There will be an exhibition of screen prints at Ink_d gallery in Brighton from 20th March - 10th April. I’ve finally got around to sorting through several of the teetering piles of paper in my studio and I’ve found some interesting things, such as low numbered prints from editions that have long sold out from www.slowlydownward.com (like the golden Cnut, Pacific Coast, the Eraser puppet theatre print and a lot more. And I’ve done the first of a series of carnivorous goat financiers (this one’s called ‘Pandemonium) especially for the show.Someone referred to them as chupacabra, which awakened dormant memories… I looked up the word and found all kinds of strange and esoteric information.   The new print of MANHATTAN is now finished and is available from both slowlydownward.com and from Ink_d in Brighton. It’s a very vibrant seven colours with an additional varnish over the top, using the palette of eyecatchers I noted down one time whilst driving around Los Angeles. I assume they use these colours as most of the adverts and information signs around are designed to be noticed from a speeding automobile. Subtlety is not important whilst cruising on the six-lane versions of linear hell one is forced to travel on over there. Also me and my comrade Dr Blimfield have been printing wallpaper for the Printed Papers show at Ink_d. It was kind of an experiment as I’m not really set up for printing wallpaper, but it worked out ok with the judicious use of hairdryers, fan-heaters and as many tables as we could find. The result was good, and very… ‘English’, featuring, as it does, CCTV and the Cerne Abbas giant.

I walked a line as straight as I could make it from Paddington Station to Fleet Street.  It went like this: London Street, Sussex Gardens, Radnor Place, Southwark Place, Hyde Park Crescent, Titchbourne Row, Connaught Street, Upper Berkeley Street, Portman Square, Fitzhardinge Street, Manchester Square, Hinde Street, Marylebone Lane, Oxford Street, Wardour Street, Saint Anne’s Court, Dean Street, Bateman Street, Greek Street, Old Compton Street, Cambridge Circus, Earlham Street, Short’s Gardens, Endell Street, Bow Street, Wellington Street, Aldych, Strand, and Fleet Street.

In Fleet Street it was cold and the light was bruising quickly.  All kinds of dreadful things had been passing through my mind whilst I was on the train from Somerset, mostly connected with the dissolution of civilisation.  ”You think things are bad now,” I told myself.  ”Just you wait.  This is nothing.”  London itself had calmed me down, pacing along the list of streets which I had written on the back of my hand becoming a sort of meditative incantation.

The substance of London had endured for so long, through unrecorded pre-historical cataclysms to Boudicca’s terrible revenge, the repeated attrition of the Black Death, the Great Fire of 1666, and the second great conflagration wrought by airborne Nazis; for centuries cholera and consumption had been endemic when not epidemic, there had been countless violent confrontations, serial killers, homegrown fascists, and most recently the bombs of Irish republicans and English jihadists.

Perhaps the greatest threat faced by London is water.  In 1953 there was a disastrous storm surge in the North Sea, and hurricane-force winds swept round the east coast of England.  Soon after midnight on February 1st the waters rushed up the Thames towards London, having already caused immense devastation around East Anglia.  Tilbury and the Docklands were flooded, and the sea wall was breached at London’s East End.  307 people died.  Since then, a surge has not recurred, although being a meteorological phemonenon it of course could.  Also since then there has been a massive amount of building along what is euphemistically termed the ‘Thames Gateway’; actually the river’s flood plain.

When the Thames Flood Barrier, a massive construction that spans the river at Woolwich was built between 1974 and 1982 it was closed to prevent flooding about twice a year.  After around 1990 it had to be closed four times a year.  In 2003 it was closed fourteen times.  I don’t know how often it’s been closed since then, but there does seem to be a pattern emerging.

Fleet Street became a glittering canyon, the sky as blue as the deepest ocean.  I could scarcely see the architectural features I was attempting to scribble down representations of, and I couldn’t quite get the hang of the digital camera I had borrowed.  Packing my stuff back into my bag, I went into the Cheshire Cheese, an unusual and warren-like pub.  Fleet Street was once home to hundreds of printers, publishers and their associates, acolytes and hangers-on.  In 1500 Wynkyn de Worde, who took over Caxton’s print shop, set up his business in Fleet Street, and in 2005 Reuters, the last giant of Fleet Street, departed.  In the intervening half millenium countless gallons of ink have been printed onto acre upon acre of paper. I drank a pint of cider and thought about why I had walked to Fleet Street, and what I was here to do.  I had stumbled upon the existence of what was probably the last printing press of Fleet Street.

