territory.

Publishers' blurb as follows:

Beyond the Wall: Writing A Path Through Palestine is a sharp, immediate reportage published by Seagull Books/Chicago University Press on 15th May 2012. It is the latest release in Seagull’s series of short Manifestos for the Twenty-First Century, which tackle current issues in international political affairs. The publisher’s page can be found here and the Amazon UK page, which has a little bit more blurb, is here.

Beyond the Wall: Writing A Path Through Palestine is an unflinching portrait of life in the West Bank in the 21st Century, seen through the eyes of its activists, its ordinary citizens, its children, its population of international aid workers, reporters and foreign visitors. From my first experience of the caprices and cruelties of checkpoint culture upon entering the West Bank to a final confrontation with the army in Silwan I report, reflect upon and analyse multiple aspects of life in an occupied territory. Covering Bethlehem, Hebron, Jerusalem, Ramallah, Nablus and Nazareth, speaking to children in the refugee camps at Balata and degree students in the lecture halls of Birzeit University, I share observations of Palestinians from all walks of life.

Beyond The Wall: Writing A Path Through Palestine is based on my first visit to the West Bank as a reporter in 2011. A short film by Murat Gokmen, summarising the effects of the trip on some of the participants including Anne Chisholm, Ghada Karmi, Ursula Owen and me can be viewed here. I was not a Middle East activist or specialist and went with the intention of reporting exactly what I saw, as it happened. I was both shocked by the behaviour of the military and circumspect about many aspects of Palestinian culture. My final vision balances faith in the vigour of the country's young activists, shock at the perverse effects of military occupation on the mentality of the occupied and the occupiers alike and sorrow at seeing the frustration and anger of the country's youngest citizens.

Excerpt:

It is only now, about halfway into the trip, that I think about the strategy of occupation. How do you subjugate a people? By nihilism, chaos and anarchy in the name of control. You do it by sabotaging their certainty, by toying capriciously with their presumptions, by continually tilting the playing field, moving the goalposts, reversing decisions, twisting definitions, warping parameters. You control where people can and can’t go, then change the rules arbitrarily so that they cannot make plans or have any stable expectations. You give a permit to one person but deny one to another person who’s in exactly the same circumstances, so that people cannot deduce, conjecture or extrapolate based on an individual’s experience. You make them feel that their house is not their home and can be violated, occupied, demolished or taken at any time, so they cannot fully relax even in their own beds. You isolate them and put a wall where their view used to be. You instigate a faux ‘system’ of permits, which is deliberately obscure and can be changed at any time. You shout at them in a language that is not their own and which they do not understand. You monitor them. When they travel you put your hands all over their possessions. You arrest and question anyone for any reason at any time, or threaten to, so they are always in fear of it. You are armed. You intimidate their children. You change the appearance of their cities and ensure that the new, alien elements—the walls, roads, settlements, sides of walkways, gates, tanks, surveillance towers, concrete blocks—are much bigger than them or on higher ground so that they feel diminished and watched. You make everything ugly so that seeing is painful.

Their consolation is that if they die, the euphemism ‘martyr’ will conceal the ignominy.

Further launch events related to Palestine, the Middle East, war reporting, international reportage and international affairs include the below. A full and updated list of appearances can be found here. 

• [Friday 4th May, 4.30pm, The Globe Theatre, London. I will be participating in a panel discussion entitled Theatre under Occupation: What Does Shakespeare Have to Say to the Palestinians? following the Ramallah-based Ashtar theatre company's staging of Richard II in Arabic.]
• [Saturday 19th May, 2pm, Watershed, Bristol. I will be in conversation with novelist Selma Dabbagh as part of Bristol's Festival of Ideas, in an event called Palestine Now. Click here for details.]
• [Wednesday 30th May 2012, 7pm, Kuumba Imani Millennium Centre, Liverpool, as part of the city's Writing on the Wall festival. I will be in conversation with novelist Ahdaf Soueif about the Middle East revolutions. Further event details here.]
• [Saturday 9th June, 11.30am, Hay Festival, Hay-on-Wye. I will be interviewing war reporter Janine di Giovanni. Further event details here.]
• [Sunday 10th June, 11.30am, Hay Festival. I will be interviewing Ahdaf Soueif about Cairo and the Arab Spring. Further event details here.]
• [Saturday 7th July 2012, 5.30pm, Southbank Centre, London. I will be chairing a discussion on The Art of War (Reportage), with BBC war reporter Frances Harrison, journalist Oliver Bullough and Caine prize winning writer Michela Wrong. For event details click here.]
• [Monday 9th July 2012, 5.30pm, Bluecoat, Liverpool. I will be giving a solo reading and talk on the effects of the military occupation in Palestine as part of the Liverpool Arabic Arts Festival. For event details click here.]
• [Friday 17th August 2012, 4pm, Edinburgh International Book Festival. I will be chairing a panel discussion on international war reportage with Ed Vulliamy and Janine di Giovanni.]
• [Tuesday 9th October 2012, 5.30pm, SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies), London. I will be curating and chairing a panel event called Palestine Now: Writers Respond as part of the university's autumn series of lectures on the contemporary Middle East. Further details here. My speakers will be Rachel Shabi, Naomi Foyle, Miranda Pennell and Selma Dabbagh.] 

• [Sunday 11th November 2012, 6.30pm, The Map cafe, Kentish Town, London. I will be discussing Palestine with the writer and academic Ghada Karmi.]

• [Friday 16th November and Saturday 17th November 2012. Location and speaker details confidential. I am speaking at a leaders' conference about art, culture, politics and the role of the media amongst Arab Spring states.]  

• [Sunday 18th November 2012, Leighton House, London, 3pm. I will be in conversation with British Palestinian author Selma Dabbagh as part of the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea's Nour festival of North African Arts. Event details here.]

• [Friday 7th December 2012, The Watershed, Bristol, 8pm. I will be opening the Bristol Palestine Film Festival and chairing a Q&A with speakers including film directors Ken Loach and Leila Sansour after a screening of the film 5 Broken Cameras. Details here.]

• [Saturday 8th December 2012, The Watershed, Bristol, 6pm. I will be speaking and reading at an event called Writing A Path Through Palestine alongside writers Selma Dabbagh and Guy Mannes-Abbott. Details here.]
   

The death of Magical Democracy and the rise of A Card From Angela Carter

The novelist Angela Carter, who died twenty years ago at the age of only fifty-one, was a creative genius, a consummate entertainer, an ambitious artist, a highly sophisticated crafter and a great intellect. [UPDATE, as at 10th Feb 2012: I have just been contacted by BBC radio producer Sara Davies, who has produced a documentary about Carter's plays, which is going out on Radio 4 on Thursday 16th February at 11.30am. She writes:

I hadn’t known about the plays till an academic in Bristol told me about them, and I discovered they were all in the BBC archive. I’ve used excerpts from all five, with interviews with various people who were connected with her back then, including Susannah Clapp, Marina Warner and Carmen Callil, and I’ve tracked down the studio manager who worked on the plays who talks about what fun it was putting them together in studio.

I don’t think many people know this side of Angela’s work, and the plays are such a riot!

Please tune in and enjoy Carter's imagination and genius afresh.]

I have long wanted to write a book of accessible essays, one about each of Angela Carter's major fictions, expressing my fannish enthusiasm, which is effusive and profuse. I'd envisaged it coming out this year, fully embossed, emblazoned and engilded, illustrated and illuminating, a Christmas gift for the literate. I’d call it Magical Democracy, after a phrase used in the Carter obituary written by Lorna Sage, another genius who died too young... and who also edited a wonderful book of essays on Carter, called Flesh and the Mirror, which includes contributions from Ali Smith and Marina Warner. 

For now, Angela Carter’s life has been commemorated in a beautiful looking, precisely written, perfectly constructed yet melancholy-making volume, A Card from Angela Carter, written by the renowned theatre critic and biographer Susannah Clapp. The book is hand-sized and gifty, its chiselled sentences and glinting insights giving us a sharp and immediate portrait of an entire life.

This is achieved despite rather than because of its central conceit. Clapp and Carter were close friends for several decades. Carter sent Clapp a series of postcards, which Clapp describes with a crisp humour that far exceeds the interest of the cards themselves, which are reprinted in a drab monochrome and bear brief, sharp, dashed-off messages. So there’s an image of a pot of Texan chilli beef. It’s like a 1970s tea towel illustration, block-printed and painfully indelicate. This is Clapp’s brilliant description:

The picture shows a black cauldron trying to pass as a saucepan. Bubbling with beans and frighteningly red beef, it was sending off a swirl of blue smoke.

