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stanportus · 7 years ago

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Berlinde De Bruyckere: Stages and Tails

When you visit Hauser & Wirth, Somerset, what is striking from the very beginning is the grandeur of the location. Nestled just outside the village of Bruton, the large complex of restored farm buildings seems at odds with the local rugby club’s goal posts, that are just visible above the site’s perimeter. Inside the gallery, the warmth of the brick walls welcomes you, and the surrounding land is framed beautifully in floor to ceiling windows. Because the landscape is immediately so integral to the experience when visiting these galleries, it feels odd that in the first room of Berlinde De Bruyckere’s exhibition ‘Stages and Tails’, the windows are covered up. White fabric is stuck over the panes, allowing sunlight to pass through, but dispersing its rays in the process. The reason for this is obscure at first, and remains so for quite some time.

The space contains three objects which make up a new work by De Bruyckere, ‘Anderlecht’ (2018). Each is a pallet with layers of folded and stacked hide, forming their own contours and falls, where the odd pinks, yellows and blues of these objects speak of the fatty animals these hides once were, and the treated material they will become. But they only speak of this origin and future. When you look closer these objects reveal, after quite some guessing, that they aren’t on this transitional journey - they won’t be turned to leather - because they are in fact casts of hides, meticulously hand painted by De Bruyckere in wax, and embellished with the hairs and salt from the original hides. On closer inspection too, the wooden pallets are bronze. ‘Anderlecht’ then is a trick on the visitor, deployed through De Bruyckere’s artistry, and maintained by the covered windows. The light, explains the gallery assistant, could melt the works.

The joy of discovering the deceit of this work is followed quickly by the relief that you are not facing the actual skins of animals. De Bruyckere’s work raises questions about death, why society wants to prolong its inevitability as much as possible, and why it is something that people shy away from discussing. So, this relief is cut with irony; death is presented, but really it is hidden. De Bruyckere likes to deal with themes in a lofty, abstract sense. Death is death with a capital ‘D’. The ideas of bodies and flesh in her work verge on the phenomenological rather than the literal. These themes appear to be discussed in an ahistorical sense as opposed to a temporal one.

‘Courtyard Tales’ (2017-2018) is a series of works made of old blankets that De Bruyckere left to decompose in the courtyard of her studio hanging over one another to create abstract, layered compositions. The provided text explains that the broken down weaves of the woollen blankets represent, “the failure of social structures”, and that they are, “particularly compelling at this turbulent moment in history.” The blankets hang over unseen structures making them bulge and fall in uncanny ways. The iron nails pinning them high to the wall surely can’t be the only way they are suspended. Despite their holes and gashes that make them appear so miserable and forgotten, their framing in the gallery makes them seem like rich drapery more than anything else - even if that is drapery in ruins.

Like ‘Anderlecht’ they make you wonder about their creation, but any specific social structures or turbulent moment seems far removed from these works. Instead, ‘Courtyard Tales’ is best read in relation with ‘Anderlecht’, where the works fall into a strange cyclical relationship. Walking between the two gallery spaces the hides of ‘Anderlecht’ started to appear more like blankets that had been folded into stacks, and the blankets of ‘Courtyard Tales’ appeared to look more like hides. De Bruyckere may not speak of a particular moment or structure, but together ‘Anderlecht’ and ‘Courtyard Tales’ open a space to consider the cycles of creation and dispossession, meanings lost and meanings gained, that through the fabrics held close to bodies, play out in life’s most intimate moments.

This review first appeared on this is tomorrow

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stanportus · 7 years ago

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Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World

Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World, at the Guggenheim Bilbao, aims to show the recent history of Chinese Art, bracketed by the events of Tiananmen Square in 1989 and the Beijing Olympics in 2008, two events that radically altered China’s relationship to itself and with the rest of the world.This is the second iteration of the exhibition after its first staging at the Guggenheim, New York last year – an exhibition that was shrouded in controversy and has resulted in a show that includes what feels like an overwhelming 120 works by 60 artists, spread out across 6 themed sections.

