Jericho, Anselm Kiefer, Royal Academy Courtyard, 2007
Some artworks stay with me indelibly. Experiencing Anselm Kiefer’s Annenberg courtyard commission “Jericho” (above) is one of the most prominent memories of my few years in London, yet one I have rethought and re-understood time and time again.
Now, as I am contemplating my future in our nation’s capital, it strikes me as a disturbingly appropriate commentary on the things about London I find most problematic, both within the “art world” and as a place to call home.
(NB: I hate the words art and world put together like that).
Kiefer’s works have puzzled and enthralled me for years now, and I often feel somehow ill-prepared for the full weight they exert, both in meaning and in materiality. Nowhere was this truer than when I was standing in the royal academy courtyard before these two monoliths. My reaction to the work at the time understood some sort of apt and historical linkage between the empirical prowess and pomp of the RA and the rotten, shanty-builds of Kiefer’s towers, unashamedly delivering a treatise on social divides, class divides; non-sequential historical narratives crossing borders and centuries. The towers appeared a public meditation on their immediate vicinity, whilst also leaving shadows as far as the British Empire once stretched. They appeared like totemic exemplars of 3rd world living conditions, but also of the crumbling core of Britain’s pout. A smile swept off.
The image above is crowned with a sorry St. George’s cross more appropriate than any metaphor could muster.
Now, however, all of these thoughts ring somehow hollow, or at least superficial. London has taken on a particular shape for me, in my conscious. It lies somewhere between the metropolis of my childhood excitement, sidling up alongside New York, Paris, Chicago… (the battlefields of my dreamt desires)… and the twisted archaic monstrosity as presented beligerently by J. G. Ballard in his 1997 essay Airports.
London itself seems hopelessly antiquated. Its hundreds of miles of gentrified stucco are an aching hangover from the nineteenth century that should have been bulldozed decades ago. London may well be the only world capital – with the possible exception of Moscow – that has gone from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first without experiencing all the possibilities and excitements of the twentieth in any meaningful way. Visiting London, I always have the sense of a city devised as an instrument of political control, like the class system that preserves England from revolution. The labyrinth of districts and boroughs, the endless columned porticos that once guarded the modest terraced cottages of Victorian clerks, together make clear that London is a place where everyone knows his place.
I’ve come to know my place, and London’s place. After three years, its enchantment alongside New York, Paris, Chicago is on the wain… it is failing to hold sway even next to the (sent to) Coventry of my childhood. The municipal pride is lacking that any great city should harbor in abundance, even in my friends born here and bred here or hereabouts. It is a sham of a capital dressed up as a frivolous parlour game. In the setting of the royal academy, Jericho shames London into submission if only for a second, condemning everything corrupt and moribund about this flailing home of elitism.
The snootiness of such institutions as Christies resembles a club I’ll never be allowed in… I would only want to be in a club that would have me as a member… and it is that club mentality which I constantly fit out of here… I don’t sit well amongst “gentrified stucco”, and the contorted concrete and twisted steel of Jericho appears closer to the Coventry of my childhood, my comfort zone and my understanding. Coventry is both the fragmented sorrow and the toneless concrete personified. London is the colonial oppressor. Coventry is my retarded younger brother.
Coventry Cathedral after the Blitz, 1940.
Coventry’s Mercia House
I was recently thinking about what I consider to be London’s poor musical lineage in comparison to places like LA and New York, only to come across Paul de Noyer’s new book In the City: A Celebration of London Music. It got me thinking about what London might sound like, and the disquieting, threatening rumble of dub-step and grime seems more apt to the London I’ve experienced than any cheeky chappy mod or ska group. I don’t want to descend into Ballardian crises, but this city isn’t all waterloo sunset. It is strikingly akin to what I have found looking back at Jericho.
All this interpretation is for us to find… Kiefer offers us little, and resists interpretation. He only offers us up the ability to process our own thoughts.
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