Kakistocracy XII:Get Lucky.

"We've come too far to give up who we are. So let's raise the bar and our cups to the stars" - Get Lucky, Daft Punk. 

So, Daft Punk have split up. A dizzying work rate of four albums in twenty-eight years must have completely exhausted them so they're hanging their robot suits up and presumably lounging around the Bois de Boulogne smoking Gauloises and drinking Paul Ricard now, content with the huge success, critical acclaim, and wealth they achieved during their floruit.

I'm being facetious, of course. Like most people, I liked Daft Punk a lot. I wasn't what you'd call an expert but had a couple of albums and could never tire of singles like Da Funk, Lose Yourself to Dance, One More Time, Around the World, and, of course, Get Lucky. But Daft Punk didn't get lucky. Daft Punk had innovative ideas, a sense of showmanship, and the ability to write tunes that got you on the dancefloor and refused to leave your head.

I tell you who has got lucky of late, though. The government - and me (not in that way, there's a pandemic on you know). I'll come back to my own good fortune towards the end of this piece but I'll start with something I never thought I would in these Kakistocracy blogs. Praise for the government. Highly conditional and partial praise, for sure, but, compared to everything else they've done it looks like they're finally doing something right.

Or nearly right. Time will tell. Boris Johnson's 'roadmap' to ending lockdown restrictions actually looks measured, flexible, cautious, and sensible (three adjectives you would never normally apply to the man). They are, of course, too cautious for the likes of Steve Baker and the disingenuously named Covid Recovery Group. They are, equally, not cautious enough for others. Particularly as regards kids returning to schools while vaccines are still not prioritised for teachers.

If Boris Johnson is serious about this being the last lockdown, and history teaches us that as a man he is neither serious nor truthful, then this 'baby steps' approach is the right way to go. Hell, I desperately want to meet my friends for walks, go to the pub, have a curry, go to an art gallery, and visit people who live outside of London but I understand if we can all just be a little bit more patient we have far more chance of getting there with considerably less loss of life. Get there safer. Stay there longer.

So, well done for finally getting your shit together. It's only taken over a year and it's only cost a mere 121,305 lives (the fifth highest death toll in the world, the fourth highest death toll per head of population) and well done on the speedy rate of vaccination (over a quarter of the UK population have already received their first jab). But these blogs are not about dwelling on what the government gets right (or when they get lucky). They're about holding them to account (and telling you what parks I've been going for walks in, of course).

Not necessarily for getting things wrong. Everyone gets things wrong. But for when their divisive and untruthful leadership intentionally gets things wrong and people die because of that. When they refuse to accept that they have made lethal mistakes that have cost people their lives. When they line the pockets of their friends (as Health Secretary Matt Hancock has been found to do so) and in doing so inflict further death on people and damage to the economy.

When they take credit from the NHS (staffed by the very people whose pay rise block they famously applauded) for the vaccination programme but take no responsibility for the outrageously high death toll they allowed Covid to notch up in the UK. Writing in The Guardian, Zoe Williams put it succinctly when she said they "privatise the losses" and "socialise the gains".

Alex Bourne, a neighbour of Matt Hancock's who used to run The Cock Inn (with Hancock's track record, amazingly not The Cock Up) in Thurlow, Suffolk, was making a living making plastic cups and takeaway boxes for the catering industry. So it seemed a bit strange when Hancock presented him with a £30,000,000 contract to produce Covid test vials. 

The MHRA (The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency) certainly thought so. They launched an investigation and it turned out that Mr Justice Chamberlain, a high court judge, agreed. Matt Hancock, the judge said, had acted unlawfully in not publishing details of the contract. It had been a serious and very costly breach of transparency regarding how tax payer's money was being spent by the government.

The escalating death toll, the chumocracy and cronyism that will remain a clear and present danger even when the threat of Covid abates, the complete inability to even apologise or to stand down when laws have been broken. Yet the government keeps getting away with it. It doesn't help that Keir Starmer isn't going in harder (I support Starmer, but he should go much harder on this) and a supine media either cowed by government threats (BBC) or with their own right wing agenda (Daily Mail, Daily Telegraph) doesn't help either.

Nor does it help that some have become so desensitised to the death tolls and so far removed from political debate they genuinely believe the government have done the best they can with the hand they were dealt and nobody else would do any better. A simple look at a list of the death tolls prove that to be untrue. The UK has a higher per head death rate from Covid than even the US (whose own death toll passed the grisly half a million mark last week - many avoidable and many directly due to Trump's vanity and incompetence).