Before the New York show opened a petition was started objecting to the inclusion of several artworks that included or had involved animals in their making: Xu Bing’s A Case ‘Study of Transference’ (1994), a video work that shows two pigs marked in pen with Chinese and nonsensical Roman script; Sun Yuan & Peng Yu’s ‘Dogs That Cannot Touch Each Other’ (2003), another video which consists of two dogs on wooden treadmills, unable to reach other, but trying to fight; and the artwork that gave the exhibition one half of its name, Huang Yong Ping’s ‘Theater of the World’ (1993), which contains lizards and all manner of beetles. The curatorial response, explained at the Bilbao press conference, immediately pointed out that there was never going to be any live dogs or pigs in the show, and would not pull the artworks entirely, but instead form a counter protest by turning the screens depicting Xu Bing’s and Sun & Peng’s films off, and to remove the critters in Huang Yong Ping’s work leaving the structure vacant.

Huang’s critters have made it to the Guggenheim Bilbao (as has A Case Study for Transference - Dogs That Cannot Touch Each Other was, according to the curators, never on the cards for Bilbao), and the populated work offers a paradigm through which to view the show. The structure of Theater of the World is meant to act as an arena-cum- Panopticon, where despite the fact the creatures are quarantined, they come to feed off one another. This is at once a critique and jab at the supposed superiority of Western Modernity, which many Chinese artists at the time were questioning, but also an expression of superficial divisions between East and West, where in the world of the artwork difference does not lead to division but to digestion and nourishment.

While this breakdown of an East and West dualism maybe a familiar starting point for an exhibition devised by a Western institution looking at Chinese art, what is most salient about Theater of the World in the context of Art and China after 1989 is that it examples an absurdist streak that runs throughout much of the exhibition. Pushing things to their extremes to reveal the ludicrousness of existing structures is repeated time and again to highlight the false divisions between East and West, but it is also done to question the conservatism of tradition and the workings of the Chinese state. Qui Zhijie’s ‘Assignment No. 1: Copying the “Orchid Pavilion Preface” 1,000 times’ (1990 - 1995) shows the artist using his skills as a calligrapher to copy out a text considered to be the highest standard of calligraphy to the point of an unreadable spoil of ink, calling for a return to the act of writing itself. Language is also interrogated in Geng Jianyi’s ‘Misprinted Books’ (1992), which take the official texts and turns them into nonsense through pressing printing plates over each other, while Wu Shanzhuan’s ‘Today No Water’ (1986 - 1996), a 437-page study of the language and visual culture of the Mao Zedong era, highlights the control exercised through bureaucracy and government propaganda, and the exhaustion of meaning that ensues.

As well as pieces that move the workings and material of everyday life into a conceptual realm, much of what’s on display in Art and China after 1989 shows artists carrying out actions in the real world. In the case of the Big Tail Elephant Working Group, who organised events in public spaces, it was a means to think through China’s opening up to the world as a market economy in the 1990s. One such example of this is the 90-minute recording of ‘Safely Maneuvering across Linhe Road; (1995) where Lin Yilin moves a wall of concrete blocks across a road next to a construction site, calling into the question how people’s everyday experiences are altered by the onset of economic growth and rapid urbanization. ‘Kan Xuan’s Kan Xuan! Ai! (1999), doesn’t so much look at how physical spaces change, but how they can prescribe behaviour. Shot on a hand held camera Kan walks against the flow of commuter traffic in a subway shouting ‘Ai’, which can signify alarm or simply recognition. In this instance, it turns into a call for autonomy, but also a reminder of restraints of expected behaviour, as the commuter’s turn in surprise.

There is a teleological feel to many of these works, but in regards to global perceptions of Chinese art in the 1990s, some artists took a far more standoffish, explicitly critical stance. In ‘There Came a Mr. Solomon to China’ (1994), Zhou Tiehai presents the American author and journalist Andrew Solomon, who came to China in the early nineties and wrote about the contemporary art scene for the New York Times, aboard a boat piloted by Marco Polo, ridiculing his ‘discovery’ of Chinese art. Yan Lei and Hong Hao’s ‘Invitation Letter’ (1997), a forged invite to Documenta X sent to 100 Chinese artists, mocks the stardom promised by international recognition, and Yan’s ‘Appetizer’ (2002), a silver tray with biennale written in white powder, shows success as, obviously, a drug: something that may lure, but warps perceptions.

