Clearing the Decks — Part I

Eleven perceptions from the year 2024.

Dec 31, 2024

Bored of cultural lists and round-ups, but cherishing the thoughts and the writing and the lives of the people I care about, I invited a bunch of people to tell me about a sharp moment of ‘perceptual awareness’ that stuck out through the fog of a grim year. Here’s the first half of those contributions. We hope that you enjoy them.

(Photo of '“I AM” READING ROOM by Adrian)

Adrian Dannatt

The end of April and we had already been out a month, nearing the end now, a final push to the ocean. We were following ‘The Darkest Line’, a road route or possibly just a long poem, devised by writer Josh Shoemake. Working with a geographer and supercomputer Josh had minutely plotted our journey across the USA to avoid all light, taking side streets and abandoned alleys, ancient rural tracks, ‘the America where even electricity does not dare venture.’

We began at Jekyll Island, Georgia and now we were pulling in at twilight to the base camp of Mount Shasta, California. There are no coincidences on such an occult route; I had always wanted to see Shasta and it happened to be right on the path of our obscure plot.

At 14,179 feet Shasta is a psychic nexus, one of a small number of global "power centers” according to those of us awaiting the Harmonic Convergence. Many have hunted here for a rumored branch of the Great White Brotherhood or climbed to find the hidden city, somewhere up in the eternal snows, of advanced beings from the lost continent of Lemuria. It was high on Shasta that Guy Ballard met by chance a mysterious stranger who revealed himself as Comte de Saint-Germain, the eternal wandering adventurer. And yes, thus was born the ‘I AM’ movement.

I woke at dawn. Across the street opposite our motel was the ‘I AM’ Reading Room, a tiny wooden house and peering through the windows I was just able to make out the shrine to ‘Our Beloved Ascended Master St. Germain’.

I walked up steep Orem, a mystic street name in itself, amongst sitting room lamps lit against the early morning. I carried on walking to the outskirts of this town and at the last houses I looked up to see now the sunrise on the freezing white mountain side, scudding cloud. It was so cold, so early and tomorrow we would at last reach the Pacific.

Al Anderson

On my birthday I got shellfish poisoning from the oyster shack at Borough Market. I didn’t comment on the translucent greenish film over the rock oysters from Colchester, nor their disconcerting stillness, nor the more general sense of foetid air that hangs over that market – where I worked for many years. This was because I was cognizant of a pleasant, innocent mood and didn’t want to throw off its equilibrium. The sickness tinkered at the seams of my perception under the cover of a hangover before my body commenced with projectile vomiting, which continued at regular intervals for the next nine hours. This led into a further three or so days of fever and sweating and shitting and puking. The last time I was so unwell was at seventeen, with swine flu. Interestingly, that was also when I watched Saló for the first time. Interesting because the week leading up to the rancid oysters I’d rewatched Pasolini’s Trilogy of life movies out of order, starting with The Canterbury Tales; possibly the most melancholic sex comedy ever put to screen. In ‘The Cook’s Tale’ Pasolini’s younger boyfriend, Ninetto Davoli (who was in the process of leaving him while they were filming) plays an affably grotesque, if likeable, rogue swindling and leching and fucking up around Borough Market circa 1971, which easily doubles up as a Medieval slum. At its worst, the fever rattled my sense of consciousness to such a degree that any sense of the ‘real’ and the ‘imaginary’ collapsed altogether. I had whole days where I would drift through a mid-twentieth century London playing a more ancient version of itself and I was a creature altogether more complicated and sophisticated than the one that sits at a laptop typing this. I felt like a sort of angel, like a consciousness incomprehensibly capacious, like many thousands of eyes. I would go to work, go meet my boyfriend for katsu curry on London Bridge, which in this world was a sort of horizontal Chungking Mansion over the river, I’d re-read Cities of the Red Night, my favorite novel at seventeen, I would befriend ruddy cheeked aristos and involve myself in some court intrigue. The flow of that reality would then fade into the milky sheen of sweat and smells clouding the large square windows next to my bed in Bow. The fever can be a kind of epistemology, I learnt. The closest I got to really understanding the Earth was in that state of frenzied corporeality, as it was processed through a deracinated mind. Even as I recovered, everything felt feverish, or drugged. I’m still not all there. Apparently it can take up to two months for the lining of your stomach to fully heal after shellfish poisoning. As the experts love to tell us, gut health is intrinsic to maintaining a sound mind. Pasolini was heartbroken filming The Canterbury Tales and its nominally light-hearted register is weighed down by a mannered, melancholic photography. The world received by the viewer is several worlds palimpsesting one another; nothing coheres, but it holds; like a sad mummer’s song, conjugated from centuries worth of things disappearing.

Alexandra Symons-Sutcliffe

Included in Tate Modern’s current retrospective ‘Mike Kelley: Ghost and Spirit’, is Kelley’s first full video work The Banana Man (1983). The protagonist of the Banana Man is taken from a children’s television show that Kelley himself never saw but heard about from his classmates at school. Driven by a monologue, Kelley inhabits a persona who narrates their psychological motivation, detailing shame, rejection, and an urge for emotional independence. Dressed in a yellow sailor suit he cocks his head and turns down the corner of his mouth, a VHS-era Buster Keaton. He pulls a floppy appendage from the zipper of his trousers– boing!– swings it like a skipping rope that children jump in the playground. Spoken word and sound effects prefigure acted-out vignettes, a collage of signifiers contained within Kelley’s body, performed to the camera, which records and distances the viewer from liveness. Having no first-hand experience of the original show Kelley’s portrait is a double fiction, a TV character told through the interpretation of children Kelley hasn’t seen for decades.

If you know Mike Kelley you know how this one ends, and moving through the galleries you process towards his inevitable suicide. Not as a young man but in late middle age, when even bolstered by success and admiration he failed to continue to live. Kelley’s practice is laced with an obsessive, almost grotty, interest in the banality of American culture. Superman, high school architecture, sports rituals, and mass-produced toys… consumption habits re-interpellated as the material reality of our lives. We all know how this feels: a pop song you never liked plays on the radio at the wrong moment and suddenly it breaks your heart, a sexual position that mimics your partners’ previous partner’s taste in pornography, a schoolyard game seemingly invented anew by every generation of children, but in the exact same form it took in their parents’ day. Throw an object out in front of you and run towards it, you can't help but drag an assemblage of inherited trash behind you.

The final video work in the Tate show is ‘Bridge Visitor (Legend-Trip)’ (2004), which recalls the summer camp legends of cryptids that peppered Kelley’s adolescence. An aged naked figure, perhaps Kelley, lumbers towards the camera across a bridge but he never reaches the viewer. In the previous room, ‘The Banana Man’ plays on a loop. Twenty-nine when he made it, still younger than Jesus, dressed in an infantile costume, playing out juvenile memories, but not ones that belong to him. Kelley forever in a middle zone, a vector for the culture that surrounded him, and now a container for disappointments and diminishment of that same culture. Tragedy is emotionally effective because it de-privileges originality; a series of small failures that build into an inevitable disaster, foreseen from the very start. In ‘The Banana Man’ Kelley chases himself through a composite image of an interior world, rendered authentic through its repetition.