On the back – and how I wish Bloomsbury had just turned the card over in the photocopier and given us a glimpse of Carter’s handwriting – the novelist has written,

Carter’s reply to the critics! Texas chilli, it goes through you like a dose of salts. I would like to forcefeed it to that drivelling wimp…preferably through his back passage.

This – Clapp’s description and Carter’s message, both - is pure Carter fiction territory: vehement, salty, violent yet camp, the image of beef and chilli turned to one of gore and guts, nutritive turned into purgative, a recipe for the rectum, the domestic made demonic. But the brevity and sharpness of the message is typical Carter too. She was as much a honer and an architect as she was an impresario or conjurer of literary circus tricks. The stories may happen in the lurid glare of a carnival tent – but the tent’s held up with iron pegs and metal rigging. There is method to the madness, deftness to the dazzle.

It has always bothered me that Carter’s work is often described in terms of stylistic effect, symbolic resonance and folkloric influence rather than mental effort or thematic craft. She is depicted (as Clapp acknowledges) as a literary aerialist exulting in costume, a dazzler magicking up a false yet apposite paradox-world of masquerade and bewitchment, of things pretending to be other things in an infinite hall of mirrors, references refracting off references. It is as though, if one were to smash the mirrors, there would be nothing behind them but stage lights and severed puppet strings. Carter’s fiction is presented by critics as one of high theatricality and loosely picaresque plotting, wild abandon held together with the strands of an unravelling devorée  shawl and a spot of false eyelash glue. The books and their characters seem to survive on sheer guts and willpower.

This is a false impression, peddled as much by her lovers as her detractors. Angela Carter wrote with an iron fist in a sequined, fringed, marabou-trimmed lamé glove, holding a scalpel quill. She was a consummate artisan as well as an inspired artist, a romantic as well as an intellectual, a sensualist and a stylist. She may have presided over the revels, but she organised them well in advance and made sure the schedule ran to time. That, in life as well as art, is one of the secrets of great creation: one labours meticulously, tightening those symmetries, buffing those commas, to make it look as though one wrote it (and compel readers to consume it) in a single exuberant swoop.

There is a satisfying tension between the baroque fantasy of what happens in Carter’s fiction and the austere precision with which it is planned; between the lavish indulgences of her characters and their speech and the stern control of Carter’s own ideas. Her characters - whether they are the mercurial, curious, stubborn and inquisitive protagonists of her famous collection The Bloody Chamber or the loquacious giant swan-heroine Fevvers in Nights at the Circus - do not merely enact mechanistic reversals of traditional fairytale martyrdom, overturn overdone gender clichés or blather on pointlessly for page after page of earthy ventriloquism. They are fully imagined lovers, fighters, thinkers, adventurers, charismatic beings. They have heart and soul; they are not just strung up in Carter’s sequence of symbolic events. Readers love Carter because Carter is fun to read: a fantasy novelist who writes ripping yarns that make you feel anything is possible.

A Card from Angela Carter restores the idea of Carter as a constructor of tremendous skill as well as a creator of wild genius. The postcards are merely a device to pay tribute, to illuminate, to analyse, to commemorate and to critique. On their few hasty lines, Susannah Clapp has managed (like a Carter character herself) to spin and hang a tight, light and glittering biography, beginning to end, with teaching jaunts, prize-judging and prize-winning, family, career, lifelong love and mortal illness in between. I am not quoting much from the book because I want you to buy it. But I had to put in this wonderful line:

Her card was a photograph of an armadillo, a curved creature picking its way, like an elderly millionairess, through prickly undergrowth.

Days after having read it I am still wondering how Clapp did it. In barely a hundred pages she has performed an origami trick of stunning expertise, folding an entire life into a half-inch width of book, summarising a life and a body of work, conveying a steely awareness of time’s passing, a sense of history and a complex depiction of Carter’s character and contribution. With her icy, smooth humour and beautiful spare prose, Clapp strips out the tinny taint of campness that surrounds Carter. She does away with the standard critical soundbites – of the macabre, the kitsch, the playful, the carnivalesque, of masquerades and harlequins, dolls and hybrids, fairy lives and horror tales – that obscure Angela Carter under a thick white greasepaint of cliché.

