Now, following postings of artwork on social media supporting the Black Lives Matter movement, I’ve been accused of ‘exploiting political and social turmoil to prop up revenue’. It would seem that I am ‘a vulture, a bottom feeder and a vile human being for supporting… prejudiced organisations’. The prejudiced ‘organisations’ in question being, in actual fact, no organisation at all but merely the belief in the benefits of an ant-fascist political standpoint.
I’ve been posting my art on facebook for probably a decade and unless you’re new to my feed you’d be hard pressed not to find politics in my work. Clearly this punter was just aggrieved by my general sense of anti-authoritarianism impinging obviously for once on their delicate political toes. I presume that the person in question wouldn’t consider themselves a fascist but they’re siding with a political establishment and media that are portraying anti-fascism as being a singular block of organised anti-statists, determined and organised enough to replace their liberty-loving western world with a “Marxist-Leninist-Anarcho-Trotskyist Communist dictatorship”. They could start by reading beyond their regular media providers. A library might be a good idea too. Perhaps spend some time researching all their pet hate terms that they love to bandy about so liberally. I know of the word ‘epistemology’ and I may even have a passing interest in its definition(s) but I don’t know enough about it to comment on the subject. Some others would benefit from a little less enthusiasm to drive their mouths full-throttle into an argument without at least some approximation of a map pinned to their dashboard.
And another contemporary cliché has been tossed in my direction too. That of ‘virtue signalling’ on various issues, but Black Lives Matter in particular. Now I’ve got a lot to say on this issue but my response to those that are taking me to task over it is basically boiling down to ‘shut the fuck up’. Black Lives Matter doesn’t need me to get involved but it does need me to listen. And it needs me to not be another silent dissenter. It needs me, as a white man (benefiting from white privilege), to call out the racism and bigotry when I see it. And it needs me to shut up and listen to the black community – because though I know the dictionary definition of ‘racism’ I haven’t actually lived it have I? Every day, every week, every year… I haven’t had to change my name on a job application because I fear not even getting an interview. I haven’t had to worry about being followed by security whenever I walk into a shop. I don’t get in my car and immediately check I’ve got all of my documents in case I’m stopped by the police. So I will listen to black people and I will not challenge what I am told because I have not lived through their experiences. I will stand alongside when asked and speak up when it’s demanded – and it is currently being demanded. Silence in the face of the violence, hurt, bigotry, inequity and discrimination is as bad as assent. It’s not ‘virtue signalling’ – it’s solidarity against injustice.
Do you want to know where the phrase ‘virtue signalling’ comes from? It was first used in The Spectator magazine (famously right-wing) by the writer James Bartholomew to supposedly put down political grandstanding by individuals who, in his opinion, were trying to gain kudos from expressing their ‘virtuous’ political beliefs but weren’t necessarily matching them by their own actual behaviour or lifestyles.
This was written by a journalist who essentially has a full c.v. of right-wing British newspapers to his credit. He’s written books that attack the welfare state. He’s stood as a candidate for the Brexit Party. He trained as a banker. He’s the founder of the Museum of Communist Terror… So you can guess which end of the political spectrum he’d level any attack at.
So, in my opinion, the often-hollered ‘virtue signalling’ attack is an attack from the establishment. It’s an attack to shut down any challenge to the establishment’s right to continue doing what it has always been doing – protecting its own interests at the expense of anything or anybody else. And if your only attack is this whiny, pathetic, think you’re clever, ad hominem attack – well… you can just shut the fuck up.