My friend Richard had told me about a strange institution that was situated behind St Bride’s church, at the eastern end of Fleet Street.  St Bride’s Institute, as it was called, functioned as a library of materials to do with the histories of both printing and of the street itself, and also had collected a vast emporium of old books, lead type, woodblock type, engravings, inexplicable impedimenta and, most interestingly, semi-functioning printing presses.  One of them was an immense old Albion press, made a century and a half ago, and capable of printing a larger area than any similar press I had heard of.  Since printing a series of linocuts entitled ‘London Views’ in 2006 I had become increasingly compelled to continue on a kind of retro-primitivist style; at least, as far as printmaking went.  I was still entranced by the woodcut illustrations in the Nuremberg Chronicle.  They seemed frightening to me, and they must have been cut before 1493 when the Chronicle was published.

The St Bride’s Albion was housed in a secret room adjacent to the Institute’s library.  Certainly not a public room, this one was piled high with books published in many past centuries, with cases of lead type blanketed with Victorian dust, with instruments which I couldn’t understand; some looked like the kit part for Mediaeval implements of torture, although that could easily have been my imagination.

 Several months later (not a long time for a project like this) we proofed the large linocut I’d made.  It was divided into two, the idea being that we print first one half, then switch the lino and rotate the paper to print the other half.  This sounded simple as a spoken idea, but not for the first time the gulf between a straightforward collection of words and an inky reality proved to be immense.  We managed ten smudged, fingerprinted proofs that day.  Admittedly I had begun by completing the cutting of the image, and wasted time by standing, inky-palmed, to be photographed, but still; we had established how to print the bastard.

Again.  Several months later, we arrived in Fleet Street to print an edition.  By now we were comparative experts at the archaic registration of two haves of a 38 inch by 25 inch linocut.  We knew how much ink was needed for each impression.  The sweltering heat of an unusually sunny August day was nothing but a rumour, as the only illumination that filtered into the Albion’s quarters was refracted from wall to grimy wall, down an accidental light-well, the inadvertant result of a concatenation of unplanned building around the church of St Bride’s.  Hours passed, ink was rolled, paper was shifted, the press came down again anad again, wine was bought, drunk, sandwiches were hastily eaten, ad inifitum…  by the end, we had the edition printed.  Oddly satisfying, to become a part of a functioning human machine, each of us with a set of tasks to repeat until the job was done.

FLEET STREET APOCALYPSE. 
Fleet Street Apocalypse was cut into linoleum by Stanley Donwood during January and February 2008. It was printed on 4th March, 23rd July and 3rd September 2008 by Stanley Donwood and Richard Lawrence at St Bride’s Institute, Bride Lane, Fleet Street, London, with assistance from Kim Vousden.
The printing press used was made in 1844 in Finsbury, London by Hopkinson & Cope. The paper is acid-free archival quality Somerset White 300gsm satin, with a deckle edge on all sides, and is made at St Cuthbert’s Mill, Wells, Somerset; the ink used is Cranfield Letterpress black.The print area is 25″ x 38″ (640mm x 970mm approx), and the paper size is 30″ x 44″ (760mm x 1120mm approx).