What becomes apparent in the latter stages of the exhibition is a sense that many of the exhibition’s themes collapse into one another. 2008 is painted as a pivotal moment where the Beijing Olympics act as an affirmation of China’s ascent to global power, yet the Sichuan earthquake happened only a month before. Throughout Art and China after 1989 the curators have gone to great lengths to provide the viewer with contextual information. Each of the show’s six sections is given ample introduction in the form of wall texts. But little explanation is needed for the closing sections. Ai Weiwei’s ‘Citizen’s Investigation’ (2009 - 2010), a project which would ultimately land him in prison, sits one room away from footage of the Olympic opening ceremonies, taking place, of course, in the Bird’s Nest stadium. Sarah Morris’s ‘Beijing’ (2008), and the Long March Collective’s action, ‘Avant-Garde’ (2007). also sit nearby offering a glimpse into the changing face of the city as well as the uproar, reinforcing the conflict of interest that came with the exposure promised by the Olympic project and the domestic repercussions.

The exhibition concludes with the ‘Coda’, a single room where Yan Jiechang’s ‘Lifelines 1’ (1999), hangs at one end, while Gu Dexin’s ‘2009-05-02’ (2009), runs across the room’s four walls, and Sun Yuan & Peng Yu’s ‘Freedom’ (2009), a recording of a fire hose suspended and thrashing from its own power, plays in the centre of the space. These three works were made to commemorate anniversaries of Tiananmen Square, and considering the exhibition’s historical and often duteous approach, it may not come as a surprise to find such a neat loop back to the exhibition’s starting date of 1989. But really the space comes to represent the monumentality and expanse of the exhibition itself, and leaves the visitor feeling what the exhibition presents elsewhere: a desire for frenzied opening and consideration, rather than a calling to order.

This article first appeared on this is tomorrow

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stanportus · 7 years ago

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Mark Jenkin: Bait

Cornwall is a county that seems to be at a perpetual crossroads. Much of its identity is understood through its industrial history; mining, of course, has existed in the county for almost as long as memory itself, and fishing has too. But for quite some time, both these industries have found themselves in competition with another form of business altogether: tourism.

Mark Jenkin is a Cornish film maker, based just outside Penzance, who is eager to show this conflict’s muddy complexity. Through the microcosm of a coastal village and two brothers’ fishing business, Jenkin’s new feature film Bait, which is currently in post-production, considers how industry and tourism struggle to coexist.

Jenkin is keen to not come down on one side of the tourism or industry debate, and stresses that although the characters in the film, “argue until they’re blue in the face with one another… nobody’s got a bad intention”. But when comparing Bait to a Western, Jenkin’s position becomes clearer: “It is a frontier story, it’s about the settlers arriving, and imposing order and civilisation on a bunch of natives who are living off the resources that are there.”

This mistrust of new forces overpowering what was is also apparent in Jenkin’s cinematography. Like his previous film Bronco’s House – which similarly looked at the gritty life of a Cornish coastal village – Bait is shot in black and white on an old Bolex 16mm film camera. Jenkin tells me that the camera is older than he is, and that shooting in film is very much his way of escaping the world of digital film making, which he sees as repulsively high-budget and technology obsessed. But although he takes a strong stance against modern film making, it would be wrong to call Jenkin nostalgic. He is not sentimental about the past, rather he is aware of the weight the past pushes on the present. Cinema, for him, is really a young art, and film has not been outmoded by digital – it has just suffered from a certain form of neophilia.

Jenkin will hand process the film that they shot for Bait, methodically winding it through a variety of chemical solutions. Jenkin describes how, “if you put your finger on the actual frame of the image,” once the film has been through a developer solution, and before the film has been run through another solution that will fix the images permanently, “your finger print will be there for forever.” He says this with a joy more akin to a craftsperson discussing their work than a slick director. The imperfections created in the developing process are very much part of it.

