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August - September 2010

On Painting: ‘Hours Of Happiness’, process and purpose*.

This summer I double over with stomach pain quite suddenly. I have been working on my painting ‘Hours Of Happiness’ for nearly five months, since January. To do are the final layers, glazes and highlights – I estimate another four weeks to completion and I know the work I will begin next. Now stabbing pain that has nothing to do with painting interrupts my concentration, a fact I have to attend to and waste time on.

It is disheartening to have to pull back out of the form of my painting into my own hurting physical form because outside my open studio windows the supreme pleasure of summer is palpable. Sunlight glints off silver birch tree leaves, the gardener mows our emerald green communal lawn, cut grass and my neighbours pink roses scent the air. And, incongruously, I feel as if I have swallowed shards of glass that rip into my intestines.

I am exasperated with myself. I recognise this pain. I know what it is. Despite the intensity it is not serious, I am sure. Being sent away from home to boarding school at the age of five made me, in bouts of acute anxiety, physically ill. Since childhood I have been stopped in my tracks by stomach pain. As a teenager, in order to be able to work and earn my living, I needed to understand why my body kept breaking down. The source of the pain, since I repeatedly recovered, was obviously not pathogenic. I came to realise that my body could act out the painful anxiety of my mind.

To ward off fearful thoughts of helplessness, desertion and disaster my brain, my will, conjuring up images of ineffable physical strength, sends barrages of kinaesthetic impulses through my nervous system and into my muscles. Gripping my paintbrush I brace myself, hard, alert, jaw tightened, brow wrinkled, back erect. And, deeper still, deep inside my body are my intestines, my guts. Yes, the pain I have is gut ache. That is all. Mental anxiety has caused tension in the muscles of my gut to build up into a sustained contraction, a painful spasm. This muscular spasm is a good measure of the effort of will my mind has been making to ward off fear and anxiety.

But I have nothing to be anxious about! I am very annoyed with myself. All is well with my life. My perfect life! At last, I am no longer afraid or insecure. This painful gut spasm must be mere body habit erupting from the most primitive part of my brain not yet accustomed to the careful calm, the luxury of unobstructed time that I have acquired with age.

I wipe my paintbrush, place it beside my easel, I get up from the chair and I step away from my painting. I lie down flat out on my white tiled studio floor.

The paradox of my childhood is that although the malign shock of being banished to boarding school is partly responsible for my nervous stress reactions it was also a providential escape into a caring community of fine artists. Madam Nadine Nicolaeva-Legat, whose husband Nickolas taught and danced with Anna Pavlova, was the Russian founder teacher of The Legat Ballet School. Madam was immaculate, usually dressed in black with pearl earrings and white lace collars; she was poised, authoritative, every inch a mature classical ballet dancer, her head held high over her gnarled feet. She was passing on to us the discipline, technique and stagecraft that had been passed down to her from that group of great artists who broke away from the conservative milieu of pre-revolutionary Russia – Tchaikovski, Borodin, Mussorgsky, Chaliapin, Petipa, Fokine, Diaghilev… Madam believed that yoga was imperative for dancers because it enables them not only to relax their muscles but also to refine their physical and mental powers of resistance and endurance. The innovation of her teaching method was to have her pupils begin their day, before breakfast, with a yoga class. At the end of the class we all lay flat on the dance studio floor while Madam walked around our prone bodies lifting up and dropping our limbs. If we had learned our deep yoga relaxation lessons well our arms and legs would hit the floor painlessly.

On the floor, floored, I recall that five-year-old child in yoga class. I empty my mind. If I can relax and reduce my mental anxiety (I know I can, I have done it a thousand times) I can cure my stomach pain.

When I began painting ‘Hours Of Happiness’ all those months ago I was framing my happiness subject in a very happy frame of mind. I am so precisely where I want to be, so exactly living the image I had as a child projected into the future of myself as an artist before her easel in her studio that the reality now seems like an astonishing miracle of fulfilled convergence. Many times in the past when my psychological distress seemed unbearable I wanted to end my life but I never feared old age. At home I saw my musician grandmother and my artist mother thwarted by fear and patriarchy into renouncing professional ambition. Angry and bitter they did not rebel against the class strictures that forbade ‘ladies’ to work or earn money. Only ‘hobbies’ were ladylike. In contrast, at ballet school, I was taught by committed theatre world people, ambitious, dedicated, passionate, de-classed female and male artists for whom earning money and professionalism was essential. There was 70 year old Lydia Kyasht, a Bolshoi soloist in her youth, sitting before us in ballet class, her white hair pinned up, her head thrown back, her half-blind eyes half closed, whacking the floor with her stick demanding that we repeat the steps, again, again, again! She was awesome. We loved her for expecting the best of us, pushing us to the physical limits of our abilities. This was a professional artists’ old age, an old age filled with creativity, knowledge and experience. And I am not yet as old as the great artist teachers I loved, not yet as old as exemplary artists like Georgia O’Keefe, Monet, Tamara de Lempika, Matisse, Louise Bourgeois or Alice Neel. In my mind I scroll through photos I have seen of old artists, images of old women like Eudora Welty, Leslie Blanch, Kathe Kollwitz, Meret Oppenheim and Carol Rama. I think of all the professional women who defied class and patriarchy to make their mark in art, even into old age, their faces lined by the glacial grind of life’s adversities, their eyes radiating continued creativity and the memory of the uproar they caused.

Three days have passed. I am painting. I am persisting with twice daily yoga sessions. But I cannot relax my gut. I am in pain.

What could I possibly be anxious about? There has never been a better time on Earth for women, especially in Europe, especially in London. Unlike in the past I have no money worries, not least because of the legal rights to earn and own money, and equal pay, that female and male feminists have won for women.

Training my deep brain to acknowledge my new financial circumstances I repeat, like a mantra, I have no money worries. In the past it was being broke that broke my body. But today I have enough money and enough is plenty. In fact, I have never been so financially secure. Right, this is so remarkable that I can hardly believe it!

Since I was sixteen I paid taxes and self-employed National Insurance, sometimes less than £5.00 a week. I glory in the profit motive that drives capitalism. In advance of any need we may individually have, profit means that anyone who works can pay taxes and contribute to Welfare Services that provide the basic goods and freedoms of our generous, humane and civil society. I support the social contract politics of our welfare state not only because I personally appear to receive more than I have given. Five years ago a letter came from The Pension Service telling me what I must do to receive the state pension that years of contributions to the tax pool entitled me too after my 60th birthday. The current state pension for a single person is £97.65 per week (which will increase next April as the link to earnings has been restored). For a self-employed artist to have a regular basic needs income, an earned delayed reward in the form of a state pension, a weekly payment come hell or pestilence, is paradisiacal. I have no money worries.

But I cannot shift my stomach pain. I go for a long walk. I feed on bland food. I interrogate myself. I cannot be anxious about the cost of a plumber to fix the overflow because I fixed it myself after I went to Nu-Line, our local DIY store, and got a youth to give me an over-the-counter lesson on flush valves. I am certainly not anxious that wind blew down the stand of carefully tended delphiniums in our communal garden because a single spear survives like a flash of lapis lazuli. Nor am I anxious that my plan to make summer pudding for friends is stymied because, despite 63 varieties of bread on market stalls and in delicatessens on Portobello Road, I cannot find a loaf of brioche – Mrs Beeton’s recipe recommends sponge cake.

Returning home from Tesco’s I see neighbourhood artist Colette Morey De Morand cycle past, her crash helmet swooshed with red like one of her fine abstract paintings. An e-mail invitation from Mathew Flowers announces an exhibition of paintings, ‘Interiors Of A Kind’, by Derek Hurst, one of my macho tutors at Central College of Art in the 1960’s. His abstract paintings are very pretty and decorative (I smile to myself). I remember Hurst remarking that having to teach us students made him a ‘Sunday painter’ but, anyway, ‘painting is dead!’ I did not believe him. He is an old man now, still painting. I am painting, figuratively. I am sitting before my painting ‘Hours Of Happiness’. There is absolutely nothing, nothing in my perfectly resolved life to cause me anxiety. And yet, I feel as if I have shards of glass piercing my guts.

Three more days have passed. I lie on the floor trying to relax, emptying my mind. I have started to worry that the pain is serious and it would be sensible to go to the doctor and arrange an abdominal scan.

Then, at last, I admonish myself for not getting sooner to the epicentre of the pain. My self-interrogation so far has not been dishonest exactly, but evasive. Looking for and then discounting trivial impingements has only delayed what I know I must confront. This pain, this gut ache, has everything to do with my painting.

Now I am afraid. To cure my illness I must do battle with myself; a dangerous undertaking that I cannot be sure will have a positive outcome, this time. To rid myself of physical pain I must mentally confront the most elemental aspect of my consciousness, the essence of what I imagine myself to be. I feel my sense of self lose traction with reality. I am slipping towards infinite blackness, a pit of such grave hideousness that I will never escape. I am restraining a surge of violent raw energy that I recognise as a primal retaliatory reaction, how the animal in me responds in the face of threat. I am being threatened by my painting. I look at ‘Hours Of Happiness’ in horror. I am overwhelmed by an impulse to destroy five months work. Destroy the painting! Destroy all my paintings! Heat from the burning pyre of my work, flames crackling through canvases piled high, is so real I feel my cheeks burn. To immolate my work is to immolate myself – I am my work. I can barely breath. A substance of dense darkness closes around me, blocking out all the lightness of summer.

I am trying to stay rational. I laugh at myself, furious with pain and exhaustion. I lie on my back flat on the floor, trying to take control of my thoughts to maintain my sanity (I know I can, I have done it a thousand times).

Paintings that I will paint in future, on a written list, are like milestones marking out a secure way ahead. This structured painting plan frees my mind to consider spontaneous ideas like… It was last winter on a dark afternoon as I was finishing painting for the day that ‘Hours Of Happiness’ began forming in my mind. As I drew the studio curtains against the cold outside I felt a longing for sunlight. Summer, pleasure, leisure – ideas occurred to me that I immediately put to use.

I remembered images that have formed in layers over the first pictures embedded in my mind, the framed under glass original pictures that hung on the walls at school, water colours and gouaches of ballet costumes and set designs by Alexander Benoise, Leon Baksk and Natalia Gontcharova. I recall jewel-like colours, gold and silver, the purposeful sense of body movement suggested by bold line, sparkling and sumptuous characters dancing out the drama of life. I remembered people in hot, tropical places: Armide, Prince Igor, Raymonda, Firebird, Daphnis, Choloe, Petrushka… people at market fairs and festivals and at play in parks. I thought of places I have been to: playing in the sand at Broadstairs below towering chalk cliffs, boating on the lake in Hyde Park, floating on a lilo in Lindos bay, diving through forests of fan coral in the Caribbean sea. I remembered carefree happiness that I began to compose into my painting. And in answer to my question ‘How have artists captured pleasure?’ my mind flickered through Suzanne Valadon’s ‘The Casting of the Net’, her triple nude portrait of her young lover on a Corsican beach; the Birth of Venus paintings of Alexandre Cabanel and William Bouguereau; George Seurat’s bathing places and parks; the luxe, calm and volupte of Henri Matisse’s South of France; Jane Gravrol’s surrealist view down into a vulva-phallic rock pool. In the middle of last winter I imagined an entirely happy and free Arcadian world of joyous love and hedonism, a pastoral idyll of sensuality, an archetypal image of the summer holiday I would fix for all time. This idea made me feel very happy and the title ‘Hours of Happiness’ would refer not only to the subject but, I was sure, to how I would be as I worked on the painting.

With preparatory pencil sketches I began putting the painting together. I composed my peopled seascape over formal Euclidian geometry inside what would be the 122 x 153cm proportions of my canvas, a sky/sea horizon line about a third of the way down. Rather than a single block of action drawing the viewer’s eye to one arresting focal point I wanted my composition to lead viewers eyes outwards as if the action in the painting extended panoramically beyond the picture frame. I composed not one main action but clusters of actions, a patterned arrangement spread across the surface plane in regular steps structured by the mathematics of the golden section. I want to convey air, natural light and movement. People stroll, they play, sail, paraglide, swim and sunbathe. I intend the children and adults in the sea and on the beach to be integrated with nature, to express an ecstatic contact with nature to enhance their human identity and complexity. To suggest a transcendental dimension of seemingly infinite space and vastness I compose tiny anonymous figures in the distance. To pull the eye outwards and upwards I composed leaping figures along the lines of slanting sunlight. And to keep the eye moving I composed triangles, points of three – three sea gulls, three beach balls – creating vertical elements across the three horizontals of sky, sea and land.

The foreground figures in the painting are not the hybrid beings, the hermaphrodite transsexuals and gender fused people I often paint to unsettle the patriarchal male v female binary - they are obviously female and male figures displaying themselves to us, the spectators, as people do to each other on the beach. And yet, they could also be blithely unaware of such display, as we usually are, arms above our heads, submitting ourselves to the sensuality of being naked, outside, at one with nature.

When I paint landscape I often use volcanic smoke to symbolise how bucolic pastoral can be shattered by natural disaster. At first, in ‘Hours Of Happiness’, mountains and wooded hills sloped to the sea and only a lazy tongue of smoke drifted from the crater of a dormant volcano. Then, in March, when the real world Iceland volcano Eyjufjallajokull erupted, I filled the sky of my painting with dark volcanic ash. These darkened clouds helped both with my light source and the idea I wanted to convey (if only to myself) of a seaside place not necessarily in the tropics but on the North Sea coast. Light now came from sun behind clouds, rimming the clouds with white and illuminating the foreground figures from behind so that they are almost in silhouette, their skin colour and cultural identity ambivalent. I am aware of the cultural diversity of my friends and how important it is that they are represented in my paintings. I have been trying to fuse painting of the past with my unique vision now, to make a unity between the painterly and the graphic. My design is not to be faithful to what I have seen but to make permanent a memory of a scene, to fix feelings of happiness into an immutable recuerdo, a remembrance, an icon of worship symbolising awe of life and exaltation.

If it appears that no politics or feminism informs this painting then this is a mistake. Pleasure is political. She is here, she lacks for nothing, she is whole. The woman reclining on the blue striped towel, the Venus of the Beach, she has worked, earned and paid for her own holiday. She has travelled abroad, maybe alone, she is reasonably safe alone on the beach, she can gaze at women and men for the sake of their youth and beauty, and for her desire and satisfaction she can treat them with her own money, pay for them to accompany her, she has earned her freedom and independence. She is on her mobile phone telling friends back home what a wonderful time she is having!

I feel dizzy and nauseous with pain. Nothing of five months work satisfies me anymore. I had expected great things but the painting has lost all its potential. It is only painting, unnecessary, insignificant, unwanted, useless. I am not able to find a single good word to say for myself. I try. It is no use. Nothing I have done is worth anything. My gut aches. In the garden two pairs of blackbirds are squawking territorial warnings to each other. I am humbled and bewildered to be so suddenly sabotaged by loss of hope. There is nothing the matter with me but shame and hurt ego. The painting has failed.