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Some people like my angel drawings and some people hate them. I’m not surprised by this response; in fact it’s generally the response to most of my artwork. I’ll share it on social media and the numbers show that the greater majority just look without commenting. A smaller number will hit the like or share button and a smaller number again will express a written opinion. It’s interesting though that a few people seem to get so piqued on the subject matter of angels.
The main objection seems to revolve around the idea that a ‘serious’ artist wouldn’t choose angels as a subject matter; that it’s just that bit too kitsch – perhaps even as just a visual metaphor. Anybody that really knows me and my work will also know that being told not to make a specific subject matter or aesthetic choice is probably going to be problematic in realising the chance of me actually stopping doing it.
One interesting, and positive, comment I recently received after posting a new angel drawing was that it made someone remember the short story ‘A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings’ by Gabriel García Márquez. Which I thought was a fine compliment. I also like the association (that I naturally made) of some of my work (the minotaur women and angels in particular) with the literary notion of ‘magical realism’. That idea of using a kind of hyperfiction to bring a focus on to an element of contemporary reality has been a common thread through a lot of my work.
Anyway, back to angels… I won’t apologise for them and I’m not likely to stop using them. Angels are an interesting cultural device.
Our European use of the word ‘angel’ comes from the Late Latin ‘angelus’ – literally ‘messenger’, but the angelic origin goes back much further in ancient religions than the Abrahamic texts. They have performed all manner of functions from a witness to a messenger to a divine soldier, but they all seem to wield a power beyond human capabilities and have connections to assorted deities. They have been, for those that consider them a reality, a manifestation of righteous power that would improve the spiritual or actual outlook of those that believe in them. They’re a metaphor for the power that people wished they actually could exercise in their earthbound lives. So the angel seems an appropriate metaphor for an artist, whose work is considered by some to be political, to use.
Anyway, on to the current band of angels I’m drawing. This set of work consists of 39 drawings and four poems.
In 1967, the American writer Richard Brautigan wrote the poem ‘All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace’. The title itself, for me, is perfect in both its capacity of specificity and ambiguity. As an artist I wish I could make the drawing or painting equivalent of that line of text. It’s one of those lines that I imagine any writer would wish they’d conceived of and put down for themselves.
At heart it was a poem that suggested a desire for a combined technological and ecological Utopia where all humanity exists harmoniously within the boundaries of an idealised nature, overseen by beneficient and human conceived technological guardians. Was it a heartfelt desire? Some critics suggest that it was more cynical and satirical in its intention but that’s probably informed by a contemporary awareness of the reality of humanity’s impact on the planet. Taking into consideration his lifestyle, the other creative people he mixed with and the (counter) cultural circles he ran in I prefer to be more optimistic of his intentions. And despite his lifelong mental health struggles and eventual suicide I even think Brautigan was an optimist too – particularly with regards to humanity’s inevitable recognition of having to cede to the natural authority of our ecosphere.
In an interview in 1983 he expressed his love of the growing availability of ‘information’ or knowledge. Maybe he was suggesting that modern, industrialised humanity was, at long last, on the cusp of being able to understand its natural place in a natural world. He was optimistic that the proliferation of ‘information’ in the early 1980s would give us the necessary tools to effect the social and cultural change needed.
And, like Gabriel García Márquez, in Brautigan’s writing there is also the blending of reality and fantasy. Brautigan said himself, of reality and fantasy, that one is the mirror and the other is the reflection – but that they are also interchangeable. And that is what my angels are for me I think (it’s always subject to change of course). They are the aspiration and the action. They are the watchers, the messengers but the fighters and saviours too. They are what we want to help us make change and what we want to be in making the change for ourselves. And they have the authority of ancestors. They are of a time and world far older and wiser than us.
The world we know, that our parents and their parents knew is disappearing. Its waters are acidifying, its ice is disappearing, its seas are rising. Forests burn and tundra melts. Temperatures are rising sufficiently to make vast areas of the planet soon uninhabitable by mammalian life. Cereal crop production, one of the primary drivers of early human civilisation is already being affected by repeated reduced yields. Species are being made extinct at a rate greater than over the last ten million years. We need help, but realistically the only help that can make the changes needed is going to have to come from ourselves – working together.
Our angels can be the messenger of action or it can be the action itself. The mirror or the reflection. We all create our own personal guardian angels. Be it science, religion, political or direct actions; alternatively, but equally attractive to many – fatalism, denialism and defeatism. Varieties on a theme of personal survival strategies. But our long-term survival can only be achieved at the expense of the individual.
So we need to come together and prioritise our common humanity. We have to reject the flawed and arrogant directions that have driven our economic ideologies of chasing a progress judged by material measure at the expense of other (more human) cultural and social metrics.
With this work I’m just calling out to our metaphorical angels. Be they priests or physicists, economists or ecologists, bankers or bakers. They’re all just you and I. Help us bring the changes humanity needs to negotiate the potentially apocalyptic future we face. Because, like it or not, we face it together.
Despite our worst, selfish, natures.