He shows me two frames exampling another blemish. They are from a scene where a woman is walking along in the rain, lit by a single lamp. One of the frames is as you would expect but the other is solarized. This was caused when Jenkin had to expose it to light to check if the roll of film was developed correctly, permanently altering the frame.

Due to how little film Jenkin usually shoots for his films (for Bait he shot roughly five hours, hardly anything to create a feature length film from), and the fact that each roll of film in the Bolex camera runs to a meagre two and a half minutes, Jenkin explains that solarized sections of film may be the only images he has for a certain line of dialogue, and therefore they would have to make the final cut. But this doesn’t concern him. “I love that,” he says, “they’re the mistakes that create amazing, randomisation and individualism in the image.”

As much as there is a fight to get the material to do what he wants, there is an acceptance of what the material determines too. This imbues Jenkin’s films with a magical, raw life of their own. Fitting, for the subject at hand.

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stanportus · 7 years ago

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Richard John Seymour: Consumed

“The ecological crisis we face is so obvious that it becomes easy,” writes philosopher Timothy Morton in his book, The Ecological Thought, “to join the dots and see that everything is interconnected.” From the microscopic to the macroscopic, and beyond to the unfathomably big, everything on this planet is entangled in an unimaginable set of relations. Morton conceptualises this as a mesh. The term, he says, suggests “both hardness and delicacy”, where there are connective threads but holes as well, suggesting how not everything in the mesh may be linked but also that there may be spaces in what we understand. This is quite an idea, and one that can feel rather unsettling, but Morton argues that we must begin to grapple with this interweaving, mixing and mingling if we are to confront and deal with the age in which we live – one which has the reality of environmental damage pressing up hard against it.

What this means is we must begin to think big and try to understand what constitutes our familiar world by shifting gear slightly and confronting the strange and unfamiliar. The actually not so faraway places and the effect our actions have on them.

One means that Morton outlines for beginning this task is – maybe obviously – scientific experiment, but he also stresses the value of artistic practices in beginning to help us confront some of the biggest challenges of our time. One photographer and filmmaker who can be seen to pick up the mantle of thinking ecologically is Richard John Seymour, whose 2016 BAFTA-nominated short film Consumed looks at the landscapes, mines, factories and shipyards that make up production in China.

Seymour studied at the Architectural Association under the tutorage of Liam Young and Kate Davies, who run a speculative design studio at the school called Unknown Fields Division. The studio works with writers, designers and architects and ventures, “out on expeditions to the ends of the earth to bear witness to alternative worlds, alien landscapes, industrial ecologies and precarious wilderness”. They aim to make apparent the relationship between the landscapes, and supply chains that come to support contemporary cities, which are often unseen, or imperceptible. Active since 2008, Unknown Fields Division have conducted field trips travelling extensively. This has included lithium mines in Bolivia, textiles factories in India and Bangladesh, gemstone mines in Madagascar, and precious metals mines in Western Australia. Unknown Fields Division are preoccupied by how envisioning such places and relationships can come to alter perceptions, and be generative for speculation: how understanding the entanglement of here and there can help develop new cultural relationships with climate change and the by-products of industry.

It was on one of these fieldtrips that Seymour filmed the material for Consumed. Seymour began filming the factories and mines that they visited in Inner Mongolia and China primarily as a form of documentation. But Seymour amassed enough footage to make a film, which in collaboration with Young and Davies he then turned into Consumed.

Whilst Seymour was studying undergraduate architecture at Bath University he became more and more interested in images as opposed to actually designing. Seymour felt that producing images could come to form a critique of issues that the architectural discourse he was in did not address. Seymour explains that at university, “there was a big focus on style and form. It felt a bit like architecture was a bit of a window dressing, and that was its main capacity. It was almost to entertain,” and that with his photography he was, “trying to find out what was going on outside of the architectural world.” In particular, the ‘starchitetural’ world spearheaded by the likes of Frank Gehry, Norman Foster and the late Zaha Hadid.

