The model citizen
Just before Easter, I took a day trip and magic happened. Here's how an exhibition, an event and a book seemed to speak as one, pointing the way to a better future and a different way of life.
Through the entrance are two more doors.
Each of those leads to two more.
There’s no time to take anything in. In fact, there’s not much to take in at all. The space between doors is mostly corridor, just short empty stretches of nothing. It’s a little suffocating, to be honest. No space. No time. No reference points for the decisions piling up one one another: left or right, onward or back.
With no path to follow and no stated purpose to being there, you choose at random. Eventually, your boldness is rewarded with some signs of life. Here’s a nook with shelves and a film poster. Behind this door is a sparsely dressed room, perhaps an office. Along that adjoining corridor is what appears to be a bar.
What’s weird, uncanny even, is that no one’s here.
That office? Abandoned. The bar? It’s empty.
The dominant presence is absence.
Absence is everywhere in the Hayward Gallery’s Mike Nelson retrospective. Each installation is defined by inhabitants who are no longer there, or by a need that no longer exists. The significance of things lies in the way they were once used, by people you can’t see; in materials whose original role is redundant. Everywhere is haunted by old ideas, old stories, relics.
Take the collection called The Asset Strippers. Here, Nelson has forged metallic chimeras, presenting as sculpture the decayed materials of factory work and agriculture. Metal and wood, pullies and pipes, blades and rusty nails, wire mesh and concrete - as if industry itself has been abandoned and oxidised into something brittle. What once moved energetically, was once put to use, perhaps even ennobled its handlers, is now old, use-less, encased in rust, a burlesque. Nelson invokes pity for these machines, renders them as pseudo-anthromorphic figures. They are Frankenstein’s Monsters of scrap.
Or take the concrete shack half-submerged in sand, a Gulf War bird-hide. Inside, it is dark-room red. Photos are clipped to rope, strung back and forth across the room. An old monitor flickers senselessly on the desk, its mangled signal spilling out like water from a broken faucet. It feels like you’re standing in an abandoned outpost. Like everybody left. Fleed some fraying web of power before it all fell in on itself, on them, leaving the monitor on and the spy-like photographs dangling, forgotten transmissions of abandoned ideologies.
It’s the same uncanny feeling you get in those first corridors. The way all those doors creak and slam ostentatiously against the silence, magnifying the absence, a quiet louder than war. You sense life teemed here once, in the abandoned offices and bars, if only as a kind of bunker madness, with spaces designated for work and play pressed up tightly against one another. An existence played out entirely inside, days and weeks measured in shifts and artificial light. It’s so claustrophobic, a warren, the low ceiling yielding nothing.
All except for one point, where steps lead overhead to a view across the roof. It’s a secret above-world up there, a cityscape of old furniture, luggage, picture frames, wood, a jungle of abandoned stuff. Part skyline, part open air attic.
The part of life where everything got stored, and was then forgotten.
Two hours later, I am in a different bunker.
This one genuinely is below ground. The absence we’re here to mark is very real.
It’s years since I’ve been to Fabric, and the descent below Smithfield Market generates its own uncanny feelings, memories of previous turns taken on instinct, doors chosen without knowing what lay behind them.
But I’m not here to dance. Along with hundreds of others I am sat on a plastic chair, facing the stage and about to be led in remembrance.
We’re here for Andrew Weatherall, who would have been 60 this week had he not died just over three years ago. Weatherall was a DJ, musician and producer, a key figure in clubbing since the early days of acid house, and therefore loved not only as a man of good taste and judgement, but also as an alchemist, a maker of moments and memories treasured by everyone here. Soon the stage will be filled by people speaking to Weatherall’s skills and qualities, his famed witticisms and aphorisms, his commitment to a way of life that was close to a philosophy.
Tonight, two screens on either side of the stage are scrolling through a sequence of snapshots, details of Weatherall’s studio. You sense things stored in the hope they’re not forgotten. It’s a kaleidoscope of photos, flyers and fonts, corners of record sleeves, recordable discs Sharpied with text and stacked against a wall. Endless shelves are filled with 12”, spines of books and CDs. It’s a sea of cultural ephemera, a lifetime of collecting, recording, making. In his absence, the images take on a greater poignancy. The parallel with Nelson’s work is - that word again - uncanny. Here is a place where work and play became indistinguishable from one another. You wonder if there’s a Rosebud memento somewhere in the debris. Certainly there are familiar logos, a sabre or a cutlass here, a band name scribbled there. There are sketches and lino cuts, portaits of the DJ/artist as a young man, postcards of big days out, backstage, travelling.
You’re left with an impression of a man always at work: scanning, bookmarking, colliding things together in search of the spontaneous and the surprising. His output was so enormous you might have thought the work came easily to him, but of course the opposite was true. Dedication begets inspiration, not the other way around.
As the talks begin, as the testimonies tumble out, the room seems to cohere around the idea of this man. You have the sense of someone who hadn’t only inspired the people here, but had mentored and supported them. If not in person, then by example. There is a feeling this will endure. As if absence, mere death alone, won’t curb his influence.
