24^th Feb 2012

Upside Down Kangaroo

…This particular Bill English LP was displayed on the wall in the basement of Harold Moore’s Records in Soho. I had seen it there about 3 weeks ago and made a beeline for the shop, down the stairs and up to the wall. It had gone. I asked the staff who had no knowledge of it. The owner of the shop who used to do a show on Resonance passed by so I said: “What happened to the Bill English LP which is my name too”. He said “I didn’t know that was your name, I have nothing to do with Jazz if I can help it”. Foyle’s Jazz shop have never heard of Bill English and couldn’t find any trace of it on DiscOgs or any other web site. This is a track by William English the thrash band:(T-H-C from Home). Continuing with my researches into Art and Language and the Red Krayola I have brought along an LP by them from 1981 on the Rough Trade label called Kangaroo. The cover shows a painting of a Kangaroo upside down in the manner of Baselitz. The following quote by Michael Baldwin of Art and Language, not Coronation Street, is priceless: “One of the more memorable observations made to us recently was by someone in New York who said ‘It’s so interesting that in relation to your earlier work you have become so lyrical’. At some point I have to regard that statement as first order. The displacements in the work were successful enough to direct that person into a 180 degree (mis)interpretation. That (mis)interpretation is as it were one of the ironies internal to the work. The attempt to produce a stable, non-radical, non-sceptical, non-ironic, non-self-inconsistent interpretation of the work must be doomed to failure, or the work has failed. This is not charismatic solipsism. The work requires the prosecution of conflict, not the luxury of the play of contrasts. This conflict may always remain ordinal. You may never get a sense of the whole. This is reality – the only chance against manipulative barbarism. The ontological problem is that a work of art tears itself apart having worn the clothes of unity. Adorno’s interpretation of Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis is entirely germane. I think we can extract more hope than Adorno, I don’t think I have to resort to quite the same artsy pessimism as he insists upon. The radical incompleteness of what he called the human project, the necessity for the radical interpretation at any and every moment in the unfolding of that project, and therefore the dry necessity of taking risks with aesthetically incomplete and self-uncompleting works, is what hope there is for a human project. This is entirely distinct from the solipsistic play of contrasts authorised as a secure cultural moment. That’s Tony Hancock”.