For further information, purchase details, etc.,:
www.slowlydownward.com

‘SIX INCH RECORDS’ is a project that may take a little explaining.  Well, a lot of explaining.   The story begins around the time of Christmas 2006, when I drunkenly decided to become a record label boss.  Every man needs a hobby, or so the cliché has it, and if I was going to make a late-stage attempt at normality then that was one of the things that I should do.  So, still reeling from red wine, I typed out a email to three musicians that I knew, suggesting that I release their music on my as-yet-unnamed record label.  I have no record of what I wrote in that fateful email, and I had no recollection of it the following morning, when I awoke with a hangover. Forgive me, for I knew not what I had done.  The three musicians replied to my email with alacrity and enthusiasm, promising to send me music, and, perhaps surprisingly, not telling me that setting up a record label at the precise historical point that record labels large and small were going to the wall was probably a really stupid idea. Never mind, never mind.  I started to work out how my ‘hobby’ was going to work.  It was true that the musicians I had contacted made music I liked, and I was fairly sure that other people would like it too.  I liked music, but during the period that I had been designing record covers I had come to detest the compact disc.  The CD, I had decided, was simply too small.   I began to muse on numbers, thinking about the twelve inch record, the speed of thirty-three and a third revolutions, and so on.  Eventually I realised that releasing three six-inch records in editions of three hundred and thirty-three and charging six pounds sixty-six pence for each one was the only was to do this.  There would be nine hundred and ninety-nine records in total.  Half the profits would go to the musicians and half would go to me.  I was going to do this properly.  I drew up a contract, which I mailed out to ‘my’ musicians and got them to sign it.  SIX INCH RECORDS was born.   I was left with quite a big problem, and that was the six-inch record part.  I investigated the possibility of getting six-inch vinyl pressed, but the cost was a little prohibitive.  I thought that making six-inch sleeves would be relatively easy, but a little four-and-a-half inch compact disc would just rattle around in it.  I went to see my friend Richard, who had a 1965 Heidelberg printing press and a large amount of beer-mat board.  Beer-mat board, by the way, is the material that is used to make beer-mats.  We decided to get a cutter made in the same size as a compact disc, fix the cutter into the printing machine and cut CD-sized holes in six-inch squares of beer-mat board.  We could then push the CDs into the hole in the board and then insert the whole into the six-inch square sleeves that we were going to make.  It was all relatively simple in theory, if massively time-consuming. The signed contracts came back in the post from ‘my’ musicians, but my glee at having these characters in my ‘roster’ quickly abated, and very soon I ran into ‘contractual difficulties’.  One of the musicians; well, half of one of the ‘acts’, to be more precise, had signed a contract with Electrical and Musical Industries, better known and reviled as EMI.  At approximately the same time I discovered that another member of another of the ‘acts’ was currently, well, indisposed.  Another had voluntarily exiled himself from all aspects of modern society and gone off to a distant island in the North Sea, and was only accessible via a care-of address which was a derelict crofter’s cottage.  On top of all this, I had done some calculations and discovered that the entire enterprise was actually guaranteed to lose money. So this was what it was like to be the CEO of a record company.  This, I told myself ruefully, was my ‘hobby’. Never mind, never mind.  I put my mounting concerns to the very back of my mind and began the work of printing the sleeves.  I decided to use a very minimal format for the sleeve artwork, as the manufacturing process was an art in itself.  The releases would be numbered from 01 to 03, and each sleeve would have an individual number from 001 to 333.  There would be no images apart from an embossed design on the reverse of the sleeve, and I would use moveable lead type and woodblock type for the text on the front.  For the sleeves I used a material called ‘printaboard’, which is the same stuff that cereal-box fabricators use.  I had to shave some costs off somewhere, and I liked the idea of a collectible piece of music being packaged in the same material that holds cornflakes.  The Heidelberg printing press clanked and wheezed, and time passed.  Occasionally I wrote a short email to ‘my’ musicians telling them how little progress I had made. In the meantime the potential contractual difficulties eased, as Electrical and Musical Industries went into some sort of corporate spasm.  We began to discuss the possiblity of some sort of launch, an event somewhere in London, with ‘my’ artists playing live.  It was possible that some of the SIX INCH RECORDS would be sold.  Things were looking good.  I now had all the music: Travel Notes, by Patrick Bell; Classist, by Max de Mara; and The Beyond Within, by The Joy of Living.  Getting the compact discs duplicated was only delayed by my decision to use a scan of the letterpressed sleeve os the onbody artwork; this obviously meant that I had to print the sleeves before duplicating the discs.  This, however, given that almost two years had passed between the original drunken idea and a realistic date for a launch party, was a minor matter.   Well.  At the time of writing the tedious hand-manufacturing is about two-thirds done.  As I mentioned at the beginning of this carthartic screed, I am making a website to help explain all of this, and at the same time as functioning as a shop where people can buy SIX INCH RECORDS.  I am seriously considering a launch night in London this December, although on past form ‘December’ is rather optimistic…  and of course, Patrick Bell is unique among modern musicians in that he refuses to play at all.   