On cue, proof of his continued presence, in a picture he didn’t pose for. A photo appears on the screen, showing him striding purposefully along London’s Kingsland Road, caught unaware by a moving camera.
Weatherall walks among us as a Google Streetview ghost. A man who is not here is still there. And in the dialogue between these two truths, questions emerge. In the midst of remembrance, what do we do with this poignant symbol of the right to be forgotten? Is this a tactless invasiveness, or a record that people will come to treasure? With its subject now permanently absent, how do we understand this temporary trace of his presence? We can celebrate its serendipity, but its very accidental nature also makes the image feel precarious, liable to disappear with the next photographic sweep or software upload. In the future, will blue plaques will be digitised, dropped as pins on maps?
Underneath all these questions lies an undeniable truth: this image is a perfect portrait of the man. Here is Weatherall, a flaneur of the edgelands, seeking inspiration anonymously, in the noise and bustle and randomness of city life. He is not on show, though he is at work, and is, as always, dressed intentionally, impeccably. We might imagine him to be walking between appointments or crate-digging opportunities, or between home and the studio. It is an ordinary day of work, one spent ploughing the psycho-geographical furrows of East London, engaged in the search for serendipity, for magic, waiting to catch the uncanniness of life as art and ideas bounce from every surface. A fan of rituals and transcendence, this is a man who made his own set of tarot cards, one of which bore the legend ‘what’s wrong with being pretentious?’ The answer, of course, is nothing, because pretentiousness is the name shame gives to curiosity. For believers, the entire purpose of music and books and art is to open doors, to create portals into new worlds. This is why art is kept from people, made contingent. Yet art is for everyone, and life when it’s boiled down is little more than an exploration of ideas you’ve never previously encountered. Weatherall knew this. He knew that enlightenment is as possible at the heart of the disco as it is in books, and so he sought to create mystery and unlock the sublime.
Which is why, when Weatherall cannot be here, it’s so delicious he is trapped in there. He’s an error, an irritant, a magical notification pinging from inside a platform that’s conceived to design out serendipity. Streetview is as un-Weatherall as David Guetta at the Brit Awards. It is a tool intended precisely to eradicate chance, to literally map the world as something effortlessly navigable. It takes the chaos of this city of 7 million people - not to mention its ghosts and stories and hopes and dreams - and reduces it to so many street names and transport links, to a collection of distances and opening times; information at its most binary and least imaginative. It is shallow knowledge, awkwardly and superficially framing London’s endless possibilities and endemic strangeness within the field of a 360 degree camera perched on a moving Smart car. And what does it do to us, really, this flattening of life, other than to insidiously entrench and then monetise our fear of getting lost. It makes non-explorers of us all. It turns us into consumers rather than participants. It maintains our illusion of control as we sign up to a system that quietly squeezes out all joy, magic and wonder.
But Weatherall reminds us who we are. Who we can be. He is the crack where the light gets in.
I hadn’t planned to experience Mike Nelson’s work the same day as the Weatherall tribute. But clearly this was no accident. Nor was the book I read that day. I’d only taken Citizens, by Jon Alexander and Ariane Conrad, with me because it was lighter (in all senses) than the novel I was reading that day. It was better for the train.
But the city connects. Ideas bounce from its every surface. Magic is real.
Citizens is a book about agency. Regaining it. Reclaiming it. Because in the West we’re trapped in what Alexander calls the Consumer story. The end of the second world war brought human rights, but it also made growth in GDP an article of faith for all economies. Increased living standards have brought greater opportunity and more choices, but ultimately less control. Our options are created for us, not by us. Political representation is passive and occasional. Business and employment are both, mostly, exploitative. The survival of our planet is in the hands of a system designed to kill it. We stand as individuals, but our communities are failing.
But Alexander sees a new, emergent story, one that will help everyone establish a foothold in the decision-making processes that affect our lives. The Citizen story. The book shows that we are more than what we consume, and that to unlock this story we must accept that we are more than ourselves. Citizens is about the transition we must make as individuals, but also as communities. A citizen makes an active contribution, Alexander says. They give their time or their ideas or their expertise, to solutions that solve the challenges we face collectively. Or rather, to solutions that only work if we can decide on them and shape them together. Citizens is a book about making better decisions as a result of working together to give ourselves better options. It shows how we might effect that shift in government, business, and other organisations. There are countless examples of this emergent idea occuring around the world and in different fields, from the Citizens Assemblies in Ireland that led to the referendum that overturned its ban on abortion, to efforts the National Trust have made to renew the connection between its work and its members, to the Taiwanese government’s bottom-up response to the Covid pandemic. It’s an inspiring read.
The first half of the book contains Alexander’s diagnosis of the Consumer story as an old myth, slowly losing its power. It’s hard not to read it and see our current, divided state as evidence of an idea that has run its course. The tribalism of our politics, the excessive wealth of shareholders - these are not evidence of community, but of panic. The more visible a system is, the less powerful it is. And as old stories lose their power, their death throes show up in surprising, sometimes virulent ways. As what once was certain starts to seem merely provisional, people yearn for the familiar, the definitive – a regression to the mean. But insoluble issues like Brexit are, I think, the whiplash at the end of the rope: violent, yes, but a kinetic energy playing itself out. The Consumer story might still be dominant, but we no longer have to see it as permanent.
