CAROLINECOON
October 2008
Painting: I am working on three oil on canvas works (123 x 153cm) focusing on the body and gender as performance. Humans in these paintings are striving for poise and control. The decorative beauty of masculine and feminine performance is destroying the old patriarchal hierarchy of male over female; all genders are equal and we are free to shift from role to role and back again. (The paintings of Carol Rama, Meret Oppenheim and Cheri Samba have been hot inspiration through this mostly grey and damp summer.)
August – September 2008
A walk with Barbara Steveni: Beginnings of APG, the 1960’s
Barbara Steveni is stretched flat out. Crouched over her a young woman dressed in black is drawing around her body onto a piece of cloth. Yoko Ono and Barbara Steveni are performing ‘Shadow Piece’ on rough ground near Powis Square, Notting Hill. It is 1966. Work has just started on the nearby Westway Avenue Extension that has necessitated the demolition of over 700 houses. Lying in the dirt Barbara and Yoko risk being investigated by rats-as-big-as-cats that plagued the area during that time of dereliction.
Now Barbara Steveni has come back to Notting Hill for part of a project called I AM AN ARCHIVE. She laughs outside the reclaimed and renovated Powis Square Tabernacle as she recalls the ‘Shadow Piece’ she performed over forty years ago: “Yoko drew my shadow so that she could put me in her pocket and carry me away!” Then she adds “I got a heap of free clothes from Biba for one of Yoko’s ‘Cut’ performances.” And yes, Barbara risked arrest for being naked and moving in ‘Cut’ performances. This crucial recall is part of the ‘Beginnings’ Barbara is tracing, her life, performances and events that lead to the formation of Artist Placement Group (APG) in 1966.
Her original concept for APG was to place artists who were working in the emergent fields of Multimedia and Conceptual Art within major UK industrial concerns and government departments. Artists like John Latham, Barry Flanagan, Ian McDonald Munro and Anna Ridley were to "carry ideas from one form into action and activity in another context".
As Barbara explains to the walking group gathered around her*, she wanted to "create freedom for art in the commercial space" which meant artists engaging in "negotiations and exchanges" including "decision-making in organisations at all levels."
There is a nice paradox here – a group of outsider Authority attacking avant-garde artists wanting to penetrate the Capitalist Establishment to improve society from within. Informed by Surrealism and Dada, the artists Barbara Steveni worked with in the 1960’s presumed to change society through art that set a moral example with precision and honesty about personal experience. This was art with large ambition, with socio-political point, a grand enterprise to turn-on, to contemplate, to amuse, to invoke and to threaten. This was art anywhere, art with anything, art as happenings, performance and prank – it was conceptual art with meaning.
Barbara Steveni has included me in her I AM AN ARCHIVE project because not only have I practiced as an artist in the ‘Beginnings’ Notting Hill neighbourhood since I was a teenager, but Release, the civil rights, anti-prohibition organisation I co-founded in 1967, was just around the corner from where she and her husband John Latham had their home and studio. Rufus Harris and I, art students both in 1967, were thrilled that we had the great avant-garde artist and political seer as our neighbour. John Latham’s inspiring presence was a good vibes counterbalance to the BNP fascists’ office that was a few doors down on our other side.
The example of avant-garde art was at the heart of how I organised Release. We were an interface between young people and Authority - the law, the courts, the police, government and politicians. This was office bound, a process of slow technical persuasion. It was necessary work but it was not immediately visible to the public and it was not fun.
A fun way to get our voices heard was to create visible disturbances and interventions into the public space. The amount of street art – political street theatre – created in the 1960’s was phenomenal. There were huge anti-Vietnam war demonstrations. But everyday there were artists of all kinds making a flurry of ‘little’ events. For instance, I participated in one of Barry Flanagan’s Victorian Picnics. On a bucolic Sunday afternoon in Hyde Park suddenly there appeared several life size paper-mashe cows and men and women in Victorian crinolines and embroidered waistcoats spreading out rugs and opening wicker picnic hampers. When Brian Jones was arrested in another Rolling Stones drug bust, I organised the making of 1000 fake joints which we ‘smoked’ at a Kings Road ‘Free Brian Jones!’ demonstration. Another time Release office became a fake blood factory. We filled hundreds of plastic bags with fake blood made from flower, water and red dye that we tipped down Oxford Street to symbolise the horror of blood spilt in Vietnam. In street protest-style we dyed the fountains at Trafalgar Square blood red.
At the time of its making The Establishment denigrates socio-political avant-garde art and denies that it will have any influence whatever on social change. One out come of Barbara Steveni’s I AM AN ARCHIVE project will to be expose and prove the extent and successful influence of avant-garde art intervention. The triumph of feminist avant-garde art has made it possible for artists like Barbara Steveni to become visible. As Barbara says “My own path in this history has hitherto registered as virtually invisible. Hidden behind both the artists involved (predominantly male) and the organisations (APG and O+I) themselves.”The I AM AN ARCHIVE ‘Beginnings’ walk is No 1 of 5 which Barbara will lead through further sites in London, Scotland and Germany. Her project will critique “the different methodologies of art practice used, exploring the development of the personal and political”. It is especially significant that she will be tracking gender differences with artists and others. Barbara Steveni is in a unique position to bring together the history and practice of the APG movement that she pioneered. Artist Placement practice is now commonplace and mainstream.
* ‘Beginnings’ walkers included Guy Brett – art writer; Chris Bird and Kelly Large – HUT project; Ryumi Choi – I AM AN ARCHIVE project assistant; Caroline Coon – artist; Tristan Hazell – Move; Michael Horowitz – poet; Lisa-Raine Hunt – I AM AN ARCHIVE project Curator; Barbara Kukovec – photographer; Tatiana Mallinson – sculptor; John Mallinson – photographer; Clive Phillpot – art writer and historian; Laure Prouvost – filmmaker; John Seth - artist, 4D Pathway; Rita Sirignano – painter; Laura Trevail – artist.
May – July 2008
Drugs, Racism, Pete Doherty and Gordon Brown.
‘Do you think, what with the smoking ban, that we might see illegal places like shebeens start up again?’ producer Kate Bland asked me in an interview for her BBC Radio 4 programme ‘The Blues Dance’*. ‘Yes, absolutely,’ I replied. Later I wondered whether I was already missing something. Surely, all over the country there are people disobeying smoking bans and drug prohibition and quietly gathering to indulge their pleasures in illicit, unlicensed rooms?
Kate Bland’s interview enabled me to reminisce about the 1970’s glory days when, in dark basements we smoked pot, drank Babysham, listened to reggae music and danced until dawn. Blues dance shebeens were a function of racism and prohibition. In the 1970’s almost every street around my Ladbroke Grove neighbourhood had one. Although there was never a legally enforced apartheid colour bar in Britain, until recently most black people were deemed ‘not respectable’ enough to be granted local authority alcohol premises licences. Unable to own or run legal clubs, unwelcome in ‘white’ clubs, many black entrepreneurs decided to outsmart the system. They set up little shebeens. Always threatened by police raids and harassment, shebeens survived because door guards exerted heavy manners to maintain the mellow mood. Violent troublemakers who would make it impossible for the police to turn a blind eye were cast out. Under the radar of racism and prohibition, invisible night and day except to the trained eye and in-the-know locals, blues dance shebeens provided a convivial private party atmosphere for those who loved the pleasure of reggae music and marijuana. I really miss those local good times!
But I refuse to get downhearted about the fact that democracy seems unable to deliver a liberal, rational drugs policy. Because anti-prohibitionists are mostly ‘green’ and leftist we have been unable to muster capitalist money to back and boost our campaign. Most politicians follow the money. Politicians bow before billionaires who ameliorate their reputation for greed by cloaking themselves in the pseudo-respectable anti-drug moral high ground.
Prohibition is not supported by science and good public health policy. Our struggle is against puritan authoritarian ideology and politics. We have to stomach the arrogant and ignorant spectacle of Prime Minister Gordon Brown doing a U-turn to ‘send a message’ to young people about the ‘danger’ of pot. He will uselessly increase prison sentences for cannabis possession from a Class C sentence of 2 years to a Class B sentence of 5 years. Don’t vote for him! We have to stomach the demeaning spectacle of otherwise law abiding drug users like Pete Doherty being ‘punished’ with prison sentences. Images of popular cultural heroes being handcuffed and jailed – and then taking drugs in jail – are no deterrent, and never have been. This is empirical scientific fact.
We have to stomach the spectacle of a wannabe ‘liberal’ politician like mayoral candidate Brian Paddick doing a U-turn on the BBC. Apparently, he was ‘always opposed to moving cannabis from class C to B’. Don’t vote for him! Politicians’ incoherence about efficacious use of law and drugs policy is one of the reasons respect for politicians is at an all time low.
My anti-prohibition spirits were immensely improved recently by a meeting with bold witty social historian Dr James Mills. He interviewed me for his forthcoming book ‘Cannabis Nation: Britain, Control and Consumption 1928-2008’, the second phase of his research into the history of the British and cannabis. His first book ‘Cannabis Britannica: Empire, Trade, and Prohibition 1800-1928’** is a must-read brilliant and delightful combination of hard facts and colorful portraits of the personalities who shaped past drug policy. Showing how ‘attitudes towards substances like cannabis are formed in the context of vested interests, moral judgments, and political agendas’, Jim Mills’s stark conclusion is that politicians over the last thirty years have clung to false historical assumptions to inform drugs policy, assumptions that his research proves to be ‘blind’.
Like the heroes who once ran blues dance shebeens, anyone who is presently courageously breaking drug prohibition laws should be celebrated. We must out-wit authoritarians who, not satisfied to merely bully us about our health, continue to make even moderate, responsible pleasure choices illegal.
*‘The Blues Dance’ produced by Kate Bland and presented by Don Letts, BBC Radio 4, 11.00am, Tuesday 13 May.
** ‘Cannabis Britannica: Empire, Trade, and Prohibition 1800-1928’ by Dr James H. Mills (Oxford University Press 2003)
February – April 2008
Painting: I am working on three Urban Landscapes, views of North Kensington street life around Grand Union Canal at Ladbroke Grove and Harrow Road. This is an apparently inhospitable, grey area where it is not usual to stop and look but, hidden behind the dilapidated strip of Harrow Road, the canal curves and gleams in winter sun and above all Erno Goldfinger’s Trellick Tower stands guard for all its brave Modernism every bit like a medieval fortress complete with battlements and arrow slits. The paintings are 183 x 153cm, oil on canvas.