When I speak to my mum, and in the last year we have spoken more than since I was a child, she remarks on how 'when this is all over' there will need to be some kind of reckoning, an investigation in to how the UK government handled this so very badly. But, don't bank on it. With the weather getting better, with a vaccine bounce behind him, and with a country desperate to get back to some kind of normality, Boris Johnson will revert to his standard mode boosterism and say we need to focus on the future and not dredge over the past.

Those who say we do will be called doomsters and mocked as gloomsters and Johnson's government, not to put a fine a point on it, will be free to kill again. If a government can allow tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths and get away with it, it will certainly be free to participate in some very risky experiments in governance over the next few years. Following a health crisis and an economic crisis, we may soon be facing, perhaps already are facing, a crisis of democracy.

The blunt tool the government will use to slip out of the shackles of responsibility for their own wilful negligence will be, of course, the culture war and the materiel for that war is being assembled right now. In truth, production never ceased once during the pandemic.

Joe Biden's welcome announcement that the US is to stop arming Saudi Arabia so that they can no longer inflict death and disaster on the people of Yemen was very refreshing to hear after four years of incomprehensible bullshit and boasting from Trump. It would have been nice if the UK government had said they'd also take this position but James Cleverly, the Minister of State for the Middle East and North Africa, has announced that they will not be doing so.

He put a few mealy mouthed words together about needing to put some checks and balances in place in the hope that that would put an end to any further questions on the subject. He kicked the can down the road because, at heart, our government is putting Saudi money before humanitarian law and human rights and if that upsets the liberals and the left then great, that's a bonus.

Get them so angry they say something bad and then point the finger at them. Make it about others. Blame others. Take, for just one example, Priti Patel appearing on LBC to say that she thought the Black Lives Matters protests last year were 'dreadful' and that she would support more peaceful means of protest. 

Taking the knee is, demonstrably, a peaceful form of protest. So presumably Patel approves? Turns out the proven bully does not approve of taking the knee. Which undermines her entire point. She's not the brightest, Priti Patel, we all know that. But that's not the point. There is no need for joined up thought and there is no need for joined up policy. Patel's job, like Cleverly's, is to antagonise, to enrage, and to divide.

With those KPIs in place, you can be sure she will receive a favourable appraisal from her Prime Minister when the time comes. Not all of the confusion this government sends out in the public sphere is malicious like that. Some is down to simple incompetence. Take, as an example, Secretary of State for Transport Grant Shapp's announcement that we should not book holidays abroad or even in the UK for summer 2021.

A clear message in its own right but one that's hard to take seriously when Matt Hancock lets it be known that he has booked his own summer holiday in Cornwall. Boris Johnson, of course, fully backed both of them. A cognitive dissonance not unfamiliar to observers of Johnson's career but also the point where incompetence is juiced into policy.

The appointment of the unelected David Frost, Baron Frost to Johnson's cabinet (due to take place on 1st March) certainly isn't incompetence. It's an affront to democracy and it really ought to upset all those people who voted for Brexit because they were fed up with unelected bureaucrats. Frost is nothing but an unelected bureaucrat whose rise to power has happened simply because he can't get his tongue far enough up Boris Johnson's arse and Boris Johnson likes nothing more than a tongue up his arse.

An unedifying image for an unedifying government. A government of 'slippery cunts' who, even as lockdown starts easing and the days get longer, we need to keep our eyes on because they've not finished damaging the country yet. While we keep one eye on them, however, we should also try to keep one eye on the future which, in some ways, is looking a little brighter than it has done in a long time.

For me at least. I've not had a lot of good luck in recent years but I've taken solace in the comforts of nature, music, and, most of all, friendship and, this week, that has paid off for me. My dear friend Cheryl referred me for a job at her place, I was interviewed last week, they offered me the job yesterday, and I start on March 22nd. I'm very happy about this and I'm very thankful to Cheryl as well as Michelle who helped me tidy up my (very messy) CV.

It's not the only happiness I've had. With the power of Nurofen Express and Co-Op own brand cranberry juice drink, I managed to mostly swerve what could have been quite a nasty gout bullet and, I can't stress how much difference this makes, the weather has started improving. The sun has been out, the birds have been singing, and I've been on a couple of (reasonably) long walks. On one of them I even managed to pick up a takeaway vegan sausage roll from Greggs.