Consumed is Seymour’s most recent move away from this slick architectural world of surface, and a cinematic one at that. The film opens with a shot of a digger, perched on the edge of a mine’s slope, moving scree with the bucket on the end of its jolting mechanical arm. In the next scene waste pipes belch blackened water out onto an artificial lake. The lake is constituted of the tailings material (what is left after the process of separating the valuable material from the mass of the ore which has been extracted) from a mineral refinery in Baotou, Inner Mongolia, that extracts rare earth minerals for the production of electronics. These scenes are a set up for the rest of the film, which moves quickly from the mines of Inner Mongolia, to a factory in China’s Jiangsu Province. There is a sense of unsettling vastness in all of these operations, visible through how the size of the mine dwarfs the digger and the expanses of factory floor.

A departure point for Seymour when thinking about the China trip was the work of photographer Edward Burtynsky, whose photography aims to achieve a similar ‘drawing to attention’ as Consumed and Unknown Field Divisions work. There is a similar sense of an ‘architectural scale’ in Seymour and Burtynsky’s work too. Seymour’s shots of endless shipping containers parallel Burtynsky’s images of industrial sprawl. Although in Burtynsky and Seymour’s work the intention is to point to the impact of these landscapes and places, they are portrayed in such a way that they take on an odd beauty. There is a friction here between the desire to depict the consequences of development and consumerism and the portrayal of industrial and polluted landscapes, which leads to sense of an almost industrial sublime.

Consumed manages to avoid remaining entirely in this mode however through the character of Chen Li Ming, who we hear describing his life working in the factory, over the repetitive din of machines. Chen Li Ming explains how he has worked in the factory for 11 years, and that his hands are his livelihood; the factories in China have not caught up with the automation in countries like South Korea. He speaks of how hard life in the factory is, but he also talks of how proud he is of the work he does. As he speaks the scale of production becomes clear as the camera pans rooms full of gold, silver, red and green Christmas baubles, and closes in on a worker sewing a beard onto a Santa’s bare face. It is October, and Chen explains that it is the busiest time of the year as the factory prepares goods for the Western Holidays.

Despite the scenes with Chen Li Ming appearing as a straight forward character profile one would expect in documentary film, Chen is fictitious and was built through interviews Seymour conducted with different factory workers. This was a result of being unable to get a decent sit down interview and the difficulty of trying to talk to people whilst they worked. But it was also due to the fact that Seymour’s interviewees were often being overlooked by their bosses, meaning they rarely divulged the reality of their workplace. But Seymour feels, “it was one of those situations where fiction became more true than fact”. The stitching together of different stories and thoughts from different people in the factory creates a rounder depiction, and a better insight into life working in a Chinese factory.

Consumed takes the fiction-truer-than-fact approach throughout. It is a meshwork of narratives and disparate scenes, coming together to form a vision we would not otherwise see or be able to quite conceive. It does this in part by exposing the phantasmagoria of commodities and the stories behind their magical apparition. We see the dirty process of mineral extraction that sits behind the superficial cleanliness of our phones screens, and the labour that goes into festive ornamentation. Through Chen Li Ming it also reveals the life of a factory worker, as well challenging perceptions of what that may be like. It brings to light what Morton says “we don’t like to recall”, and reframes what is familiar (technology and Christmas) in relation to what is unfamiliar (mining and factory production).

It can be seen to achieve what Morton describes as the role of artworks for thinking ecologically: they enable a questioning and disrupting of a known reality, through exposing one’s complicity in ecological conditions. Yet Consumed also suffers in a way that film, photography and art that takes the brave move of trying to portray the complexity of supply chains, environmental damage and vast industrial landscapes often do. Despite the horror of what is being portrayed, a strange majesty is evoked. There is a closing of distance in one sense, but an opening in another.

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stanportus · 8 years ago

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John Akomfrah: Purple

“Old news reel footage shows a woman, hat pulled down to her thick rimmed glasses and coat buttoned all the way up, being interviewed about a leak of soap within the water system. Standing in front of a frothing stream, contaminated by household detergent, the interviewer asks the woman what she thinks of the incident. The woman laments that of course, it is a terrible thing. But when the interviewer pushes her, asking in his clipped RP accent, “Would you yourself stop using detergents?”, she becomes more reticent. “Well,” she says, before pausing, “I don’t know about that”.”