I will not get drunk, I will not use legal or illegal drugs to numb this pain. I will not be hysterical. I have to reason this through with my mind calm and collected. I must remain conscious and intelligent. All I must do to relieve this pain is to get my head in working order again. I must become ‘undevastated by uncertainty’. I must regain my nerve. I must believe that it is worth going through this Hell to get there.

My self-evaluation and scale of personal esteem has diverged too far from what I expected of myself. I have lost my equilibrium. The whole apparatus of my will has fallen apart. There is too big a discrepancy between my ideal and what in reality I can do. I am inadequate, devastated. I feel small, a limbless speck, not competent enough even to go to the garage for a carton of milk. I want to lift my arm to paint. The air is thick and dark. I move sluggishly.

I had been absorbed in my work unaware of my body except as the tool that performs the ideas that I make. The canvas size I usually use is practical, I can carry it arms out stretched and, when I am working at arms length from the canvas surface, the size is big enough so that I cannot see where it ends. I am in my painting, spit, sweat, and skin cells, eyelashes, hair and fingerprints. Up till now I have been unselfconsciously lost in the tactile pleasure of paint application, mixing, squeezing, brushing… to appear convincing the marks I make must be assiduously repeated until nothing but intentionality remains and they are just right, perfectly beyond alteration.

Now, three quarters of the way through the painting, I am standing back. To assess what more there is to do I ask myself: how is it going? I double over, aware of my body in acute pain. Sticking in my gut is ‘the knife of the perfectionist’. I am physically overwhelmed by the thought that one wrong decision now will ruin five months work. It is not the further work I am afraid of. From the start I was trained to work hard for future rewards. After ballet classes or rehearsals for public performances, as we took off sweat drenched tunics in the changing room, we did not consider ourselves worthy unless blood from our blistered toes stained our point shoes red. No, what I fear is how I will judge the outcome, and how I will be judged.

Destroy the painting now rather than make the effort to finish it! Destroy the painting now and I can prevent others from judging me failed, I can save face. This is the battle with my ego. The sudden crisis of confidence is anxiety that I am experiencing as pain. To win I must find my determined inner voice and drive myself forward out of this potentially catastrophic abyss. I tell myself just stop it!

Saturday: a Polish student, with enthusiastic charm, is doing a magnificent job of serving demanding customers in a busy Portobello Road café. My friend CM and I order a posh brunch treat. We settle CM’s five-year-old child beside us with colouring book and crayons to keep her occupied while we talk. This morning CM, who is capable of shifting a film crew and equipment across the most remote and inhospitable terrain, is wearing a delicate Liberty print blouse. She is telling me her news in a restrained manner, quite modestly. But as I begin to comprehend the significance of her story I want to cheer and dance on the table.

From the time, over twenty years ago, that CM began making documentaries, often under the aegis of the United Nations or the World Health Organisation, her object was to illustrate how Human Rights, education and pressure on government could change lives and reduce the horror of survival issues like child marriage, cholera, starvation, and Aids. Inevitably in Africa, whether it was Egypt or Uganda, she was confronted by female genital mutilation (FGM). Since woman’s liberation is part of her personal and political agenda she determined to make campaigning films against it. Eventually, despite winning awards, despite contributing to the law that made FGM illegal in UK (including taking UK nationals out of the country ‘on holiday’ for the sole purpose of FGM), CM came to realise that nothing, not close-up images of torture, not interviews with women brave enough to talk about and show their life destroying wounds, no marches or demonstrations, no pleading or demanding, nothing polite or rude was persuading Men Who Rule to abandon the abhorrent practice. Like so many long-time committed campaigners CM was caught between corporate media indifference and the protected voices of those who denounce anyone ‘interfering in our religion and our traditional culture’. I understood why, shocked and wearied by the relentless blood, heartache and death, she stepped back from filming in Africa.

The news is that several weeks ago CM got a call from a powerful woman entrepreneur who was organising an ‘End FGM’ conference in Kenya. Would CM be a key speaker? After a rush to digitalise her films CM was on the plane. Today CM seems won over again to the fight, ready to say to men, like the ones who came up to her at the conference physically sick weeping and wringing their hands, ”then what are you going to do about it?!” I touched her arm with a glad heart, laughing, feeding back to her what I hoped she believes: all the work she did in the past counts, all the films she made matter now, they give unimaginable hidden crimes real visibility, real presence in society, they contribute to breaking the socially coerced silence that allows the torture of women to flourish.

Back in my studio I tried not to completely lose my head. I jumped up and down, in actual inches perhaps one or two but psychologically I went up a mile. I was light-headed. Before we walked to the café, before I could stop her with some imperceptible diversion, CM was in the studio. I rather like for friends to visit me and so take for granted finished paintings and my stuff going on that they need not notice. On the other hand how they ‘see’ a work in progress and the comments they make can bring to my attention invaluable connections I have missed.

This morning CM stood in front of ‘Hours Of Happiness’ and said: “Oh, I like this!” Pop, I felt the burning twist in my gut spring undone! The stabbing pain was gone! Astonished by my body’s instant physical reaction I could not take the compliment with good manners. I muttered something, got off the subject of my painting, and ushered us all out of the house.

Flattery! Afternoon sunlight fills the room, shadows from the silver birch trees dance across the wall, I am in such good spirits. I do not want to cause this state of happiness to disappear by arguing with myself. I can bring myself down again by allowing my brain to slip off the moment and start analysing the sincerity of my friend’s flattery and whether it could be true. I do not care. CM said she liked my painting! And the pain in my gut is gone. Failure had been right before my eyes. It will not do to miss the chance to cling on to the lifeline of words CM has thrown me. In the morning I will take up my paintbrush again with a light heart – my mind knows exactly what I must do – repaint the sky a slightly darker tone of cobalt, for a start – more bright yellow, more foam in the waves.

I will keep going and take the consequences. I know I am doing my best. But I am not satisfied. I cry, I laugh and my monstrous ego demands: “how can you live in the knowledge that you have not painted the greatest painting ever painted?” I answer myself: live because only by living can anyone hope to do better. Refusing to adjust myself to my limited powers means I refuse to lose hope. Sanity is the ego climb-down that enables me to live and create while being both ferociously ambitious and facing up to what my talent enables me to achieve.

And the purpose of painting? The purpose of painting is only and always education and enjoyment to a greater or lesser degree. With my painting I hope to leave a record of a received vision of life to fulfil the need of rising generations to make sense of the world, my individual, idiosyncratic perspective. I am taking full advantage of enlightened hard won rights of free speech and equality; the purpose of my painting is to keep up the tradition of independent creative expression.

*Endnote: ‘Hours Of Happiness’ 2010 122x153cm oil on canvas. This painting is not yet professionally recorded – I have only my own studio photograph. The image is not in my web site Gallery yet because the above essay about process, what I have written about the psychological drive that enables me to finish a work, should be hidden, invisible or separate from how you view the painting. Primarily I would like my work to be considered and appreciated without reference to my work process or my biography. I will put the image of this painting in the Gallery in 2011.

June - July 2010

Drugs: the exorbitant social and financial cost of punishing pleasure.

When David Cameron and Nick Clegg expound coalition government policy on drugs they look and sound like cranks, at best. We know, even those of us who never took a joint or a line from either of them that these are men who used drugs for pleasure in our enlightened, liberal youth culture. Cameron and Clegg are functioning people protected by wealth and privileged who are oh so understanding and supportive when occasionally one of their kind needs legal services and expensive private medical interventions for addiction. In private both would agree with the recent Guardian leader: ‘In Britain and America, the war on drugs is now widely seen as a failure. Begin again by treating drug abuse like alcoholism and smoking – not as a matter of law and order but a question of public health.’* In public, however, Cameron and Clegg tell us, the common pleasure seeking people, that we must be criminalised, serve terms of imprisonment and have our lives ruined.

Is it that common people are not aware of, or outraged by, the cost of this war on drugs – which is not a war on drugs but a war on us? Do they not know what portion of our taxes goes on punishing people for dealing and taking drugs of pleasure? Are they unaware of the social cost of needlessly sending people to court and prison? And, if they knew, would they care? Is this the problem? The pleasure-indulging majority of people do not care about the damage and the waste that the war on drugs inflicts on us all? Or even worse, does criminalising people appeal to an atavistic human need to inflict punishment on others? Or, more optimistically, is it simply that the alternative to the war on drugs and prohibition has not been presented to people in a popular way?

These are questions I mulled over, yet again, with the solicitor Richard Parry. I first met Richard when we both spoke at the 2002 National Legalise Pot Demonstration in Trafalgar Square. He was a new anti-prohibitionist face on the scene with a lively, activist approach. He appealed to the thousands of demonstrators. He said he was getting together a group of criminal lawyers who would be prepared to challenge prohibition with legal strategies. He offered to provide free legal advice and representation to anyone arrested for any cannabis offence willing to plead NOT GUILTY rather than accept a caution or admit guilt.  Since then Richard – who realised ever since he was a history student at University of London that our drug laws were wrong – has defended hundreds of cannabis dealers and users. Pioneering the ‘medical necessity’ defence he has taken cases to the Court of Appeal, the House of Lords and the European Court of Human Rights.

Richard Parry is on the front line. For him, the social and financial cost of prohibition is not academic. Every day, like solicitors all over the word, he tries his best, face-to-face, to support non-violent people crushed and ruined by the criminalising prison system that drug-using politicians like Cameron and Clegg hypocritically maintain.

In Britain this year more than 10,000 people arrested for drug offences will be given immediate prison sentences averaging 3 years**. It costs taxpayers about £41,000 per annum to keep a person locked up.

“But what does it cost us taxpayers to take non-violent drug dealers or drug users through court, the tens of thousands who do not receive prison sentences?” I asked Richard.

“It could be estimated in money” he replied. “For each court appearance there are average legal aid fees of £600 to £700, there are court costs of about £300 to £400. Then, if you are not using legal aid, or say, you take the case to appeal, then you are talking a minimum of £3,000. Then there are the police time costs of ‘street cautions’, cautions and the rest… But” he continued, “the social costs are far worse. When someone is sent to prison for a cannabis offence, be it non-violent selling or merely personal use, the repercussions are dreadful.”

To make this point I asked Richard Parry to describe just three of his recent or current cases to highlight the iniquity of our punitive and disproportionate drug laws:

Mr A is a 45-year-old who has never been in trouble with the police. Police stop him in the street. He panics and runs because he has a few ounces of cannabis resin on him. He is arrested and admits he imported it for his own use from India where he lives happily for half the year with his wife and 2 young children. He is charged and because he is not a permanent resident in UK he is held in custody. He pleads guilty at court next morning, but is sent to the Crown Court for sentence. He spends 3 weeks in prison while his wife and family do what they can to help him, supplying character references and arranging expensive legal representation. The Prosecution accepts that 7 imported ounces is a small amount but the Judge says it was not insignificant and gives an 8 months prison sentence. An appeal is lodged within days but his family’s life and business is shattered. On appeal the sentence is reduced to 3 months and because Mr A has already served that amount of time in prison he is immediately released.

Mr C is a 65-year-old who suffers from 80% burns and is severely disabled. He smokes cannabis for his chronic pain. He has other friends who are medical users so they club together and buy larger amounts, as it is cheaper. He is raided and arrested. The police find a small grow room and cannabis all over the house. Mr C runs a ‘medical necessity’ defence, but the Court of Appeal outlaws this and he is advised to plead guilty. He strenuously denies commercial dealing, but the Prosecution demand confiscation of his only asset – the equity in the house he has lived in for the last 20 years. The Magistrates throw him in jail for 12 months for non-payment of this equity; his appeal is rejected. In jail his condition continues to deteriorate. Notwithstanding his prison sentence for non payment, under the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002 the equity debt remains. If a Receiver is appointed to sell the house to raise this money, Mr C will have nothing to come out of prison to but the Homeless Persons Unit.

Mr J is a 40 year old who had a business selling hydroponics equipment; he also sold cannabis seeds and a book on how to grow cannabis. All entirely legal. He submitted tax returns. He displayed a large sign over the counter: ‘Please do not ask for advice on how to grow cannabis it is illegal (sic)’. But the police send in an undercover man (with a secret camera and audio device) to buy equipment and ask for advice on how to grow cannabis. Immediately Mr J points to the sign and says he can only give advice on growing tomatoes. None of the conversation recorded over the following few days mentions cannabis. However Mr J is convicted of incitement to produce cannabis and sentenced to 15 months imprisonment. He is forced to abandon his business. But this is not enough for the Prosecution, they argue that his business turnover is the ‘proceeds of crime’ and demand over £400,000 and 4 years imprisonment in default.  By the time the case reaches appeal (last month) Mr J has served his prison sentence – the appeal is refused.

Compared to the horror of drug users executed by the Chinese government or violent drug lords funding Jamaican politicians or British soldiers dying in Afghanistan in a futile mission to eradicate much needed medical heroin, Richard Parry’s life-destroying cases are ordinary, normal, in our courts everyday.

But, even when common people understand all this and are outraged by the social and financial cost, what seems to be holding back a People’s Uprising against prohibition is the way anti-prohibition arguments are presented.

In Britain, the tepid anti-prohibitionist argument which calls for ‘harm reduction’ and ‘better ways to reduce the harm’ of cannabis fails to arouse much popular support because the policy is always messed up in anti-tobacco and anti-alcohol cant. Anti-prohibitionists who say that tobacco and alcohol are ‘more dangerous’ and cause ‘more harm’ than cannabis are talking irrelevant science and unethical, unprincipled nonsense.

The campaigning organisation Transform, set up in Bristol in1996, now wants to promote ‘sustainable health and wellbeing by bringing about a just, effective and humane system to regulate and control drugs at local, national and international levels’. Here is what the organisation has to say about alcohol: ‘For alcohol policy to have an effective future it is clear that potentially very unpopular decisions will have to be made that will involve increasing regulation and heavy restrictions on all aspects of marketing and promotions.’

And this is what Transform proposes for cannabis: ‘A key task of any regulatory body would be to manage supply so as to prevent the emergence of branded products and limit all forms of profit driven marketing and promotions.’***

In fact puritan, Stalinist campaigners like Transform have helped to destroy the liberal, permissively social cannabis culture of the 1960’s. Luckily tax paying common people will never support authoritarian so-called anti-prohibitionists who are contributing to the decline of the British pub and have already stymied any prospect of a cannabis café culture. The British anti-prohibition argument would gain popular appeal if it were presented as a principled, liberal, inclusive case for all pleasure giving drugs.

The American anti-prohibition scene is more appealing, not least because it embraces fair-traders who enjoy marketing. But still the argument problematically revolves around ‘medical cannabis’. In the USA millions of common people, a people’s Popular Uprising, have created convivial, playful medical cannabis ‘dispensaries’ and ‘clinics’. But many of us are uneasy that ‘medical cannabis’ is being promoted as a pathological norm that threatens to render illegitimate and abject all pleasure and recreational uses of the drug.