CUNST ART:
The Cunst Art pamphlet Calling Women 'Whores' Lets Rapists Go Free by Caroline Coon and barrister Amber Lane is about the need to legalise prostitution. We explain how the use of the word 'whore' for moral condemnation creates a fatal link between rape and prostitution, with the consequence that convictions for rape are shockingly low. Respecting prostitutes, and all 'whores', is the only way that all women will be respected. Only when adutls are free to work in a lawful, respected sexual service trade and free to use sex trade services within the law will we be able to protect all women from sexual violence.
The special, limited, hand stamped edition of 100 copies costs £15.00 per copy, to include post and packing. Normal copies are £5.00, to include post and packing. To recieve a copy email: cunstart@tiscali.co.uk
January 2008
Happy New Year and very best wishes for a great 2008!
November - December 2007
Law breaking and abortion:
The only time in my life when I might have killed a person was when an NHS surgeon refused my request for an abortion. His smug callousness followed by a complacent offer to be the obstetrician at the birth of my baby filled me with killer rage. Luckily for him, and me, I did not have a Beretta 9mm pistol in my pocket.
Having to ask even one doctor ‘permission’ for an abortion is an iniquitous insult to women. No one, especially not a man, has a right to force women to have children. In the perpetual fight over abortion and women’s rights to her own body the female and male pro-life lobbyists have to be resisted. Call them the forced-birth lobby. Women have the right, the moral obligation even, to break any laws passed ‘to protect foetal rights’. How horrible it is to see Lord Steel, the revered architect of the 1967 Abortion Act, blaming women for being sexually ‘irresponsible’ and for using abortion as a form of contraception!* Since he has done nothing over the years to change the male dominant/female submission model of sexual relations and since he has, to my knowledge, never criticised males for any ignorance of and unwillingness to learn the co-operative fundamentals of how to practice loving safe sex then anything he has to say on the matter of women’s behaviour is contemptible.
Instead of unjust patriarchal laws controlling women’s bodies and birth choices we must pass laws controlling male fertility. One law, sponsored by Cunst Art, will be the 2008 Condom Act. It will only be legal for men to have penetrative sex using condoms - men will only legally have unprotected baby-making sex with the provable informed consent of their sexual partners. That is to say, in principal it will be illegal for men to have penetrative sex without using condoms. No one could then complain of women having ‘too many’ abortions because unwanted pregnancies will be reduced to almost nil. Now, why didn’t Lord Steel think of that 40 years ago?
Law breaking and drugs:
We should be outraged by cannabis warnings and cautions. They are being used - in fact their sole purpose is - to criminalise people cheaply. As the Home Office has admitted, the reported 14% increase in drug offences reflects not an increase in drug use but ‘the increased use by the police of their new powers to issue on the spot warnings for cannabis possession rather than the more time-consuming process of taking the suspect to the police station to make an arrest’.** Most people do not know the difference between warnings, cautions and court convictions. They are not aware that the consequences of being warned and cautioned are just as serious as a court conviction. Warnings and cautions are a criminal record. Warnings and cautions can act as disqualifiers for employment and travel abroad in the same way as criminal convictions.
My advice is: REFUSE TO BE WARNED OR CAUTIONED. If you refuse ‘on the spot’ warnings police officers have a choice. They can go the ‘time-consuming process’ of taking you to the police station to make an arrest or they can drop the matter.
In fact, by the time police officers ask you to accept a warning they have already made some record of the stop and search and cannot technically erase it. When you steadfastly and politely refuse to accept the warning this is what is likely to happen: Police officers will suggest, or rather they will almost beg you to give a false name. This means they can complete the warning paperwork, but you will not be on record. Be prepared. Out and about these days we must have our nom de avertissements et attentions at the ready. Be helpful to police officers. Make your on the spot warning false name sound plausible. More Jill or Jack Smith than Mini Mouse or Puffi Bear.
Furthermore, to have accepted an on the spot warning you must have admitted your ‘crime’. No, no, no, never admit to imprisonable criminal offences without the presence of a lawyer! When police officers ask you ‘Is this cannabis?’ it is smart to reply ‘Well, officer, I don’t know. Perhaps you could send it off for analysis?’ After all, because of prohibition, who knows what it is you actually have. Could it be some concoction of rosemary or thyme?
Accepting a warning or a caution may seem like you are avoiding court appearance hassles, expense, wasted time etc. However since by being warned or cautioned you are going to have a life-damaging criminal record anyway then far better that it is an 'expensive' through the courts record than government’s 'cheap' street or police station record. In principal I would (and have) refused to be cautioned because: making arrests for immoral unworkable prohibition laws ‘time-consuming’ and expensive is likely to speed-up the repeal of those laws. If the thousands of people who accept warnings and cautions instead elected to go to court then courts would grind to a halt. As an occasional cannabis smoker I challenge government to BUST ME! BLOCK UP THE COURTS!
*Guardian 24/10/2007 ** Observer 19/10/2007
October - November 2007
Punk Rock Film
Zillah Minx is the lead singer with punk band Rubella Ballet. Her unique oral history documentary film about Punk Rock Women ‘She’s A Punk Rocker UK’ will be shown at The Raindance Film Festival, Cineworld Trocadero Centre, Shaftesbury Avenue, at 5pm on 3rd October. Featuring Poly Styrene, Gaye Advert, Eve Libertine & Gee, Viv Subversa, Michelle Brigandage, Caroline Coon and many others, the film is a fascinating and brilliant look into women's lives and attitudes during some explosive times!
The Plight Of Release
A member of the public writes: ‘I recently rang Release and spoke to one of their legal advisors, I have to say that he did not tell me anything I didn’t already know and was of no help at all. My son had been arrested with one E on him out side a nightclub and because of that the police came and searched my home and everyone in it! (They also charged him with possessing a class A drug). I’ve been trying to find out if the search was unlawful but nobody seems to know, the guy at Release certainly didn't know anything about it and didn’t appear to be that interested.’
Every so often, as the founder of Release, I am called upon for support and tapped up for funds. This time - the first time I have ever critisised Release in public - I am saying No, and explaining why. I've been told that unless Release has funds it will close in four weeks time. Well, it is not Release as an organisation per se that is of concern to me. We founded Release 40 years ago BECAUSE of the horror and distress caused to young people by drugs prohibition. My concern is the iniquity and misery caused to people and society by drugs prohibition. It is not Release as an organisation that matters. What matters are the terrible consequences of prohibition. The problem is that Release no longer campaigns to end prohibition. In fact, Release is colluding with prohibition. It pains me to say this but Release has degenerated into nothing more than a constituent of the drug Prohibition Industry. Furthermore, because Release has had nothing interesting to add to the anti-prohibition campaign for at least ten years, it still relies on the anti-prohibition campaigning glamour and heritage of the 1960's and 1970's to give it a vestige of profile.
Today rock stars are being asked to give free performances at a benefit to 'Support Release'. Release? Young rock stars and the general public have no idea what Release is. And why should they? Release is invisible. Despite 'drugs' and new 'moral panics' about cannabis being one of the main topics of press and public concern - not to mention heroin addicts and addicted rock stars being monstered in the press - Release is silent.
Release's plight has many causes.
For too long there has been a deep strategic failure of principal, a failure to fight for anti-prohibition policies upon which to build a public profile which would attract long term public support from young and old people alike. For too long Release directors have been ludicrously unambitious. For too long the Release office was 'filthy'. Although now clean and tidy, the Release office remains closed to the public. Release offers legal advice for two hours a week-day on a Legal Helpline - 'legal advice by telephone and e-mail'. This is unacceptable.
Aside from some worthy explaining of drugs law, on 'drugs issues' and 'human rights' Release is producing vague, derivative, 'decorative' waffle. This waffle is exemplified by the web site where information published is said better and with more point elsewhere. There is very little difference between what Release says on its web site and what Government says in various drug information outlets.
All Release has to say is behind the curve. It is dull and tepid. For instance, this is typical: a web site post about cannabis dated July 19th 2007 says 'maybe it is time to consider a regulated supply where those choosing to use cannabis would know what they were buying.' Maybe! Time to consider! This is unacceptable.
Navel gazing in the midst of prohibition devastation Release is currently using a marketing agency to 'review the market it operates in' and to carry out a crass 're-branding exercise' in an attempt to 're-connect to young people'. But young people, and adults, at the sharp end of drugs issues having their lives ruined by iniquitous drug laws, will not be attracted by the wooly well-meaning platitudes offered by Release, especially not when they are offered 'by telephone and e-mail'.
Release is no fun! Release does not advertise. Release is not outraged.
Release does not care. Release does not campaign.
It is sad to say but Release has degenerated into a remote, irrelevant organisation. Because the so-called 'services' Release offers are not accessible, they are obviously not essential, and are obviously not really needed.
Release is no longer an organisation firmly and bravely out in the vanguard with those - often the general public - campaigning to end drugs prohibition.
Release is no longer any practical help to the people, especially young people it was founded to serve.
Release is now simply exploiting drug prohibition as a jobs opportunity for 'Release workers'. Considering the distress, death and devastation caused by drug prohibition Release's response is disgracefully complacent.
The Release Drug Helpline is only open for 20 hours a week, otherwise a message tells callers to ring FRANK or dial 999. Release is a remote organisation and does not matter anymore. There are other organisations that do get media coverage - Transform and The Legalise Cannabis Alliance for anti-prohibition campaigning, Drugscope for drugs information. There are Government Drug Action Teams (DAT's) and private addiction facilities. If Release ceased functioning - or rather ceased malfunctioning - it would make no difference. Because Release has nothing interesting to say and nothing practical to offer to the thousands of people warned, cautioned, arrested and imprisoned for using or selling drugs, Release has no influence - no influence on Government and no influence in the media. The general public does not know that Release exists. Unfortunately no one, other than those who rely on Release for wages, would miss it.
To make Release relevant and viable: For a start, OPEN THE OFFICE! Have face-to-face case work contact with people who need help and advice for at least a few hours a day. And look at the exemplary modus operandi of voluntary campaigning organisations that the public admires and is aware of. For example: Shelter, Crisis, Centre Point, Friends of the Earth, Amnesty International, Greenpeace, The Howard League For Penal Reform, Liberty, Citizens Advice Bureau, Childline, The Medical Foundation, Human Right's Watch....
ALTERNATIVELY RELEASE SHOULD CLOSE. Release workers who do not wish to campaign against prohibition will be able to find other jobs, legal work and volunteering opportunities in the Prohibition Industry.
Closing Release will remove a hollow shell of an organisation out of the path of any new group that might spring up run by young people for young people energetically campaigning to end the crime generating misery of prohibition.
August – September 2007
Painting.