Massive Attack are curating this year’s Meltdown Festival at the Southbank Centre in London, between 13th & 24th June.  They are working with Reprieve, a charity set up by Clive Stafford Smith, a lawyer who has been extremely active in exposing some of the horrendous abuses of power that have occured within the parameters of The War Against Terror.  

The programme of ‘extraordinary rendition’ where people are kidnapped and secretly flown to ‘black sites’ where they are tortured and held indefinitely without trial is a matter that deserves much wider public scutiny than it has recieved.  I was asked if I could contribute anything to this debate. Like most people, I had heard about this, but I didn’t know a great deal about it, other than what I had read in newspapers, so I decided to do a bit of research.  I bought a few books, notably Stafford Smith’s excellent ‘Bad Men’, and ‘Torture Taxi’, by Trevor Paglen and A C Thompson.  I already had a copy of a superbly disturbing book about torture called ‘Inquisition’.  This period of research was pretty upsetting.  It’s hard to read about torture, hard to believe that people engage in it, and harder to believe that torture has apparently gained something akin to official sanction since The War Against Terror gained momentum.

Of course, no government is going to admit that it tortures people.  But that’s not the same as saying that it doesn’t happen.  In a lot of cases, what most people consider to be torture has been redefined; a process which the book ‘Inquisition’ makes quite clear has happened repeatedly though the ages.

When I had finished reading these books, I made some wallpaper for the Meltdown Festival.  The letters and numbers used in the wallpaper are flight numbers from the varied aircraft used in  connection with ‘extraordinary rendition’.

‘Honor bound to defend freedom’ is a motto of the prisons in U.S. Naval Base Guantanamo Bay.  

The coloured squares in the background are shipping containers, which are frequently used as interrogation, incarceration and torture chambers. The image is a detail taken from ‘Shipping Containers, 2007’ by Chris Jordan.

The monochrome images in the background are wrist and leg-irons, the water torture, the interrogation chair and the ‘Judas Cradle’.  All of these monochrome images are taken from ‘Inquisition/ Inquisición’, a bilingual Guide to the exhibition of torture instruments from the Middle Ages to the industrial era, presented in various European cities in 1985. The Guide was written by Robert Held.

I thoroughly recommend the books I’ve mentioned here.  For more on Meltdown:

www.southbankcentre.co.uk/festivals-series/meltdown

In Tokyo the rain fell softly and I thought the drops landed differently to the way they do in England. In England they fall solidly and hard like water deciding to end it all.  In Japan the raindrops dance on the ground, briefly, fragmenting in arabesques like the frozen waves drawn by Hokusai.  Or perhaps I was suffering from the lag of time, of eight times of day flown through at high speed in a darkened aeroplane.  Another time I was awake at some invisible, impossible and unknowable hour, sitting vacantly in the lobby of an hotel, listening to the distant sound of a vacuum cleaner, helpless and difting in space.  I existed in some sort of reality that didn’t concur with any of the varieties I had encountered before.  I ate strange things and went on foot, on underground train and in taxis to many places which confused and elated me.  I think my favourite place was Asakusa, and Kappabashi-dori which was filled with cavernous establishments selling black pans and shining knives.  And I think, though I’m not sure, that the Kappabashi itself is some weird sort of cartoonish turtle.  To travel directly from Asakusa to Harujuku was pleasantly unremembered as I think I may have drifted off into a kind of slumber.I’m going to try to remember some more things that happened in Japan, but everything is a bit like the rain. 

