Strangeland - Tracey Emin

 STRANGELAND - TRACEY EMIN

I like Tracey Emin. There, I've said it. There is a proviso, however, in that I'm not a big fan of her art, particularly her installations. It's a delicate balance - a juggling act - but I manage it in the same way that I like Francis Bacon whilst not being a big fan of his art - or his studio. Especially his studio. I remember there being an exhibition of Tracey Emin's artwork in Amsterdam once, and on the outside of the Van Gogh Museum a gigantic banner advertising the show had been hung and I remember stopping to look at it and thinking that's an impressive achievement for an artist to have their name outside the Van Gogh Museum like that. Up there if not better than being nominated for the Turner Prize? The thing was, I didn't feel compelled to go in there and to actually view the show. I did at a later date but for the meantime the kudos and the sheer achievement was enough, which all served to enforce the idea that Tracey Emin's greatest work of art is not her tent with the names sown onto it or her unmade bed or her drawings. No, Tracey Emin's greatest work of art is herself.

Strangeland is a collection of Emin's memoirs and recollections written in a painfully forthright, often shockingly confessional but more than likely exaggerated manner, reminiscent of the confessional writings of Billy Childish. And that didn't take very long did it - to bring Billy Childish's name into the proceedings? But then it's almost unavoidable, really. Billy Childish is like the conscience that haunts Emin's art. The pure and unsullied Ying to her 'sold to the highest bidder' Yang. The question of whose art is the better doesn't come into it, however, and neither does commerciality or even originality. If anything, it's more to do with marketing because without any doubt more people know who Tracey Emin is and know some of her art than those who know of Billy Childish. It's just how the world works. The art world especially.

There's some pretty shocking stuff in Strangeland. Things that a reviewer once said that he wished someone who loved Emin had advised her not to publish. But publish she did and now here it all is in book form for the whole world to see. And for whose benefit? Well, for Emin's I presume because whilst it's good to have such candid and at times such brutal honesty displayed there's very little for the reader to actually gain from it, particularly when it comes to her anecdotes in regard to underage sex and abuse.

Strangeland is another addition to Tracey Emin's canon. Another string to her bow. Another medium to channel her art through - that art being herself, of course. Tracey Emin is her own muse, her own subject, and her own creation. Her grand finale, even. The point being that whether it's good or bad art is neither here nor there. That's not the question. That isn't what Emin's art is about.

Likewise, the question as to whether Strangeland is a good book or not is also neither here nor there. It can be read in the same way you would any other book, of course, but it shouldn't really be critiqued in the same way. That's not to say it's beyond criticism, it's just that the ingenuity of Tracey Emin is in the way she's smashed through a kind of fourth art wall in the same way, dare I say, as Picasso did with his Cubism. Purists might scoff but it's true and it doesn't mean you necessarily need to like Emin's art to recognise this.

John Serpico

Notebooks of a Naked Youth - Billy Childish

NOTEBOOKS OF A NAKED YOUTH –

BILLY CHILDISH

I admire and respect Billy Childish – the man, his music, his art and his moustache. He also still gets my vote for being the Greatest Living Englishman. Unfortunately, there's something about Notebooks of a Naked Youth - his sequel to his début novel, My Fault - that makes it inferior to it's predecessor rather than being it's equal or even its better.

There's a sense about it of being a work in progress, as if there was no clear aim as to where the book was going to go or of even what kind of book it was going to be. It starts off as if this time Childish is playing it for laughs and effecting a style of writing that displays his somewhat dark and twisted sense of humour. It ends up as a sort of bastard child of William Burroughs and Henry Miller.

The narrator's voice is that of an imbecilic child inside the body of a young adult, or of someone with Aspergers who doesn't know how to properly relate with other people. It's rather like the Paddy Considine character in the Shane Meadow's film A Room For Romeo Brass. Is it an affected voice, I wonder? A fictional voice utilised to relay the story? Or is it Billy Childish's actual voice? I don't want to give offence but it's hard to tell. Either way, though it's a disturbing voice it's noticeable that it's not such an intense voice as that heard in My Fault.