That's always a pleasure. I've walked in Peckham Rye Park, Peckham Rye Common, Dulwich Park, Dulwich Woods, Sydenham Hill Wood and even as far as Burgess Park (a beautiful February day that saw swans, geese, coots, mallards, and even a heron) and South London World Cup of Parks winner Crystal Palace Park (an even more beautiful February day that saw dinosaurs, sphinxes, and alpacas) where I had a very tasty ciabatta tricolori from Bloom on the Triangle and washed it down with a can of Coke.

I've attended (online) a London Fortean Society talk on love-locks and a SELFS talk on the lore of love (it was Valentine's weekend), I binge watched (and wrote about) Adam Curtis' Can't Get You Out Of My Head, I had great fun at an eighties themed murder mystery evening arranged by Kathy with lots of help from Mike, I came a close second in Alex's quiz to Tony (my supreme Flump knowledge surprised even me) and remarkably I won my Dad's sports quiz (I'm not that knowledgeable about sport as anyone who saw me on Eggheads will know).

A couple of weeks ago I was quite down. It was hard to see in front of me. During that time I had life affirming uplifting conversations with both my mum and my dad and my dear friends Adam, Michelle, Ben, Vicki, Shep, Cheryl, Valia, and Simon and they, undoubtedly, helped me negotiate that slump. Now I can see light at the end of the tunnel (while hoping, and here's one for the Half Man Half Biscuit fans) that its not an oncoming train) and that is a very nice feeling.

 

It's forty-nine days today since I met with another person in real life but, on Sunday, I'm planning to (hopefully) meet with Pam for a walk around Sydenham Wells Park and I'm really looking forward to that. As the next few weeks roll on I will meet other friends, in parks at first and then in beer gardens hopefully, and I will start my new job.

It will be a long and arduous, and sometimes bumpy, journey back to something resembling normality but it's one I now feel mentally equipped to take. The government have done a lot of work in trying to make this country small minded and cruel but my friends, I'm proud to report, have not taken that bait and have continued to be as kind, considerate, creative, curious, and funny as ever. When friends were being handed out, I sure got lucky.

From Despair to Where:Can't Get You Out Of My Head.

"Pretend there's something worth waiting for. There's nothing nice in my head. The adult world took it all away" - From Despair to Where, Manic Street Preachers.

"Won't you stay? Won't you lay? Won't you stay forever and ever?" - Can't Get You Out Of My Head, Kylie Minogue.

"We need no Gods or emperors and we don't believe in saviours of any kind. We do not want to serve as tools of dictators with personal ambitions for carrying out modernisation. We want to modernise the lives of the people. Democracy, freedom, and happiness for all are our sole objectives" - Wei Jingsheng.

We live in strange and uncertain times. Things keep happening that seem to defy all logic. People regularly vote against their own, their country's, and their planets best interests. Lying is accepted in a way that it seems never to have been done so before. Division is rife, encouraged even. And, on top of all that, we are in the middle of a global pandemic that has so far taken just short of two and half million lives.

How did we get here? How do we move on from here? Adam Curtis', whose over eight hour long Can't Get You Out Of My Head:An Emotional History of the Modern World is currently available on the BBC iPlayer, is not going to give anybody a direct answer to either of those questions but what he can do is put together an epic, artistic, confusing, frightening, dense, and powerful documentary to try and explain at least one way of looking at what's been happening.

If you've seen any of Curtis' previous documentaries (Bitter Lake, Hypernormalisation, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, The Power of Nightmares, etc;) you'll know what to expect. A visually spectacular collection of found footage, people dancing, talking heads (but only in archive footage), empty basements full of banks of mainframe computers, images of traffic refracted through the windows of skyscrapers, block capital titles in large Helvetica font. These all come together to create a vision of chaos while Curtis' calm, slightly nasal, narration attempts to create order from this chaos.

It's a journey from then to now told via the rise of China, the rise of conspiracy theories, the rise of AI, the rise of opioids, and the rise of identity politics. With the threat of climate change and mass automation lurking in the background at all times along with demons of the past that lurk in the inherited structures of our minds as surely as they lurk in the inherited structures of our societies.

Episode titles like Bloodshed on Wolf Mountain, Shooting and Fucking are the Same Thing, and Are we Pigeon? Or are we Dancer? are tempting enough on their own but when Curtis weaves together a story that brings together such seemingly disparate characters as Fidel Castro, Ayn Rand, King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, H Rap Brown, Joan Baez, Colonel Mengistu, Ken Dodd, Boris Yeltsin, Lee Harvey Oswald, Bertrand Russell, Sandra Paul, Richard Nixon, BF Skinner, Cecil Sharp, Jane Fonda, Sir Walter Scott, Bobby Seale, Betty Ford, Radovan Karadzic, Bob Geldof, Yuri Gagarin, Margaret Thatcher, Adolf Hitler, Rodney King, and Tony Martin the Norfolk farmer you realise this is an exercise in lunatic scholarship.

There are several 'lead' characters whose narratives, to some degree, intertwine and Curtis returns to these time and again throughout Can't Get You Out Of My Head. Afeni Shakur, Julia Grant, Stokeley Carmichael, Jiang Qing, Michael X, and others (and their extraordinary stories) are the touchstones in this tale of inequality, this story of split and polarised societies, corrupted governments, and chaos. A moral maze we seem unable to escape from.

We have created technology that allows us to have the same thing, the thing we like or think we like, over and over again but seems incapable of ever offering a different tomorrow. Our politicians, too, seem as hardwired as the technology and we end up with an all you can eat buffet where with each return we choose the same thing again and never try anything new.

In an age of twenty-four hour sports channels, people can watch football all day and shield themselves from news, documentaries, art, or anything that may fundamentally question their values. Safely cocooned in our beatific idiocy, we are willing tools of the state and we choose, time and again, not to punish, or remove from power, insider dealers, bankers, or politicians who protect and enable them. We choose the inherent violence and corruption of our powerful institutions because we're sold an idea, or fear, that it would be unsafe to do otherwise.

We are presented with bogeymen, real and imagined, to cow us but these bogeymen also live in our heads. Can't Get You Out Of My Head takes us from Stuttgart to Prague, from New Orleans to Shanghai, from Doncaster to Lvov, from aeroplane hijackings in Entebbe to Californian wild fires, from British attempts at psychological manipulation of African minds and the Mau-Mau uprising in Kenya to the plight of the Vietnamese boat people and the foundation of Medecins Sans Frontieres.

There is torture, killing, fear, irrational hatred of immigrants, Nazis, forced sterilisations, cannibalism, Siberian labour camps, slum landlords in Notting Hill, Saudi Arabia's nefarious tactic of turning fuel into a weapon, paranoia, power struggles, exceptionliasm, gaslighting of women who speak out, the famine in Ethiopia, and a consideration of the anger and melancholy at the heart of the English over the loss of their empire. But, despite these horrors, Can't Get You Out Of My Head is never boring and is, perhaps oddly, strangely uplifting. As if we are taking a step back and viewing ourselves from an outsider perspective.

Curtis' use of music does a lot of the heavy lifting on this front. Nine Inch Nails, Stars of the Lid, The Incredible String Band, Burial, Marlene Dietrich, Clint Mansell, Henry Mancini, Death in Vegas, William Basinski, Harold Budd, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Ennio Morricone, Do Nothing by The Specials, The Sex Pistols' Who Killed Bambi?, Where Were You? by The Mekons, and Schneider TM's glitch cover of The Smiths' There Is A Light That Never Goes Out. The Aphex Twin's beautiful Avril 14th gets multiple callbacks.

In China, in the mid-thirties, Jiang Qing was a modestly successful actress. Her self-belief outstripped her ability and she believed that this drive for fame and fortune was such an important part of her that it was, in fact, the only thing holding her together. Later she joined a guerrilla group in Yunan, near the border with Myanmar, and began an affair with the group's leader, Mao Zedong.

Who she would go on to marry. Jiang's individualism, "I am a unit of one", upset the collectively minded Communists and, as time passed, she would be sidelined. At one point she ended up living alone with her pet monkeys and her nurses (who she trusted less than the monkeys). On another point on her strange journey, she was locked in a Moscow sanatorium.

The Cultural Revolution in China saw 120,000,000 students revolt against their teachers who were forced in to the streets to repeat the mantra "I am a demon. I deserve to die". These ideas didn't help people in China buy food or live happier lives and when Mao died in 1976, a power struggle took place between Jiang (with three others, her group became famous as the Gang of Four) and Deng Xiaoping whose grand idea was that China could produce items the West wanted more cheaply and sell to the West to increase China's wealth and power.

It was a triumph of managerial government over ideological government and that was repeated globally. Michael de Freitas arrived from Trinidad to the UK, the 'homeland', to find a 'sad and frightened' country. Soon he became an enforcer for slum landlord John Rachman before reinventing himself as a statesman for British black power and renaming himself Michael X.

When Michael X made an inflammatory speech with racist undertones, at much the same time as Enoch Powell made his 'rivers of blood' speech, it was Michael X who was punished, imprisoned, and Powell who went on to gain further power. This, to Michael X - and others, was proof that the power structures of the west were so established and ingrained they could only be changed by violent revolution. In the streets and in people's minds.