There is not one great mind here, there are two, and both have been undersold. Susannah Clapp’s previous book, With Chatwin, is a superlative personal memorography of the travel writer and explorer Bruce Chatwin, whom she was close to. It was praised fulsomely by all the major papers when it came out some years ago. These lines of praise are to be found, rightly, on the back of A Card From Angela Carter. But Clapp has not produced a major full-length work since, despite her tremendous talent and huge fanbase, obvious from her popular theatre reviews for the Observer, her erudite wit as a theatre critic for Night Waves on Radio 3, her pedigree as a co-founder of the London Review of Books (for whom Angela Carter was a longtime writer) and the support and joy which has greeted the publication of  A Card from Angela Carter. It has only been out a week and it’s been covered with great positivity in The Observer (who gave it their Review section cover) and The Guardian, flagged up as a must-buy in ES magazine, reviewed well in The Independent and made a Radio 4 Book of the Week.

I want more from Susannah Clapp. I want a big book. Two thousand word reviews and one hundred page books are too meagre for a magnificent mind and a wide wit. Write a satire about a Biba-chic theatre critic, why don’t you? Just keep a diary and change the names at the end.

A Card From Angela Carter has been created with obvious devotion. Its controlled yet luxurious cream, black, gold and red cover was designed by the brilliant Holly Macdonald and the lovely red-inked endpapers were drawn by Carter’s longtime collaborator Corinna Sargood. There is a twist in the plot to do with these endpapers, which I won’t reveal except to say that it brings tears to the eyes and fully establishes this book as a serious eulogy for a dazzling talent too briefly explored…

…and too thinly praised. Carter was always loved by readers, much admired by other writers and reviewed thoroughly and respectfully. She was a prolific journalist whose great insight turned even casual reviews into weighty and important cultural essays with wide relevance. She was adapted very successfully for film (notably by Neil Jordan for The Company of Wolves) and was an acclaimed dramatist for radio, as well as working speculatively in theatre. However, none of Carter’s novels had ever been Booker nominated. Her last novel, Wise Children, was published with great fanfare but ignored by that year’s Booker jury, leading directly to the establishment of the Orange Prize, now in its 17^th year.  Clapp writes, “Her early death sent her reputation soaring.” She adds, however, that

[Carter] was not acclaimed in the way that the number of obituaries might suggest. She was ten years too old and entirely too female to be mentioned routinely alongside Martin Amis, Julian Barnes and Ian McEwan as being a young pillar of British fiction. She was twenty years too young to belong to what she considered the ‘alternative pantheon’ of Iris Murdoch, Doris Lessing and Muriel Spark in the forties...

Twenty years after Angela Carter’s death, there is still no major biography of her and no major mainstream critical volume about her work. Could I propose here a small reconsideration of a speculative amateur scholar’s enquiry entitled… Magical Democracy?

Until I complete that magnum opus of trenchant literary criticism and squealing sycophantic hagiography, A Card From Angela Carter by Susannah Clapp can be purchased everywhere, published by Bloomsbury.

A great variety of art. Not a great variety of artists.

An image from the Hackney Hoard show at Galerie 8

This year I have written in celebration of the Max Mara Art Prize for women, showcased at the Whitechapel Gallery in London. The Whitechapel has an excellent track record in supporting women artists: its comeback show after months of restoration featured the work of Goshka Macuga and Isa Genzken, amongst others. Even the thinking behind the Turner Prize, notorious within the art world for being awarded to such a small number of women artists over the long duration of its history, has transformed in the last ten years, with a marked increase in women shortlistees and women winners. This is all to the credit of the art world, which has been quicker on its feet than the literary and classical music worlds when it comes to crediting women for our creativity and intellect. Recent major exhibitions and retrospectives in the UK have given cultural space to Maria Lassnig, Polly Morgan, photographer Dorothy Bohm (at Manchester Art Gallery), Marina Ambramovich, Fiona Banner, Nancy Spero, Annette Messager, Eva Rothschild, Tracey Emin (currently on at the Hayward) and Susan Hiller and I have every hope that this trend will continue. In the last few years Emin and Barbara Kruger have represented Britain and America respectively at the Venice Biennale (Emin being only the 2nd female artist ever to do so) and I hope their presence counteracts somewhat the utterly damning art world statistics given on the Guerilla Girls' brilliant posters, which I saw at the 2005 Biennale.