Between the comical narration there are indeed plenty of disturbing episodes such as when the author is stalking a 15 year-old girl, or when he's stopped by the police and they see he's wearing a trick toy ring water pistol – and they ask him if it contains drugs? Or when he's about to have sex with 'the Jewish lady' and he suddenly remembers lying in bed with 'uncle' Norman who's tugging his trunks down round his knees and whispering 'Can you keep a secret?' Or when he's on a bus and he accuses all the other passengers of having 'mind mirrors': “You think that I don't know that you've all got mind mirrors?” he shouts “You think that I don't know that you can look into my darkest thoughts? You think that I'm mad, that I'm sitting on this bus amongst you strangers and that I don't know that you all have mind mirrors! Go on, cross your gangrenous legs and hold your newspapers to your noses like I'm invisible, all the while secretly studying me with your hideous, disrespectful, hypocritical mind mirrors! Ignore me then, damn you! But don't think for one minute that I don't know all your names and addresses, you scallywags!” We've all met this person before, haven't we? On the Underground, at the shopping centre, or even on the bus? The person we try to ignore and keep away from in case he turns his attention explicitly upon us?

Billy Childish is that person.

What is even more disturbing about the book, however, is the blurring of the lines between fantasy and reality, and between fiction and fact. Did Childish really fuck a dog? Has he really killed a little girl and her tiny, bird-like body now lies hidden in his blue cardboard guitar case? Who knows? It's feasible. Is this a work of fiction or a memoir? The edges are so blurred that it's hard to tell.

Billy Childish is an extremely interesting character which makes for anything he creates being equally interesting; be it art, music, poetry or prose. For all its faults, Notebooks of a Naked Youth easily falls into that same canon.

                                                                                                                                        John Serpico

My Fault - Billy Childish

MY FAULT - BILLY CHILDISH

If I was to vote in one of those Greatest Living Englishman polls, for me it would be a toss up between Mark E Smith and Billy Childish though I suspect Billy Childish would win it by a whisker which, when taking his moustache into consideration, would make sense. It certainly wouldn't be Sir David Attenborough or Stephen Fry, or even Nicholas Parsons for that matter.

What makes a man an artist? Or rather, what makes a man a great artist? Must you suffer for your art or must you have suffered? If so, does this explain Billy Childish? Picked on, beaten and bullied by his father and elder brother. Shat on, spat on and made to eat soap. Betrayed by his mother, dragged into school and yet more misery where - as Childish puts it - 'specialness' is destroyed. The world of nature, innocence and imagination erased. Then raped by a friend of his family.

Childhood is a horror show, no better exemplified by Billy Childish's account not of his molestation and rape by an older man or the physical and psychological violence inflicted upon him by members of his own family but by the cruelty that children themselves are able to inflict through the bullying of their weaker classmates and through the torture inflicted upon lesser creatures. A case in point being his description of him and his friend glueing matchsticks to wasps then burning them alive like some sadistic Japanese prisoner of war camp game, followed by Childish demanding his friend (whose father is a vicar) spit on a cross: 'Come on, God’s kid, fuckin' spit on it, you fuckin' Christ lover! Jesus ain't gonna save you now, so spit on it! Spit on it, you wanker!'

Suffer little children to come unto me.

Billy Childish is an artist, poet, writer, photographer, film maker and musician; and despite being diagnosed dyslexic at the age of 28 has published more than thirty poetry collections and three novels. He's recorded over one hundred albums on a variety of record labels and exhibited paintings all over the world. According to the late, great John Peel he's 'a cult-rock icon'. Billy Childish is a one-man art movement and My Fault is his memoir of his childhood and teenage years.

