Monday, August 08, 2005
Jeff Nutall: Bomb Culture and Beyond
Jeff Nutall at the Chelsea Arts Club on 4th November 1985.
Photo by Ed Barber (Copyright Reserved)
First publication
The following extract from my interview was included in the book ( as follows) with a slightly different audio version on the record:JM: What were the circumstances that led you to write ‘Bomb Culture’?JN: I’d had a couple of preliminary stabs at it and then I went on holiday to Wales and suddenly it all fell into place: the three strains – the pop strain, the protest strain and the art strain – and the merging of them in some kind of movement that felt that everyone of these three strains had something to offer in the state of emergency - which was the failure of CND. It became clear in the early 1960s, that massive crowds and massive civil disobedience were ineffectual and nobody in Parliament was bothered about them one iota.Several people came up with the idea of cultural warfare, of seeding pacifist and subversive elements in the popular culture. The popular culture having been almost purely a commercial enterprise previously (if you can say purely commercial), art not being concerned with being popular at all, and protest eschewing art as though art were self-indulgent and were not sufficiently puritan, not sufficiently ethically motivated. Just for a while they merged and that was what Bomb Culture was all about, and I happened to be around while it was merging. I wrote it in 1967, which was the year of mounting protest against the Vietnam War, and 1968 was the student upheaval. In Paris, as everybody knew at the time – though people have kind of forgotten – they did open prisons and burn the stock exchange and it really did look as though this was it, this was spontaneous revolution.I was very much concerned about the Bomb, and about sowing this element of dissent into the popular culture, that would ultimately lead to inevitable disarmament and probably the dissolution of nations, and the setting up of a common human consciousness. We all believed it then you know! It looked as though it was bloody near inevitable, because the change in thinking and the change in culture between ‘65 and ’67 was amazing.Hunter S. Thompson talks very eloquently about how it all seemed completely inevitable, the victory was there, it was just a question of letting it happen. So my writing Bomb Culture was a signing off from it really, a kind of retraction to going back to writing poetry which was concerned with poetry and concerned with the interpretation of a highly personal vision, and making art which owed nothing to anybody and didn’t have to contain any kind of message at all.JM: You talk in Bomb Culture about the gap that’s opened up between the generations in the atomic age.JN: The gap is between those people who have experienced a notion of the world as a continuum and those people who have not had that experience. I don’t want to be patronising or come on like an uncle, but I think I can remember up until 1945 believing that one way or another there might be some awful things that would happen, but the world would continue. That whatever went wrong, in the fullness of time, it would eventually come right. You can’t remember that. You might wish to remember it. You might be able to imagine it. But I can remember when everybody believed it. I think this has done something quite disastrous to social ethics.JM: Is the Bomb shaping artistic consciousness all over the world?JN: What one wants from a Bomb-conscious artist is an antithesis to the Bomb. One wants opposition to the Bomb, and one can’t have opposition to the Bomb which in itself has its roots in the existence of the Bomb. What one actually wants from one’s artists is gestures and statements and experiences that are going to perpetually put before humanity, before the public, before society, a way of thinking, which is not part of the internal, competitive, war-power system.…..You have to overcome the difficulty of loving your state, your condition. Anybody can look at a sunset and say goo goo goo, how nice, or cuddle a baby, or fall in love with a pretty girl or a pretty boy. That’s the easy bit. The difficult bit is somehow loving a state which includes the obscene and the vicious and the dreadful and the painful and loving that. Really loving it, not tolerating it or blessing it or forgiving it or putting up with it or grinning and bearing it, but really loving it as being an integral and unavoidable part of the kind of creature your are and the state of existence you inhabit.That’s where I stand at the moment. Far too much, somewhere hovering behind the existence of the Bomb, is the notion that…it’s not worth saving. It’s so disgusting, it’s so foul, so corrupt, it’s so old and so boring and its so diseased that you might as well…JM: Just wipe it clean ?JN: Yes. What you’ve got to really do is create some kind of cultural movement which would be against that. How it’s to happen now I really don’t know. I don’t feel despairing because I think that – I’m 52 now – I really didn’t expect to see the age of 30.More infotmation on Jeff Nutall:
