Ghost Milk: Calling Time on the Grand Project by Iain Sinclair Page A
Authors: Iain Sinclair
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after day, around the entire circuit; repairing damage, covering up protests. Sticky trails drip into grass verges, painterly signatures. Plywood surfaces never quite dry. Subtle differences of shade and texture darken into free-floating Franz Kline blocks.
But the major artworks, self-sponsored galleries of opposition, occur at the back of the fence, and on the unexposed panels of giant off-highway hoardings. Two artists in particular, white boys emerging from the squatting and warehouse-occupying nexus, have undertaken astonishing projects: mile after mile of two-headed crocodiles, grinning gum-pink skulls, clenched Philip Guston fists. A punk codex using industrial quantities of emulsion to revise railway bridges and condemned factories. We are here, they shout: Sweet Toof and Cyclops. Ghost-ride mouths eating the rubble of development, the melancholy soup of black propaganda.
You have to believe that the muralists of Hackney Wick are responding to Daniel Pinchbeck’s apocalyptic text: 2012: The Year of the Mayan Prophecy. Pinchbeck is convinced that the year of the London Olympics is an ‘end date’. Stone calendars warn of the dying of one great cycle of time, of environmental catastrophe. The neurosis of stadium-building is nothing more than an unconscious desire to prepare sites for ritual sacrifice: Westfield ziggurats, Barratt pyramids. That horror mantra whispers once more in its echo chamber.
Berlin ’36: The setting in which boy soldiers will be executed for cowardice in the last days of the Third Reich. In the forest that surrounds the Olympiastadion.
Mexico City ’68: President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz is instructed by Avery Brundage, president of the International Olympic Committee, to deal with protests inspired by this moment of global attention. ‘The Olympic tradition is at stake,’ Brundage warns. Ordaz orders 10,000 troops of the Olympic Battalion, accompanied by light tanks and water cannons, to occupy Ciudad Universitaria. The final reckoning, the death toll, according to John Ross in El Monstruo: Dread and Redemption in Mexico City , is 325. A figure confirmed by a Guardian journalist buried under a heap of corpses on the second floor of the university building. Two thousand protesters are arrested, stripped to their underwear and held in secure pens in a military camp. Black power salutes, the gloved hands of podium athletes. Future newsreels.
Munich ’72: The city of putsches is remembered for the massacre of eleven Israelis, athletes and coaches, by members of the Black September group. A secure Olympic village. Admired architecture. Hooded figures on balconies. Bungled response. Hijacked Lufthansa airliner. Revenge assassinations in an operation known as ‘Wrath of God’. Documentary feature films. Exorcism by Oscars.
The spray-can artists are not responding to remote legends, their work has a feral intensity. Zany, psychedelic bestiaries informed by pre-Columbian models, more Robert Crumb than Diego Rivera. The social message is: Look at me. Admire me. Give me a show on Brick Lane.
Painted eyes on the walls of the Lord Napier pub melt in an acid attack, but are never extinguished. In every crack and crevice among the crumbling detritus of the Wick, snakes and teeth appear. Priapic buddleia. Vagina dentata.
Coming home one evening, I encountered a group of muralists on the Olympic front line near Whitepost Lane. I was impressed by their quiet efficiency, the speed with which they underpainted, squared up and set to with roller brushes. The boy in charge issued terse instructions. He stood off, letting apprentices fill in the background, before he stepped forward to finesse signature wings and flames. Within a few hours, digital snoops were cataloguing this latest exhibit as a potential CD cover. The process of spontaneous reproduction is the defining characteristic of the area. What begins on the wrong side of a temporary hoarding soon becomes the colourful backdrop of a TV cop show. By
But the major artworks, self-sponsored galleries of opposition, occur at the back of the fence, and on the unexposed panels of giant off-highway hoardings. Two artists in particular, white boys emerging from the squatting and warehouse-occupying nexus, have undertaken astonishing projects: mile after mile of two-headed crocodiles, grinning gum-pink skulls, clenched Philip Guston fists. A punk codex using industrial quantities of emulsion to revise railway bridges and condemned factories. We are here, they shout: Sweet Toof and Cyclops. Ghost-ride mouths eating the rubble of development, the melancholy soup of black propaganda.
You have to believe that the muralists of Hackney Wick are responding to Daniel Pinchbeck’s apocalyptic text: 2012: The Year of the Mayan Prophecy. Pinchbeck is convinced that the year of the London Olympics is an ‘end date’. Stone calendars warn of the dying of one great cycle of time, of environmental catastrophe. The neurosis of stadium-building is nothing more than an unconscious desire to prepare sites for ritual sacrifice: Westfield ziggurats, Barratt pyramids. That horror mantra whispers once more in its echo chamber.
Berlin ’36: The setting in which boy soldiers will be executed for cowardice in the last days of the Third Reich. In the forest that surrounds the Olympiastadion.
Mexico City ’68: President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz is instructed by Avery Brundage, president of the International Olympic Committee, to deal with protests inspired by this moment of global attention. ‘The Olympic tradition is at stake,’ Brundage warns. Ordaz orders 10,000 troops of the Olympic Battalion, accompanied by light tanks and water cannons, to occupy Ciudad Universitaria. The final reckoning, the death toll, according to John Ross in El Monstruo: Dread and Redemption in Mexico City , is 325. A figure confirmed by a Guardian journalist buried under a heap of corpses on the second floor of the university building. Two thousand protesters are arrested, stripped to their underwear and held in secure pens in a military camp. Black power salutes, the gloved hands of podium athletes. Future newsreels.
Munich ’72: The city of putsches is remembered for the massacre of eleven Israelis, athletes and coaches, by members of the Black September group. A secure Olympic village. Admired architecture. Hooded figures on balconies. Bungled response. Hijacked Lufthansa airliner. Revenge assassinations in an operation known as ‘Wrath of God’. Documentary feature films. Exorcism by Oscars.
The spray-can artists are not responding to remote legends, their work has a feral intensity. Zany, psychedelic bestiaries informed by pre-Columbian models, more Robert Crumb than Diego Rivera. The social message is: Look at me. Admire me. Give me a show on Brick Lane.
Painted eyes on the walls of the Lord Napier pub melt in an acid attack, but are never extinguished. In every crack and crevice among the crumbling detritus of the Wick, snakes and teeth appear. Priapic buddleia. Vagina dentata.
Coming home one evening, I encountered a group of muralists on the Olympic front line near Whitepost Lane. I was impressed by their quiet efficiency, the speed with which they underpainted, squared up and set to with roller brushes. The boy in charge issued terse instructions. He stood off, letting apprentices fill in the background, before he stepped forward to finesse signature wings and flames. Within a few hours, digital snoops were cataloguing this latest exhibit as a potential CD cover. The process of spontaneous reproduction is the defining characteristic of the area. What begins on the wrong side of a temporary hoarding soon becomes the colourful backdrop of a TV cop show. By
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