I object to having my pleasure use of cannabis masked from police by ‘medical cannabis’ for, while the ploy is a fun façade that cocks a snook at prohibition law it also turns me into a dishonest person. We need to oppose prohibition without embracing ‘medical cannabis’ as the exclusive or most highly valued use of the drug.

Meanwhile Cameron and Clegg warn us that the axe is falling on government spending, including spending taxpayers money on police, courts and prisons. Maybe ‘austerity’ will reduce the number of people arrested, imprisoned and ruined by our drug laws in the name of punishing pleasure. Lets hope so because the present situation is, as Richard Parry says “a monstrous insanity”.

*Guardian, Saturday 22nd May 2010

** Ministry of Justice Statistics: England and Wales 2008 (the number of drug offenders sentenced – 52,911 – in 2009 was up by 18.9% from 2007)

*** ‘After the War On Drugs: Blueprint for Regulation’ Transform Drug Policy Foundation 2009

April – May 2010

The Art of Stamps. Royal Mail's Rock 'n' Roll stamp collection, Women and Black Artists AWOL, continued:

Why were only white male musicians featured in the Royal Mail's collection of 10 rock 'n' roll classic album stamps? The patriarchal explanation for why women are absent from collections of excellence is stark: women are not as good as men. Even Camille Paglia, who has been called a feminist, argues from a female essentialist position that women's wombs sap us of the drive that is required to make humans excel: men don't have wombs and therefore men have the drive to be great. My kind of feminism profoundly disagrees with this patriarchal, constructed idea of biological male superiority. However it has been very difficult to propose 10 album covers of women musicians comparable to the album covers chosen by Royal Mail. Here are some of the socio-political explanations why:

1. Misogyny in the British music press and music industry, which amounted to a closed shop against women musicians, meant that compared to thousands of young men comparatively few women musicians joined or formed rock 'n' roll groups. When women did join or form groups, confronted by the macho closed shop they found it very difficult to get heard, signed, promoted, or encouraged and therefore becoming economically viable was difficult. Hence, few of the British woman musicians who did have the guts to brake with sexist tradition and create music or join bands survived for long enough to have comparable success or to make as many albums as male musicians.

2. The second wave of Women's Liberation that began in the late 1960's purposefully to challenge and destroy the white male closed shop, gained force in the 1970's. In Britain this should have been a socio-political platform upon which women musicians could make a stand for their art. Paradoxically, in the 1970's Women's Liberation in Britain was informed by aspects of puritan leftism that acted against women's struggle for economic independence and success. Unlike in USA where capitalism is lauded, in Britain capitalism has been challenged if not despised, especially in anti-establishment arts culture, including rock 'n' roll. Recently American voters have been demanding more 'socialism' and the British left has had to modify its contempt for entrepreneurial profit to talk of 'fair trade'. But in the 1970's the British left was anti profit and anti consumption.  Just when it looked like a critical mass of British women musicians were matching their male contemporaries in the punk rock era, there was leftist economics sabotaging their progress. Unlike their American counterparts, many British woman musicians failed to sell and make a profit from their work because of their antipathy to capitalist business and marketing.

3. Because the decorative aspect of female is privileged in patriarchy - in fact 'beauty' is the only aspect of female that is privileged in patriarchy - very few woman musicians have been able to work against the sexist grain and commission album art which is not about female 'beauty' portraits and decorativeness. On the other hand, the glamorous body skills that women have perfected through the ages means that when asked to be subjects in album cover art women can be exceptionally artful, creative and decorative. As Carol Dyhouse says ‘It is important to remember that women practice glamour, they are not simply the objects of the male gaze [] Glamour can represent self-assertion, sexual confidence, playfulness, pleasure and delight.’ But portraits of living people other than the Queen, however glamorous, are not allowed on British stamps.

4. Despite laws against sexual harassment being passed since 1975 women have had to expend mental and physical energy negotiating the industrial hazard of sexist hostility, often violent, in male dominated workspaces, energy that most women would rather have spent on creativity and career advancement.

5. Leftist anti competition and anti elitism – anti the struggle to be The Best - fed into patriarchal propaganda that indoctrinates women with the notion of female second-rateness, a learned psychological state of inferiority that suppresses innate motivation and drive and is very difficult to overcome. Young men who form bands cover their initial lack of skilled musicianship with a bravado 'don't care' front. In the punk era young men made a public art of three chords while in private they rehearsed hard to develop complexity and technique. But many of the young women musicians I interviewed in the 1970’s seemed to take at face value the false belief that skill is unnecessary and that improvisation will do - they seemed unwilling or unable to compete with male musicians and woe betide the woman - that would be ‘lady’ – who admitted to Ambition. Dumbing down in the name of egalitarianism acted against women achieving comparable musical skills to their male contemporaries. This learning to loose mentality was quite tellingly expressed by ex-Slits guitarist Viv Albertine on BBC Radio 4 recently: 'I wasn't really influenced by say Janice Joplin or Grace Slick, people who went before, because a) they had too much talent and I couldn't even conceive of myself being in their league [] let's get rid of all this trying to be rich, trying to be a star...'

In the past oppressive patriarchal practices within the family and in education helped to assign women their social positions and even convinced some women that they desired the subservient positions they were assigned. But since the 1980's the struggle to combat sexism in the classroom has gained force and teachers are giving female children a confident sense of themselves as people for whom striving for the highest attainments is legitimate. To-day the exclusion and barriers against women musicians, including what Helen Reddington describes as 'sophisticated tensions between representing womankind, the realities of press hostility and the exaggerated focus of being a novelty female', are breaking down, especially since on the World Wide Web there cannot be white male gatekeepers. (Women sing 13 of the all time top twenty songs of the 10 billion downloaded from iTunes.)

Given the patriarchal strategies of exclusion that confronted women in the past it is remarkable and heroic that so many women created so much great music. After years of struggle it is now normal for 50% of chart music to be created by women. To work as a stamp album cover art has to be conceptual and pictorial rather than literal and graphic. You can’t have ‘hair and make-up’ portraits or band names in big lettering which is too much like advertising. In future we will have as much female as male conceptual album art to choose from. Meanwhile, here are some albums covers by women and black musicians, art that would work as stamps, that Royal Mail could have chosen:

Yazoo 'You And Me Both', Miranda Sex Garden 'Suspiria', Siouxsie and the Banshees 'Nocturn', The Raincoats ‘The Raincoats’, MIA 'Kala', Sundays 'Reading, Writing and Arithmetic', Voodoo Queens 'Chocolate Revenge', Goldie 'Saturnz Return', Sneaker Pimps 'Becoming X', Girlschool 'Demolition', Sinead O'Connor 'Universal Mother', Elkie Brooks 'Pearls', Helen Love 'Radio Hits Vol.3', Rubella Ballet 'Greatest Trips', Blue Roses 'Blue Roses', Courtney Pine 'Resistance', Aswad ‘Aswad’, Linton Quasi Johnson ‘Bass Culture’, Kate Bush ‘Aerial’, Eurythmics ‘In The Garden’, P J Harvey ‘Dry’, Soul 11 Soul ‘Vol.11: 1990 – A New Decade’, Fairport Convention 'Unhalfbricking', Sade 'Soldier of Love'...

Notes: 'Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickenson' Camille Paglia, New Haven, Yale University Press 1990. 'The Lost Women of Rock Music: Female Musicians of the Punk Rock Era' Helen Reddington, London, Ashgate, 2007. 'Learning to Lose: Sexism and Education' Dale Spender and Elizabeth Sarah eds, The Women's Press, London 1980. ‘Glamour: Women, History, Feminism’ Carol Dyhouse, Zed Books, London 2010. ’Women of the New Wave' BBC Radio 4, Sunday 14 March 2010. Apple News, 25th February 2010.

Thank you to Cazz Blase, Suzette Newman and Joan Smith for album cover art suggestions.

March – April 2010

Art and Rock ‘n’ Roll Stamps – Women and Black artists AWOL!

When Pennie Smith first looked at the contact sheet of photographs she took of The Clash at The Palladium, New Your City, on 21st September 1979, she dismissed one particular frame as being too out of focus. She knew The Clash well through her lenses. Like all photographers who study their subjects she always looked out for those signature movements that define a band’s character and stage presence – Patti Smith throwing her head back to scream, Bob Marley shaking out his dread locks, Pete Townshend and his arm whirr. Paul Simonon had begun clunking his Fender Precision bass like a hammer into stages. His new move would make a great shot if all was ‘right’ – lighting, focus and frame. At first Pennie Smith didn’t think she had it. Sometimes artists have such a firm idea in their minds of the image they want it takes a while to see what they actually have. Pennie Smith had to be persuaded that, despite what she considered to be technically ‘wrong’, the photo she had taken of Simonon using his bass as a hammer was one of the most iconic rock ‘n’ roll photographs of all time. It became the cover to ‘London Calling’ and it is now one of the stamps in Royal Mail’s Rock ‘n’ Roll LP Cover Stamp Collection. For the sake of rock ‘ n’ roll the Queen has broken with tradition and for the first time allowed living people on stamps – an honour which goes to Paul Simonon, and David Bowie on the cover of ‘Rise and Fall of Ziggie Stardust and The Spiders From Mars’. As well as The Clash and David Bowie the Royal Mail’s chosen 10 are Mike Oldfield ‘Tubular Bells’, Pink Floyd ‘The Division Bell’, Blur ‘Park Life’, Coldplay ‘A Rush Of Blood To The Head’, Rolling Stones ‘Let It Bleed’, New Order ‘Power, Corruption and Lies’, Led Zeppelin ‘1V’, and Primal Scream ‘Screamadelicia’. The stamps are deliciously cute with vinyl discs ‘emerging’ from the edges but, what a line-up of white male musicians!

To live up to what Royal Mail calls its ‘reputation for showing the richness and diversity of British heritage and culture’ Julietta Edgar, Head of Special Stamps, should have ensured that album covers of women and black musicians were included. But choosing album covers of women and black musicians is difficult, a symptom of commercial and cultural exclusion which is only recently evaporating. To work as a stamp album cover art has to be conceptual and pictorial rather than literal and graphic. You can’t have ‘hair and make-up’ portraits or band names in big lettering which is too like advertising – which rules out Shirley Bassey ‘Something Else’, The Spice Girls ‘Spice’ or Amy Whinehouse ‘Back to Black’. Neither does murky darkness work – which rules out Siouxsie and The Banshees ‘The Scream’ or Joan Armatrading ‘Back to the Night’. And of course, no nudity – which rules out The Slits ‘Cut’.

Which album covers of women and black artists would you choose to add richness and diversify to the Royal Mail’s next Rock ‘n’ Roll LP Cover Stamp Collection? Albums I came up with are Aswad ‘Aswad’, Fairport Convention 'Unhalfbricking', Linton Quasi Johnson ‘Bass Culture’, Kate Bush ‘Aerial’, The Raincoats ‘The Raincoats’, Eurythmics ‘In The Garden’, P J Harvey ‘Dry’, Soul 11 Soul ‘Vol.11: 1990 – A New Decade’…

Thursday 4th March - Peaceful Demonstration outside the Malaysian Embassy, 45 Belgrave Square, London SW1X 8QT (nearest Tubes - Hyde Park Corner/Sloan Square) from 1pm to 3pm. Similar Actions will take place in Paris, USA and Vienna prior to the UN Drug Policy Summit from 8th to 12 March 2010. Many of us continue to be outraged by the fact that there are estimated 300 people on Death Row in Malaysian goals principally for drug offences, including many accused of trafficking relatively small amounts of cannabis. Judges have no choice under Malaysian law but to sentence those convicted of trafficking to mandatory death by hanging...the sharp end of prohibition and the iniquitous war on drugs!

January - February 2010

Drugs, Science and Horse Riding on Ecstasy.

Will there be any progress in 2010 towards ending drug prohibition? What surprised me most last year in the Professor David Nutt v Home Secretary Alan Johnson spat was the way organisations like Transform and Release jumped to Nutt’s defence. After all Nutt like Johnson is a prohibitionist. Nutt was chairman of the Home Office’s Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD) when government took their advice to add ketamine to the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 as a class C drug with a prison sentence for possession of up to 5 years. In fact, government accepted all Nutt’s ACMD recommendations (94, I believe) except just the one he is in such a paddy about – his recommendation that cannabis should not be re-classified as a class B drug but stay in class C. How any reputable scientist can recommend that people in possession of cannabis should be sent to prison beats me. I do not believe any of the scientists on the ADCM can be reputable since they surely knew when they were recruited that their purpose was to advise government on how best to enact prohibition. Most reputable people know that prohibition is an extremely harmful and expensive failure. The ACMD’s support of prohibition and the imprisonment of cannabis users and dealers in the UK is one end of the prohibition scale that has state murder of alleged heroin smugglers in China at the other. If Professor Nutt, and those scientist colleagues who resigned in protest at his sacking, had any reputations to protect they would have forsworn the flattery of having Government Advisor attached to their names and made an honest critique of prohibition, the legal process that has ruined many more lives than the drugs it affects to prohibit. It was dishonest of Nutt to criticise government in the most floridly facile terms and on such a minor and insignificant detail of prohibition. Of course the Home Secretary had to sack Prof Nutt, for his stupidity if nothing else.

David Nutt is a great nuisance. The ‘scientific’ and ‘rational scale’ he is promoting ‘to assess the harm of drugs’ has done nothing but add to the general scary-drug phobia. Nutt has assisted people like Liberal Democrat shadow Home Secretary Chris Huhne who cites the ‘rational scale’ which puts tobacco and alcohol near the top, when saying that had tobacco and alcohol been invented to-day they would be prohibited. When leading liberals use Nutt’s kind of ‘science’ to justify prohibition and a puritan intolerance of pleasure then any idea that there will be a more rational way of regulating social drugs is way off.

Scientists like David Nutt who are toiling in the prohibition industry miss the point. It is not drugs per say that cause harm – what can cause harm is the way drugs are used. When Nutt says ‘there is not much difference between horse riding and ecstasy' or when he states that ecstasy is no more dangerous than horse riding, he just sounds nutty. Any fool knows that sober children riding ponies in a paddock are less dangerous than bus drivers stoned on ecstasy down Oxford Street.