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The words…

MACHINES OF LOVING GRACE?

herald triumphant new vision
that machines witness our madness
lest carve reluctant incision
to grace parting love’s sadness
and yet bears no burning witness fires
to the sorrows of old Daedalus
imprisoned still in his selfish desires
of wars on youth and nothing less

sun setting we find our shamed eyes drill the earth
journeyman’s feet, iron shod, and spread for some cull
wearing tired eyes of the life that only we chose to birth
considering value of aged wisdom essentially null
so we direct them to the heavens, still turn to the dreaming
the thin finger is raised, waved and it’s pointed
and guarantee, to sedate us before of our screaming
their weapon will be loaded, and blessed, and annointed

our oft timed watched waters will rise
and cancerous leased nations still fall
surveyed through smoking pyre eyes
beneath fumy softening black pall
imagined thresholds lit by winged strangers
their bells still ring a long calculated rout
and our elders, their priests, the prophets, some saviours
hold hands as humanity softly blacks out

some severed politic history end thread
of a now tangled voiceless gold line
finds Theseus reformed, and hanged, lost, dead
strangled veiled head again, thick twice bound in twine
bull-headed, bull market bullshitters
fear the red rag of no simple heroes
bearing witness their hardest big hitters
cybergod no ones, just zeros

so hear the burning call of children crying for your change
step down, stand back, come forward when demanded
ever fearful the yearning fall of lead primed for the range
and rest grateful for any opportunity of forgiveness if extended
so pity the inheritors of todays political hand wringers
when the too hot sun melts our dreams technical, mechanical
will have little to do but count bodies and point fingers
at those previous generations that drove their betrayal

we watched as white sank, blue claiming way
then waters once calmed boiled to vinegar
declared forged warnings of green carpeted grey
under the marathon of an ever hasty calendar
who half century on still celebrates mundanity
though hoping a surrendered Minos may call
to end again yet this unbounded insanity
but ever the king teaches that all angels still fall

then finally our angels will
fall short and rest still

A STORM ISN’T COMING

we’ve pursued every pound
poisoned air, sea and ground
danced as the future roared burning
cold truths were presented
realised and resented
but the dance had no move with a turn in
a storm isn’t coming
it’s already here
and yet
still no abate to the dancing

leaders distracting
push hating, sell fearing
to dance their own dance to the polls
so estates count their numbers
but don’t number our counters
and we audit their fictions and failings
now we say, we reckon on a reckoning
for the future generations
to have air, sea and ground
and time for a masque and a dance of their own

PARADISE CAN ONLY BE HERE

Cease your brawling
we are the fallen
here to declare paradise
hear all seeing leaders
deaf swingers and bleeders
declare but the asking price
You will witness from hills
our washed away ills
as masters maintain division
and you’ll wish for our wings
to escape your mad kings
who justify all excision
Neither your left or their right
can stop the day chasing night
Pray where you will
but all deities rest still
the solution rests where we fear
there was ever only one earth
from the day of our birth
and paradise can only be here

THE AMBIGUOUS ENGINE

you claim abstention
of the ambiguous engine
hawking carnival tunes from afar
but roads driven by others
are yours, and our brothers
pull charred dreams down under the car
sleep direction away
to dream just one more day
declare clowns on the return ticket wrong
world engines refrain
so never again
this bread and handbill circus song
the caravans now closing
to songs of bankrolling
tried to feel the fall as time came
but neither your left or right
will stop day chasing night
the world will never be this again

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I’ve maintained a personal fascination with Charles Baudelaire since the 1980s. My introduction to him was through his 1863 essay ‘Le Peintre de la Vie Moderne’ (The Painter of Modern Life). It’s one of those key art historical texts that used to get pushed your way to explain the idea of the ‘Modern’ in Modern Art. From this I discovered his poetry and one of his most well known collections ‘Les Fleurs de Mal’ (The Flowers of Evil). These drawings were not made to illustrate specific poems from within the collection – they were a response to the spirit of what the writing expressed to me. They were first exhibited at Chateaulin in Bretagne and later in London in 2015.

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I love social media. Particularly when it turns unsocial. Now I’m being scolded for not being ‘on message’ with the UK Government and its (mis)handling of the COVID-19 pandemic within the UK. I’m being told I shouldn’t be being ‘political’…
Don’t tell me this is not the time to be political. Difficult times are the exactly correct times for being political. Everything is political. Especially in times like this pandemic. When is the appropriate time and place for “being political”? When there are no crises facing the population? Do we only challenge our politicians retrospectively when any potential damage has long since become history? Are we to just address them once every five years when they want the affirmation of our votes, then nod and congratulate them when things are running calmly and without problem… and if you do raise your voice any other time it’s just politically motivated opportunism is it? Telling people to not be political right now is itself a political position and action. So, I won’t shut up.