Read the full review on this is tomorrow here

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stanportus · 8 years ago

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Parallel (of Life and) Architecture

“It would be easy to label Parallel (of Life and) Architecture, currently on show at The Edge gallery, Bath, as part of the growing trend for Brutalist revivalism and fanaticism. But far from a familiar fetishisation of the movement, this is exhibition is ambitious, setting out to engage with the ideas of Alison and Peter Smithson, the husband and wife architectural duo who were central to the development of British Brutalism.....”

This review was written for this is tomorrow and can be found here

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stanportus · 8 years ago

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“When Did You Last Buy a Joint of Beef?”: East London Big Flame and the People’s Food Co-op

Just before Christmas in 1973 a small group of people living on the Lincoln Estate in Bow, East London, set up a food co-op. Their reason for doing so was simple: rising inflation and stagnating wages. Since the beginning of a Conservative rule in 1970, rent, food, and other consumables had been going up in price, whilst wages remained the same. In short, people had to spend an increasingly high proportion of the money they earned just to get by. They named their venture the People’s Food Co-op. It aimed to provide for everyone in need on the Estate and was run by the residents themselves.

Built in 1964, Lincoln Estate housed 2000 residents, and by the early 70s was in a dire state. The tower blocks were neglected and dirty, and there were virtually no facilities for those who lived there, such as a playground for children or a decent chemist. Often hot water and heating was faulty, and alongside the residents being dismayed that the estate was neglected by the off-site caretakers, there were also complaints that the estate’s architecture led to people feeling isolated.

When the co-op first started it was modelled like a market, setting itself up on the Estate’s green, where tables were set out and piled with food that was sold cheaply at wholesale price. Set against the dismal conditions of the estate, the sight of tables set out with food, and members of the co-op inviting those who walked by to join, was an odd thing to see. But such a sight enticed people to join up. As well as camping out by the estate, the People’s Food Co-op made flyers, pamphlets, and leaflets to garner interest. These were often pointed documents, asking their readers why they had to put up with the conditions they were in. They also relayed information about the co-op’s activities, and printed stories from the co-op’s members.

The people who set up the People’s Food Co-op, were part of East London Big Flame. This was a collective of fifteen or so people in East London — made up of men, women, migrants, the employed, the unemployed, and squatters — that had come together a year prior. They had been inspired by a larger collective based in Liverpool called Big Flame, who described themselves as a revolutionary socialist feminist group, orientated towards the working class. Big Flame had developed from a magazine into a political organization with smaller branches cropping up across the country. Campaigning for workers’ and women’s rights, they wanted to change the face of Leftist politics, which they consider to be outdated and unaccommodating of new forms of political and social action such as squatting.

East London Big Flame were influenced by feminist politics as well as the worker and student movements that had recently flourished in Germany and Italy, which were grounded in Autonomist Marxism. This approach espoused organizing around your own needs and political demands, rather than aligning with political parties or even unions. In an essay written anonymously by one of East London Big Flame’s members, reflecting back on the group’s activities, they explain how at the time they saw unions as being ‘blinkered by a hierarchy of white, male, middle-class’ elitism. By working together collectively, they intended to break down and to be critical of the austere social and economic structures that came to determine how one considered and conducted their life. East London Big Flame considered the house workers and the stay-at-home mums as equal to factory workers, and recognized that class struggle was inseparable from women’s struggle for equality. The members of East London Big Flame were adamant that social change or revolution could start from the houses and estates in which people lived, not just from those working in factories or along the docks.

With ‘SOARING FOOD PRICES: CAN WOMEN FIGHT BACK??’ emblazoned across the co-op’s first flyer, its members laid out how food prices had increased ‘25p in the Pound’ since 1970. They proposed that even if inflation could not be solved, they could cut out the increasing margins imposed by shopkeepers by working together and buying their food wholesale and then selling it at cost price. In this way, people would spend a little less, and in turn, keep a little more in their pockets each week. The flyer also asked its reader, rather rhetorically, ‘People get together at work to fight for a decent living — why can’t we do it where we live too?’