Nutt’s silly unscientific analogy prompted me to take a look at the science used to come up with his ‘rational scale’ of drug harms. I discovered that he unfortunately misused the Delphic Analysis Method. Even when used properly this method is a creative effort and not a scientific process. Properly constructed the Delphic Method is a communication device to combat groupthink. Professor Nutt and his colleagues misused the method to reinforce groupthink about prohibition. The ‘rational scale’ that Nutt recommends to government is no better than the classifications in the Misuse of Drugs Act 1971 that he condemns as having ‘seemingly little scientific basis’.*

I won’t be jumping to Professor Nutt’s defence until he stops hiding behind ‘science’ in the prohibition industry and instead states clearly that adults who use drugs for pleasure are not a ‘harm’ but a benefit to themselves and society. If Nutt is concerned about harms of excess then he must state clearly that it is not criminalising and imprisonment but licensing and control that is the rational way forward to protect individuals and society. Meanwhile, a bracing New Year canter across the South Downs on Ecstasy seems very appealing to me…

* ‘Development of a rational scale to assess the harm of drugs of potential misuse’ Prof David Nutt FMedSci, Leslie A King PhD, William Saulsbury MA, Prof Colin Blakemore FRS. The Lancet, Volume 369, Issue 9566, Pages 1047 – 1053, 24th March 2007

December 2009

Calling Women Whores... up-date:

Two women a week are killed in their own homes in ‘domestic violence attacks’. The cry ‘Nanny State!’ goes up whenever government takes a lead on social issues. But when we refuse to recognise the extent to which personal behaviour in private can cost taxpayers’ substantial sums then authority in the form of government is right to take a stand.

A recent NSPCC report* has found that a third of teenage girls suffer unwanted sexual acts in relationships. A quarter of 13 to 17-year-olds in relationships report physical violence such as being slapped, punched, or beaten by their boyfriends. Girls from families where there has been violence towards them are at greater risk.  For boys, having a violent group of friends makes it more likely that they will be violent in relationships.

One of the NSPCC report’s authors, Professor David Berridge, said: ‘The high rate and harmful impact of violence in teenagers' intimate relationships, especially for girls, is appalling. It was shocking to find that exploitation and violence in relationships starts so young. This is a serious issue that must be given higher priority by policy makers and professionals.’

The social behaviour government is now addressing, albeit obliquely, in a more invasive way than ever before is sexual violence and sexist verbal abuse in the home. To do this government plans, in 2011, to teach children from the age of five how to prevent violent relationships – non-violent relationship education. (This plan co-insides with a chorus of United Nations officials calling on the international community to make greater efforts to tackle the global pandemic of violence against women and girls.) But why is government putting yet another burden on teachers? Well, obviously, it is easier for government to access the public space of schools than to tell adults how to behave in private. In school, children act out behaviour seen at home. So it is really by stopping adults being violent in the privacy of their own homes that will reduce children acting out violence and sexual abuse amongst their peers.

Too many adults have been deaf to forty years of second wave feminist campaigns against violence in the home. We have had some effect. But the obdurate refusal of adults to address endemic humiliation of women continues. Unreconstructed men, like those who write and read Lad Culture media, have resisted change, allowed sexist whore-language to flourish and have promoted the normalisation of sexual violence ‘fantasy’. Too many men have refused to take responsibility for teaching their boy children how to be modern. Too many adults, in the privacy of their own homes, are refusing to take responsibility for their own violence and misogyny. Teach the adults, don’t blame the children!

*NSPCC and University of Bristol, 1st September 2009

Exploiting whores: The Hoerengracht by Ed and Nancy Kienholtz (1983-8) at the National Gallery until February 21 2010

This is an interesting art installation. It is 'an exploration of the theme of love for sale', but with no male-dummy buyers amoung the female-dummies selling sex the installation risks accusations of sexism. It is presented merely as crowd-pulling titillation. Curator Colin Wiggins says the National Gallery is exhibiting the work to ‘trip people up, knock them on the head, hit them with something that’s radical and dangerous’. I wonder why he thinks whores are dangerous? Instead of walking through a dummy mock-up of Amsterdam’s red-light district I suggest that to be really radical you should walk down a corridor of Holloway Prison and gawk at real women prostitute ‘criminals’ sitting in grey prison cells.

October – November 2009

Rape: Calling Women Whores… an update.

The scandal of rape continues – according to government estimates 95% of rapes in England and Wales are never reported. However, as Richard Garside, director of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies Kings College, has been saying for years, no more changes in the law will help to reduce the incidence of rape or make a difference to rape reporting and conviction rates. What will make a difference is a systematic onslaught on male attitudes to women (attitudes which many women mimic) including pillorying men who believe that women’s sexuality can be attacked. At the moment the only women who are not likely to be blamed for being raped are female babies and women over the age of 70. Misogynistic attitudes to women are responsible for the small number of rape cases that reach court. Shame on all those like Robert Harris (author) and Bernard Kouchner (Foreign Minister of France) who are revealing their misogyny by leaping to the defence of a film producer (43 years old at the time) who groomed a thirteen year old in photo sessions, drugged her, raped her vaginally and anally and then shouted ‘she asked for it’! As a result of government concern Harriet Harman has appointed crossbench peer Lady Vivien Stern to examine the way rape complaints are managed. Lady Stern believes that police bad management of rape reports and gross negligence in regard to forensic evidence in rape cases is partly responsible for the low conviction rate. Her report, The Stern Review, will be published early next year.

Painting: Mr Olympia - an interview with Jonathan Stockwell for his art history (University of Sussex) final dissertation on ‘Visual and Literary Explorations and Critiques of the Social Constructions of Masculinity and Femininity, through depictions of men in both a feminist and erotic context.’*

Jonathon Stockwell: The first thing I wanted to ask you is whether you feel that your painting Mr Olympia could be used to serve an erotic function for women?

Caroline Coon:  It could serve an erotic function, but I’m not saying that that’s the reason I painted it, because after all, I could have painted a pair of shoes or a sword, and for some people, that would be an erotic function. So I’m not painting it necessarily as an erotic function, although I am painting it as a woman looking at a beautiful body, for admiration and delectation. It’s a very interesting question: are you actually drawing erotic pornography or are you just doing a painting out of sheer admiration for beauty? And I have to say as a matter of fact, many great artists from Rembrandt and Rubens right the way through to Jean Cocteau and David Hockney have earned a lot of money drawing specifically erotic drawings. To date women artists haven’t had the benefit of that aspect of earning a living. At least, I’ve never actually been paid money to paint an erotic painting.

JS: Do you think it’s possible for a pornography to be developed by women that would serve women’s sexual desires to the same extent that traditional pornography serves men’s?

CC: Yes of course women can develop traditional pornography, but like any other subject it’s not a pornography, it’s pornographies, because different women are going to be turned on, made hard by different things. So this one genre ‘woman’ has never existed. For instance, as a woman I might be creating erotic images for other women who like to make love to women. There’s a lot of hidden erotica painted by homosexual artists, or men who are maybe bisexual or have a predilection for other men, that’s not obvious. In other words, many homosexual artists have to hide their sexuality, so you can’t necessarily tell from looking at the image what effect the artist wanted it to have. As an artist painting an image, I have no control or power over how that image is going to be used.

JS: That’s interesting because a quite a central part of what I’m writing about is how there isn’t this concept of ‘woman’, just women - that it’s really just a social construction.

CC: There’s a lot of feminist theory around the ‘male gaze’ that I contest - the hypothetical ‘woman’ walking around a gallery being outraged by all the absolutely exquisitely beautiful women being painted by men. Where is the feminist theory about women who actually want to make love to women, who walk around galleries and gaze at and absolutely adore all the beautiful images of women? So I quite challenge this idea of the ‘male’ gaze as being a) exclusive to men, and b) a bad thing.

JS: In the seventies, Laura Mulvey said that women are the bearers of meaning and men are the makers of it. Do you feel that by depicting men as sex objects, you are turning them into bearers of meaning made by women?

CC: There’s two things here: first of all, if I paint the idealised man - an Adonis - that man is not the object of my painting, he is the subject of my painting. Secondly, should I objectify a man, well, to me it’s never been the issue of whether we objectify this or that. If I paint a picture of a man’s torso as an object, the issue would be ‘how am I going to treat that object?’ If I was going to paint a vase, an absolutely beautiful blue and white vase, as an object, the issue would be ‘am I now going to want to smash that vase?’ So to me, artists’ objectifying humans or nature is not the issue. It’s what the artist then has the power to do to that object. I don’t think that’s been drawn out from those arguments. The patriarchal argument is that ‘anything beautiful has to be available to me, and if it’s not available to me, I’m going to destroy it, to make sure it’s not available to anybody else’. I have seen no evidence that ninety per cent of male artists have wanted to destroy the women they paint. Especially looking back to the Manet portrait of Olympia, he was perfectly aware that his model, Victorine Meurent, was a working class woman who was an artist herself. So this is a woman who has no access to funds, who is supporting herself doing work that is available to her, modelling. So he is aware of that, and I think that it’s an absolutely wonderful portrait of this woman. I see no malice in that painting at all. So I paint my Mr. Olympia, recognising that I have male models that I love, and am perfectly aware that they are very happy to have the funds that I give them. So there’s no derogatory inference in what I’m doing. The bad inferences stem from orthodox patriarchal readings of paintings like Olympia. Why, every time patriarchy sees a nude woman in a painting, do they call her a prostitute?

JS: So do you feel that with his erect penis - you’re obviously celebrating male beauty with that image…

CC: Well not quite - he’s almost…to have done him blatantly erect would have been too hot. Have you come across the word ‘ithyphallus’?

JS: I haven’t.

CC: It’s a great word here, because we don’t want to necessarily talk about erect penises so we? So ithyphallus is the Latin for erect penis, I quite like using that word. In Mr Olympia he is not so erect that it actually dominates the picture. But to me as a woman, in my heterosexual moments, I actually think that the erect phallus is wonderful, utterly beautiful. The erect phallus is something I’m going to draw into myself. And therefore when I paint an erect penis it’s through absolute awe of a life-giving force. And I would like women to admire that too. Why my work was so controversial in the sixties and seventies was firstly because in patriarchy women are not allowed to enjoy sex and secondly because it was thought that if you are a feminist you should hate the penis. And I absolutely, fundamentally, disagreed.

JS: So I understand the Tate refused to hang the painting on the grounds of this ithyphallus, and I was wondering if you thought this had anything to do with perhaps their fear or anxiety of seeing an intimate image of a man created by a woman?

CC: Actually it’s very funny because they had done an exhibition at the Tate called Venus - this was in the eighties when you’d have thought they’d be more conscious - and they had a whole art gallery full of images of naked women. And I think suddenly they realised quite what a patriarchal statement this was. They did a kind of education pack, where they wanted to offset their male theme of naked women with images of naked men. They saw a tiny transparency of my Mr Olympia and they thought it would be an ideal painting to include. It was only when they enlarged the picture that they realised how intimate it was! That’s when they decided it was too shocking.

JS: So they wanted intimate images but perhaps not that intimate!

CC: Yes exactly. In other words it was perfectly acceptable to have every kind of intimate detail of female anatomy, but the minute that you had male anatomy that could possibly arouse women, that was going to be a problem. And I have to say that it’s also a problem for men. I loved Anthony Easthope’s book, What a Man’s Got To Do. It’s a wonderful dissertation about why men are so terrified of images of the erect penis, because it destabilises their sexuality. In patriarchy there are only two forms of sexuality allowed: female or male heterosexuality. If you see an erect penis, it is actually a very potent sexual image and even if you think that you are heterosexual you could be slightly turned on by an erect penis?

JS: Yes that’s certainly possible.

CC: Exactly, and therefore an erect penis destabilises what is allowed of male sexuality in the patriarchy. In other words, homosexuality/homoeroticism absolutely is not allowed. Anthony Easthope’s book is about male fear of being attracted to the penis. My Mr. Olympia not only destabilises what is allowed of women in our culture, but it is also a threat to men, because if they should see this beautiful ithyphallus they might be attracted to it, and what does that say about the stability of male heterosexuality?

JS: I’ve noticed some striking parallels between that and the incident in 1971, in which the authorities closed down Margaret Harrison’s exhibition for much the same reason. The painting they took particular offence to was of Hugh Hefner as a bunny girl with a bunny penis.

CC: I’m writing her name down. I didn’t know about this instance of censorship, but it’s obviously an example of a forbidden challenge to patriarchy’s rigid dichotomy agenda.

JS: Yes, and that was 1971, so what I wanted to ask you was whether it concerns you that there’s been such little change in people’s attitudes after all these years?

CC: For me, since I was a teenager at art school in the seventies, there’s been absolutely massive change. And yet on a logical analysis of what changes there should be, it seems very little. I think we are slowly getting there. And yet there’s also a kind of re-talibanisation of culture. We have to guard our liberal, enlightened advances very carefully and very resolutely. It has always interested me how most men who come into my studio, if I’ve got one of my Adonis works on the go, have been absolutely shocked and horrified. They take my depiction of the ideal male personally. They will gasp ‘I’m not as big as that’! For centuries women have had to get accustomed to men idealising the female form, so that every time we see a female form we don’t necessarily say ‘my breasts aren’t as beautiful as that!’. We’ve internalised that ideal in a way that men have yet to do, which I find very interesting. All kinds of men will walk into my studio - rock and rollers and right on liberals - and they will actually wag a condemning finger at me and go ‘tut tut tut’.

JS: I find it quite strange that they should feel offended by such a depiction.

CC: Yes, they are threatened and… I mean, there are lots of layers there. As an artist, as a woman, inviting people into my studio, what does the invitee expect? The invite sees me with these idealised male forms and then thinks ‘I don’t stand a chance here’. So that adds a whole kind of poignancy to the novelty of women entering the workspace as artists. And I’m not sure that male artists have had to deal with that level of erotic charge when their male patrons walked into their studio.

JS: To go back to the erect… to the ithyphallus, do you think that they would have been more likely to exhibit it if it had been painted by a man?

CC: They would have been more likely to exhibit it if it had been done by a man, yes and no. Because, as a matter of fact, very many men artists through the ages have had terrible times with censorship of nudity. This could be one of the reasons why men paint relatively few images of the male nude. Although, actually. I went to the National Gallery the other day and for the first time they had this absolutely fantastic male nude by the great French Impressionist Gustave Caillebotte. It must be the first time that this male nude has been seen in public for 50 years! Male nudes painted by male artists are hidden and censored, too. So in other words, I would say there would be a pressure on men from painting the male nude as well. When David Hockney began painting the male nude in an erotic way, he was going to have a very difficult time had he not had Kasmin as a patron and a protector, and Kasmin himself was gay. I don’t think men have had that much easier a time of painting male nudes than women have. Male nakedness, because of patriarchy’s homosexual panic, can be problematic or confrontational whether painted by a male or a female.

JS: Yes, one of the artists I’m really interested in is Tom of Finland…

CC: I adore Tom of Finland! How wonderful that you love him too!

JS:  I do, and I think it’s really interesting how he… perhaps almost over-idealised the male genitalia, and how that was obviously seen as very threatening.

CC: Well he’s such a great draughtsman! I love his work because it is kind of popular and naïve at the same time, you know? Well listen, his painting isn’t necessarily ‘art’. He was painting for, I would guess, mainly what he would presume his audience was: homosexual, but I know a lot of women who absolutely adore his work.