In the US, extreme right wing groups fuelled paranoia about the uncertain future, there came to be a suburban theory that President Eisenhower was, somehow, a dedicated and conscious agent of the Russians, it became accepted by many that the Bavarian Illuminati (who wanted to replace religion with reason) were a secret group dedicated to the destruction of American democracy.

Operation Mindfuck, and the concept of Discordianism, began with a letter to Playboy. It was a parody religion in which humans, much like Curtis in his documentaries, create order from chaos. It was intended to be as ridiculous as possible, such an outlandish spoof that it would break the spell of conspiracy theories but, as we all know now, it was believed. Soon many decided that the Illuminati were behind the wave of assassinations that shocked America throughout the sixties.

The human mind was posited as the last outpost to be colonised, planting suspicion in human minds could be a weapon in this colonisation, algorithms and patterns could dictate how people, en masse, may behave, and the data and the systems that people created in this era automatically transferred all our only too human faults, prejudices, and hostilities into cyberspace to float around consciousness forever more.

Mass consumerism and sexualised imagery were deployed to detract us and lull us into a false state of peace and susceptibility but that illusion could only be sustained by exploitation, often in the form of deadly wars, elsewhere in the world. People under the burgeoning new system of neoliberalism became mere objects to be monitored and monetised. The self became an accessory used fpr processing a never ending avalanche of incoming data.

The inevitable anxiety created by these machinations was treated with Valium and diazepam. Drugs that were taken up, initially, overwhelmingly by suburban housewives who found that the new 'freedom' and independence they were supposed to be enjoying had, in fact, just made them desperately lonely. They were the crest of a wave of isolated despair. 

Collective action had, in the past, risen from people migrating in large numbers to big cities to work and from unions and other community groups. With oil, rather than coal, becoming the dominant fuel of the future, people were beginning to find themselves too geographically diffuse to agitate, educate, and organise each other. Or even give comfort to each other.

With the rise of the Internet age, this was doubled down on and, with the pandemic, it has reached what we must hope is its peak. This retreat to our silos, to our bubbles, is, of course, necessary, vital even, now. But, as a quote from the American anthropologist and anarchist activist David Graeber (who died last year) reads at the very start of Can't Get You Out Of My Head:-

"THE ULTIMATE HIDDEN TRUTH OF THE WORLD IS THAT IT IS SOMETHING WE MAKE AND COULD JUST AS EASILY MAKE DIFFERENTLY"

The Russian novelist and philosopher Alexander Solzhenitsyn posited the theory that ideology itself was the problem. Yet the counter ideology he proposed was a belief in nothing - and people need a reason to live. We can't stare endlessly in to the void for all our waking lives. We need hope, we need reason, we need to live, and we need to love. We need to see our humanity reflected back at us in the eyes of a friend, a lover, or a child.

The understandable tragedy of recent decades is that governments worldwide have abandoned transformative idea and become agents of surveillance, management consultants for bankers, tech giants, and the establishment. A deeper tragedy is that this idea has become so deeply embedded now in so many minds that we are divided between passive consumers of life and the products we're told are vital for living it and those of us who are permanently staring into the abyss of deep existential gloom. 

Those of us who are not served by the supposed 'rational bureaucracy' of our contemporary world. Simplified, robot men who play the game of working, shopping, and consuming prosper whereas anyone who questions that suffers in a private world of anxiety and pain. Those that believe that redemption and transformation can never be found in material objects, wealth, or status but in friendship, in love, and in nature.

How we transform the world when so many don't seek transformation, when so many rail against imaginary, rather than real, foes, I do not know. Neither does Adam Curtis. It is his job only to ask the questions and that he does in a fashion quite unlike anyone else.

It makes him easy to ridicule and many do, some quite validly - Ben Woodhams' brilliant parody The Loving Trap went viral and even Curtis admits it made him have a rethink, but, to my mind, this is because he is such a distinct and idiosyncratic voice in British culture right now. His powerful and, often, entrancing documentaries tell disturbing and fantastical stories but he guides us through these choppy waters with a sure hand and a compelling narrative. Surely, the first step towards a positive transformation of society is to at least ask where are we, how did we arrive here, and where are we going?

Journey to the Top of the World.

"I'm on top of the world, looking down on creation and the only explanation I can find is the love that I've found ever since you've been around" - Top of the World, The Carpenters.