I read this section on the train into London, before stepping into Mike Nelson’s world of abandoned bunkers and repurposed materials. It couldn’t not frame my experience of an exhibition called Extinction Beckons. All I could see were old certainties, evaporated. Collapsed former strongholds. Old lives and norms only there in traces, like ashtray butts or posters on the wall, or sand banked against hideout walls, or machinery transmuted into pitiful sculpture, or the occasional flickers of a transmission once so important it couldn’t be turned off, now lost to time and space. Nelson’s work documents stories and creeds once so powerful, so dominant, but now only hinted at by the relics they left behind. Like Planet Of The Apes, it’s both warning and mystery. What went on in between, you wonder. Are we on the same trajectory? Are we defending bastions that one day, we will simply abandon.
At Fabric, a man leans over to make conversation with me. It’s become clear during the evening that while everyone in this audience loved Weatherall, some really knew him. Maybe even worked with him. It’s that kind of scene. My neighbour mistakes me for someone else, but we get talking anyway. He is from Greenock. I glean through the background noise that he played in a band in a the 90s. He thought maybe I did too.
Later in life he ran a club, and hosted Weatherall there. Stunned that the great man said yes and had travelled so far to play such a small place, he remembers telling the DJ, “I love that you play small clubs.” “So do I,” Weatherall replied.
For a man so revered, there are a lot of stories like this. The superstar DJ who walked away. The gigs playing to five customers and a dog. Marathon sets in far-flung places, headline slots that confounded expectations. These are the moves of an artist willfully maintaining a place on the cusp of misunderstanding, and it’s a life easier to admire than it is to experience. Living at the margins is best, he once said, because there’s more room there. The underground, the outside, the niche - these were spaces to cherish, nurture, not leave behind.
Perhaps this is easier when you’re a DJ. Being a good DJ is about taste, being a step ahead, giving people something they didn’t know they wanted. In a sense, an escape to the margins makes sense; it’s easier to surprise people, to create moments that dancers don’t expect. You don’t need a big crowd or cheque to feel superior. Yet ego didn’t seem to be his thing. Weatherall was always interested in what others could bring, what they thought. They might have put him on a pedestal, but he valued his position for how it let him stay close to others. Close to the energy that inspired him. His was a creative life as much about community as it was about success. In fact, success was rarely the point. ‘Fail we may, sail we must’, as his credo put it.
The second half of Jon Alexander’s book embodies that message. It sets out emergent way of life that, with work and care from all of us, could replace the Consumer story. The Citizen story. By facilitating contributions from more corners of society, we can re-shape business, make our politics fit for purpose, and transition to a more sustainable economy. It’s going to be hard work, but it’s possible. The transition will come from thousands of small changes, because it’s a story forged in community. Institutions will properly harness the power of more people. Groups will unlock the full potential of their collective voice. Everyone will realise what they have to offer and commit to action that doesn’t only benefit themselves.
It’s no accident that Citizens is the Weatherall philosophy, played out across society. As David Keenan put it from the stage, this was a man who found his own audience, turned that audience into a community, which ultimately became family. There are, of course, better, more pertinent examples in Alexander’s book. But I was struck that on the single day on which I read Citizens, I witnessed both an analogue for inaction and a model for the remedy. Mike Nelson’s installations seem to me a warning. A projection into a future where old certainties have crumbled. It’s quite possible we’ll have nothing left. No people. Abandoned institutions, serving no one. An eerie existence built around little other than the urge to survive. But the Weatherall event was a reminder that nothing is inevitable.
People can choose different paths. They can value different outcomes, come together for good, in ways that run counter to the prevailing wisdom. The way something is, is not the only way it can be. Dominant ideas are only that, they are not permanent. A market can have a conscience. The artisan still has a legacy to leave. It just requires some discomfort along the way, some sacrifice.
At the Fabric event, the music press was mentioned a lot, because it started Weatherall on his path. This was a space, now gone, where people who loved weird music could write about it, and through those words other people might discover something they liked but otherwise wouldn’t hear. It was a gathering of citizens, musicians, writers and readers each contributing what they could, shaping a marginal world that opened doors and changed lives, made it possible to believe in art, made it possible to imagine things being different to the way they were ‘supposed’ to be.
This, as Jon Alexander shows us, is the kind of space we all need, more than ever, if we are to change.
For his part, Mike Nelson shows us what’s at stake if we don’t.
But Andrew Weatherall proves that this new future can be a fine and fulfilling way to live. And that we can make it if we try.
Because change exists. Art is powerful. Every moment holds possibility.
And it’s all connected.
Magic is real.
There’s magic in this story. In the creative void of loss, it touched me, and deposited there at its many boundaries, a renewed vigour for intention and hope.
Perfect write up of the AW 60 talks