Although the flyer was only a one-sided piece of A4 paper and sparse in text, it had taken a whole evening to make. A member of East London Big Flame explained this in another leaflet produced sometime later, stating simply, ‘we hadn’t much experience of doing it’. However, despite the difficulty and their unfamiliarity with producing flyers, it was a prime way to procure support. The sheets of paper were diligently distributed by children on Lincoln Estate, who pushed them under people’s doors and into their homes. The flyers became a physical and symbolic reminder of rising food prices, inflation, stagnating wages, and, not least, of the widening disparity between rich and poor — not to forget the mission and activity of the food co-op itself.

One of the People’s Food Co-op’s pamphlets, bluntly titled ‘WE PAY while THEY PROFIT’, brazenly made this disparity evident. In one column the pamphlet outlined rising food prices, and in another it detailed how inflation was benefiting the banks as well as those who ran and worked for the businesses supplying food. How could it be that the price of eggs had doubled in a year, that a loaf of bread now cost 12p, and that the price of fish, frozen food, fresh fruit, meat, and biscuits — not to mention shoes, telephone bills, stamps, clothes, and beer — had all risen too? How come the four major banks had doubled their profits that year? And how come John Stratton, the chairman of the aptly titled Fatstock Marketing Corporation — supplier of fresh meat, bacon, poultry, and sausages — had received a £16,000 pay rise.

The pamphlet provoked its reader by asking, ‘How often these days can you afford pork chops?’ and ‘When did you last buy a joint of beef?’. The rhetoric was aimed to make the people of Lincoln Estate seriously consider the plight of their material living conditions. Despite the fact that the flyer was rather prosaic in parts, these questions, paired with straight forward examples of rising food prices, clearly pointed out that what could be afforded —– as well as what cuts people were being forced to make —– was a direct consequence of the decisions and actions made by large companies and the government. Not being able to provide a roast dinner or the household staples wasn’t just a personal or family problem, it was a political one too. The pamphlet showed how one person’s problems were likely to be another’s, and by elucidating this shared reality, the co-op’s members were able to step towards changing it. Solidarity around issues in the home could lead to action, much like how strikes and unionization in the factories had led to change before. A cartoon in the pamphlet depicts fat, suit-wearing bosses, conspiring about how to maintain their soaring profits. They decide that raising rent, whilst cutting school and hospital costs, will be the perfect means to extract more and more surplus value from the already squeezed workers, who, pushed so far, ‘wouldn’t know what to do about it’. The cartoon’s final frame, however, shows (against the backdrop of a school, a hospital, and a shop) a giant, collective speech bubble riling ‘OH YEAH?’, the force of which topples the bosses. Collectivity, and the united voice, is shown as the means to combat such oppression; the People’s Food Co-op is the what to do about it.

When it was first set up, the People’s Food Co-op took some time to gain momentum, but it quickly became apparent to the resident’s on Lincoln Estate how the co-op could save them money. But the early success of the co-op meant its model had to change. Local shop keepers began to complain about the co-op’s presence on the green and the fact it was taking their customers away. It was not long before they started getting the police to shift the co-op’s stalls, as well as threatening to report the co-op to the Greater London Council for being on their property.

The fact that the co-op had managed to rile those who they had set out to defy was ample proof of their success, but to avoid further aggravation, the co-op moved indoors. Every fortnight on a Wednesday the co-op would meet at one of the member’s apartment, where they would compile a mass shopping list of what everyone wanted. Then, on Thursdays and Fridays, a few of the members would travel to Wapping market, a Cash & Carry, and other wholesalers. Fresh produce like apples, eggs, and potatoes were bought directly from farmers. The cut-price purchases would then be divided up between the different families on the estate at the weekend.