'All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental', as it states in the disclaimer at the start of the book but clearly that's not the case at all. Tracey Emin, Childish's ex-girlfriend, for example, can be identified fairly easily and the things he's got to say about her are... interesting, to say the least. No wonder she'll no longer talk to him: 'There's nothing that bitch liked better than a thick one up her arse, looking over her shoulder, mascara like a spider. Then I'd pull it out, feeding it into her mouth, and she'd take it full in the face, laughing and coughing through the sauce,' he confides to the world and its mother. It's the kind of confession that might sour any relationship, you'd have thought? Or maybe not?

Other episodes are equally identifiable such as him relaying a conversation conducted among workmen at Chatham Naval Dockyard one day as they sit drinking cups of tea and reading the newspapers:

'"Lucky for me I ain't got kids, but still, in front of my wife, six o'clock, it's bang out of order!"

"Fucking disgusting!"

"But this idiot in here, it says he kicked his TV set in, two hundred quid's worth! It says it here in black and white. Here, take a look for yourself, read it! What do you make of that? Two hundred quid's worth of television, it's a bloody joke! The man's an idiot!"

"I'd have just switched it off."

"Exactly!"'

Without mentioning them or going into any further detail, Childish is clearly referring to the Sex Pistols and the Bill Grundy incident that made headlines in 1976, catapulting them to world-wide infamy and without realising it himself at the time, planting a tiny seed inside of him that would inform everything he would do in the future. By this I mean Punk Rock and the spirit of independence and 'do-it-yourself', where art and creativity are guiding lights and the highest ideals for man to attain to.

Other episodes in the book are - if not identifiable due to being local to the area Childish grew up in - familiar due to almost everyone having experienced something similar. He mentions, for example, the destruction of the woods at the back of his house where he and his friends played: 'The woods, our woods... They moved in and flattened the lot! Crushed to the ground! Without so much as a 'by your leave'. Age old and noble. There's no doubt that those woods belonged to us kids, us kids, the dickie birds and the occasional adder. One day rabbits, spiders and birds, the next: bulldozers!'

I feel the same about the Stonehenge Free Festival that was so violently smashed by out-of-control police in the summer of 1985, known now as the Battle of the Beanfield. Unleashed by the Thatcher government in the wake of the miners strike the previous year. It still makes my blood boil after all these years. I still want it to be avenged.

'People have no rights and kids have less than none. They knocked down our world with no warning, with no consultation. Their only emotion: contempt! An atrocity that should never be forgotten. I write it down, here for all to see, to be documented for future generations. The holocaust against our friends the trees, the grasses, the flowers and all their myriad of friends and relations, four-legged, six-legged, eight-legged, and wings of the sky. I swear to Christ, it makes me see red, even after all these softening years...'

For Childish, however, this event led to his involvement with the Walderslade Liberation Army, a highly disciplined ecological terrorist unit comprised of him and his gang of fellow eleven-year-olds, led by a political mastermind called Goldfish. "We need guns and we need politics!" Goldfish would declare as he wiped the snot from his nose "The politics of our situation!"

Armed with crude, home-made guns made out of old metal pipes and real bombs made from chemicals stolen from the school lab and typical bomb-making materials such as weed-killer, sulphur and saltpetre bought from any hardware shop or chemist, Goldfish led his men into battle with the developers who were trashing their woods. "The first thing an army needs is discipline! Discipline! Food! Guns! And Glycerine!"

I wonder what became of Goldfish? What did he grow up to be? I wonder if Billy Childish even knows? Maybe he went on to form Class War?

My Fault is funny, disturbing, brilliant and harrowing all at the same time. Within its pages are echoes of Charles Bukowski, Knut Hamsun, Dostoevsky, and Henry Miller - and that's a very good thing indeed. Billy Childish is an example to us all. An example of triumph over adversity, of art over commerce, and of integrity of intention. An example of creativity being the heart and soul of mankind.

And Billy Childish gets my vote for the Greatest Living Englishman.

John Serpico