JS: That’s very good because I’ve found that the reaction of women has generally been that the idea of homosexual erotica is quite off-putting to them.

CC: I don’t really like S&M, but that’s my own taste; I don’t like torture in bed! But Tom of Finland… those beautiful men lined up drinking at a bar; I just want to stand amongst them.

JS: That’s the beauty of Tom of Finland I think. He wasn’t so interested in S&M and torture, dungeons and so on - all of his men are depicted outside, in natural settings like woodland…

CC: Yes, or on the beach. I’ve looked at his work for a long, long time. I could also think of somebody else - have you heard of Kurt Kauper?

JS: I’m not familiar with him, no.

CC: Kurt Kauper is a little bit more ‘fine art’ than Tom of Finland. I first saw an illustration of his about fifteen years ago: a nude of…not David Niven… a very brilliant Hollywood actor…Oh, yes, Cary Grant. Anyway, please look at Kauper’s work. He’s also done some fantastic pictures of hockey players. Very graphic. I don’t know enough about him to know whether he is gay, or whether he’s ever talked about being gay, but I love his images of men. I don’t think necessarily they’re painted to be erotic, but I empathise with him, because I think he’s painting the beautiful male nude - honouring the male nude - in the same kind of way as I do. He paints women, too.

JS: I think that this kind of male nude painted by men is really central to the theme of transformation, especially with the way Tom of Finland appropriated the image of the nude male as something that actually celebrated the beauty of masculinity, whilst allowing the audience to revel in masculinity and feel masculine themselves, rather than feel their masculinity threatened.

CC: As a matter of fact, I can confirm that for you. It’s the masculinity in Tom of Finland’s work, of men loving each other, men loving the look of other men, which I find so life affirming and so gorgeous. It goes back to that idea that it’s not masculinity that’s the problem. The problem is patriarchy and what patriarchy allows men to do in a damaging way to those that have less power than them. You could say that Tom of Finland is objectifying men in his fantastic portraits, but I don’t feel that he wants to destroy those men and be nasty to them, or not allow them to vote or give them equal wages and stuff like that! So that’s where I think feminists have come unstuck sometimes, when they assume that masculinity is an issue, and that objectification is an issue. To me that’s not what it’s about. I love and cherish the objects I paint.

JS: So to go on to the next question, how important do you think the rebirth of figurative art was in furthering the cause of feminism? And I’m really thinking of the criticism of figurative art - that the male gaze couldn’t be appropriated by using an artistic language created by men - do you think there’s any truth in that criticism? How do you respond to it?

CC: I can’t respond to it very academically, except that there’s a wonderful book called The Power of Feminist Art. There’s some fantastic figurative art in that book, and it stretches from the early fifties. For instance it even encompasses Alice Neel. One of the most incredible portraits owned by the Tate is by Alice Neel of a naked man, one of her friends, with a very big phallus. Absolutely fabulous! Anyway, this is my subject really, and I’ll try to be brief. One of the difficulties for me as a student at Central St. Martins School of Art when I was nineteen was that just then the art male establishment decided that figurative art was dead. They retreated into abstract art, which kind of disabled me. In fact life drawing was banned at Central in the year that I started there. To me, unless you can do life drawing, even if you’re never going to use it, you can’t really do figurative work. I think that the minute you do figurative work you are tackling ideas and philosophy and then maybe ideology. I think that for a lot of male artists the ideologies that would be prevalent at that time, i.e. Capitalism and Communism had seemed to have ‘failed’, so they had nothing figurative to work on so they retreated into decorative abstractness. Whereas for feminists, or for women artists, there was a whole landscape of ideas and ideologies about race, about gender and sex which absolutely needed a figurative practice to explore. And to a certain extent, because life drawing was abolished in art colleges, women found it very difficult to explore in a figurative manner some of the intellectual ideas that were thrown up by the politics of the 20c. However, as you will see if you look at The Power of Feminist Art, a lot of feminists didn’t stop doing figurative work but, because it was so political, it was hidden from public view, or excluded from the cannon and the academy. And you have to remember those feminist artists from the fifties and sixties were considered to be second-rate because they were women.

JS: Yes that’s certainly something I’ve come across. So you could almost say that it was actually the feminist artists who were making figurative work that were subverting the male artistic language and not the other way round?

CC: Absolutely. There’s a kind of academic orthodoxy that the avant-garde stopped in the sixties. Male academics will say ‘where is the avant-garde after the sixties?’ Well, feminist art was the avant-garde.

JS: And I suppose the patriarchy didn’t want to accept that.

CC: Absolutely not. The art world could accept men challenging certain things - the male avant-garde has always challenged contemporary orthodoxy - but when women started challenging the very footings of patriarchy, that was not going to be acceptable. Just flip through The Power of Feminist Art…  Look at Sylvia Sleigh…

JS: I hope they’ve got it in the library…

CC: If they haven’t it’s an absolute scandal! Anyway you will see how feminists were doing conceptual work because it’s a very fast way to work. When you want to make a political point you can do it very fast with a conceptual work. Figurative painting can take time. Never the less, there was always a lot of figurative art going on in the sixties and seventies, by women artists, but they were not allowed into the male public art space.

JS: So do you feel that there are any individuals that have particularly influenced your own work or viewpoints? Talking about Pauline Boty as well, do you feel that she has been quite influential upon your own work? Because obviously she is someone who was producing figurative work in the sixties.

CC: Exactly, and it blew my mind when Derek Boshier took me to meet Pauline Boty. At Central life classes were banned and all the students coming from Roy Ascott’s classes were into cybernetics and abstract work and I was really feeling very isolated and disheartened. To see Pauline Boty’s work, her colour palette was so un-English, absolutely blazingly optimistic. And the fact that she was working figuratively and actually tackling political issues - I don’t know if you can imagine what an impact her portrait of Jean Paul Belmondo had on me! The rose on his head! Any young woman would know that the rose on his head was a symbol of female genitalia…

JS: It’s certainly a very sexual image

CC: It is such a wonderful, erotic, loving, celebratory portrait of a man…anyway, so Pauline Boty was a huge enabling influence on me. The other great women artists were people like Bridget Riley - and great as Bridget Riley is - but that was not how I wanted my art practice to develop.

JS: And do you think that the fact that women artists like Bridget Riley were producing abstract art was perhaps one of the reasons why she has become so much more famous than Pauline?

CC: If you draw up a group of the women artists who were allowed into the male cannon: Elizabeth Frink, Bridget Riley, Barbara Hepworth…yes you could make that argument. But Pauline died when she was very young. Had she lived, with the confidence to carry on in the figurative way she was painting, she would have hit the moment in the mid-seventies…she wouldn’t have been excluded for long. Dr David Mellor, having rescued those paintings, the minute he put them on the wall in an exhibition with other sixties artists, there was just no argument any more. David was literally attacked, he was actually physically attacked by one of the most famous and powerful art critics of the time, for allowing Pauline Boty’s work in that exhibition. Some male artists of the sixties said he couldn’t exhibit their work if he allowed her into the exhibition.

JS: That’s really quite shocking.

CC: It is shocking, but those were the absolute battles that had to be fought. But once you put Pauline Boty’s work there, there’s no discussion. And if Pauline had been alive and carried on painting, she would be absolutely huge and considered to be one of the greatest celebrated painters of our time. Like for instance Louise Bourgeois. She only become recognised as one of the greatest living American painters in the middle of the eighties. If only I’d known Louise Bourgeois when I was twenty at art school… I didn’t know that she existed. Unbelievable really.

JS: So would you say that even though Pauline didn’t live to see the height of feminism in the seventies, she in many ways anticipated it?

CC: Yes, it’s not that she anticipated feminism exactly; she was just innately - because she wanted to earn her own living as a woman artist - a feminist. As a matter of fact, Dr. Sue Tate is very interesting on this point. Sue discovered that at the time Pauline’s contemporary friends didn’t understand the political positions that she was working through in her paintings. We say they couldn’t see it. When Pauline was painting It’s a Man’s World I and 11, the meaning and significance of what she was saying in the paintings was so shocking that they kind of blanked them.

JS: I’ve heard that when It’s a Man’s World was first exhibited it was completely disregarded.

CC: Yes, I think it was wilfully ignored because, to actually engage with it would have caused a lot of problems. So what you do, as is often the case with a shocking taboo, is just literally walk steadfastly past. But that’s the power of Pauline Boty’s paintings. The fact that they had to be so fervently ignored indicates how hot they were.

JS: While Pauline was alive, she experienced a lot of prejudice purely from the position of being a ‘beautiful’ woman, possibly to the extent that it prevented her from being taken seriously as an artist. So the final question I wanted to ask was whether you feel this is something you’ve experienced in your own career?

CC: Well you see, what I say to that is this: I was on a television programme with Waldemar Janacek who said: ‘Pauline Boty was just a dolly bird, she was a bad painter’. I replied, well, in fact in the 1960’s we were after all surrounded by very, very beautiful male painters. David Hockney was very beautiful. Allen Jones was very beautiful. Derek Boshier was very beautiful. It’s interesting how the men around were fantastically conscious of how decorative they were. I mean, David Hockney didn’t wear a gold lamé jacket and dye his hair blonde without being very interested in his appearance. So, like her male contemporaries, Pauline Boty not only was painting the sixties, she embodied the sixties. And as much as I would say I didn’t know I was beautiful, people said that I was beautiful, and that therefore they couldn’t take me seriously. I don’t forget that people will say, for instance, that David Beckham isn’t a very good footballer. So beauty has it’s disadvantages but I think, that can apply to men and women. And it’s not very graceful to complain about it. What you have to do as an artist is just fucking carry on and do the work! Prejudice sometimes hurts, but it’s to be expected. People have said to me ‘Caroline if you make yourself look ugly you’ll be taken more seriously’. Well how do you make yourself look ugly?! That’s a Taliban solution. In reaction to that I’m going to make myself more beautiful! And now I’m 64, age has come upon me. And I say to all youths, male and female, honour your pulchritude, be as sexy and virile as you possibly can while you’re young and students, because it won’t last. Just enjoy it!

* Telephone interview 27/04/09

September 2009

For the last eighteen months or so I’ve been enjoying the historic change created by the critical mass of women getting recognition in all sectors and at every level of the music industry - Krissi Murison has just been appointed editor of NME, the first woman. Musicians like Bat For Lashes, Little Boots, Florence in the Machine, VV Brown and Lady Gaga have unhinged the unreconstructed faction who whinge that so many women getting attention is ‘too many’ or ‘a fad’. Just when the gender hullabaloo was deafening, yet another young woman entered the mix. She is La Roux. Early this year friends went to see her at the Notting Hill Arts Club and they raved about her. And suddenly this summer, there she was ‘red-hot and hair raising’ leaping to the top of the charts with singles ‘In for the Kill’ and ‘Bulletproof'. In June La Roux’s album ‘La Roux’ was battling for No 1 in the charts with Michael Jackson.

When BBC Music Entertainment contacted me to ask whether I would like to ‘champion’ La Roux for the Mercury Prize*, I couldn’t have said a more resounding YES! ‘I think she is FABULOUS!’ I told producer Sasha Duncan, and her cameraman John Williams, when they came to my studio to film me for the BBC Mercury Prize website.

La Roux (Elly Jackson) creates perfect pop songs about love and betrayal, happiness and misery, lust and fidelity – ‘As if by Magic/ Thoughts of you are gone/ And now I’m keeping/ My head in the clouds/ And it’s not so tragic/ If I don’t look down’ – presented in minimalist electro-pop with oodles of melody and a touch of trance. She demands fun and thrills but she makes us hold our breath because, of course, punishment is what fun lovers are bound to provoke. There is a kind of careless danger about La Roux, a light and darkness that makes her exceptional. Her sound is angular and metallic dry, as if it reaches us from outer space but then, with arranger/producer Ben Langmaid, she adds a velvet rich detail, like the London Community Gospel Choir on ‘Cover My Eyes’.

Pop has always been about confronting adversity with pleasure and La Roux is a brilliant new star carrying the torch of this grand tradition. But she is not only a musician; La Roux is a DIVA, a leader of fashion. Her style is a subtle but majestic rebuke to the normal. Her sexuality is reserved and ambiguous. A quif of red hair screeches over her forehead like the wing of a stealth bomber. And suddenly thousands of young people want to be like her.

Sasha Duncan suggests that it is hard for pop acts to win the most prestigious music industry awards, and I agree. Powerful voices in the music press have always tried to trivialise pop - which is strange because there wouldn’t be rock ‘n’ roll without pop music. Trivialising pop music has a lot to do with fear of young people’s lust and passion – and in particular fear of young women’s lust and passion.

Anyway, at last so many barriers are breaking down. This year it is my pleasure and an honour to champion La Roux for the Mercury Prize – La Roux, with a debut hit album of exquisite pop songs, deserve to win.

* BBC 2 Mercury Prize coverage Tuesday 8th September 10pm - update: the prize of £20,000 for best album of the year was won by Speech Debelle for 'Speech Therapy'

July – August 2009

Painting: over the summer I will complete ‘A Sweet Lob from 25 Yards…’ (oil on canvas 153 x 122cm) and ‘Anemones in a Glass Vase’ (oil on canvas 76.2 x 76.2) as well as beginning a not yet titled beach scene. The weather forecast is for a heat wave so the windows and doors of my studio will be wide open and summer sounds of Ladbroke Grove will drift in with a lot more Michael Jackson in the mix than usual. Of all the images of Jackson I saw over the weekend of his death the most striking was a 2004 painting by Maggi Hambling. She captures a paradox, Jackson’s dejected melancholia set against his promise of ecstasy. David Hockney says it is ‘a bloody good painting’. To my amazement Hambling tells this story: ‘I submitted it to the Royal Academy but certain academicians said they would remove their work if it was hung. Even in supposedly civilised places there are a few people without any judgement.’ This example of sexist art world closed-shopism reminds me of the time in 1993 when certain artists threatened to remove their work from David Mellor’s Barbican exhibition ‘The Sixties art scene in London’ if he included the work of Pauline Boty.

Abortionists Save Women's Lives: I want to thank and support abortion providers, doctors, nurses, health care workers and clinical staff everywhere. Without these courageous health care workers women would have no choice… too many women and girls would die and/or suffer needlessly. In memory of Dr George Tiller, Katherine Spiller, executive editor of Ms. magazine is leading the Reproductive Freedom Campaign. Dr Tiller’s motto was ‘Trust Women’. He endured countless threats, bombings and assaults on his clinic and many legal challenges by anti-abortion extremists. He knew his life was in danger but continued to provide vitally needed healthcare services to women – until he was murdered on June 1st 2009.