The People’s Food Co-op continued to operate as a way of distributing food and tackling rising prices, but the fortnightly meetings also began to act as an open forum where other issues, such as the problems felt by the women on Lincoln Estate, could be raised. As a result, it began to break down some of the isolation felt by many of the female residents, some of whom had expressed that they often spent days without speaking to any other adults apart from their husbands, who left for work in the morning and came back in the evening.

A sixteen-page pamphlet with the title ‘People��s Food Co-op’ playfully wrought in bubble writing at the top, was priced at 10p. It was illustrated with various photographs documenting the co-op’s work, and brought together testimonials from various members of the co-op, expressing the strong sense of community gained from joining the group. One person described how, in ‘meeting the same people every two weeks you get to know what their problems are and how they manage to cope’. But aside from the meetings acting as a space to find solace, they also functioned as a place in which to organize action and remedy shared concerns. The co-op presented a means of organizing all aspects of life differently, from living conditions, unemployment, child care, health, family, to sexuality and personal relationships. ‘When I was first in the women’s movement we used to talk about “revolutionizing our lives” and “smashing the family” but we didn’t really understand how you moved towards it in practice’, one person explained. They go on to suggest how the pragmatism and wherewithal to tackle other issues, ‘starts happening from doing something together like a food co-op’.

By showing a pragmatic way to take on social and political issues, the People’s Food Co-op did indeed lead to other community projects and initiatives. These included providing a model for other food co-ops in London, such as in Deptford and Holborn, whilst also helping to establish other community initiatives, such as a play-group in a squatted house which was free of charge and helped alleviate child-care pressures, and also a kid’s club. One resident remarked that without the co-op it was unlikely that the kids club would have started: ‘we wouldn’t have spoken to one another otherwise’. The co-op also led to the setting up of a women’s therapy group, which ran alongside another therapy group set up by other members of East London Big Flame called Red Therapy. The women’s therapy group allowed participants to talk through problems and to talk openly about certain feelings and emotions that many women in the co-op had suppressed, largely as a result of how they felt society expected them to behave. Stemming from the co-op and East London Big Flame’s interest in Autonomist theory, some members of the therapy group were explicit in their belief that therapy was a means for fighting capitalist ideology. These meetings became a way of understanding and breaking free of oppressive political and social structures that had come to affect and define the personal.

The impetus for the co-op’s members to take on other aspects of life and work may have largely germinated from these regular meetings, but the process of making pamphlets also contributed towards this. The ‘People’s Food Co-op’ pamphlet explains how the testimonials included were collected by members of the co-op interviewing each other and taping the conversations. The pamphlet details how, ‘a lot of unexpected and interesting things come out in this way’. One such example in the pamphlet is a page specifically dedicated to problems concerning Lincoln Estate, such as the bad sewage system and an infestation of insects. The page doesn’t describe what has been done to solve these problems, but rather, it put a spotlight on these issues, stressing what needed to be addressed. This keen reflexivity reveals how the pamphlet making process opened up not just a space to think about the co-op’s activity and impact, but also extended to questioning what else could be done to improve the livelihood of those involved.

In a sense this was the lasting impact of the co-op. In 1975, East London Big Flame disbanded and the People’s Food Co-op broke up with it. East London Big Flame’s desire to not have a single-issue focus, and instead wanting to understand and address how exploitation invaded all aspects of life, led the co-op’s members to influence and carry out a wide range of activities, which, adversely, also spread them too thin. East London Big Flame burnt out. The realities that the founding members were faced with, such as families and individuals moving away, led to the group’s disbandment. Yet what East London Big Flame and the People’s Food Co-op put into action found new forms after their end. The self-help therapy group set up by members of the People’s Food Co-op continued for several years, as did Red Therapy, and former members of East London Big Flame remained active in the area, supporting women workers’ rights. The brevity of East London Big Flame and the People’s Food Co-op shouldn’t be seen as a shortcoming. Instead, their activity should be seen as having set forward alternatives to take on politics and the political. Indeed, they showed how the act of asking of a simple question can come to reframe an entire situation.

This essay first appeared in ‘Meet Me in the Present: Documents and their Afterlives’

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