I took a journey to the top of the world but I never even left my front room. Even in normal times I'd have only had to jump on the 63 bus and take a short walk into Bloomsbury to the British Museum to visit their Arctic:Culture & Climate exhibition. Something, as established in my most recent arts correspondence, I'd very much liked to have done.

I enjoy shows at the British Museum, I like to have a nose around their Egyptian section while there, have a coffee and cake in the Great Court, and maybe go for a pint in a nearby pub afterwards. The Arctic, however, is not somewhere I've ever been desperate to visit. I like warm weather. I'm not a fan of the cold - and the Arctic, if there's one thing everyone knows about, is fucking cold.

'Loons and Seal in Ocean Swell'

But what else do we know about the Arctic? I can't speak for you but I, personally, don't know an awful lot. I was keen to learn a little about the history of the area, the people who live there, their customs, and, hopefully, some of the wildlife there too. The 'climate' part of the exhibition's title informed me, from the off, that I'd also be learning about how climate change is affecting, and will continue to affect, these people, their customs, and, of course, their natural environment.

As it turned out, with the online tour at least, it would focus almost entirely on that. The beautiful artworks, clothing, artifacts, and even the walrus mask that decorate this blog were all in the exhibition but they weren't mentioned once in the virtual tour so they are just that - decoration. Which is a real shame as I believe more information on them would have bought some important context to what, as the curators mentioned, is a rare British Museum exhibition that is about the future rather than the past.

Decorated ivory plate

'Nunavut Qajanartuk (Our beautiful land)'

If I'd gone to the British Museum, I imagine I'd have spent between an hour and two hours there, maybe even more. The virtual tour was considerably shorter than that - which explains why it's free! There's a big map there that I'd have enjoyed standing on, imaging myself on top of the world looking down on creation, and there are sleds from Greenland made from driftwood and antlers, gut skin parkas, and photos of whale blubber sliced up into neat little cubes.

Safe to say, being an animal in the Arctic isn't much fun. As with, more so in fact, most of the world there's a good chance you'll end up either being worn or eaten. Alongside stories of reindeer domestication (and who doesn't want to learn about that?) there are detailed instructions as to how one may gut a duck to make duck soup.

Young girl's parka

Of course, it's easy for me. A vegetarian (not even a vegan) living in a large city in the 21st century to be sniffy about cruelty to animals and I still maintain that anyone who gets outraged about people in China and Korea eating dogs but still eat pigs and cows themselves are total hypocrites. But, I do understand that at many times in history, not least in remote, and let's face it unfavourable towards fruit and vegetable growing, locations people have needed to eat and wear animals.

People have lived in the Arctic for over 30,000 years (since before Britain was repopulated following the Ice Age, apparently) so they've needed to adapt and innovate to stay alive and they have done. Remarkably successfully. The exhibition has been curated with the help of members of indigenous groups like the Inuit, the Sakha, the Inupiat, and the Chukchi.

Hunters, reindeer herders, and scholars from these groups who live in the most Northern parts of Russia, Canada, and the US combined to tell the story of how the combination of tradition and innovation, the ability to use the stars and the skies and the behaviour of the local wildlife to predict changes in weather and survive, is facing an existential threat in the age of global climate change.

Pair of snow goggles

Wooden serving spoon

In the Arctic, climate change isn't a future, or distant, threat. It's the lived experience of the people there right now. Places are melting for the first time in history. Ice is melting that people who live in the Arctic need to be able to fish for food. If they can't eat, they can't live, and run the risk of becoming the first climate migrants. But almost certainly not the last.

The people who live in the Arctic, we're told a little heavy handedly I thought, are integrated into the ecosystem but powerful people elsewhere see valuable resources as something that can be exploited for profit. Even Arctic art, of which the virtual tour shows us nowhere near enough of, is made as an expression of gratitude and respect towards the environment and its beauty.

Waterproof whaling suit

Brass and copper mask

Sami hat

Generations upon generations worth of accumulated knowledge and wisdom is being rendered obsolete at a fairly rapid clip. Indigenous people, and others, are working hard to not become climate migrants but the rest of the world, Greta Thunberg will tell you, needs to be on board too.

As mentioned earlier, I would have loved to have attended the show in person so I could learn what the story was behind the rather lovely 'Loons and Seal in Ocean Swell', to see why the decorated ivory plate doesn't look like it's made from ivory at all, and to learn about the stone place markers known as Inuksuks that are believed to contain information from the elders that is passed down through the centuries.