May – June 2009

Painting: Ordering stretchers for my next paintings… it is a moment when time stands still. I have been ordering stretchers from Rob at Bird and Davis Ltd for over 44 years. The other day I found in my files a Bird and Davis invoice for three stretchers costing £7.66 dated 1966. Back then Bird and Davis were a small firm of ‘joiners and wood merchants’ in a mews. Today they are ‘the artists’ manufactory’ in an industrial estate warehouse. The only change for me is that whereas in the 60’s I would collect my stretchers and bring them back to my studio by tube, now I have them delivered. In relishing this routine, sameness and familiarity I’ve begun to realise how, in contrast to life’s fast changes and uncertainty, the inheritance of the past stabilises and grounds my work. Robert Hughes said: ‘The one thing that truly sustains creation is the inseminating authority of the past’. I like to think that in my invented paintings I combine a veneration of the past with contemporary concerns.

This spring I’ve been admiring the past paintings of Vilhelm Hammershoi (1864-1916) and the present portraits of Kurt Kauper (1966- ).

Drugs: The spliff is fat and long, a sensual plume of smoke fills the TV screen… Again! Damn that FRANK New Labour advertisement for cannabis. Talk about unintended consequences. Despite the supposedly 'reefer madness' psychotic-giggly youth, the advert is not off-putting. Instead I have to react against the sell. Lovely image of spliff! Oh, I could do with a puff, says my brain. No, I have to tell myself, like I have to resist rushing out for a Magnum ‘Temptation’ every time those delicious adverts pop up. New Labour is spending over £150 million per annum on advertising. How grateful the cannabis industry must be for this bonanza product promotion.

March – April 2009

Queens of British Pop: a 2-part BBC 1 art documentary* is being made to celebrate Britain’s most admired female singers from the Sixties to the present day. From Dustry Springfield to Kate Bush, from Siouxsie Sioux to Amy Winehouse, the films will profile pioneers who have shaped the landscape of popular music and who have proved a huge influence on other musicians. A project like ‘Queens of British Pop’ is necessary because previous BBC films about popular music have all but excluded women.

When the director, Dione Newton, interviewed me we had time to reflect on how good it feels for women to be receiving proper recognition in popular music. Historically it has been male musicians who are grouped together, compared and contrasted as if male was a superior genre. Women were after-thoughts and exceptional add-ons. The exclusively male music club was perverse, contrived and abnormal, not at all women’s actual lived experience of music. At last a new generation of musicians like Florence Welch, Little Boots, Alela Diane, VV Brown, Larkin Grimm, La Roux, Emma-Lee Moss, Josephine Oniyama, Micachu, Melissa Livaudais and Ikonika are reaping the rewards of a sixty year struggle for normality and equality.

Painting: I have completed ‘A Fast Rucking Game’ the first of three 123 x 153cm oil on canvas paintings I am working on this year 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 has destroyed 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.

Lesbian and Gay film festival at the NFT: Gina Birch, a huge pioneering influence on popular music, is screening her 'The Raincoats - Fairytales - A work in progress' documentary.** With Gina, Ana, Beth Ditto, Viv Goldman and Naz in a panel discussion afterwards, and a rousing chorus of 'Lola', it will be good to see you there!

* Wednesday 1st April and Wednesday 8th April at 10.30pm (subject to change).

**6.00 pm Sunday, March 28th.

February 2009

Murder and ‘The Hate Nancy Conspiracy’: Homage to Nancy Spungen

by Nina Antonia.

When Nina Antonia, writer and manager of The Skuzzies, contacted me for this laudatory essay about the young woman Sid Vicious murdered she caught me at a good moment. I had just been interview for a DVD film about Vicious ‘the ultimate punk pin-up’ to coincide with the 30th anniversary of his death in February 1979.* When I mentioned Nancy Spungen there was an attempt to contemptuously brush all memory of her and the way she died aside.

Like the tragic character of Nancy in ‘Oliver’, Nancy Spungen lived and died for her man. Unlike Dickens’s martyred creation however, Nancy Spungen has been reviled ever since. Aged twenty at the time of her death on October 12 1978, ‘Nauseating Nancy’ as the tabloids dubbed her, had been stabbed in the abdomen with a hunting knife. The blade had been a gift to her boyfriend and chief suspect, Sid Vicious. Found slumped under the sink in a bathroom of the Chelsea Hotel, the press reported with morbid salaciousness that Nancy was wearing nothing but black underwear. When her mother, Deborah, went to identify the body in New York, she overheard the desk sergeant describing her murdered daughter as a ‘Druggie Slut’. This casual dismissal of Nancy as trash was nothing in comparison to the ignominy that had been heaped upon her by the punk contingent that she had yearned to be a part of. Sex Pistol’s manager Malcolm McLaren called her 'This dreaded disease'. Johnny Rotten opined that she was a 'Beast'. Guitarist Marco Pirroni chortled that ‘I’m pleased that she was stabbed to death, we all had a good laugh about it. Looking back, you think “that fucking woman!” There was something wrong with her, she wasn’t all there. It was just that she was fantastically stupid.'

Born with an umbilical cord wrapped around her neck, Nancy Laura Spungen came struggling into the world on February 27, 1958. Her mother promised her a life of dignity and although Nancy was given all the trappings of a pleasant middle class upbringing in the suburbs of Philadelphia, she was a troubled child. She was intelligent, she could read Tennessee Williams by her tenth birthday yet, four years later she was diagnosed with organic brain dysfunction and a tendency for anti-social behaviour. None of the diagnoses were enough to save Nancy from delinquency: 'I had a lot of problems. I was just real different from everybody else. I was a lot smarter then them. So I just started to really rebel against my parents. I hated them a lot. They got real worried and sent me to a shrink.'

Like many a disfranchised kid, Nancy turned to rock n’ roll. Not to save her soul but to annihilate it. What better place to begin her journey than New York in the winter of 1974. Within months she had aligned herself to Gotham’s nascent punk scene, claiming that Debbie Harry had been her partner in peroxide when she’d decided to go bleach blonde. Nancy also started writing about punk bands for local publications like New York Rocker which included a review of The Heartbreakers of whom she was especially fond. Indeed, Nancy had a huge crush on The Heartbreaker’s drummer Jerry Nolan who later told me 'I never had a relationship with Nancy, we were friends. I respected her and liked her because she was one of the few people that understood where The Heartbreakers where coming from, musically.' Unfortunately, Nancy’s relocation to the Big Apple soon soured. She couldn’t get paid writing work and her dalliance with heroin became a full blown addiction. To support her habit, she got work dancing in Times Square topless bars. It was also rumoured that she prostituted herself. Whatever the truth, Nancy was a restless spirit and when The Heartbreakers decamped to London, she soon followed arriving the same month, March 1977 that Sid Vicious joined the Sex Pistols. It was Jerry Nolan who introduced her to Sid Vicious. They had much in common as scenester Simone Stenfors recalls: 'One night I bumped into her at the Music Machine. She was all bandaged up and she’d told me she’d tried to slit her wrists, as if it was something normal, something that happened every day.' In a scenario that parallels Nancy’s aptitude for self harm, artist Caroline Coon who at the time was one of the few women writing about punk, remembers taking Sid Vicious for afternoon tea at Fortnum’s: 'They said he could come in if he took off his dilapidated leather jacket. There he was in this sleeveless t-shirt and his arms were covered in burns and scabs. Sid’s self harm was terrible. He was struggling with internal pain. No father, a difficult mother and looking for love.' Love came to Sid in the form of Nancy, who like Sid’s mum, Anne Beverley, was an addict. This is not to suggest that Anne Beverly used with Sid but he would have absorbed and normalised those influences.

Nancy has often been wrongly charged with having turned Sid on to heroin but he was already cognisant with its anesthetic qualities. Lurching to Nancy’s defence, Sid told the press 'I’ve been doing every fucking thing they reckon she turned me on to two years before I met her.' Nancy Spungen and Sid Vicious were damaged children who shared the same irresistible pull to the abyss and found comfort in each other’s arms on the long way down. According to Caroline Coon, Sid became less insecure in Nancy’s care. A clip of the couple filmed at the Chelsea Hotel in Lech Kowalski’s documentary ‘DOA’ shows Nancy fussing over Sid like a concerned little mom. No doubt Nancy was bolshie, mouthy and sometimes hostile. Many of the qualities that Nancy was despised for led to Sid Vicious being idolised and revered. So why the Hate Nancy conspiracy?

Over the last 30 years an industry largely propelled by men has sprung up around punk. Book after book from Legs McNeil’s definitive account of NY punk ‘Please Kill Me’ to Colegrave and Sullivan’s ‘Punk’ tome reiterate the Nauseating Nancy myth, never seeking to question the party line. I asked Caroline Coon why she thought that might be: 'You are going to get a lot of scorn poured upon a young woman who is virile, sexy, and luscious. She was very confident, delicious looking. Curly hair, blue eyes, luscious lips. I remember her running over to say hello to me when she first arrived in London. Nancy came into a scene which was resolutely misogynist. The British library is knee deep in books about the patriarchal horror of sexy women. It isn’t much spoken about but in rock n’ roll there is an all male fan-club, the homoerotic relationship that male fans and managers have to the bands. She was like punk’s Yoko. Nancy was another woman who got closer to a rock hero than any man could have done. She is a focus for male jealousy and misogyny and written off as a groupie.'

When Alex Cox was casting the role of Nancy in his 1986 movie ‘Sid and Nancy’ which sought to portray the couple as punk’s Romeo and Juliet, a then virtually unknown girl, Courtney Love, tried out for the role of Spungen. In the audition she declared ‘I am Nancy Spungen’. Typically, the feisty Love got a bit part while the anodyne Chloe Webb was cast as Nancy and never once sets the screen on fire. Even on film Nancy was denied. In life, she was a vibrant creature who invented her own look, a smoky eyed after hours Jean Harlow in ripped stockings possessing the downbeat glamour of the kind of girl who sticks a broken stiletto heel back on with chewing gum and totters into the night. Whilst Courtney Love might have empathised with Nancy, Spungen was a victim. In the last few days of her life, she finally admitted to her mother that Sid had been hitting her. Their romance had run aground in a seedy hotel room and the final scene was about to play out. By stripping Nancy of any dignity, her detractors undermine Sid’s love for her. Shortly before his own death in February 1979, Sid sent a letter to Deborah Spungen in which he wrote 'Nancy was a very special person, too beautiful for this world, I feel so privileged to have loved her and been loved by her….'

Sources: ‘Please Kill Me’ Legs McNeil & Gillian McCain, ‘Punk’ Stewart Cosgrove & Chris Sullivan, ‘In Cold Blood’ Nina Antonia, plus interviews with Simone Stenfors and Caroline Coon.

*DVD 'Sid Vicious - My Way' Play.com

January 2009

Drugs and Painting: when to stop the BBC.

‘We cannot encourage you to break the law’ said the BBC TV Horizon researcher. This was a disingenuous back-covering statement because breaking the law by smoking cannabis while being filmed was exactly what Horizon wanted me to do.

I first got a call from the BBC several months ago. A Horizon researcher rang to say that she was looking to film a group of people smoking cannabis and would I be part of such a group? What was the purpose of the programme, I asked. It was explained to me that Horizon wanted to show how cannabis taking is normal and that the public perception of the stereotypical pot smoker as young is false. Over the telephone the researcher herself sounded, to me, very young. I decided to engage with her at some length because: the subject is close to my heart, I have campaigned against prohibition for over forty years, I am a publicly declared moderate pot smoker and Horizon has the reputation for being one of the best science programmes on TV.

This is my position, I said: filming groups of people smoking pot has been done many times before and the images have done nothing to further the anti-prohibition cause. I explained that seeing people smoking pot was no more informative about cannabis than seeing people drinking wine was informative about alcohol. There could be mild-mannered post-dinner pot smoking and distressing music festival excessive-psychosis pot smoking. I explained that it is an established fact of research that a drug per se is not the issue. The issue is how individuals use a drug.

I went on to say that I had always maintained that using any mind-altering substances for pleasure was an adult activity. Cannabis use, I told the researcher, was in my view incompatible with intellectual learning and psychological development and therefore should, like such things as alcohol and tobacco, be prohibited for children under the age of eighteen.

For me, I explained, pot smoking is an occasional recreational activity. One of the reasons I would not smoke a joint while being filmed for TV was because, to me, being interviewed about drugs and prohibition is serious work and I do not smoke pot at work. At work, I explained, whether painting or writing, I need to be compos mentis, of clear and controlled mind. And I laughed as I told her that the place I was most likely to smoke pot was in bed with a lover. I said I would be prepared to be filmed talking about my drug use but I would not take part in a group pot smoke nor would I be filmed smoking pot in an interview. The conversation ended with my suggesting other people she should talk to. I wished her good luck with her programme not expecting to hear from her again.

About two months later, another Horizon researcher telephoned. She referred to my previous conversation with her colleague. She said the form of the programme had changed and that they were no longer going to film a group of pot smokers. She wondered whether I would be prepared to be interviewed smoking pot? No, I said. And I repeated, firmly and in depth why: I would not smoke pot during an interview because to me being interviewed is work and I do not use drugs at work. I repeated that I would give an interview about my drug use. The researcher said, yes, she could not encourage me to break the law and that the BBC would be interested in an interview. As always with researchers I knew notes were being taken. The researcher said she would ring me back to arrange a date and time. I was informed that Horizon does not pay fees but that I would receive £50 in lieu of half a days work. This I agreed to, exceptionally, because of Horizon’s educational remit.

On the appointed day, just before Christmas, I stopped painting and cleaned-up ready for the film crew. When they arrived, in my studio, I suggested to the director a good place for the interview to take place. The director wondered whether she could film me painting. This was not what I had agreed to or expected, and because, for a start I had cleared up for the day and painting now would be a fabrication I said ‘no’. And then I hesitated. I did not want to upset the director. I backtracked a bit and I asked her exactly what she wanted.

The director said that she wanted to film me painting ‘because otherwise people might think you are just some woman sitting amongst a bunch of paintings…’ She reacted to the expression on my face by elaborating. She said ‘we could have film of you painting while your voice over would be saying how smoking pot helped with your creativity…’ Absolutely NOT! I said, and I turned to the researcher, ‘I explicitly told you that I do not use drugs for my work’. I must have looked thunderous because the director intervened. ‘I’m sorry’ she said ‘it has been some time since I read my notes…’

Well, that was it. Put myself in the hands of this sloppy journalist? No way! We do interviews, they can take hours and only a very few quotes will end up on screen, quotes cut and selected by directors and producers. Usually this quote selection is not crucial because the subject is not law breaking. But, the subject of this BBC TV Horizon interview was to be my law breaking. Considering that the director had come to film me carelessly, without a proximate reading of the notes she had received from researchers to whom I had given a careful amount of my time, I had no trust in how she might use my interview or represent my knowledge and experience. I could not go ahead with the interview. I put a stop to the BBC.

After the film crew had gone I realised that Horizon had not come to interview me. They just wanted film of ‘some woman’, a pot smoking 63 year old. And I had a laugh at my own bruised ego’s expense.