Mainly I am working on a still life of ‘Peonies’ and an urban landscape, the wonderful view from the top of Notting Hill looking north to distant Kensal Rise, called ‘Eve and Adam in Ladbroke Grove’. Some of the tubes of oil paint I am using are over 40 years old, Pauline Boty’s paints that were given to me after she died in 1966. I am using her Winsor & Newton ‘chrome green’, ‘terra verte’, ‘green alizarin’ and Reeves’ ‘New Blue’. But this is the last time I will use Boty’s paints. The remains of her half-used tubes, some as she left them, I am making into a reliquary called ‘Pauline Boty’s Duel Box’ – a memorial to her life and death fight to be an artist.
The death of Pauline Boty, the way she succumbed to Catholic religion and patriarchal culture and ‘decided’ to sacrifice herself and not have treatment for her cancer in order to save her in uterine baby, was a misogynistic scandal. There is no evidence that anyone tried to persuade her that she had the right to put her own life and her superb talent as an artist first, before the life of her unborn child. Had Boty had an abortion and chemotherapy for her cancer she would have been condemned as selfish and worse, a criminal (abortion in the UK was illegal in 1966). Even today many women are terrified of being considered ‘selfish’ and for most women abortion is still forbidden. Pauline Boty’s death exemplifies the disgrace of valuing unborn babies more than the lives of women.
July 2007
Punk publication and Celebration!:
'The Lost Women of Rock Music: Female Musicians of the Punk Era'
by Dr Helen Reddington
Dr Helen Reddington researched this book, tracked down musicians, and persuaded them to be included, out of pure love and enthusiasm for music. But the book is also fired by outrage, an outrage that I share. Although Helen is more than a generation younger than me, we have experienced history in the making – and then watched as the history we made closed over our heads as if it had never happened.
Helen has more than just a music lovers’ interest in ensuring that this integral part of punk history, and women’s history – HERSTORY - is not lost. She is interested because she was right there in the mix as it happened making music.
When she told me she was writing this book I immediately recognised how significant it would be. We would have a book nailing down the historical record not written by an academic – however good such books are (and Ashgate publish some of the best). We would have a book written by a woman who was there and who understands the actual, visceral, blood pumping experience of creating and performing music.
There is a very personal reason why I believe this book is so important.
We all need enabling images, or role models, if you like. As a child I glimpsed what women could achieve as artists because I was sent to a boarding school run by a brilliant woman, a Russian classical ballerina turned teacher. I learned about great women like the ballerina Anna Pavlova and the set designer Natalia Goncharova.
But when I got to art school there were no woman art teachers, nor were we taught about any women artists. In the 1960’s there was not one art history book that mentioned any women artists at all.
In common with all young creative people I had moments of crippling doubt. I did not know any hero women artists to identify with.
Identifying with male artists is fine – but I needed woman heroes as creative examples. My crippling moments of doubt would not have been so bad had I known that women like Georgia O’Keeffe or Suzanne Valadon or Evelyne Axell or Carol Rama existed.
I am absolutely sure that there are young woman today who would like to play instruments but are held back or discouraged or in doubt because they do not know any women musicians. They do not know about women musicians as heroes, enablers and shapers, as lead guitarists, rhythm guitarists, bass players and drummers…
When we are young we do not image that we will be excluded. Joining in just seems normal. We want to be really good and be part of the scene as artists, writers, musicians, filmmakers and photographers.
Thirty years ago, in the 1970’s, a new generation of women set out to make their way in the rock ’n’ roll world. I thought, great! This won’t be like the 1960’s! Women are now armed with the language of Women’s Liberation.
But in the 1970’s I think we were all absolutely astonished by how very high the Men Only Rock ‘n’ Roll Wall was. Many of us had to keep silent about how hard it was to clamber over the wall. We faced resistance of all kinds and every degree.
One of the dilemmas of exclusion is what to do about it. Most of us have hung in there getting stuck into the established mainstream scene. Many of us have created our own scenes. We have wanted to work as equals, shoulder to shoulder with men. But sometimes its great to be in a space where we can forget our gender and just BE. And in the space of just being we are free.
But the female spaces we create aren’t the answer. It is like saying that because women still find it so difficult to become Members of Parliament then we should jolly well piss off and build our own Palace of Westminster from scratch. Separate development has a place – but we all want to be in the MAINSTREAM, we want to BE the mainstream – mixing it in THE charts, in THE music press, in THE media. We want to be PRESENT as equals with men – making the public space normal.
Today, because of the example set by women musicians in the 1970’s, the rock ‘n’ roll world IS more normal. Punk women, with their music of resistance, protest and pleasure, redefined what and who women are.
Women artists have always been the avant-garde, the advance guard! The punk generation of women changed the public face of women forever.
Today, in 2007, the charts are 50% women musicians. Women musicians are no longer considered ‘exceptional’. Women musicians are the rule.
This didn’t just happen by accident. The normalization of the public space for women was struggled for, fought for, begged for and demanded by many of the musicians Helen writes about.
For me the 1970’s punk era was a joy. It was bliss to be in the workspace with a critical mass of hard working creative career women. We would do our work – and then have each other for support in private moments of grief.
I’m not saying that men do not have grief in the workspace. Men face the fiercest competition. Virginia Woolf’s insight that sexism is the kind of ‘closed shop’ tactic that men have to deal with among themselves all the time helped me to see what was actually going on. Only recently an ex-editor of MOJO told me proudly that the first thing he did as editor was ‘sack everyone who was middle class’ – and they were, of course, all white men.
So, since we all do have to combat discrimination in the work place then the most important thing we can do is fit-up with the right tools to fight it.
And Helen’s book is one of these tools. Here are women musicians telling their own stories, NOT always making light of the strife and struggle – which we so often have to do to keep our jobs and earn our living!
Helen’s book will inspire young woman musicians today – and entertain, of course.
Helen wrote ‘The Lost Women of Rock Music: Female Musicians of the Punk Era’ because she is passionate about music – passionate to create music – and passionately determined to pass on the historical record of how women, despite formidable barriers, just get on and do it and make it, great!
****
History making women musicians and colleagues attending our publication Celebration! included: Zillah Ashworth - bass Rubella Ballet, Nina Antonia, Richard Adams, Gaye Black - The Adverts, Gina Birch - The Raincoats, Jenny Bellestar - The Bellestars, Maeve Bayton - Mistakes, Steve Beresford, Sue Bradley - fiddle Reward System, Leonie Cooper, Rhoda Dakar - Bodysnatchers, Ana Da Silva - The Raincoats, Heather de Lyon - drummer The Objects and Devil's Dyke, Sam Dwyer, Erica Echenberg, Karen Grey - Gymslips and The Renees, Viv Goldman, Paul Gambaccini, Kate Hayes - The Objects, Ellen Jones, Mandy Little, Rachel Lovell - Dollymixtures, Lora Logic - Essential Logic, Suzanne Long - bass The Reptiles, June Miles-Kingston - drums The Modettes and Fun Boy Three, Ellie Medeiros - Stinky Toys, Liz Naylor - keyboards Gay Animals, Lucy O'Brien, Shirley O'Longhlin - The Raincoats, Tessa Pollit - bass The Slits, Valerie Palmer, Andrew Pedder, Christine Robertson, Heather Smith - The Dollymixtures, Poly Styrene - XRay Specks, Nichola Swords, Keiron Tyler, Penelope Tobin, Jane Woodgate - Modettes, Enid Williams - bass Girls School. Present in spirit: Pauline Black - The Selecter, Vi Subversa - Poison Girls, Sara Furse - No Man's Band, Mufti Berridge - drummer No Man's Band.
June 2007
Drugs and Release 1967 – 2007: Needed Then – Needed Now
Caroline Coon’s talk for RELEASE 40th ANNIVARSARY CONFERENCE, 18th June 2007.
'Thank you for inviting me to participate in this occasion. I am especially pleased to be on the same platform with Joe Boyd and Sebastian Saville. Joe was vital to Release when we started in 1967. Sebastian has done brilliantly over the last four years - especially in fundraising, which is such a difficult but essential task.
There are many others in this room who have helped keep Release going and I thank you all. I’ve done so little… On the other hand, Release continues today because what we set up 40 years ago WORKS. We set up an organisation for a demonised group of young people and we stood as a protective interface between ‘us’ and ‘them’ – the ‘them’ who were intent on punishing us and destroying our lives by giving us criminal records and sending us to prison.
Much has changed for the better over the past 40 years - but too much is worse or at least has remained the same.
Actually, to underline how much has remained the same I considered simply reading out notes I made about the court cases of young people we helped in 1967. They were mostly between the ages of 17 and 30, mostly charged with possession of opium, LSD, cannabis, metherdrine, cocaine, heroin. The young people were, students, museum curators, musicians, shop assistants, nurses, artists, writers, addicts – some ‘registered’ some not. As I read again these case histories all my youthful outrage at the way powerful adults treat young people came flooding back. My feelings about how we treat youth in this country have not changed in 40 years. Release was set up because young people were just disappearing off the streets. ‘Suspicious’ young people were stopped and searched and then disappeared into the prison system. In 1967 hippies or those who looked like hippies were the hyped-up ‘enemy within’.
In May I had to pinch myself. Was it 1967 or 2007? There on TV was a grim faced Home Secretary announcing his ‘plans’ for a war time ‘stop and search’ power.
Politicians are uneasy about threatened derogations from the Human Rights Act. They rightly say that it could be counterproductive, that ‘stop and search’ will ‘radicalise young people’ or youths who look like ‘Muslims’.
Politicians are puzzled by the democratic deficit – about why people don’t bother to vote these days.
40 years ago it was obvious to me that the ‘stop and search’ of ‘hippie’ young people - who were then punished for using drugs - was going to ‘radicalise’ young people. Release made this clear. An immoral and unworkable drugs policy would drive a wedge between politicians and democracy. And it wasn’t just Rufus Harris and I, us twenty-something art students running Release, who made this point.
Michael Schofield, the great social psychologist was, in 1968, a member of the Government Advisory Committee on Drug Dependence. He said that the way the then Home Secretary had responded to rational arguments against drug prohibition was ‘a display of emotion and prejudice which [was] sad as well as shameful.’ He said that if adults with ‘power and influence’ did not put the iniquities of the drug laws right then society would ‘deserve all the trouble we would undoubtedly get’.
The trouble that emotional and prejudiced politicians did get was the detached contempt in which most of them are held today.
Why would young people – that most idealistic portion of the population – want to vote for adults who are patent hypocrites?
Young people know how politicians live their lives – what they do for pleasure – how much they drink. And these days, politicians appear especially hypocritical because many of them have to finesse their ‘respectability’ by assuring us that they haven’t taken illegal drugs since they became MP’s.
Young people study how adults behave. Adults rightly believe that if children are to grow up as useful happy citizens then they must be set good ‘adult’ examples.