It's heartening to see an entire international industry and a great and grand discipline with centuries of history change in so short a time. I feel hopeful...until I read Brian Sewell's openly misogynistic ripdowns of Tracey Emin and Susan Hiller, until I realise that only one of the major newspapers picked up on the Women Make Sculpture show at the Pangolin Gallery - and until I get a press release like the below:

Hackney Hoard
Opening celebration: Thursday 21 July 2011 / 6 - 9 PM
With a special performance by Doug Fishbone

GALERIE8 proudly presents Hackney Hoard, a project initiated by celebrated artist and amateur London historian Adam Dant. The exhibition takes the discovery and narrative surrounding the find of the “Hackney Hoard” as a starting point and what follows, is an inquiry of the value and status placed on contemporary art objects.

Including an introduction by finder Terence Castle, and artworks by Adam Dant, Le Gun artists, Matthew Killick, Annabel Tilley, and Gavin Turk.

The Hackney Hoard exhibition is part of GALERIE8's summer opening series of events entitled Launching Pad to begin its residency within the Arthaus building. This diverse exhibition, both visual and interactive, engaging and reflective, will include a series based on events, sound and performance art, a publishing fair, film screenings and theatre evenings.

Le Gun are a collective of illustrators whose work is exciting, fresh and original. The collective is made up of 8 men and 1 woman. Of the rest of the named artists invited to participate in Hackney Hoard, there are 4 men (Adam Dant, Matthew Killick, Gavin Turk and Doug Fishbone) and 1 woman, Annabel Tilley. I am sure that all are excellent - as well as Le Gun, I love Gavin Turk's work. But don't tell me that a grand total of 12 men and 2 women participants is anything like a free and fair representation of all the possible creativity, genius, artistry, insight, history, performance, collaboration, energy and thinking that the show's organisers could have accessed. The PRs for these exhibitions are always, of course, female. I wonder how they feel, working so hard to support projects whose perks and credit go only to the men in power. I have run out of interest in perpetrators' excuses, lies and victim-blaming ("it's women's fault - women are scarce - shy - small - unpushy - having babies - emotional - absent - less bothered about success/fame/money/career"). Don't tell me that it's just a funny and sad coincidence that all the really really great work is done by men and all the really really shit work is done by women and, hey, that's just how it is. I mean, the current Galerie 8 show features a woman artist, Mary Yacoob, so they obviously know some. The audience for all cultural events in all disciplines from dance to music to literature to art to design to theatre is always at least half and usually majority female. We deserve better. Turn it around.

Literary women, literary prizes. Not often to be found in the same room.

A shorter version of this feature was printed in the Guardian yesterday, on Friday 3rd June, but due to a glitch hasn't been put up on the web site yet. Following requests for links from women colleagues within the publishing industry I have put it up here.

This year’s Dolman travel writing book prize has longlisted 8 men and 2 women. The previous year the shortlist was 6 men and 1 woman. The Walter Scott prize for historical fiction has shortlisted 5 men and 1 woman this year. There were double that number of women on the shortlist last year: 2. One of them, Hilary Mantel, won. The Independent Foreign Fiction Prize has returned a shortlist of 5 men and 1 woman every single year for the last five years. In 2006 it went totally mad and had 2 women and 4 men! Since 2001, the IMPAC prize has had 11 men winners and 0 women. The Samuel Johnson prize has a 2011 longlist of 15 books by men, 1 co-authored by a mixed pair and 2 books by women. In the previous 12 years it has had shortlists of 5 men and just 1 woman 7 times. In 2009 it was 6 men and no women. It has been 4 men and 2 women three times. In 2003 they had their year of insanity: 3 men, 3 women. The Ondaatje Prize has honoured 7 men and 1 woman. The Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic literature has been awarded to 10 men and 1 woman. The David Cohen prize has honoured 7 men, 2 women and one joint win. Its 1993 winner was V S Naipaul, who this week at Hay expressed his derision for women writers, who are “unequal” to him, writing “tosh” with our “narrow view of the world.”

Despite our toshy narrowness women are everywhere in the book world and even on the bestseller lists. We are the overwhelming majority of book buyers, book readers, book editors, agents, PRs, event attendees, festival-goers, champions of literature, literature teachers, writers and book club members. We read the comically major majority, in a really major way, of all fiction. We support the entire industry from within and without. We are everywhere except in the nicest place: the prestige podium, that zone of acclaim furnished with prizes, honours, respect, speaking invitations, special commissions, credit, mentions, recommendations and a place in the canon.