The curators, certainly of the virtual tour, didn't want to tell those stories and I, to be honest, can't blame them. The people of the Arctic are fighting a losing battle. Whatever your take on the recent/current migrant crisis in the Mediterranean and the Channel you will surely understand that it's not really what anybody wants. That it's really sad and has resulted in way too many people dying long before their time.

A climate migrant crisis would dwarf that and who knows what political demons that would loose upon the world (likely the same ones, Farage and Trump, that immigration already has done). At the start of this piece I joked that I didn't want to visit the Arctic because it's fucking cold but the really important thing for the Arctic is that it stays fucking cold. Or it won't just be the people from these mysterious northern lands who will suffer. We all will.

Model of a reindeer camp

Walrus mask

Bruce Nauman:The True Artist Helps The World By Revealing Mystic Truths.

"If I was an artist and I was in the studio, then whatever I was doing in the studio must be art" - Bruce Nauman.

As the lockdown, some measures have been in place for nearly a year now, drags on interminably and some of us start to feel mentally drained by it all, it'd be very nice, useful even, if an artist, say Bruce Nauman whose show at Tate Modern I was visiting online (of course), was able to reveal mystic truths that helped us deal with our current situation.

Or any situation for that matter. But artists, especially conceptual artists like Nauman, have a tendency to make dramatic claims like that. Like our own PM, their promises often don't mean very much at all. I've seen conceptual art I've loved, I've seen conceptual art I've disliked, I've seen conceptual art I didn't understand, and I've seen conceptual art that is total and utter wank.

 Clown Torture (1987) 

But this would be the first time for me looking at conceptual art online. Which is neither what the artist nor the visitor would have wanted, or intended, for this work. I've missed going to Tate Modern (and other galleries). Not just for the art but the shops, being around other people, having a coffee or a pint afterwards - maybe a pizza, enjoying a walk along the South Bank, and buying a vegan sausage roll in Greggs to eat on the train home.

Sat in my front room (and now having not seen a single friend or family member in real life for forty-six days), Nauman's show could never be as good as the genuine experience. But needs must - and it proved to be an interesting and worthwhile experience. Any kind of distraction, right now, is a blessing.

 Falls, Pratfalls and Sleights of Hand (Clean Version) (1993)

Now seventy-nine years old, Nauman was born in 1941 in Fort Wayne, Indiana and his work, from the start, has been a mish-mash of sculpture, photography, performance, and neon lights. He'd probably not accept the title of 'conceptual artist' but as he refuses to assign specific meanings to these, sometimes bewildering, installations I'm calling him one.

What else do you call an artist who claims the very act of him being in the studio makes him an artist. Marcel Duchamp's no longer around to ask? What else do you call someone who encourages viewers to assign their own meanings to his work and in doing so create potentially infinite alternate readings.

The True Artist Helps the World by Revealing Mystic Truths (Window or Wall Sign) (1967) 

I suppose you could call him a charlatan! But that would be unfair. The video installations of the first two rooms at the Tate were not available to online visitors but as they apparently consisted of intentionally mundane videos in which the occasional appearance of a cat or a mouse or Nauman himself performing dull and repetitive tasks I guess I didn't miss too much.

The neon signs, sometimes puns, sometimes palindromes, sometimes anagrams, and sometimes, as above, statements, were certainly more aesthetically pleasing if perhaps not as deep and meaningful, at least to me - we've established that Nauman expects different visitors to come to different outcomes with his work, as I think he'd like them to be.

The promise of a live hum from the neon which would, the curators claim, create a sense of danger when in close proximity with the work obviously never materialised online - but, to be honest, the likelihood of feeling a sense of danger when looking at art is negligible. The only time it's happened to me is when I went down one of Carsten Holler's slides into the Turbine Hall back in 2007.

Walks In Walks Out, sadly, has nothing going for it whatsoever. It's just Nauman himself walking in and out of a video. Which is supposed to make us think about scale but I think we can all think about scale quite easily enough should we need to. At least Clown Torture (which features an actor dressed as a clown sat on a toilet, suffering) is interesting. Clowns are tricky to incorporate into art or cinema without being cliched. They're either sad or evil. Rarely are they funny. Nauman's clown takes the sadness into deeper dimensions to reveal a sad truth about all of us.

Walks In Walks Out (2015)

Double Steel Cage Piece (1974)

We are all imprisoned by layers of masks we put on to present ourselves to the world. We alter realities depending on our audience and if you think you don't then why did you tidy up your bookshelf before that Zoom call? Why do you say words like 'fuck' and 'cunt' to your friends and not your nan? Why do you even smile at people?