This is a good adult example set me in my teens.
I would come home from boarding school for the holidays. I might be allowed to go around the farm with my father. He would take a walk through the hop gardens. Hops provide the bitter flavour in beer. Growing hops is part of the alcohol industry. By autumn the hops would be harvested and dried in our Oast House.
My father might take me along to meetings at Young’s Brewery where the quality of his hops would be discussed. And beer would be tasted. At home we had a wine cellar – a lovely cool dark place where casks of beer and bottles of wine were stored. The process of growing, making and storing alcohol and learning about this most cultivated of adult pleasures was a normal part childhood.
Before a dinner party I saw adults performing lovely alcohol rituals, shining glasses and crystal decanters, putting out little mats… there were cocktails, aperitifs, fish or meat wines, desert wines, the after dinner brandy or port… and adults would be very jolly – and some did not drink and some did not smoke cigars either.
And then I remember one evening - there was an almighty crash. The adults were terrified. The front door was kicked down and 10 police officers and sniffer dogs came piling in… and everyone was arrested!
Well, no – of course that didn’t happen, alcohol being legal, licenced, regulated and taxed. If my father had been farming ‘cannabis gardens’ he would have been classified a drug dealer – likely penalty 20 years in jail.
Young people in the 1960’s and young people today are socialised about alcohol-drug use – for pleasure and as a medicine. There always was and still is understanding about alcoholism – as an illness and a terrible wrecker of lives. In the 1960’s there were trenchant anti-alcohol Temperance Societies, and nation health services and well-funded charities for alcoholics. Using and abusing the drug alcohol is what adults have always done as a civilised pleasure and pain of being alive and human.
Alcohol is the backdrop against which powerful adults - police and government - play out their punishments of young people and their illegal drugs. In the 1960’s our drugs of choice were different to theirs but our social, medical and spiritual reasons for using them were the same.
This is why Release was needed then. Here is what frequently happened in 1960’s - one of the first cases Release handled: Barry, age 19, was an editor of a community newspaper. He and a group of his hippie friends, 29 people, were having a party. There was an almighty crash. They were terrified. The front door was kicked down and 10 police officers and sniffer dogs came piling in… and everyone present, except a Russian Orthodox Priest, was arrested. Only a small amount of cannabis was found. Five weeks later, at Committal Proceedings, the charges against 24 people were dropped. Many had spent several weeks in custody because they couldn’t find anybody to bail them out. Barry, and his friends Paul, Mary and Mervyn were the only ones finally charged. Barry and Mary were charged with possession of cannabis and for allowing their premises to be used. When their case was heard at the Inner London Sessions before a jury, they were found not guilty of possession, but guilty of allowing their premises to be used. The case was remanded so that probation and medical reports could be obtained. Mary was allowed bail, but Barry was remanded in custody.
Release contacted people who knew Barry and arranged for them to be character witnesses. Their evidence did not persuade the judge. The probation officer’s report to the judge recommended that Barry would benefit from a period of borstal training. Mary was put on probation for two years and Barry was sentenced to Borstal. This, I noted at the time, meant that Barry would spend months in the Borstal Allocation Wing of Wormwood Scrubs because borstals were so overcrowded.
What happened to young people in the 1960’s certainly radicalised me!
The first time I went to court for a drugs trial was in 1965 at the Old Bailey. I was 20. I saw a 25-year-old black Jamaican friend of mine being tried for possession of cannabis. He was sentenced to three years in prison. I thought what happened to him was about racism and prejudice against the working class.
Then government turned on us white, often middle class, kids.
I thought government – those respectable but hard-drinking MP’s – I thought they must be unwittingly ignorant. I thought that they simply didn’t know what has happening to ordinary, normal young people.
I thought that adults - those who were running what we were told was the fairest and best justice system in the world –I thought they would be horrified to know what was happening.
I honestly thought that what Release needed to do was research, get the data, inform powerful people. And then the prohibition drug law scandal would stop.
Release was needed: Because young people don’t usually know their civil rights. Our first practical intervention into the 1960’s civil rights emergency was to print up ‘Know Your Rights’ Bust Cards. Immediately our 24-hour telephone number was out in the community, published in underground magazines, given out at demonstrations, at music festivals and clubs we were inundated with calls.
Aside from drug related issues, young people wanted help with poverty, disability, homelessness, abortion, birth control… Every social problem you can think of came our way. We established links with all the other anti-authoritarian voluntary organisations that sprung up in the 1960’s like Centrepoint, the Pregnancy Advice Service, Shelter, The Simon Community, and Task Force. We liaised with social workers and probation officers. We gathered around us a group of progressive lawyers and doctors. We went to lectures and we learned. We attended weekly meetings with other voluntary and professional social workers to get support and discover how to take care of ourselves as we took care of others.
At Release we never said that any drug - even cannabis - was ‘harmless’. Drugs per say do not cause harm. What matters is the state of mind and physiology of individuals.
People came to Release and the only problem they had with drugs was that they were being criminalised and threatened with prison. Then there was a small but crucial minority whose drug use was disrupting their own and other people’s lives.
One of our most important functions was to proved assistance when a young person’s drug use caused real distress. There were those who took just a tab of acid and ‘bad tripped’. There were those who used a huge amount of pot, and other drugs, that brought on states of psychosis – a problematic loss of contact with reality. Sometimes this ‘psychosis’ would simply be a temporary but particularly intense or distressing experience, sometimes it was much more serious.
We were observing, on a daily basis, how many young people who were unhappy and depressed would use drugs, from cannabis to heroin, to make themselves feel better – as self-medication. We had evidence that the younger a person was when they stated using drugs then the more likely it was that they had family problems they could not talk about. Young people’s stoicism is heroic. Children and young people damage themselves and act out anger rather than tell you why they feel bad, why they feel emotional pain.
I was shocked that young addicts could not discuss with psychiatrists at Treatment Centres the abuse they mentioned to me. In the 1960’s, when children or young people tried tell and talk to professionals about abuse they were not heard and not believed.
The abuse of children was and is endemic – in all social classes. Few young people use drugs to the point of ruining normal social functioning unless they are deeply distressed. Drug misuse in very young people is a sure indicator of distress – a sure sign that a young person needs social support intervention from careful adults outside the family.
Take another typical Release case from the 1960’s, the case of ‘James’. He was 17, unemployed. He was arrested for being in possession of 1/2oz of cannabis. We organised a solicitor for him when his case came up at Oxford Magistrates Court.
My case note reads: ‘James has not seen his mother since he was 11 years old, when he was sent to mental hospital. He was there for three years, often in wards with adult patients, and since then he has spent most of his life in institutions and hospitals. Because of this he has had no formal education.
‘His probation officer was sure that he would receive some form of custodial sentence, and made arrangements for him to be accepted at one particular borstal, if the need arose. However, when James appeared before the magistrate, with our help the probation officer submitted that if he were to be institutionalised again there would be little hope of his ever being absorbed into the community.
‘The magistrate fined James £30.00 [in today’s money about £400.00] and told him to get a job so that he could pay the fine.
‘Two weeks later we heard that James was in Ashford Remand Centre for causing an affray. We wrote, telling him how to apply for legal aid but we received no reply. We heard nothing for two weeks until James walked into our office after being fined £5 at Bow Street. He then told us that "the affray" he had caused was at a Treatment Centre. The doctor called the police. We also discovered that the reason he had not applied for legal aid was because he could not write and was too ashamed to ask the Welfare Officer at Ashford for advice.
‘We were able to arrange for him to receive regular treatment with the same doctor at the Treatment Centre who had called the police.
‘We helped him get a job and find a room and he came to the office every week with the money to pay off his fines.’
For a teenager like James, Release was a structured place of safety and protection, stability and good manners.
Many young people told us that they wanted to gain an insight into why they were self-destructively misusing drugs. We set up twice weekly evening ‘group therapy’ sessions with the help of doctors and psychologists who sat in and guided us
Because we were seeing such a mix of people in the office, from those with unproblematic drug use to distressed addicts trying to withdraw from drugs – not to mention visits from the Drug Squad – we had to have boundaries. During office hours, from 9am to 10pm, we had a ‘no drugs policy’ in the office.
Raising money to keep going was a struggle.
Release had to be a free-at-the-point-of-delivery service. For a start this system is efficient and cost effective. Everyone is treated equally. As well as raising donations from generous individuals we needed a regular source funds of the kind that sustain our superb welfare state. Capitalism can be socially responsible. People can be persuaded to pay tax if it is seen to be fair. I suggested to Joe Boyd that to fund Release we could take a regular cut from entry charges to clubs like Middle Earth and Implosion. He agreed. He convinced his partners and we received what I called the Underground Community Tax to fund Release - and, incidentally, via the trust we set up, other voluntary organisations.
We were open to criticism. Our critics in the hippy underground didn’t think our no-drugs-in–the-office-policy was very ‘cool’. They wanted us to say that taking drugs would save the world and that cannabis was harmless. We were sometimes blamed when we failed to stop people going to prison but more often our interventions in the criminalising process kept many young people out of prison. Our factual, educational information about drugs reduced harm – for instance, the way we contradicted government and the law about the differences between cannabis and heroin.
On the whole Release worked because we were accessible to the community, an open house, great to visit. We were visible when and where it mattered, out and about in the community. Because of the community ‘tax’ people felt ownership of Release.
We collected data, gave evidence to government committees and commissions, gave talks at police academies, schools and universities, spoke to the media…
So what do I know after 40 years?
Whatever the law, there will always need to be organisations like Release delivering ‘soft’, smart, early intervention harm reduction services locally, to the community in the community.
I know that drug taking is normal not deviant - it always has been normal and always will be. Whatever the law, humans will use pleasure-giving drugs. Whatever the law, we will always need to care for those who use drugs self-destructively to mask emotional distress.
Young people, as human beings, have not changed. Today there are hundreds of young people like James struggling to cope with deprived childhoods. There are thousands of Barrys and Marys just having fun. Young people always will test boundaries. As adults we need to encourage the kind of self-regulation by example that treads the line between exciting risk and dull but responsible safety.
The past 40 years have proved that the ‘hard’ authoritarian, punishment model of demonising drug dealers and users is a failure. Prohibition causes harms far greater than those it is intended to address. Prohibition is an expensive malevolent social policy that, far from protecting society from any harm drugs can do, is a barrier impeding our ability to help vulnerable people, especially those under the age of 18.
After 40 years I am sorry that all of us who have campaigned to end prohibition have not yet succeeded.
But the tide is at last flowing our way.