It’s rank misogyny, sure, but it’s mainly misogyny’s simpering complement, its geisha: man-worshipping. A man does a shit in a potty and it is called a work of genius; a woman produces a work of genius and it's treated like a shit in a potty. Many of the juries for the above prizes are laudably mixed, yet somehow all the perks are given to the men, often by women who are just the most astounding, patriarchy-propping, desperate, grovelling little manworshippers. The committee for World Book Night 2011 had a majority of women, who chose just 8 books out of 25 by women. Know what wasn't on their list? Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, On Beauty, White Teeth, Brick Lane, Small Island, Hotel World, Possession, The Children's Book, Beyond Black, The Cast Iron Shore, Hearts and Minds, The Poisonwood Bible, any Harry Potter or Jacqueline Wilson, The God of Small Things, any Doris Lessing, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, any Rose Tremain, Susan Hill... The longlist of ignored genius women is truly endless - and many of  the perpetrators were women. It's a chilling reversal because when the initial surveys for WBN (focusing on lending libraries and readers' habits) were done, women authors - Jane Austen and Harper Lee - topped two of the three surveys.

It's strange because when men themselves are called upon to give their Top Tens, their mentions, their to-read must-haves, their shortlists, their ranks of genius and tips for the top - and again, typically, the media calls upon them 10 times more often than it calls upon women - they give the power and opportunities to other men, not women. Elle magazine asked literary liar James Frey to give his top 8 favourite reads: he mentioned 8 men and 0 women. Vogue asked Peter Carey to give his top 7 novels about servants and masters when his last novel came out: 7 men, 0 women. Both these men, knowing that these magazines have a virtually all-female readership, used this woman-given moment promote their own books and to help as many other men as they possibly could, to make their position absolutely clear. If they disdained the world of women they should have refused to feature in these magazines. Instead, they took the perk and then threw the magazines' support straight back in women's faces.

Read the Guardian's literary Top Ten [war novels/love scenes/car chases/favourite writers] series, count, get the sick bag ready and see that that the hundreds of men invited to give their lists keep the numbers of women at 3 out of 10 or less, as in this latest example, with shocking consistency, across hundreds of entries and dozens of criteria. They have made it clear that they neither read nor rate women's work. This would not matter at all - I am certainly not going to force a man do to something he hates - were it not for the fact that the feeling is not mutual. Women worship male writers. But when I have attended major book events, like seeing Arundhati Roy, Doris Lessing, Sarah Waters, Jeanette Winterson, Nicole Krauss, Jackie Kaye, Lionel Shriver and many others read, the audience has been 99% women. In events with male authors the audience has still been 50-60% women. This support does not go both ways. Men stay away from women writers in their droves; when asked to explain themselves, they come out with open insults which demonstrate - thank you - their ignorance and derision with astounding transparency. There are, of course, some exceptions, and thank heavens I am friends with them. But across 20 years of experience in this area I have been shocked by the sheer level of ignoring, insulting and casual belittling of women's work that goes on at all levels of the culture, excepting the publishing industry itself, which I truly believe is non-sexist.

Those readers unconnected with the industry might argue, reasonably, that more books by men than women are brought out, that the media covers a fair and representative selection of what's out there and that prizes reflect this neutral imbalance in numbers. This is not the case. The great upside of the digital and information revolution is that publishers' catalogues can now be accessed on line, each of which shows just how many fascinating books are written by women at all levels, in all genres, in non-fiction and fiction, with many different approaches, voices and interests. The books come out and they are ignored, the men are celebrated and elevated and the few women featured (the female to male media ratio should be 2:8 or 3:7, maximum) are talked down.

Every study into reading habits has show that women will faithfully buy, read and support books by both sexes while men 'tend to' (this is the phrase which is always used when people report this little hate-fact) read books only by men. Swallow that for a second, ladies-in-denial: they have such incredible disdain and loathing for us that they will not even touch a book by us. Meanwhile the ladies are busy helping the chaps as much as their slavish little souls can stand. I suppose, if you're a female masochist, being ignored by the artist men your life is dedicated to helping is a prize in itself, though not a very prestigious one.