It had definitely been a good idea to sleep in the studio, despite my conviction that the place was haunted.  In the hours of freezing darkness I could hear scrabbling noises; scratchings and thumps.  It was, I told myself repeartedly, probably only rats.  The building where my studio is located is very old and ramshackle.  As far as I can discover, during its history it has been a stable, a tannery, a storehouse, a dance hall and a tea room.  At night it takes on the qualities of the Overlook Hotel, where Mr Torrance went to stay in Kubrick’s film The Shining.As Spring slowly inched across the country the first flowers began to appear, but if anything the temperature fell further.  I bought another heater for the studio, and wore three pairs of trousers, layered over me so I looked deformed.  Things improved slowly.  I held the first of a series of small parties in the studio; parties which I pretty much ignored whilst I carried on painting.  I didn’t really know if having parties would help, but it certainly warmed up the studio, having a lot more human bodies in there.  It was a vast improvement, in the end.  Having people talking, laughing, drinking and smoking whilst we played records very loud turned out to be a way of working that I enjoyed.  I can’t write with people around, but it seems that painting is another matter.The painting was, at last, going very well.  There were no more technical difficulties of the sort I mentioned in Episode Two.  No more of the other sort of difficulties that I can’t describe in words.  Everything was going surprisingly well.  Even my new asthma inhaler, the formoterol and budenoside one, seemed to be having an effect.  I didn’t think I needed the familiar salbutamol inhalers so much.  And I hadn’t used the beclametasone dipropionate inhaler for ages.  I was quite happy about that, anyway.  Beclametasone is a commonly-prescribed medication for asthma, for people who find that such things as salbutamol aren’t really ‘controlling’ their asthma.  And when you’re in that kind of situation you’ll not be too bothered by the slight possibility of glaucoma, cataracts, or osteoporosis, and still less by the possibility of candidiasis.Eventually I had no option but to keep the heating on in the studio, regardless of what the electricity bill was going to be, because I intened to varnish the paintings, and to do that I had to ensure that the acrylic paint had not just dried, but had cured as well.  Several days later everything was done, finished, and the paintings glowed under their shiny layers of acrylic gloss varnish.  Unfortunately I only had about 48 hours to looks at them, as due to my increasing paranoia about the security of my studio I wanted to get them into boxes and delivered to the gallery in Tokyo as soon as I could.

The new canvases sat blankly in the studio, waiting for whatever horrendous disaster I would inflict upon them next.  I was avidly reading a book called ROCI; Rauschenberg Overseas Cultural Interchange.  Robert Rauschenberg is an artist who I admire greatly, and he had created some extraordinary work with screen printing.  I hoped to be inspired by this book, but I couldn’t help being a little disturbed.  Nothing ever seemed to go wrong for Mr Rauschenberg.  It was all great, no viscous ropes of foul acrylic mucous besmearing his canvases.  Not that he seemed to use canvas very much; it was all sheet metal and assemblages.  I decided to live in my studio.  It was extremely cold, but I had a blanket, a coat, and a portable heater.  It was the only way that I would be able to devote enough time to the new paintings.  I’d done it before, anyway; I’ve spent months painting in sheds and barns before, gradually acclimatising myself to increasingly cold weather.  There would be no more ‘technical difficulties’ with solvent-based products.  I had learned that particular and, in retrospect, extremely obvious lesson.  The way forward was to use a completely water-based acrylic paint system.
The photographs of my collection of used inhalers were ready.  I had a strong feeling that asthma inhalers deserved the starring role in my new work.  I thought of the religious iconographic art of Orthodox Christianity, and about Hindu paintings of deities, where faces and figures seem to glow with the reflected adoration of the viewer.  Considering that there are millions of asthmatics, perhaps the idea of a religion, a worship of inhalers is close to the truth.  How often do religious people think of a god or a deity?  How often do asthmatics think of their inhaler?  I thought about mine very often, checking my pocket to make sure it was there, having sudden adrenalin surges whilst I racked my brain to remember where I had put it, trying not to let the last one run out before I got to the doctor’s to get another prescription filled, and attempting once more to be sensible, to stockpile some inhalers at home to be ready for the inevitable global cataclysm/economic shutdown/epidemic disease outbreak/civil war that would expose the medical system as the fragile edifice that it undoubtedly is.  And at night, when I was woken by my own laboured wheezing, as I scrabbled on the dark cluttered floor for the inhaler that I was sure was there, that must be there… I screamed prayers in my mind not to any god but to the idea of a new inhaler, it’s metal cannister full of salbutamol, the plastic cap over the mouthpiece still slightly tight, the first puffs of the drug as my lungs pulled it down my bronchioles…Desire, worship and need were all intertwined.  I envisaged iconic paintings of the inhalers, scaled up ten times, floating in fields of colour, glowing behind varnish.  This is what I set out to do.

Side effects of salbutamol: fine tremor (usually hands), nervous tension, headache, peripheral vasodilation, arrhythmias, palpitations, tachycardia, sleep and behavioural disturbances…