Adult pleasures like alcohol, tobacco, Viagra and gambling are the backdrop against which we judge Government today. Drug prohibition is the stinking elephant in the room whenever the democrat deficit is discussed. End prohibition, licence and control drugs, and with a stroke politicians will gain some respect.
We should not vote for politicians who insist on dragging vulnerable ‘problematic’ people through the courts.
We know how to improve the mental wellbeing of children. We know how to deliver drug treatment programmes and mental health programmes. Criminalising social casualties is a last resort. Criminalising the socially competent is deranged.
Appeasing Government in order to get rewarded with a tiny amount of funding doesn’t work. Government cuts funding anyway. Good!
For our funding we have to rely on ourselves, on wealthy individuals and the great and the good. We are here today because brave individuals and the corporate sector are supporting our cause. Thank you everybody. Thank you Infinity, 3DD and Mishcon de Reya.
But I do know how difficult fundraising is.
In 1969 I remember getting a call from Lord Longford. He was a very famous Labour peer. He said he wanted to help Release and would I come to the House of Lords to tell him more about our work. As everyone in the office waved me away they were excited. Such a meeting might mean we could keep going.
I got the bus to Westminster. Soon I was sitting in his Lordship’s room. After a few seconds of polite chat he leant towards me. He looked deep into my eyes. He put one hand on my knee. ‘Caroline, are you a Catholic?’ he asked. Startled, I replied: ‘No’. Lord Longford continued: ‘Caroline, is there any chance that I could persuade you to become a Catholic?’ ‘No’ I replied. ‘In that case’ said Lord Longford, ‘I am afraid I cannot help you’. He rose to his feet and he showed me to the door.
I’ve had 40 years to think of smart remarks about Christian behaviour.
I believe that giving to voluntary organisations brave enough to challenge government, voluntary organisations that protect and educate the young, voluntary organisations that assist the distressed and the vulnerable - this is fundamentally necessary, a true act of humanity, even a saintly thing to do.
Release was needed 40 years ago and Release is needed now.'
_______
40th ANNIVERSARY RELEASE CONFERENCE on Monday 18th June 2007, at the Hampstead Theatre. Guests speakers: Helena Kennedy QC, Simon Hughes MP, Simon Jenkins, Joe Boyd, Caroline Coon, Prof. Graham Foster, Sebastian Saville, Ethan Nadelmann, Lord David Ramsbotham and Allen St Pierre.
http://www.release.org.uk/html/~master_menu/~Conferences/2007_Conference.php
May 2007
Release: Remembering Rufus Harris 1946 - 2007
It seems like only yesterday that it was 1967, the Summer of Love, and Rufus and I were sitting under the statue of Eros. It was dawn and Rufus, like me, had been demonstrating against the News of the World’s character assassination of ‘disgraceful drug-taking rock star’ Mick Jagger. Unknown to each other, but both with our own personal understanding of iniquitous drugs law, we had marched from Fleet Street, past No 10, through Trafalgar Square and up to Piccadilly Circus. As strangers but demonstration compatriots, we began chatting. We discovered that we were both art students. Immediately there was a connection. The next evening Rufus came over to my studio - and that was the start of Release.
Not only was Rufus able to emphasise with the young people who came to Release for help, not only was he able to comfort people in distress, not only was he a great listener – he was also very acute. He was especially good at dealing with the Drug Squad officers whose habit it was to drop by the Release office unannounced. Rufus, after a few minutes of polite banter, would calmly come out from behind his desk and lead the officer down the road to the local pub.
It was because of his ability to cultivate police ‘friends’ that Rufus was personally tipped off about a Drug Squad raid on Release. Rufus knew exactly what to do. He arranged, with a solicitor, to camp out all night at the office. When ‘the fuzz’ turned up Rufus was there: ‘no need to break down the door, officers’ he said, showing the thwarted midnight raiders around as if such a nocturnal visitation was quite normal.
Release was not only the Hippy Underground civil rights organisation, a legal and welfare service, we also actively participated in politics. For one demonstration against the Vietnam War, inspired by street theatre protest, we all, staff and volunteers, spent several evenings with water, flour and red dye making gallons of symbolic blood to spill. Several people were arrested. When we all mustered back at the office to debrief, Rufus, who had been at a police station to bail people out, made us laugh. All had been going well, he told us, until he began signing bail forms. At the same time as the station desk sergeant noticed Rufus noticed that his hands were stained bright red.
Rufus was innately socially conscious. He was a courageous problem solver, a battler, and an optimist who brimmed with hope. In fact, he was exactly the kind of person who was always destined to be an integral part of the innovative network of voluntary organisations that sprung up in the 1960’s to meet the needs of people excluded from society and oppressed by the state. Like many of those organisations Release survives to this day. Furthermore, the ‘shocking’ but rational argument that Rufus spent his life expounding is now respectable and mainstream. Forty years ago when he spoke out against prohibition he was in the minority – today all intelligent people know that prohibition has failed. I very much hope that when Rufus visited Release for the last time a few months ago that deep in his heart, despite his modesty and diffidence, he was able to feel huge pride. Peace and Love, Rufus. Keep on marching!
March 2007 – April 2007
CUNT: asserting women’s right to sex and sexuality has been part of my art practice since I was a teenager. I was brought up in a family where sexualised bullying to intimidate and undermine me was the rule; a misogyny that I later realised was but a microcosm of generalised misogyny in society at large. Women and men were socialised into viciously denigrating women’s ‘disgusting’ genitalia. Lodged in our minds was the terrifying myth-image of vagina dentate - women's vaginas have teeth. As a girl child I was fearfully unsure what these yet-to-grow teeth were destined to bite. Looking back to my teens it is astonishing how far we have come from those days when ‘respectable’ women had to be pure, untainted by sexual pleasure and without a sexual thought in our heads. When having respectable sex married women were meant ‘to think of England’. Men could only be sexually liberated with 'whores'.
In the 1960’s, at the start of second-wave Women’s Liberation, we began to challenge what we realised was sexual terrorism to keep women in our place and out of the public space. In an interview with Nell Dunn the Pop artist Pauline Boty confessed to how believing that her cunt was ugly contributed to the deep depressions that sabotaged her work. The misogyny of disgust was a source of much disabling despair. Painting ‘My Beautiful Cunt’ in 1967 was part of my personal liberation journey as well as a defiant public statement. My cunt paintings claim and assert the wonder and beauty of this most crucial and awesome part of the female anatomy, the source of life and the vessel into which we receive the seed of life.
Pete Woods is producing and directing a documentary film, commissioned from North One by BBC 3, provisionally called ‘The History of the C Word’. Pete has reminded me of Germaine Greer’s brilliant 1971 essay ‘Lady, Love Your Cunt’. Greer exhorts women to regain the ‘power of cunt’. After a day of filming with Pete and his young male film crew, the extent to which we have all benefited from the triumph of gender equality is obvious. Today it is possible to share sexual experiences with men in a way that I hoped for in my youth. The enlightenment of sexual liberation, with all the duty to youth and health care that this entails, is one of the joys of our modern world. ‘CUNT’ (1999) is my celebration of female sexuality and companion piece homage to a painting Pauline Boty did in 1966 called ‘BUM’ - see Gallery.
Post script: As production consultant on the film ‘Ladies and Gentleman, The Fabulous Stains’ (aka ‘All Washed Up’), I designed the logo for The Stains which was, of course, spatters and smears of menstrual blood.
Photography: look out for the March issue of The Observer Music Monthly, edited by Caspar Llewin Smith. The Flashback page will celebrate the March 1977 release of The Clash’s first hit single ‘White Riot’.
Exhibition: from 9th April, Museum of Costume, Bath, is making links between music and style with 20 photographs of punk and new wave bands.
February 2007 - March 2007
The Veil-mask: Masking, Sexual Ignorance and Rape.
Those who choose to wear and advocate for the Muslim veil-mask* in Britain today appear ignorant or unaware of the violent psychosexual dynamics of ‘the forbidden’.
In a religious context the veil-mask is particularly perverse and kinky. Christian nuns, by signaling with the veil that they renounce worldly sex and marriage for a pure life married to God, become the forbidden and therefore exciting ‘sex objects’ of violation fantasy and fact. Christian culture is saturated with erotic images of the ‘sexy nun’ and nun rape pornography.
How many of us presume there is no pornography in Muslim culture or no sexual violence in Muslim society? In fact, Muslim society is rife with sexual violence**. Rumors about ‘Mullah rape camps in Northern Iran' abound. Far from being a protection from rape the Muslim veil-mask turns women who wear it into classically exciting ‘sex objects’ of sexually forbidden masked uncertainty. The black Muslim veil-mask, with its sinister undertone of punishment and torture, is a fetish of rape fantasy and fact.
It is dangerous for anyone to imagine that by wearing veil-masks Muslim women de-sexualise themselves. Nothing women do or wear is protection from sexual violence. Veiled or naked, sober or drunk, young or old, women are raped. Women ‘sex objects’, naked or veiled, are not the problem. People who believe that it is excusable or permissible to abuse, violently assault and rape ‘sex objects' are the problem.
Belief systems that forbid sex except for procreation within heterosexual marriage make masking adult sexual desire inevitable. Veil-masking women is the neurotic displacement act of fearful Muslim religious extremists who need to mask their own ‘sinful’ desires and behavior. Religion is the atavistic alibi of sexual deceit and bigotry.
It is nonsense to obey instructions on dress and sexual behavior issued by the likes of Prophet Mohammed, a child rapist with many wives. Religious patriarchs and religious ‘community leaders’, men like Ayatollah Khomeini and Osama bin Laden, lie about their sex lives. They mask their sexuality. Veil-masking women is their most visible sexual perversion.
Furthermore, hysterically anti-women cultures that are ruled by men in exclusively male institutions have always provided cover for homosexuals. Men having sex with men is one of the ‘sinful’ secrets hidden beneath the macho, homophobic front of Muslim institutions and societies that banish and veil-mask women. For adult men to have sex with adult men is common and normal. Hysterical violent denial and masking of homosexuality is common but perverse.
Instead of punishing women and condemning ‘the degenerate West’ men like Osama bin Laden - one of his father’s 57 neglected children – would do better to question why there is so much horrific sexual and domestic violence, child abuse and human misery in the morbid, life-limiting Wahhabi influenced societies they champion.
For all the faults of ‘the West’, compared to the violence and misery in those totalitarian societies ruled by religious extremists and sexual bigots, our secular civic institutions are a paradise of child care, bisexuality, gender equality, religious tolerance, opportunity, humanity and happiness.
Muslim women in Britain today are free to choose to wear the veil-mask, but in so doing they identify themselves with offensive and objectionable misogynist religious beliefs and dictate that are incompatible with democracy and gender equality***.