Happy New Year to all, especially to anti-prohibition campaigners everywhere!

December 2008

‘Sex, Drugs and Rock n Roll: The Sixties Revealed’ in three episodes on FIVE TV, Monday 1st, 8th and 15th December.

Holloway Prison 1968: I was sitting in a dungeon when the heavy door clanked open and a prison officer ordered me to get ready to see the Governor. She told me that I was to be released, immediately. A few minutes later I was on the back seat of a limousine next to Bernard Braden, the famous and powerful TV journalist. He was taking me to the Mayfair Hotel to be interviewed.

Bernard Braden knew about me because my arrest and imprisonment had been front-page news. Aside from arresting ‘hippies’ the police had been harassing rock stars.  Mick Jagger and Keith Richards were busted and given prison sentences. Brian Jones was arrested. In October 1967 he was sent to prison for nine months. Another demonstration was necessary. In my studio we sat up all night rolling 1000 fake joints. Next day we marched up and down Kings Road smoking our ‘joints’ and holding ‘Free Brian Jones’ placards. The police were not amused. Several of us, including Chris Jagger (Mick’s brother), Steve Abrams, Jeff Dexter and Suzy Creamcheese, were arrested. At my court appearance, in January 1968, I was given a conditional discharge and ordered to pay court costs of £10. ‘No’, I said to the magistrate, ‘you can arrest me, but I am certainly not paying you to arrest me. I refuse to pay costs.’ The magistrate said he would give me two weeks to reconsider and if did not pay I would be sent to prison for two weeks. At the time, as co-founder and director of Release giving 24 hour help and advice to people, especially those who had been arrested on drugs offences, I thought that I should have actual experience of what hundreds of pot smoking young people were going though. Three days into my prison sentence Bernard Braden paid the £10 costs.

A few months ago - 40 years later - I saw this interview for the first time.

Bernard Braden recorded it himself, at his own expense as a project to chronicle the lives of Britain’s famous and infamous. In doing so, he created his own slice of history. He died before he could reveal his work to the world and since his death, it has remained forgotten…until now.

In ‘Sex, Drugs and Rock n Roll: The Sixties Revealed’, produced by Silver River’s Alan Brown, some of the class of 1968 come face to face with ourselves. There is Cilla, Lulu, Peter Cook, Quentin Crisp, Sean Connery…..

Incidentally, our protests and demonstrations had the desired effect: in November 1967 Brian Jones was freed from prison and instead fined £750 and ordered to see a court appointed psychiatrist.

November - October 2008

Painting: I am working on three oil on canvas paintings (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. When I asked what Yoko was doing drawing around her body onto the piece of cloth, Barbara replies, “I can’t remember, I’ll have to ask her when next we’ll meet - I think it was about having my shadow-image with her that she
could keep maybe?” 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 a John Latham choreographed ‘Cut’ performance during DIAS at the Mermaid theatre in Notting Hill. 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, Jeffrey Shaw, Ian McDonald Munro, David Hall, Ian Breakwell and Anna Ridley, were to "carry ideas via artist's forms of expression, 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.

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.


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 Youth Campaign.

CUNST ART Comment on: 'A Coordinated Prostitution Strategy and a summary of responses to Paying the Price'. Home Office. January 2006.

A male Home Secretary who has sex without condoms with a married woman and then attempts to break up her marriage and family by demanding DNA tests on her children would look hypocritically baffoonish announcing moralistic legislation for how consenting adults should manage their sex lives. Luckily the Home Office is rid of David Blunkett.

Fiona Mactaggart presented Government's Prostitution Strategy with a good deal of credibility considering the moralistic muddle she presided over. The premise of the Paying the Price prostitution review was to eradicate prostitution with a zero tolerance policy to 'any form of sexual commercial exploitation'. In the real world, and in almost every line of her post-review Prostitution Strategy, Fiona Mactaggert acknowledges that toleration of how consenting adults in private conduct their sex lives is necessary. Already this relatively brave moderation is being condemned. Apparently there is fury at the Home Office's last minute decision to include in the Strategy the proposal of an amendment to the law 'so that two (or three) individuals may work together'. A powerful group of lobbyists, authoritarian feminists and women MPs had been urging the Home Office to adopt a Swedish-type law that would make it a crime for consenting adults (mostly men) to buy sex from consenting adults (mostly women).

Cunst Art is opposed to authoritarian feminists who still hold to the view that all prostitutes are the mindless victims of male power. There have always been authoritarian puritan feminists who order 'other' women around. Their natural alliance with women-hating religious reactionaries, right-wing conservatives and prohibitionists can give feminism a bad name. Authoritarian feminists refuse to listen to the voices of prostitutes who say they freely chose to do sex work, contending that such women are not credible. Liv Jessen, who in 2004 won an Amnesty International Award for her Prostitutes' Rights work, says that feminists who stigmatise prostitutes and refuse to accept their right to choose are wrong and that they dehumanise these woman with their accusations of 'a false consciousness syndrome'. Authoritarian feminists only want to believe prostitutes who know what is best for them, are 'repentant sinners' and who can then be called 'survivors'.

'Women in prostitution naturally have different views on the subject of prostitution,' says Jessen. 'But to say that only the ones who agree with us are right, while the prostitutes who think differently are not ascribed human qualities like the right to make their own choices or to be believed, is oppressive and a fundamentalist attitude.'

There were 861 responses to the Government's consultation paper. Considering the enormous amount of money, time and serious endeavour it would be churlish simply to dismiss the resulting Prostitution Strategy because of the missed opportunity that it represents.

In part the Strategy is tremendously good. The bad parts are where Government, and the majority of the respondents to the consultation, contend that it is unacceptable and must remain illegal for consenting adults to buy and sell sex. With much 'zero tolerance' rhetoric Government has decided to play to 'popular' opinion, hysteria about 'evils' of prostitution and 'sexy' media stories about the 'nuisance' of street prostitution. In fact, and in reality, as the Strategy acknowledges (page 13), 'the level of nuisance impacts on relatively few residents and local businesses'. For the 'few' who can be 'hugely distressed' by street prostitution there are already ample remedies in law.

It is a crime to buy sex from children under the age of 18. All trafficking of people of any age for sexual exploitation anywhere in the world is illegal. Men who have committed offences under the Sexual Offences Act 2003 of trafficking women for prostitution, false imprisonment and rape have received prison sentences of between 9 to 21 years.

What everyone agrees must not be tolerated are murder, rape, violence, assault, threats, sexual abuse, grooming, kidnapping, theft, robbery, abduction, slavery, coercion, human trafficking, fraud, tax evasion, public disorder, nuisance, noise and litter. We have laws, including the Sexual Offences Act 2003, which cover these offences.

So long as adults obey these laws and so long as adults trade according to standard business codes, employment law and health and safety regulations then they should be free to buy and sell sex. Adults who choose to buy and sell sex want to be safe not saved.

Government Prostitution Strategy is at its best when it considers children under the age of 18. The most effective measures Government proposes are the non-criminalizing voluntary welfare service 'holistic' packages. Social services, health agencies and Drug Action Teams are being encouraged to work together with a variety of early interventions to help distressed children, identifying and reaching children in need of protection, and support for vulnerable drug dependent street people, whether they are prostitutes, homeless or beggars.

These commendable welfare services never grab 'sexy' headlines. They are low-key, out of sight, unpublicised, despised by reactionary tabloids - and expensive (in the short term). No amount of DIP's, DAT's, NTA's, CRP's, CAF's, PSHE's or VVAPP's (Drug Intervention Programmes, Drug Action Teams, National Treatment Agency, Common Assesment Frameworks, Crime Reduction Programmes, Personal Health and Social Education, Victims of Violence and Abuse Prevention Programmes) can have impact without money. Government makes much of the few multi-agency Sexual Assault Referral Centres (SARCS's) but only intends to fund more as money becomes available from 'recovered proceeds of crime'.* In other words, women will only get proper protection from violent sexual criminals if police manage to recover money from gangsters!

Headline grabbing 'crack-down' rhetoric on prostitution and 'curb crawlers' is cheap and it always fails the most vulnerable, especially the women and children most likely to be victims of sex crime and violence.

But hidden within Governments Prostitution Strategy is a remarkable emphasis on changing the paedophile paradigm behaviour of patriarchal men that could make a dramatic difference to all women.

In patriarchy male status is gained by the ability to control, own and be seen with young women, the younger the better. In patriarchy having sex with chirldren is the norm. It is considered perverse for men to desire mature women. Men like the DJ John Peel, who for years salivated on the BBC about his lust for 'school girls', are valorised. Men like the film maker Woody Allen and teacher William Gibson are forgiven the statuary rape of children under the age of 18 on the grounds that this is a 'grey' area and that they married the children. Allen and Gibson deny they are paedophiles. They certainly appear not to love children since they were selfishly willing to reduce the life chances of the uneducated children in their care to childbearing and domesticity. Many men are very tolerant and envious of other men who have sex with teenagers - unless those teenagers happen to be their own daughters and then they are overcome with child-is-my-property vengeance.

Making it a crime to buy sex from children under the age of 18 has been a radical paedophile attitude-changing law. Adults who buy sex are under strict liability as to age. Pleading that they did not know the child was under 18 because she looked and acted grown-up or that she 'consented' is not acceptable mitigation in court. Adults who want to buy sex are having to get accustomed to only buying sex from those who are very obviously mature and old enough to cope with the serious responsibilities of the profession.

Encouraging prostitutes to report abusive and violent men to the police is another positive element in the Strategy. Government wants prostitutes to have confidence in the criminal justice system. The intention is to train special sexual offence liaison officers with specific information on how to deal with crimes against women involved in prostitution. Of course, legalising prostitution would be the most effective way to enable prostitutes and all workers in the sex industry to report crimes committed against them. However, if Government follows through with support for Ugly Mug 'dodgy punter' schemes and the national data base that is being set up with information about men who are abusive and violent to prostitutes then we could see a significant change in the way men behave towards sex workers. When men know that their behaviour to sex workers is being monitored they are likely to behave well. Intelligence about violent and abusive men could help to solve crimes of abduction, rape and murder. Men who abuse prostitutes are likely to pose a danger to all women. Men who behave well and respect women sex workers are likely to respect and behave well to all women.

Respecting prostitutes and all 'whores' is the only way to ensure that all women are respected. Only when adults are free to work in a lawful sexual service trade and free to use sex trade services within the law will we be able to protect all women from sexual violence.**

No legal machinery can be brought to bear to eradicate prostitution. At the same time changes in the law can improve the relationship between prostitutes, clients and society to reduce crime and nuisance. The present law stereotypes women prostitutes, and by extension all women, by focusing on women's moral 'fault', impugning women's motives, questioning their rationality and challenging their competence. Prohibition of prostitution creates the conditions for exploitation and crime. Clients can abuse prostitutes. Prostitutes, despite or because of their legal and historic power disadvantage, can harm, rob, "kiss and tell", blackmail, inconvenience or embarrass their clients. To reduce crime we need to use the business-regulating laws we already have to encourage cooperation between the two trading parties. Sex workers and their clients have the mutual, crime reducing interest of treating each other with respect and dignity. Increasing the status of prostitution to a legitimate profession would not only increase the status of all women it would reduce the conditions that foster crime, including violent crime and rape.

'Common prostitute' is a sexist term in law stemming for the belief implicit in our legal system that all women are immoral. The term does not include male prostitutes. Government now recognises that this term is 'offensive'. There are plans to create a new gender-neutral 'soliciting' offence 'along the lines of causing nuisance of harassment in public places through offering sexual services for gain' with penalties varying 'according to persistence'. We look forward to Government's law drafting struggle to define 'gain'. Laws already exist for nuisance and harassment. No new law is necessary.

Government also plans to 'redefine the definition of a brothel'. This is part of the plan to 'research off-street prostitution'. A new law that permits 'two (or three) individuals' working together to provide sexual services will conflict with the Sexual Offences Act 2003 which increased the prison sentence for 'brothel keeping' to seven years.

ASBO's (Anti-social Behaviour Orders), Government acknowledges, are increasingly discredited and 'are of limited use' especially without the back up of welfare support services. (Page 41). From April 2006 a new civil order, an Intervention Order for adults, will run alongside ASBO's to 'help individuals' out of prostitution and those dependent on drugs.

Government acknowledges that criminlalizing prostitutes has no long term effect on street prostitution and that 'success' is more likely where treatment of drug dependence and mental distress is voluntary.

War on prostitution always has and always will fail. The most effective long-term method of crime reduction in relation to prostitution is a social welfare policy that gives a helping hand to those involved in prostitution who want to get out of it and that applies to both buyers and sellers. While prostitution itself should not be a crime, coercion and violence should be. An intelligent Government would persuade the public that such a liberal approach to consenting adults involved in buying and selling sex would reduce crime and benefit everyone. This January the public might have been ready not to begrudge the slight increase in taxation necessary to pay for a society enhancing liberal strategy. Under New Labour we will never know. Maybe this is one for David Cameron and liberal New Tories?

____

* Page 44 5.17 of Paying the Price: a consultation paper on prostitution. Home Office 2004

___

**The Cunst Art pamphlet Calling Women 'Whores' Lets Rapists Go Free by Caroline Coon and 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.

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

December 2005

Rock Against Sexism - continued!

This month's MOJO, edited by Phil Alexander, is brilliant. Kate Bush is on the cover! In the history of MOJO Bush is only the third woman, after Janis Joplin and Madonna, to have broken through what Pat Gilbert calls 'the music press men only segregation barrier'.

Tom Doyle writes the Kate Bush cover story. It is rumoured that Doyle has an instructive by-the-way story to tell about how MOJO got his scoop, the first interview Bush has given for twelve years. Apparently he first offered it to another music magazine. The editor of that magazine, surrounded by an astonished sock of male writers, is reported to have said to Doyle 'if you carry on proposing stories like that you'll be out on the street!' Said editor is idiotically pushing that men only magazine with its ever-diminishing readership into oblivion. He appears unaware that he is breaking anti-discrimination law. Responsible corporate bosses should take note.

The December MOJO also has an article on Debbie Harry and Blondie. These days Blondie is recognised as one of the greatest pop-punk bands of all time. But lest we forget, in 1976 the then editor of New Musical Express gleefully allowed naive Julie Burchill and Tony Parsons to denigrate and dismiss Harry as 'just an ugly old bag'.

Phil Alexander, in a very smart marketing ploy to sell MOJO to the biggest possible readership, has added a great free CD compilation to the package: 'The Roots of Hendrix, 15 tracks that inspired the legend'. Icing on this delicious MOJO cake would have been to have included women in the all-male R&B compilation, say Betty Lavette singing 'Let me Down Easy'.