I won’t ignore the damage that a decade of UK government cuts and mismanagement have inflicted on the NHS.
I won’t ignore that the UK government delayed implementing effective actions to curb the spread of the virus for two months.
I won’t ignore that the UK government refused help from the EU to get medical equipment more cost effectively.
I won’t ignore the blatant offering of medical machinery contracts to favoured Conservative Party members and donors whose company have no experience building such machinery at the expense of other established manufacturers who have had their offers of help refused.
I won’t ignore that the UK government priorities have been supporting their economic agenda ahead of the country’s population’s health.
I won’t ignore that the UK government refused senior medical purchasing advice three years ago concerning such epidemics/pandemics on the basis of cost.
And I specifically won’t ignore the cynical hypocrisy of politicians joining a public call for communal applause in support for NHS workers only a few years after cheering loudly in Parliament for successfully defeating a call to raise those same workers’ pay.

If government failings and inadequacies aren’t taken to task on their discovery then complacency sets in. The appropriate government minister will make the appropriate tick-box apology, then trot out their usual platitudes of “learning from mistakes” or “getting the message” or “accepting there’s a lot more to do” and then just carrying on as if it’s business as usual.
I get told that I should shut up and we should all pull together to beat this pandemic crisis. Because I’ve currently got so much political agency haven’t I! Pull together? When it’s the wealthy that can afford to self-isolate and the rest of the working population that fear for their jobs, their accommodation and their capacity to feed themselves and their families.
I get told that my opinion is ‘void’ because I left the UK. Well – like it or not I’m still a British citizen, even if my vote at all future elections in the UK, France and Europe has recently been taken away by the government of my country of birth.
Don’t tell me to not question politicians’ actions, words and motivations. I’ve been questioning, protesting, campaigning and addressing politics in all the workplaces and social spaces I’ve ever been in. I’ve been political all my life and I will be political now. I won’t tug my forelock. I wont know my place. I won’t bend my knee, doff my cap or bow my head. I’ll keep mouthing off disrespectfully because disrespect is currently what is due. Respect is earned and not assigned by dint of perceived social ‘rank’.

The singular politic first attested in English 1430 comes from Middle French politique, in turn from Latin politicus, the Latinization of the Greek πολιτικός (politikos), meaning amongst other definitions “of, for, or relating to citizens”

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There was a lot to write about in the second half of 2019; there was a lot I wanted to write about in the second half of 2019. The apparent disintegration of established procedures in the self-presumed ‘mother of all parliaments’, the buried investigations into political malfeasance, the mainstream British media following up its investigatory acquiescence with an onslaught of servile repetition of whatever deceits its political masters declared necessary to be made, an election where our vote wasn’t counted and that will likely be our last that can be made as British citizens living in mainland Europe, the realisation that Brexit was going to happen and the rights of Europeans living in the UK as well as the rights of British citizens living in Europe was of little significance in the eyes of most British politicians. Then there was the ever accumulating personal knowledge of evidence that perhaps we may be too late to save future generations from the carnage being wrought upon our living environment. The arctic ice caps are likely to have disappeared in a few years, amplifying the warming of the oceans and then likely signalling the real point of no return. All these subjects to write about… not because a huge number of people hang on to everything I write – just more to formulate a confusion of thoughts into cogent and simpler arguments should the need arise to talk about these things in conversation.
And then my dad died. He’d been ill a while; in and out of hospital for odd ailments and problems. Nothing that seemed to signal an end was imminent – but then my mother was doing a good job of silently taking most of the worries onto her own shoulders without spreading it down to her two sons.
On his own terms, he didn’t want his funeral to be a sad event, but a celebration of a life enjoyed and well lived. It always sounds cliched but it was true. Though technically a few years too old he was perhaps the shining example of the ‘boomer’ generation. Born a year too late to do National Service, he was a teenager when the word ‘teenager’ was still a relatively new idea. He benefited from the post-war social reforms and when his father wanted to retire from business, bought his bakery business from him, which then flourished effortlessly (his own words) until the mid 1980s. He social life was full through weekend sport and a passion for collecting old (he would optimistically call them all classic) cars. And throughout those years he was a relatively fit and healthy man. So, on his terms, it was a life enjoyed and well lived and should be remembered in that way.
It’s only been a few months and I do miss him. I haven’t been able to make much work since he passed away and it’s probably been best that way. I’ve had a few months more or less artwork free and instead, with some help from a bit of money left to me, I’ve been doing some building work in my studio. Whenever my dad visited my studio he would complain about the fact that the barn doors had holes in, the walls didn’t all meet the roof, there was no insulation (actually, there wasn’t even a ceiling), there was no heating, lighting was via extension cables that ran all over the floor and that it was not an environment conducive to work. In fact, more than once he suggested that in my previous roles as a trade union rep, if I’d been faced with working conditions like this I would’ve been leading strike action to get it improved. I can’t deny that.
So, finally, in my mid-fifties I will be working in a studio that is warm, dry, comfortable and safe. I’ve included a large wall specifically for drawing, two metres by four… for BIG drawings… and there will be a small exhibition space too, just to show some fresh work up on walls if people come knocking on the door. There’s a couple of weeks worth of work still to be done to get it finished, but it will be ready for the summer and some open studio weekends. So thanks dad… and mum.

