Letter from London

By the time you read this, the UK will be in the full swing of a new parliamentary term, but for now we are in the early post-election blues, after a surprise landslide win for the Conservatives on May 7th. Or perhaps we are in the post-election “Blues,” for blue is the color of the Conservative party here in the UK where, for Americans at least, red is blue and blue is red. The campaign was a strange affair, both urgent and lackluster—but decisive. England went blue. London, Wales, and the north of England stayed red, apart from the very richest constituencies. Scotland went Nationalist. The other parties crumbled. The aftermath was swift. Heads rolled. According to The Guardian newspaper on May 8th, it was a tumultuous election that “decapitated” three party leaders.

Last year I returned, via York and New York, to live in London, a city I have long known as an artist and writer, as well as an occasional citizen. The question I’ve been asking myself in this rapidly changing city—not just in these last few weeks but over the past months—is how the temper of the times informs the way we experience what we see and hear in the arts and culture, and there’s a lot of bad temper about. Our cultural metaphors feel particularly bellicose right now. There was a period last year when bravura arts events and projects were being described as “head snapping.” Some time in the summer, the term disappeared, as ISIS made the practice and politics of beheading all too clear, and the content of the metaphors we live by became vividly real. We live between the literal and the imagined, and the worst things we could imagine were daily paraded across our screens. What does that parade of horror do to our everyday responses? There’s a continuous chatter across the airwaves at the moment about what extreme content makes of us, some voices even suggesting that we can get vicarious PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) just from watching bad news. Yet we also have to find fictional, imaginative ways to process the real. The most popular serious piece of TV in the UK last winter was the BBC TV adaptation of Hilary Mantel’s historical novel Wolf Hall; full of political intrigue; full of bad bankers; full of severed heads and burning bodies.¹ The most watched scene was Anne Boleyn’s execution, disturbingly intimate as she rose with dignity and reluctance to the scaffold and was relieved of her head with one deft, powerful blow from a very long and very sharp sword, wielded by a French swordsman. It was visceral and very shocking. Now metaphorical political execution is back on our shores, and, in the aftermath of the election, our politicians are running round like headless chickens.

How artists respond to the sharp end of the times in which we live, and how we read their responses in relation to its temper, is always instructive. One recent Saturday I walked across the river to the White Cube gallery in Bermondsey to see the new solo exhibition by the sound and screen artist Christian Marclay. Marclay, who lives in London, has his own take on hard times. His playful response is to fill the spaces with sounds and images of wet processes in flow. The catalogue is called Liquids and the entire installation plays on the movement between soft and hard, purpose and improvisation. Wry, light, welcoming, geeky, quirky, Marclay performs his own take on wonder and the transformative nature of the world we experience.

At the center of the show is a corridor of videos, projected just above floor level and reaching to the height of about a human thigh. On them we see, quite literally, footage—Marclay’s feet drifting down an undistinguished London street in the light of the dawn after the night before. We see a street of half-empty beer glasses on window sills, cans in gutters, and wine glasses with bits of lemon still in them, silent witnesses to the excess of a night already consigned...