November 2005

Pop song in Bilbao - British Pop at the Museo de Bellas Artes de Bilbao* until 12th February 2006

In an art history defining moment, the place of women artists in Pop Art is finally beyond contention. It is no longer acceptable to distort art history by excluding women artists from Pop Art exhibitions. Following the lead of Dr David A. Mellor in 1993, curators of Pop Art exhibitions are putting women artists back into the narrative. In other words, the Pop Art story is at last being represented in curated exhibitions today in a truthful telling of how the art was created when women Pop artists worked and played alongside their male Pop artist colleagues, friends and lovers in the 1960's.

Curated by Marco Livingstone, British Pop is a brilliant gathering of 19 artists who make up the hot core of what British Pop Art is. For the first time Pauline Boty's painting 'My Colouring Book', 1963, is included in the cannon. Boty (1938-1966) not only painted Pop Art, she lived it. Like David Hockney with his dyed blond hair and gold lame jacket, Boty dressed with a style and freedom which signed her commitment to the class and gender liberating politics of the time. She reveled in the youth culture of Pop music. As a fan she turned up at Top of the Pop's recordings to dance and pose and swoon in the presence of great stars like Dusty Springfield. 'My Colouring Book' is her painting of the Ebb and Kandor song Springfield recorded for her first solo album. Rarely has youthful love and heartbreak been more exquisitely captured in the three art mediums of music, performance and painting. However, Boty is still the subject of a sexist category error. Livingstone still finds it difficult to 'see' art when it is created by women. While he elevates the self-consciously childlike bad painting marks of male artists like Boshier or Hamilton to the status of vanguard innovation against the academic finish of traditional fine art, he judges Boty's painting to be 'sometimes clumsily executed'.

For the first time the art of Jann Haworth is included in a major Pop Art retrospective. Bringing Haworth back into the heart of the Pop Art cannon could not be more significant. Through her art, and in the way she is able to talk about her work, Haworth exemplifies what W.E.B. de Bois called, in his 1903 book The Souls of Black Folk, 'double consciousness'. In Haworth's art we can see how being a women artist (writer, painter, sculptor or musician) means standing both inside and outside society. A woman artists' 'double consciousness' means that she can see the world as men do while reaching out to touch it as a women. Haworth writes that when Eduardo Paolozzi saw her fabric sculpture 'Cowboy', 1964, he said: 'Cast it in Bronze'. Haworth told him that she had 'cast it in cloth' and 'that was the point'. Her use of stitching and fabric as a high art material was politically explosive. Male artists and the art establishment could not bear it. Sewing, when done by a woman, was considered inferior and second rate compared to any sewing art or craft made by men, like tapestry or tailoring. Because Haworth dangerously challenged male art practice and sexism she was the butt of male backlash to the point of almost being 'silenced' as an artist. Luckily for us her courage and conviction - not to mention the intellectual depth she can draw on to articulate her positioning in art establishment politics - has meant that she continues to make art, much of which 'connects directly' to the work she made in the 1960's.

More Pop Art women to sing about: Evelyne Axell, Rosalyn Drexler and Alina Szapocznikow.

* A tip for visits to Bilbao: if you are disappointed in the art on show in the Guggenheim go three minutes down the road to the Museo de Bellas Artes. Here you will be rewarded, as James Mayor would say, by art 'not interfered with by architects' but art in perfect exhibition spaces, a fine permanent collection, especially works from the Basque School.

October 2005

Rock against sexism - and racism, too!

For women to challenge the sexism of being under represented and excluded is dangerous - you risk your career. There is enough female representation around these days for it to be frequently argued that in asking for more Western women are selfish and go 'too far'. Women do not read the music press is the excuse offered for why media like New Musical Express and Q are male dominated zones. Young women music writers continue to plot ways to break in.

Emily Mackay*, music writer and postgraduate student at Goldsmith College, turned me on to 'revolution',** a new music magazine written by women about women musicians for women music fans. It was, she said, on sale at Rough Trade.

Some time ago at Rough Trade: Nigel House, the ever-helpful manager, recommended a new punk compilation Rough Trade had just released in co-operation with Mute. I cast my eye down the track list. It was only male groups. I suggested to Nigel that there would be a big demand for a CD of 1970's punk-era women bands, an alternative soundtrack to those exhilarating times, from The Slits through Althea and Donna to Lena Lovich. Nigel grimaced at mention of Lovich. 'You're wrong' I said, remembering Too Tender (To Touch) 'she was great!' Write up a proposal and a track list, said Nigel, and he would put it to Mute. I sent him the idea for SHEPUNK! But I heard nothing. Time passed, and here I was again at Rough Trade.

What's 'revolution'? Nigel asked. A new music magazine - about women musicians. After inquiring out back Nigel returned to tell me they had sold out. But, he said, he could recommend a great new CD compilation called 'Grlz'.

Oh, I exclaimed, so without telling me you nicked my idea after all! With a flash of recall Nigel said 'I left a message on your answering machine. And the Grlz CD is not put out by us.' I did not receive any message. And my proposal deserved a written reply. It appeared to me that not only had Rough Trade ignored my letter but they had missed an obviously commercial opportunity. Nigel huffed. 'Well, anyway' he said 'I don't agree with gender-based records'. How rich, I laughed, coming from behind the counter of a record shop that mostly serves men with mostly gender-based records - male gender records!

Later: Pat Gilbert, the great music writer and one of the nicest non-sexists around, was looking sharp in designer stubble and a porkpie hat. We were dodging through rain back to the Q office where he was editing another Q Classic on The Clash. We had been to the launch of 'Who Shot The Sheriff?', Alan Miles' documentary film, supported by the Amicus trade union***, about the history of the Rock Against Racism (RAR) movement.

We agree that Alan had compiled a series of stunning film clips of 1970's RAR concerts, demonstrations and revolt, images which were suppressed at the time. However, despite film of rock stars like Mick Jones and Pete Docherty giving emotional endorsement to the anti-racism cause, I thought the film ended without focus or impact. Political organisers Alan had to rely on to tell the contemporary story appeared unable to make sense of what multi-cultural British democracy is up against to-day. These speakers presented themselves as good ol' don't-need-no-educashun blokes who wouldn't touch 'intellectual' clarity with a barge pole. Opposition to the fascist British National Party (BNP) was dumbed down to the level of my anti-fascist logo is as good as your Nazi logo. Thug-stupid stereotyping of the working class, which any self-respecting worker would find offensive, was followed by self-congratulation - for making the effort to fight against racism and fascists who 'come at us with knives'.

Pat thought the political speeches were rather old fashioned. He grew up under Thatcher and he has for her a murderous hatred. But, I pointed out, that old-fashioned rhetoric was typical of much off-putting leftist politics and explained why the left failed to stop Thatcher. And to-day, I said, we will fail to galvanise everyone to Unite Against Racism if we go on aligning ourselves with 'black' fascists. Why isn't Love Music Hate Racism, who are following on from RAR, including Hizbut-Tahrir (HUT) along with the BNP in their anti-fascist campaign? Instead of challenging 'black' fascists the left is lining up along side people from the sexist, fascist right religious block which includes Sir Iqbal Sacranie and The Muslim Council of Britain. It is disastrous for the left not to know when fascists are fascists just because they are not white. Pat said that many on the left are afraid to challange HUT for fear of being called racist. Then he joked that it didn't really concern him personally that Islamo-fascists force women to wear the hijab. I tut tutted and said that if Islamo-fascists had their way they would kill him if he decided to shave off his designer stubble.

And by the way Pat, I said, what happened to my request that you edit a Q Classic dedicated to the history of How Women Have Changed Rock? Pat said: 'But don't you think that having a women only issue is just putting women in a getto?' From whom did Pat get the idea that where women are is a deficient slum? No, I replied, most of the intelligent people I know recognise that where women artists are grouped together is the avant guarde.

* After research for her essay 'Sleeping With The NME: Women, struggle and the Spectre of the Groupie in the UK music press' Emily MacKay concludes: Women's under-representation in the music magazines is one symptom of the denigration of the female in the music press as a whole. As research proves, increasing the number of women in a workplace will not necessarily produce more positive gender representations that might attract more female readers. A specific woman's taste in music or a specific female approach to writing about music proves on examination, impossible to define. The best way in which to alter the representation of women in the music press and attract more female readers is by the activism of individual writers by reclaiming female fandom and sexuality for the music press through parody and satire of stereotypes like 'groupie' or 'hysterical fan'. A separate woman's music magazine might be an important stepping stone, but the ultimate goal must be to normalise a place for women in the world of popular music.'

** 'revolution', edited by Leonie Cooper, is 'here to deliver a kick up the arse of macho music magazines who only cover female artists once in a blue moon. Or if you can see their bra.'

*** Congratulations to Gloria Mills the newly elected first black woman President of the Trades Union Congress (TUC).

September 2005

No, Bush and Blair, no compromise!

On our behalf two white male millionaires, endowed with every liberal secular freedom to make their life on Earth paradise with shaved faces and Bermuda shorts on, have asked placemen in Iraq to "compromise" on the Iraq Constitution. Compromise what? Essentially, to compromise on the secular human rights of women. The compromise will create gender apartheid. And worse. If women do not have equal rights to men then there is no democracy. In a system where women do not have human rights then the rights of men are worthless. In fact, in Iraq today self-appointed gangs of religious police are not only forcing women into the 'Islamic' veil they are murdering men for not growing beards. Men who refuse to compromise on woman's rights guarantee their own rights too.

Bush and Blair's disregard of women's rights is typical. Last month, in the Independent on Sunday, feminist Joan Smith argued that Bush and Blair had created the incipient civil war in Iraq but to bring Troops Out Now was the worst option since it would condemn Iraq to Islamic fascism.* A male letter writer objected. Labelling her a "liberal imperialist" he stated that we have "no business in Iraq and if women and homosexuals are persecuted then that is the way in the Middle East and nothing to do with us." In the 1970's women struggling shoulder to shoulder with working class men and anti racists were told to shut up about women's liberation with varying degrees of civility. Black Power leader Stokley Carmicheal told us that our role in the revolution was "horizontal". One of the organisers of Rock Against Racism, a man with impeccable right-on Labour credentials, remembers that campaigning time. He says, "The spirit was incredible. Where it got a bit silly were the arguments about whether drum risers were phallic symbols and these discussions about the phallic nature of the guitar and all that. It's fine to have intellectual debates about those issues, but in an emergency situation where Asian greengrocers are being petrol-bombed and burnt to death I didn't think it was the number one issue".**

Women were, and still are, challenging sexism in the rock industry. (The debate about phallic instruments is easily settled. The guitar is splendidly hermaphrodite.***) But women were, and still are, also confronting "emergency situations" - the "and all that" issues of rape, 'domestic' violence, and 'honour' murders. The trouble with many men on the British left is that they have always put the rights of immigrant male patriarchs and religious 'community leaders' above and before the secular rights of immigrant and indigenous women. These men are apparently not only disinterested in fighting against sexism and religious persecutors but they are actually dismissive or irritated by anyone who is. It is worse than stupid to brush women's rights aside as 'silly' while you decide how to prioritise what you judge to be more important political concerns. While women are asked to 'compromise', code for shut up, murderous extremists are allowed to flourish at home and abroad.

When women will not shut-up about sexism "no sense of humour" accusations fly. However, if you do believe in democracy and human rights and you are not just a sexist political joker then you had better start seriously demanding that Bush and Blair get serious. Support all the women in Iraq, and women every where else in the world who are bravely demanding secular equal rights to men and are refusing to compromise.

* UK, USA and other foreign occupying troops will not have the redemptive opportunity of staying in Iraq to help to 'stabalise the situation' or to 'establish democracy' - they will be forced out by Iraqi 'insurgents'.

* * Q Classic magazine: "Bob Marley and the Story of Reggae". September 2005. Page 100, Rock Against Racism.

*** For an iconic image of a hermaphrodite guitar see "Jimi Hendrix: Cock of the Rock 'n' Roll Roost. No 3". at http://www.axisweb.org/artist/carolinecoon

August 2005

No to 'Faith' and religion.

If you tolerate those who in the name of faith and religion ban art, music, dancing and free speech,

If you tolerate those who in the name of faith and religion demand the genital mutilation of children,

If you tolerate those who in the name of faith and religion stone women to death for 'adultery',

If you tolerate those who in the name of faith and religion call same sex love a sin,

If you tolerate those who in the name of faith and religion refuse women equal rights,

If you tolerate those who in the name of faith and religion refuse to ordain women bishops,

If you tolerate those who in the name of faith and religion control the way women dress,

If you tolerate those who in the name of faith and religion demand that women are 'modest',

If you tolerate those who in the name of faith and religion refuse women control of their bodies and reproduction,

If you tolerate those who in the name of faith and religion refuse the poor birth control and family planning,

If you tolerate any gender apartheid,

If you tolerate "honour killing" women,

If you tolerate the execution of homosexuals and lesbians,

Then do not be surprised when they no longer tolerate you

And you find that they murder and bomb you to death in the name of 'faith' and religion.

(Caroline Coon/Cunst Art)

July 2005

Cunst Art publishes the pamphlet: Calling Women 'Whores' Lets Rapists Go Free.

The pamphlet 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. The pamphlet is designed in conjunction with Richard Adams Associates.

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 reserve your copy email: cunstart@tiscali.co.uk

June 2005

At the Glastonbury Festival, in the Leftfield tent, look out for the launch of the documentary film "Who Shot The Sheriff". Directed by Alan Miles, it is a history of Rock Against Racism - "a mass musical counter-blast to the creeping curse of fascism 1978- 2004". Caroline Coon has contributed photographs of multi-cultural Britain in the punk era.

May 2005

At the Cannabis Education Rally on Sunday May 15th, organised by the Cannabis Research and Education Trust, Caroline Coon exhorted government not to demonise dealers but to licence them. She urged black politicians to campaign to end prohibition. For the full text of the speech: www.schmoo.co.uk/cannabis/carolinecoon.htm

April 2005

Check out the art on producer and designer Mal Burns' site: www.burnsite.int.tl/

MOJO, April 2005, reprints Caroline Coon's report of The Clash in Belfast -
"1977 - Through the Barricades". Today Coon says "The Clash's audience were from both sides of the religious divide - it was a classic case of music bringing people together, which wasn't appreciated in some quarters. The gig was pulled by the authorities - it's still not clear what exactly happened, but there may have been bomb threats."

February 2005

On BBC Radio 4's "You and Yours", in a discussion comparing today's welfare services with those of the 1960's, Caroline Coon said "I disagree with the premise that young people today are less idealistic than they were in the 1960's. Young people today are idealistically engaged in many great causes like Fair Trade, anti racism, gender equality, preserving the environment and ending poverty. Demonstrations against the Iraq war today are very reminiscent of the anti-Vietnam war demonstrations of the 1960's.

"Voluntary welfare services today carry a huge burden of responsibility for social good and they therefore have to be efficient and business-like. But then, many welfare services in the 1960's like Release were efficient and business-like too!"

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