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I was very happy to be asked to exhibit at the reopening of BSMT Space in London for their DYSTOPIA show – in support of Extinction Rebellion.

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Keep your friends close…

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Guy Denning, born 1965; now approaching 54 successful orbits of the sun. Clearly more days done than to do. That’s what it boils down to. That and drawing every day – so that you don’t have to… Have some drawings from 2019.

 

 

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Thomas Hobbes, in his 1651 book Leviathan, made a defence for the notion of the ‘social contract’ between government and citizen. That in exchange for the loss of absolute personal freedom, via election or appointment, governments had the legitimacy and resource to effect beneficial social control and change that was beyond the ability of the individual. Now I’m not about to start defending the philosophy of Hobbes, but time is short and needs must. Particularly in regards to the climate crisis we are already undergoing.

Ask your elected representative(s) if they agree with the following:
We are already living with more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than there has been for 3 million years.
The planet currently has 2 degrees centigrade average global temperature increase already locked in; that’s even if we stop burning all fossil fuels now.
Those current high levels will persist for centuries.
Climate change is irreversible within the lifetimes of newborns today.
Climate change is already happening.

If they disagree ask them for their sources of evidence.

If however they do agree then ask if they agree on this prognosis for humanity if the economic model we live by is not fundamentally changed:
That there will be global fresh-water scarcity, grain production collapse, economic collapse, mass migration from equatorial and other drought-ridden regions, resource conflicts, social collapse and even potential human extinction…

Once again, if they disagree, ask them for the scientific defence of their optimism.

But, should they agree with these terrible predictions (that many climate scientists hold as pragmatic and not hyperbole), ask why the following suggestions are not then, the only realistic, short term choices we must make:
A food industry based on meat has to be replaced by a food industry based on plants.
Local economies need to be encouraged at the expense of the existing globalist model.
We need government driven programmes of social housing building, rental and maintenance.
Energy production and distribution must be taken into public ownership.
All domestic properties should be fitted with appropriate renewable energy generation, if necessary at government expense.
All domestic properties should be made to be energy efficient, if necessary at government expense.
Public transport provision must be increased and made free of charge.
The required labour must be sourced, trained and employed at the local level by national government.
Air travel must be taken into public ownership and reduced to the absolute minimum of essential use.
Governments must work together to the common aim of preserving and replacing as much of our habitable environment as possible.

Hobbes famously declared in Leviathan that in a “state of nature”, human life would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”. Okay – he wasn’t talking about ecological collapse but you get the allusion. He could be right. But in respect of all our futures I hope we can prove him wrong.
If you’re reading this in the UK you can find your elected representative and send an email directly via www.writetothem.com without moving from the comfort of your keyboard.
Start enforcing the terms of the contract they’re being paid for.

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In 2015 a fishing ship sank in the Mediterranean; over 800 migrants died, locked in the hull of that boat. That boat has now been delivered to this year’s Art Biennale in Venice by artist Christoph Büchel and sits, titled “Barca Nostra” (Our Boat), as a contemporary art object. So ‘edgy’, so ‘provocative’, so ‘challenging’…
This attitude, that nothing is beyond commodification, has clearly now peaked. It is the ultimate exemplar of the decadence, cynicism and moral vacuity of contemporary art-world capitalism; absolutely everything is now spectacle. Enabled and celebrated by the same cultural vanguard that assign value by cost, applaud supposed artistic perspicacity with words of intentional obscurantism and spit on anything they themselves have not permitted into their pantheons.
The head of the Biennale, Paulo Baratta, stated that the wreck, the coffin, the site of human tragedy would be in “a quiet site, sheltered from noise” and be “an invitation to silence and meditation”…

Quite… and so everything just turns into another grotesque photo opportunity.

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