Thank God for the Orange Prize. And here’s a curtsey for the gents who’re filled with incoherent anger at the sight of us females who are involved with it. It's something to do with the notion of us all together that makes them boil with absolute rage, so that when they open their mouths, just any amount of jeering misogyny, hatred, ignorance and anger comes out. They say there should be a prize just for men, as though all of society is not one big prize for men, lovingly polished by millions of submissive women. Look at the statistics above, which seem to imply that across all the years, across all the genres, across all the criteria, across all the countries and cultures, the languages and the markets, women are just 0%-10% as good as men, who are geniuses. A woman bringing out a book, any book, about anything, can expect not to be reviewed in papers or magazines, not to be covered on the radio or TV, not to be invited to read or speak, not to win any prizes, not to be recommended or mentioned in subsequent years, not to have her career aided by prestigious teaching appointments, not to be absorbed into the canon, not to be studied at school, college or university and not to have any kind of legacy at all. It is a classic model: the women do all the work, the women even write the bestsellers which fund the whole industry, the women buy the tickets, organise the events, produce the programmes, they give underpaid or unacknowledged time, effort, labour, dedication and money... these things are taken from them...and every single one of the meaningful rewards and cultural credit goes to men, now, posthumously and for all eternity.

I think that an all-male book prize is actually a great idea and will happily support it. But there’s one rule: the angry men administering the prize cannot then exploit women's replaceable, overworked, underpaid, unacknowledged labour. That means the cleaners, caterers, PRs, producers, assistants, administrators, interns, front-of-house, organisers and researchers cannot be women. It means your partners will not do the childcare while you have your meetings. Let's see how far you get.

Women Make Sculpture

Christie Brown, Lost and Found

The Pangolin Gallery in London (Kings Place, 90 York Way, N1 9AG) is launching Women Make Sculpture, which will run from 19th May until 18th June.


Despite the huge success of a handful of sculptors such as Barbara Hepworth, Elisabeth Frink and Louise Bourgeois, women are still under-represented in major art shows, galleries and museums and under-valued on the art sales market. The Royal Academy’s current exhibition Modern British Sculpture which has received so much criticism for leaving out established male sculptors such as Antony Gormley (ha!) and Anish Kapoor. But what about the women? Is such a meagre selection really representative of the current state of British sculpture? Pangolin London thinks not.

Coinciding with the centenary year of International Women’s Day, Pangolin London will celebrate female achievement in sculpture with the exhibition Women Make Sculpture, an all female show highlighting the diversity and creativity of women sculptors today. The exhibition will bring into the spotlight a number of established female artists including Sarah Lucas, Dorothy Cross, Ann Christopher and Alison Wilding as well as emerging names such as Polly Morgan, Abigail Fallis, Rose Gibbs and Briony Marshall.

Women Make Sculpture provides an opportunity to focus on a selection of sculpture inspired by topical issues that concern women today such as war, mental health, sex, childbirth and science. Director of Pangolin London, Polly Bielecka, notes: “The exhibition is not intended to tackle gender superiority; rather it hopes to question whether female artists bring something different to contemporary British sculpture.”

The exhibition will include an eclectic mix of work in a variety of media ranging from Almuth Tebbenhoff’s powerful yet intricate steel wall pieces to Polly Morgan’s taxidermy constructions, and from Deborah van der Beek’s emotive horse head Collateral made from the detritus of war to Rose Gibbs’ controversial Mountain of figures and penises violently expelling bodily fluids.

Pangolin London is well-placed to do a survey show of this kind thanks to its unique affiliation with Europe’s largest sculpture foundry Pangolin Editions and its remit to promote sculpture in all its forms. Pangolin London will also host a panel discussion to coincide with the exhibition on Monday 23rd May at Kings Place. This will include both artists exhibiting in the show and guest speakers to encourage a lively debate.

To book tickets please click here.
A fully illustrated catalogue will accompany the exhibition.
The Pangolin Gallery is open Tues - Saturday 10am-6pm




This text is taken from the Pangolin's press release.

Artist Sarah Maple shows off her cocks

New solo show in Amsterdam

Sarah's next solo show is at KochxBos Gallery in Amsterdam. The exhibition runs from 12th March - 2nd April. The opening night will be 12th March.

 

New 'Cocks' edition available

The above 'Cocks' poster is edition of 100 and available at KochxBos Gallery. Each one is 95 Euros and is signed and numbered. Contact the gallery here.


Sarah at Women Inc
Sarah will be interviewed at Amsterdam's Women Inc festival on 5th March! For more details click here.