The bodily autonomy and integrity of both women and men is only protected and respected in sexually liberated societies that have secular laws making sexual abuse and sexual violence in all circumstances illegal, where prima facie ‘no fault to the victim, the perpetrator pays’ is the rule.
*niqab is the Arabic work for mask
**See ‘Iran to hang teenage girl attacked by rapists’ at
http://www.iranfocus.com/modules/news/article.php?storyid=5184
***See ‘The Burka, Jilbab and Islamo-scarf as fascist symbol and sign' at NEWS May– April 2006
December 2006 – January 2007
Seasonal Greetings and very best wishes for a prosperous 2007
Painting. The Chambers Gallery ‘Painting the Nude’ Private View was a good opportunity to ask a group of young male artists, including Michael Ajerman, Peter Harrap and Andrea Rossi, this question: Why do you think artists paint the male nude so infrequently? With one voice they answered: ‘Because they don’t sell!’ Will we begin to see more paintings of male nakedness as more independent women earn enough money to buy art?
Photography. Sony BMG has issued a boxed set of all 19 UK The Clash singles – The Clash The Singles. The accompanying booklet is illustrated with photographs by Caroline Coon and Bob Gruen. B-Unique has released the Babyshambles Pete Doherty version of The Clash song ‘Janie Jones’. Caroline Coon took the CD cover photo of The Clash with Janie Jones a few days after Janie was released from Holloway Prison in 1977. Proceeds from the sale of the single will benifit The Joe Strummer Foundation For New Music (Strummerville.com).
October - November 2006
Exhibition.
20th October - 17th November: 'Painting the Nude'.
The nude is not what it was. We can no longer simply admire it for its grace or beauty. To-day - post-Freud, post feminism - it is mired in debates about sexuality, the gendered eye, voyeurism and the ballance of power relations. It stands at the intersection where the traditional and contemporary colide.
'Painting the Nude', a group show, presents the ways in which contemporary artists have approached the female and male figure, addressing questions of nudity and nakedness, of gender, of sexuality, and the human condition. Caroline Coon's 'Mr Olympia' is exhibited for the first time in public since the painting caused a banning sensation in the 1980's.
Artists include Caroline Coon, Micheal Ajerman, Peter Harrap, Andrea Rossi, Arkady Wesolek, Frans Koppelaar, Kate Montgomery, Laura Smith, Jim Dunbar, Phoebe Harvey Wood, George Weissbort, Maggie Milne, Dennis Gilbert, Hannah Lee, Peter Rutty, Austin Cole, Linda O'Grady and Hadas Levi.
The Chambers Gallery, 23 Long Lane, London, EC1A 9HL
Tel: 0207 778 1600 Email: EveginiaG@chambersandpartners.co.uk
September 2006
Film.
Christopher Dreher, avant-guard rock musician and film director, has been commissioned by German public broadcaster ZDF to make a documentary for ARTE. Dreher is interested in events leading up to the 1967 Summer of Love and the radical new definitions of lifestyle and morals of the period which continue to influence artists and society. He will be filming an interview with Caroline Coon surrounded by Pop Art works in the Mayor Gallery exhibition 'London In The 1960's' which opens on 12th September.
Cunst Art. The project to find film of Osama Bin Laden at Stringfellow's is progressing. Promotional and documentary film makers are searching through used footage and out-takes. Peter Stringfellow remembers Bin Laden from the early 1980's: 'He was just one of the young Arabs who was welcome in London and welcome in my club. He liked it and congratulated me on it'. Cunst Art is tracing the film of Bin Laden at Stringfellow's so it can be made available to young Muslim 'jihadi' who dream of bombing clubs like Stringfellow's and the Ministry of Sound because they are full of young women they call "slags". Women hating extreamists should be warned that by acting out their anger with bombs in night clubs anywhere in the world they risk inadvertantly murdering their idol. After all, who knows where Osama Bin Laden is today?
Cricket. What is the difference between a cricket umpire and a fruitcake? A Hair's breadth.
July - August 2006
Jann Haworth: her slipshod presentation and her 'feminine' predicament.
Some artists who are bright stars in their youth slip off the radar, become invisible, their contribution to the history of creativity forgotten. In the past this was most likely to happen to women even when they were essential ingredients of a particular time, group or movement. Part of the women's liberation project has been to restore women to their rightful place in history and, over the last fifteen years great artists like Niki de Saint Phalle, Pauline Boty, Evelyne Axell and Alina Szapocznikow have been restored to the Pop Art story. Not without a fight, literally. One pioneering male curator was physically assaulted for daring to rupture the master narrative to include Boty for the first time in a Pop Art retrospective.
Jann Haworth is another 'lost' woman coming back into view. Her first solo exhibition in London for many years - 'Artist's Cut' at the Mayor Gallery - was eagerly anticipated. What with the enduring fascination with all aspects of 1960's watershed culture and politics, the scene was set for a timely reminder of her crucial part in Pop Art and a career re-launch.
But, well... some people are still stuck in the past. In his unintentionally hilarious essay 'The Mom of Pop, Unpacking Her Baggage' for Haworth's exhibition catalogue, Marco Livingstone blithely ignores feminist action or scholarship. He fails to acknowledge the intellectual journey about class, race and gender travelled by all conscious male and female artists since the 1960's. His resistance to the contrapuntal feminist analysis necessary in any relevant writing about women, art and culture today means that he is incapable of looking seriously at Haworth's art. He discusses Haworth's work in terms that patriarchal panjandrums used to slight 'women's art' in any period before the c20th and with an undercurrent of resentment he wears his belated inclusion of women in his Pop Art history narrative as quaintly as a middle aged fashion victim. He does not say why he excluded Haworth from his Pop Art retrospectives or why he now includes her. He walked over her then and he is walking over her again as he disarms her of any hint of threat to his patriarchal status quo. Unable to discuss Haworth on equal terms with the male artists of his comfort zone, he totally dehumanises her. In fact, he treats Haworth's work like a proverbial doormat.
Take a close look at 'Flowers' (1962). Does Haworth really subscribe to Livingstone's half-blind take on one of the great pieces in the show as 'feminine' in the stereotypically patriarchal sense, as if these flowers were displayed in a porcelain vase? Or does she want us to notice a monstrous parody of fleshy organs sprouting out of a sewer pipe? In 'Old Lady 1' (1962) and 'Old Lady 2' (1971), does Haworth confer what Livingstone calls 'dignity' on old women just by 'depicting them'? Or, are we meant to notice that she has made bent old women with flayed, blood soaked faces riven with the suffering of life long indignities?
Livingstone jollies himself along imagining that Haworth has 'no anxiety', 'delights in feminine things' with 'a girlishness and love of prettiness' and 'simple', 'innocent' 'unbridled joy'. He says her choices are 'simple', 'organic' and 'unpremeditated'. Mae West is described as 'not perhaps a model of decorum for serious women in the 1960's'. Of the iconic Haworth donuts he purses his lips to say 'that the donuts themselves suggest a particular sexual organ of the human body is, of course, not lost on her'. For Livingstone the spirit of Haworth's art 'literally blooms and blossoms, expressing the life force of the creative impulse as a giving birth'. Obscured behind such a thicket of queasy sexist flattery and commercial patronage Haworth is back to being the invisible woman of her nightmares.
Haworth wants to be where the action is. She obviously knows about the revolution in the way women occupy the public space and she has seen how women promote themselves and are promoted these days. She knows the feminist argument - that artists of significant calibre were excluded from art history because of the prejudice against women - has been won. However, instead of valorising and celebrating the brave enablers of cultural change, she does the unforgivable. Haworth is distancing herself from the women's liberation movement that has cleared public space for her and her art. She is disassociating herself from exciting and influential feminist scholarship. She has Livingstone pointedly tell us that although her early work is 'proto-feminist' and celebrates 'a matriarchal lineage', because it was 'fully formed' before 1960's 'radical' feminism it is not 'politically feminist'. Haworth, Livingstone tells us, would be 'inappropriate' and 'arrogant' should she claim to 'speak on behalf of other women'. Get back, inappropriate arrogant women! How Haworth can title work 'The Hollow Men' (2003), a self portrait 'The Incredible Invisible Woman' (2004) or 'Hannah Hock 3' (2005) without being political or feminist remains mysterious.
Allowing herself to be cast off from the feminist art movement - one of the most important art movements of all time - to be used as candy on Livingstone's 'Pop guy' arm is a dubious strategy. It might work for Haworth, at least in terms of sales, if she was carefully aware of this positioning and up for it. But she is neither. Did Livingstone not question Haworth's dull, badly typed, badly written press release? What was he looking at when he wrote about the work to be exhibited? Did he ask Haworth whether it was her intention to provide her gallery with photographs that makes all her art look like it is sprayed with donkey's diarrhoea? Haworth is presenting herself in a slipshod way that is not acceptable of a serious artist of any gender and certainly not of male artist contemporaries of hers like Derek Boshier, Colin Self or Gerald Laing who subscribe to and maintain the highest art standards. As a consequence, Haworth looks foolish and second rate under the weight of Livingstone's lifeless puffery. In another catalogue essay for the show she has more honest support from Christopher Finch. He contradicts Livingstone's airhead fantasy of Haworth by mentioning her 'complex and always passionately held ideas' but without telling us what they are. For Haworth, what should have been a splash of a breakthrough comeback show with a wonderful catalogue that fixed her place in the cannon and included her in - or at least associated her with - the triumphant feminist avant-garde has turned out to be a flop and a failure.
Feminist scholars and curators would make Haworth's work more relevant, more interesting and more humanly connected to the real world. Sue Tate, Sarah Wilson and Catherine de Zegher with their expertise in Pop Art and their radical reappraisals of the role of women in art come to mind. Livingstone wilfully ignores the conflict in being 'feminine' and the danger of being a rebellious liberated woman, the poignant, painful paradox in the wit and irony of Haworth's work that is the dark subject of her art.
Haworth could acknowledge and own this conflict, and then commit to the highest art standards. If, through lack of authentic feeling and clarity, she continues to present herself in a slipshod manner and if she continues to remain patronised by sincerely sexist critics then her reputation, for what it is, will suffer. The value of her work is in danger of falling just when the value of 1960's Pop Art is rising, as are the reputations of those groundbreaking feminist scholars and curators Haworth has eschewed. Dismayed admirers can only say: Come on Jann, sharpen your scissors and make the cut where it really counts!
The Saatchi Gallery 'Your Gallery' web site.