Nauman had already explored ideas of anxiety and entrapment in 1974 with Double Steel Cage Piece in which one cage is encased by a slightly larger cage. There is a small walkway in the gaps between them but it is not large enough for anyone to move through comfortably. It seems Nauman had seen the minimalist art of Donald Judd and Carl Andre and decided he could fuse minimalism with conceptualism. It would probably upset a minimalist purist (the lack of meaning was the point) but it's a neat enough trick if you come at it with an open mind.

Hardly mind blowing though. With Going Around the Corner Piece with Live and Taped Monitors, Nauman explored the then relatively new idea of mass surveillance. Us, the visitors, are filmed as we walk though the piece and, on reaching its end, we see a small video of us from behind and get the feeling we have been spied on. 

How that makes us feel now, in 2021 - with social media, tracking devices, listening devices, and CCTV everywhere, is likely very different to how it would have made people feel back in 1970. I know this room in Tate Modern and I think this would have been an exhibit that if I had been able to attend the show in person would have been far more interesting.

Going Around the Corner Piece with Live and Taped Monitors (1970)

Anthro/Socio (Rinde Spinning) (1992)

Instead, somewhat perversely, I found myself surveying Nauman (or at least his work from the comforts of my own front room). Surveillance, now, is carried out by everyone everywhere every moment they're awake. It makes the world a more connected place but, sadly, it also makes the world a more suspicious, and sometimes more unkind, place.

Not that Nauman seems to be an artist concerned with suggesting Utopian alternatives. The furniture of 1983's Musical Chairs is useless. Intentionally so. Chairs with only two legs, no seats, and no backs that serve no purpose whatsoever. Nauman had spoken about the children's game of musical chairs as being something he felt was particularly cruel because the first kid to get knocked out always felt terrible about it and then had to watch everyone else play.

When he went on to link that with torture methods carried out in Apartheid era South Africa, I have to say I felt he'd made too daring an artistic leap but, hey he's an artist, so he gets to use artistic license. Further gloom continues with a violin tuned to D E A D, some drawings of spilled coffee, and the rotating disembodied head of a man which shouts "feed me, eat me, anthropology, help me, hurt me sociology" and other disturbing stuff.

A man desperate to have his most basic human needs catered for in a society that has become so self-serving that it may choose to deny him them. With One Hundred Live and Die, there is further exploration of the process of dehumanisation. The people here are represented simply by lines of text, some get to live, some get to die, but all are mere units. Units of productivity. Units of usefulness. As surely as many of us look at the huge death toll of Covid-19 and forget that for each one of those now nearly two and half million global deaths there is a person who lived, breathed, and loved and for each one of those people lost there are family members and friends mourning. People who will never laugh or smile again and people who will never see them laugh or smile again.

One Hundred Live and Die (1984)

Shadow Puppets and Instructed Mime (1990)

Shadow Puppets and Instructed Mime features a female mime artist executing movements to the orders of a dispassionate, and offscreen, male voice. It shows that not only do we dehumanise people, fifty percent of people, women, are dehumanised more than the other fifty percent. There has been great improvement, though still far to go, in the thirty years since this work was made but there are still a lot of men out there who believe that women should bend to their will and, when they refuse to, resort to often deadly violence.

It's an aesthetically pleasing work with a disturbing undertone. Black Marble Under Yellow Light, meanwhile, is simply aesthetically pleasing. It's nice to look at it, again it shows Nauman's debt to minimalism, but it has no meaning. Nauman is nothing if not slippery. One minute you like him, the next you're not so sure. Like all of us, he contains multitudes.

The show ends with Hanged Man in which, as with Musical Chairs, Nauman is pondering the cruelty of the games we have invented for children to play. In the game hangman, a stick man is executed if one child can't guess the letters of an unspecified word quick enough. It's quite a dark idea really but Nauman has gone one step further and drawn his Hanged Man with a boner. To reflect the myth that once a man has died from hanging, he will automatically get an erection.

I enjoyed this (partial) Nauman show but I wasn't quite as excited about as the unfortunate Hanged Man would have been had he been alive (and real) to enjoy his impressive standing ovation. If I had to use the Mull of Kintyre scale to review Nauman's work, and I'm sorry to end on such a crude note but Nauman did so don't blame me, I'd have to say this show was something of a semi. I'd need further stimulation before I could really commit to Nauman as an artist. Hopefully, soon (April, May, June, later) we can return to galleries again and I can finally get that satisfaction.

Black Marble Under Yellow Light (1981/88)

Hanged Man (1985)