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…  

  I have a new asthma inhaler; it’s a combination of budenoside and formoterol.  Formoterol is a selective beta-adrenoceptor stimulant, whereas budenoside is a corticosteroid. It’s a very cool inhaler, red and white, and you click it to make something happen inside it before you inhale the powder.  There are 60 doses in one inhaler, and there’s a little window that tells you how many you have left.  When you get to the last ten doses the window goes red, as a warning to get a new inhaler, I guess.Sometimes I wonder if asthma inhalers are big business.  Maybe there’s a lot of money in asthma inhalers. I’ve decided to collect these new inhalers too. Apparently I won’t need the old blue ones so much any more, now I’ve got this new drug.I had a few days free to paint, so I started on several canvases at once, which is sometimes a good idea.  Unfortunately, things started to go wrong almost immediately.  I couldn’t figure out what it was that was going wrong though.  There is no point in trying to write about this sort of thing because it exists outside of the world of words and speech.  It’s completely to do with looking and seeing.If that was the only thing that was wrong, I probably would have been okay.  But it wasn’t. Whilst I was glumly regarding the canvases, I noticed that the screenprinting ink I’d used seemed to be cracking slightly.  I looked closer.  There were definitely cracks there.  What the hell was this? I checked some of the other canvases.  Same thing.  Now I was beginning to feel really miserable.  What if the cracks got worse?  What if the ink started to come off?  Things were looking bad, really bad.  I had to leave.  I couldn’t stay in my studio any longer, otherwise I’d start screaming.The next day I went to my allotment.  An allotment is a small patch of land you can rent from the council.  Most people grow vegetables on theirs.  There wasn’t anything much growing on mine. It was mostly mud, so I occupied myself by digging over a patch of mud.  It turned out to be a beautiful day after a while, and I had a sandwich and a little stove, so I could make tea. Whilst I dug I had a long think about the paintings.  The paintings were supposed to be about asthma and inhalers and the pharmaceutical companies and not being able to breathe and, well, about everything.  But they looked like nothing.  And I was very worried about those cracks I had noticed on the ink.  It occurred to me that the new canvases had been sealed with an acrylic-based size, which I presumed was water-based.  And the screen printing inks were solvent-based.  Uh-oh. Maybe I could use solvent to get the ink off the canvases, and start again?  Because that’s what I needed to do; start again. Maybe it was the sunny day, or maybe the digging, but I felt much more positive.  Still horribly depressed, of course, but the immediate situation was improving.The next day I went back to my studio.  The cracks in the ink were there, all right, and there was still something else wrong with the paintings that couldn’t be put into words. Everything was going to be okay though; I was going to scour the canvases with solvent and start again.  But when the solvent went on, something bad, unexpected, and totally unpleasant happened.  The solvent, ink, paint, and acrylic sealant coagulated together in a revolting, snot-like substance.  It was horrible, sticky, stinky and it was attached to my canvases with the tenacity and viscosity of molten glue. Fuck.  The canvases were completely ruined.  There was nothing for it but to strip them from the frames and restretch them with new canvas.How bad could it be? You will see; it got better, after that.

Asthma is a growth market. More and more people are displaying symptoms of asthma; wheezing, shortness of breath, persistent dyspnoea, exhaustion, high pulse rate, low expiratory flow… and more and more people are using various medications to alleviate their condition. There is no cure for asthma.Asthma is a condition that worsens itself; it engenders a sort of positive feedback loop. A person starts wheezing. They worry that the wheezing may herald the onset of an asthma attack. The worry exacerbates the wheezing… and so on. If that person has left their medication at home, or run out, or if the medication unaccountably fails to be effective…”Severe asthma can be fatal and must be treated promptly and energetically. It is characterised by persistent dyspnoea poorly relieved by bronchodilators, exhaustion, a high pulse rate and a very low expiratory flow. As asthma becomes more severe, wheezing may be absent…”

Asthma now affects up to 1 in 4 urban children within what is termed the ‘developed world’. On a global level we are faced with a planetary environment which is rapidly heating up, due largely to airborne pollutants emitted by our suburbanised fossil-fuel based society. On a personal level increasing numbers of our society have to be chemically medicated, due largely to exactly the same cause.

I took my bags of used asthma inhalers to the photographer’s studio the other day. I don’t know how many I had; I’d been collecting them for a few years. The criteria for my collection were that the inhalers had to have been prescribed to me and the contents inhaled by me until they were empty. These inhalers, made of plastic and metal, would have been thrown away if I hadn’t kept them. They would have ended up in landfill sites, buried or incinerated with all the other household trash. And household trash, rubbish, landfill, leaking toxic pollution; all of these things, among many others, had been plaguing my thoughts for a while now, but I don’t think that’s really why I kept the inhalers. These inhalers were, whilst they were full, half-full, or nearly empty, very important to me. I carried each one with me in my pocket, and at night I would remove it and place it by my bedside. I worried greatly that if I forgot or lost my inhaler I would die from lack of air. A terrible way to go. So when they were empty, I kept them. Like souvenirs or mementos, small totems of another period of life lived, another small survival. My inhalers were usually salbutamol-filled. Salbutamol is a very commonly prescribed medication, a bronchodilator, for asthma, bronchitis, emphysema and other lung-related problems. Others I was prescribed originally contained beclomethasone dipropionate, formoterol fumarat, or budenoside. I emptied my bags of used inhalers and arranged them, ready to have their photographic portraits taken. The lighting was more difficult than I anticipated; the whole process was, I imagine, similar to that used by product photographers; similar, perhaps, to how the inhaler prototype may have been photographed for medical brochures and pharmaceutical marketing materials.

more to come…

bye