Thousands of visitors a day are viewing the Saatchi Gallery site - there is a real buzz about it. Charles Saatchi says 'I'm thrilled that the standard is so high from such a variety of artists and hope it will be interesting to gallery owners, exhibition curators and collectors to see such diverse work'. I was very happy indeed to be invited to contribute work and I have posted eight images from my ongoing collage series 'Glossy Magazine Tear Sheets'.
www.saatchigallery.com/yourgallery/artist/details.php?id=6327
June 2006
Derek Boshier, a founder of the British Pop Art group, was one of my fine art tutors at Central St Martins School of Art. He recently reminded me that a painting I did in 1966 was very Pop Art. The painting was of his rumpled morning-after bed covered in the American flag sheets he had bought in New York. I remembered the painting but since it was a student work I had long since lost track of it. Derek said to me 'then re-create it'. The painting I am working on at the moment is called 'Derek's Bed - 1966'. As I work listening to disastrous news from Iraq the sense of deja vue is overpowering. Forty years ago many of us, in particular Pop artists, saw our lives through the filter of the disastrous Vietnam War.
Another Pop Art painting I have done this year is 'George Best with Heart and Dog Roses' inspired by 'Monica Vitti Heart' painted in 1963 by Derek's British Pop Art founder and friend Pauline Boty. Derek introduced me to Pauline. Her 'hot' painting, with its combination of politics and passion, transformed the way I saw art. I interviewed George Best, in 1974 for Cosmopolitan, when he was to football what the Beatles are to Pop music. If Pauline had lived to see George Best I am sure she would have included him with Jean Paul Belmondo, Elvis and Che in her painted cannon of inspirational male beauty and valour.
Joe Boyd held the launch party of his elegant and witty book 'White Bicycles: making music in the 1960's'* in the flat off Portobello Road where David Hockney painted until he moved to America. In 1967, after one of the Underground meetings that established Release, Joe gave me a lift home. I invited him into my studio. In his book Joe describes the scene. Caroline 'showed me a painting she was working on: a phalanx of naked Amazons charging towards the viewer.' Joe is immediately reminded of a recent visit to his friend Clive Goodwin, Pauline Boty's husband. Joe continues: 'Over his fireplace he proudly displayed his new acquisition: a pink-hued oil painting depicting pubic hair and moistly parted labia, viewed from below. He told me he had brought it from an artist who supported herself nude modelling - including a Mayfair cover clad in nothing but gold paint. He had an option on her next work: his description of it matched what I saw on the easel'. As it turned out Clive brought the impresario Michael White to my studio and Michael brought the Amazon painting 'Marathon', which in 1993 he lent to the Barbican for the David Mellor curatored exhibition 'The Sixties Art Scene in London'.
To complete the Pop, Art, America and World Cup football theme - don't miss Jann Haworth at James Mayor.** Haworth, born at the heart of the movie making community in Hollywood, was co-designer for the album cover of the Beatles' Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. Included in her 'Artist's Cut' exhibition of recent work are Pop Art figures in cloth that she made in the 1960's.
* Joe Boyd, 'White Bicycles: making music in the 1960's', Serpent's Tail, 2006.
** Jann Haworth, 'Artist's Cut', The Mayor Gallery, 8th June - 28th July 2006.
May - April 2006
The Burka, Jilbab and Islamo-scarf as Fascist Sign and Symbol.
I want to say exactly what I mean by fascist*. But first I want to explain why this is necessary. Many women I know are expressing shock and despair at seeing so many women wearing the burka, jilbab or even the so-called moderate Islamo-scarf. We share similar emotional reactions. Yet another women walks past in her black cloth coffin and we have wanted to scream at her 'take it off'. The dead blackness provokes in us such horror, terror and anger that we have wanted to run up and rip the damn thing away.
Women like me are terrified of the burka for the insulting subjection it signifies. We know how contingent our own freedoms are. Today, under the guise of clamping down on permissiveness and pornography which has 'gone too far', religious and secular authoritarians in USA and Europe are chipping away at the freedoms, including abortion, that we in The West fought so long and hard to gain. Covered women are held up to us as paragons of feminine virtue and modesty that we uncovered women are not but should be.
Men, too, think that the burka and Islamo-scarf is an insult, to men. Muslim women must cover-up, say the mullahs, because just the tiniest slither of naked female flesh is enough to turn men into instant rapists. This burka-insult to men is compounded by the fact that even in the UK four year olds are being forced to cover-up. Islamists apparently do not believe men can practice civilised sexual restraint even in the presence of babies.
On the other hand, it has been said to me in all seriousness by men who consider themselves sane and liberal that, considering binge drinking and pornography, it is understandable for Muslims to despise The 'degenerate' West. No it is not, I reply. Binge drinking and pornography, which we can freely criticise and control, is a price worth paying for our liberal freedoms. Despite The West's faults and excesses - including torture, foreign policy and the death penalty - we are living in a rational, egalitarian paradise compared to the hellholes ruled by Islamists.
Men who are not revolted by the burka, e.g. Prince Charles, Tony Benn and George 'I've fought against abortion all my life' Galloway, it's not as if they are consciously or even unconsciously sexist. It is superior know-it-all pseudo-tolerance that allows them never to wonder if they are. They simply do not question their male privileges and the patriarchal social-political structure that maintains them. Any equality women now have in The West seems to these men to have appeared out of nowhere. They do not understand nor empathise with our fear of the burka, the most blatant sign of discrimination. It has to be spelled out to them, again and again. In fact, British tolerance of the burka indicates a British tolerance of the most extreme hatred of women and a very atavistic British misogyny.
Women in The West are clinging on to the equal rights we have, freedoms that are as valuable to us as life itself. The oppression and imprisonment that the burka symbolises is more than painful. The burka is the ultimate provocation. It is mental torture, a daily reminder that powerful men, in the blink of an eye, would bury us back in domestic oblivion.
But I do not know a woman who has acted out her fear and rage. We are restrained and in pubic mostly silent. Women I know simply gasp in astonishment that it is not our elected Members of Parliament who protect our freedom but judges on the Court of Appeal. On the street, instead of causing breaches of the peace, we hold back. We are accustomed to street politeness and civility. We condemn bad manners and 'road rage', or any other kind of rage. We know that assault is a crime, and anyway, she is not responsible for the belief system that dictates what she wears.
It is not the Islamic Stepford wives we blame, those ghosts buried inside their burkas, religiously brainwashed to the gills and programmed to pray and walk subserviently behind hubby and when not silent or banished to 'the women's quarters' then only allowed to talk in vanilla soundbites.
The men to attack are those who impose the dress code cover-up. I call them fascists. The burka is nothing less than a sign and symbol of fascism.
So what is Fascism? The fascist* archetype is timeless and resilient. A nascent fascist worldview was apparent in Europe by the late nineteenth century. It spread around the world with the emphasis varying according to the diverse traditions of those nations that produced fascist regimes, movements or parties.
Fascism is essentially a counter-revolution against Enlightenment values. For Hitler 'The West' was code for liberal precepts. Hitler was anti-liberal and anti The West. Fascists seek to reverse the civilising effects of the European enlightenment of rationalism and secularism and replace it with myths and superstitions of racial superiority, male purity and atavistic misogyny. Fascism is a threat to freedom and democracy because it is an assault on pluralism and tolerance and contemptuous of the rights of individuals. The superiority and the might of fascist males gives them the right to occupy and conquer all territory and all individuals. Glorifying aggression and the subjugation of others by means of power and coercion never argument or persuasion, fascism is any exclusive and inegalitarian dictatorial regime that unleashes armed thugs and bullies to march over whoever they consider to be 'other', 'outsiders' or 'aliens'.
The idea that 'Muslim nations' cannot be democracies is informed by the fact that Islamists admire Hitler and all things anti-liberal and anti-democratic. The ideologues of fascism, like Hitler, Osama Bin Laden, Klu Klux Klan or Hamas, fantasise about a world-wide Jewish conspiracy to rule the world. Islamic anti-semitic rhetoric is straight out of Hitler's book.
Fascists legitimate their disgusting beliefs by maintaining they are acting out a divine mission under the orders of the Almighty Creator and his prophets like Jesus Christ or Mohammed.
Fascism is the ultimate creed of unreason. It is fascist irrationalism that characterises the extremes of religious and political Christianity and Islam today. We see an elite-led Machtpolitik, a macho political system where women have no power and are made invisible. When women have no power some fight to the death against the powerful. Others negotiate their survival by learning their lessons well from powerful men. When threatened with death for not covering-up then most cover-up.
To fascists women are inferior, the nadir of 'other'. Hitler considered women dangerous in public, naturally dependent on and submissive to men, prone to irrational passion and uncontrollable outbursts, only fit for producing children and organising 'a house'. Hitler said 'I detest women who dabble in politics... there she is, ready to pull her hair out, with all her claws showing'. Mussolini said 'Women... should never be taken seriously, for they themselves are never serious'.
For fascists, and their religious enablers, acceptable women are those who bare children. Like Christian fascists, Islamic fascists create a myth of a pure past where women know their place 'barefoot and pregnant' as the saying goes, and in the kitchen. Women are reduced to wombs in the service of God, Allah and the nation state.
The sexing of the fascist state as Fatherland (the new Iraq Constitution is addressed to 'We the sons of Mesopotamia') is paradigmatic of the fascist mindset that demands that women must be subordinate to men, even in the 'lesser' domestic domain.
At the very least the burka and Islamo-scarf are sexist because men are not forced to wear it. Insisting, as Islamists do, that women are 'modest' is sexist. No men are under a religious injunction to be 'modest'.
Forcing women to cover-up comes from the same patriarchal mind-set that allows men to demand that women get their kit off. The religions extremists who want to cover women in cloth or the lad publishers of magazines who want to strip women naked are horribly similar. They order women around and then hate her whatever she does. They hate her for being a whore and insist that she covers up or they hate her for being a whore when she takes her covers off. It is not the nudity of uncovered women or whores which is offensive. The offence is that under the pretence of provocation sexist men give themselves permission to do the worst to women, including rape and murder, whether we are naked or not.
And women are expected to forget there still is any such thing as sexism and misogyny. We are expected to act as if we are physically and mentally unaffected by sexual prejudice. If we maintain our right to continue fighting sexism from the bedroom to the boardroom in our own country and abroad we make ourselves very unpopular and almost unemployable. Having enough freedom now, we are lectured, means we should shut up and not ask for any more for ourselves or for women of 'other' cultures who are not our concerns. Our horror of the burka is embarrassing and to shut us up we are glibly and wrongly accused of Islamophobia and racism. In fact we are bullied by the guardians of the status quo into silence.
For too long I've considered my silence a betrayal. My anger and horror is based on rational and justified fear. But I want to join with those who are speaking out. Those of us who value our freedom must stand shoulder to shoulder with those who hate fascism and sexism and the burka, all the brave women who are refusing to cover-up and are dying everyday for the right not to.
When I was invited to review the papers for Sunday 2nd April on BBC Radio 4's 'Broadcasting House', I did not know what news I would mention. On reading through the papers more news of fascism stood out. In 'World News' Michael Sheridan, the Sunday Times journalist in Jakarta, reported that 'Sunbathing tourists in Bali and barely clad tribesmen in Papua are caught up in a cultural war between a minority of puritanical Indonesian Muslims and the country's tolerant majority'. Many Indonesians fear that President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono 'is losing his grip on a political debate increasingly dominated by fundamentalists who have made a parliamentary bill on indecency the centrepiece of their campaign to purify the nation. "This is an attempt by some people to import Arab culture into Indonesia," said Yenny Wahid, a Muslim campaigner for women's rights.'
In the Sunday Times News Review section I read 'Riverbend', a young uncovered Iraqi Muslim woman who blogs about her life in occupied Iraq. She wrote 'Over a month ago, a prominent electrical engineer (one of the smartest females in the country) named Henna Aziz was assassinated in front of her family - two daughters and her husband. She was threatened by some fundamentalists from [the Iraqi extremist] Badir's Army and told to stay at home because she was a woman, she shouldn't be in charge. She refused - the country needed her expertise - she was brilliant. She would not stay at home. They came to her house one evening: men with machine guns broke in and opened fire. She lost her life. She wasn't the first, she won't be the last.'
I had a moment's hesitation. Criticism of Islam is contentious, might even be illegal, and corporations like the BBC have to protect their staff from bombs. But I am a Women's Movement woman. Words and rational argument are our first line of defence against sexists and fascists. Confidently, 'live' on air, I said that the sight of women walking around London in burkas is as frightning and provocative as if people were passing by on the street every day wearing fascist swastika armbands. I was wearing a cashmere mini dress, three inches above my knees (N. Peal 1984), the sign and symbol of my liberty and liberalism.
___
*See Rick Wikford's chapter on Fascism in 'Political Ideologies: an introduction' by Robert Eccleshall et al, Routledge 2003, which includes an extensive reading list. Important reading: 'Male Fantasies Volume 1. Women Floods Bodies History' and 'Male Fantasies Volume 2. Male Bodies: psychoanalysing the white terror' by Klaus Theweleit, Polity Press 1989.
March 2006
CUNST ART glorifies CH'IU CHIN, the Chinese feminist freedom fighter who was beheaded in 1907.
At the age of 32, at daybreak on 15 July 1907 at Shao-hsing in the province of Chekiang, Ch'iu Chin was executed for organising an uprising aimed at overthrowing the Manchu dynasty in China. These were early days for Chinese revolutionaries but the uprising shook the Government which lasted barely another four years.
Ch'iu Chin's brief and dramatic career was the more astonishing because she was born into a Confucian society where a woman's role of painful - and total - subservience had hardly been challenged. Among the radicals of the budding feminist movement she was unique, if only in one respect - that she single-handedly masterminded the armed insurrection of an entire province.
Ch'iu Chin could be said to personify the traditionally revered Chinese bandit hero, the swashbuckling knight errant, inspired by noble ideals and bent on self-sacrifice in the service of high patriotism. In the Chinese tradition the knight errant was often female, in both history and fiction. Ch'iu Chin rode horses astride, excelled in sword fighting, made bombs, drilled women fighters, organised secret armies. She was also a considerable poet, a legend for her skill in verbal contests and she had a daughter who became China's first woman aviator.
Ch'iu was the eldest daughter of a declining middle-class family in Shao-hsing. They were scholarly and liberal. For instance, Ch'iu was not subjected to such extremes as footbinding - the tradition of painfully deforming the feet of girl children for the sake of beauty. Ch'iu's arranged marriage to Wang T'ing Chun, from a conservative family, came comparatively late by Chinese standards. When she moved with her husband to Peking in 1900, the year of the boxer rebellion, she reacted sharply to the visible feebleness and corruption of the alien Manchu rulers who had governed China since 1664. The sight of the highly painted doll-like Manchu women disgusted her. During this time she developed into a fierce nationalist, increasingly troubled with anxiety about her own existence, which seemed meaningless.
The failure of the Chinese reformist movement of 1898, after the war with Japan, and the persecution of reformists themselves, hardened opposition among the educated bourgeoisie and convinced moderates that radical change was the only answer to China's disintegration. Ch'iu became obsessed with the plight of Chinese women, which she later wrote about in intense and illuminating detail.
Ch'iu's attitude to married life in this period was dutiful and traditional. She applied her talents, above all, to poetry. The sinologist Mary Rankin has described the recurrent themes in Ch'iu's poetry as autumn, sorrow, loneliness, wind and rain. Significantly the Chinese character for Ch'iu's surname means autumn and is an element in the character meaning sorrow. She also took another name for herself which meant 'Male challenger'.
By 1903 Ch'iu's experiences had crystallised into a single burning ambition - to save China, through revolution. Compared with that heroic mission, poetry and domestic life seemed trivial. The Confucian tradition put the family before the State, but this was the tradition which had to be swept away. Ch'iu took the almost unprecedented action of leaving her husband and her children. For a woman of that time, it was a step into the abyss. It was a radical decision for her own emancipation, too - both exhilarating and filled with anxiety - and she threw herself into the cause of feminism and revolution with impatient brilliance. 'My body' wrote Ch'iu 'does not attain In prominence to those of men My heart truly transcends in ardour Those of men'.
Because she was a woman, she was up against greater odds than men. She had further to go to be a revolutionary, more ties to break, and, in a period of transition, little with which to replace them except her own sense of mission. Her loneliness and melancholy was necessarily acute at times, as her poetry shows; so was her deeper despair at failure. What she achieved was at great emotional and personal cost - ultimately the cost of her own life.
In Tokyo - where she sought refuge - Ch'iu seemed a fascinating, compelling figure. Having arrived from Peking 'quite alone and oppressed by a thousand anxieties', she was instantly the focus of attention. Her behavior, for a well-bread Chinese girl, was idiosyncratic in the extreme. She was never without her short sword; she swilled wine like a buccaneer. Her brilliance in debate turned any public meeting she attended into an event.
Ch'iu admired Western figures of heroic action: Napoleon, George Washington, Sophia Perovskaya (who helped assassinate Alexander ll) and Madam Roland, the Girondist leader who was guillotined during the French revolutionary Terror. Her models in Chinese history were usually those who had committed suicide in the act of assassinating tyrants. Often they were women; notably Mu Lan, who distinguished herself as a foot soldier and fought in the ranks in place of her father. Ch'iu often wore men's clothes, but whereas Mu Lan acted out of filial piety - the Confucian virtue - Ch'iu sought to prove her moral ascendancy over males.
In her writings Ch'iu railed against the system that kept women in bondage: enforced marriage, seclusion, concubinage and especially the 'untold misery' of footbinding. Concubinage was not only miserable and humiliating; it caused jealousy and unhappiness in the family. 'You try to flee its insufferable tyranny by poison, hanging or drowning...' she wrote. 'It is truly a hell on earth which competes with the hell of the dead.'
Pressed by the Manchu Government, Japan agreed to restrict Chinese students' activities in Tokyo, and Ch'iu decided to return to Shanghai early in 1906. From that moment she became an active revolutionary. She opened a branch of the Restoration Society, the main revolutionary movement of the times, and hired a house in Hongkew to set about making bombs. Her inexperience nearly proved fatal. One day an explosion rattled the windows in the district, injuring Ch'iu and one accomplice.
She made exhausting, difficult journeys through the mountainous province of Chekiang, preparing an uprising to coincide with those in Hunan and Kiangsi at the end of the year. But both ended in disaster, with the execution of many of her friends. In anger and despair she returned to Shanghai and founded a feminist newspaper, The Chinese Women's Journal. Its readership, for all her efforts, was confined to the educated elite, and it lasted for only two issues.
Ch'iu left Shanghai for the last time in 1907 for her birthplace Shao-hsing, to become principal of the Ta-t'ung school. By now, aged 32, she had total control of the movement in Chekiang. That spring she reorganised the society, tried to pull all the secret societies under its banner. She made contacts with revolutionaries in the army in Hangchow. She drilled her students for combat in the 'physical culture' classes. This, and the impropriety of wearing male dress and riding flamboyantly through the town, angered the local gentry, who tried to lynch her. Ch'iu was saved by her students.
Meanwhile, the planning went to considerable lengths. Army commanders were appointed, duties assigned, uniforms and banners manufactured - all in great secrecy. Ch'iu had joined forces with another revolutionary, Hsu Hsi-lin, a man of 'fierce energy and fanatical temper', who was in charge of Anwei province. Both agreed on 8 July for the coordinated uprising. Their plans, however, went wildly wrong from the outset. The uprising started elsewhere on 1 July. Hsu lost his judgment and shot wildly, without his glasses, at the Governor of Anwei, who was attending a local function. He then ran into the street, waving his sword, to signal the uprising. Nothing happened. He was then killed and his heart cut out to appease the governor's family.
Ch'iu wept with rage and disappointment. Any further moves were clearly hopeless, yet she went ahead. She knew that the Army was marching from Hangchow on the school. She ignored the pleadings of her students to escape, and with those that remained she put up a brief resistance, with only a few rounds of ammunition.
Ch'iu was tortured and interrogated, but refused to admit to having planned a revolution. Her only statement in court after the death sentence was passed was a single line of poetry, traced out in the courtroom and using the characters in her own name. 'Autumn rain and autumn wind will make me die of sorrow'. On 15 July, dressed in the red robes prescribed for a criminal, she was beheaded with a sword.
None of her relatives dared touch Ch'iu's body, which lay exposed for a time, until a charitable society buried it on a nearby hill. Then a close female companion honored an old promise to bury her by the Western Lake and moved the coffin secretly, by night. The Manchu Government destroyed the tomb and ordered the family to rebury the body at Shao-hsing. In 1909, her son, aged only 14, made the long journey alone from Hunan province, to collect the coffin. And finally, after the revolution of 1911, revered as a national heroine and martyr, she was brought back to Western Lake. The Wind and Rain pavilion now stands there as her memorial.
As a model of the feminist revolutionary freedom fighter and as a folk heroine, the Ch'iu Chin myth has the distinction of having survived, unchallenged, in China, since her death.
Adapted from 'Feminists in the firing line' by Robert Fox, The Observer, 26 November 1978
More feminist freedom fighters to glorify: Alexandra Kollontai, Louise Michel and Flora Tristan.
January - February 2006
Question: How much does it cost to have sex with seventeen-year olds?
Answer: 7 years in prison.
National Yout