Tag: Jay Jopling

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art Christmas Dogs Gay Whitstable

Bollocks

Spent the past couple of days in London. Stayed at Dean Street Town House which is just perfect.  Perfectly well-appointed.  Huge rooms, pale pink curtains, heavily interlined.  A wonderful shower and a great coffee-making facility.  Delicious, hand-made biscuits.  The little dog and I luxuriated in acres of white linen and huge, fluffy pillows.

This morning I walked to Oxford Street through Golden Square.  Lovely to be home in London.  Lovely.  I was stopped by a beautiful, blue-eyed youth who wanted to talk about the little dog.

The beautiful youth not withstanding the streets are unusually crammed with ugly British people Christmas shopping.  Big faces on bald heads.  Prematurely middle age.  Marching up and down Oxford Street clutching at grim paper bags and their final straw.  Pasty, miserable, bespectacled boats.

Boat race=face.

The damp streets.  The gray sky.  Oh this is my darling England.

Stopped in at a pop up gallery on Berwick Street and bought:

By Christian Brett.

I thought in the circumstances..very appropriate!

Anyway, if you are interested in this and other work go to:

www.picturesonwalls.com

As a free gift, comes with every purchase, they gave me an original art work by Banksy….a brown paper bag with a Marks and Spencer type logo that reads ‘Marks and Stencils’ and is already selling on eBay for ninety quid.

Had a long chat with the curator Sam (knows Wendy Asher) who felt that the whole STREET ART movement had been suspended in aspic for the past decade and I think that he may very well have hit the nail on the head.  He didn’t feel as if he had ‘grown up’ that things had remained static, unevolved, complacent.

My own contemporary art world gripe: how come so few artists have anything relevant to say about world altering current events like Iraq?  For instance?  Who is making work about that?

Most conceptual, contemporary art is so bloody insular and self obsessed.   The entitled, bloated Tracy Emin (for instance) has become unashamedly bourgoise and so, I am sad to say, are the rest of the YBA wankers.

Why make work about a corrupt war when I can tell you all about my vagina/blood/self?

The art of ME.  I am all I ever think about… etc.

It’s Jay’s fault.  He loves a good title and a decorative flourish.  Jay Jopling has never been interested in political art and that, my friends, is very sad.

I mentioned Joseph Kosuth to Sam the pop up shop curator as an example of an artist who might have an opinion about the war and the bloody peace.

What is conceptual art?  The ‘value’ of particular artists after Duchamp can be weighed according to how much they questioned the nature of art.

Conceptual art is based on the notion that the essence of art is an idea, or concept, and may exist distinct from and in the absence of an object as its representation. It is called Idea art, Post-Object art, and Dematerialized art because it often assumes the form of a proposition (i.e., a document of the artist’s thinking) or a photographic document of an event.

Conceptual art practices emerged at a time when the authority of the art institution and the preciousness of the unique aesthetic object were being widely challenged by artists and critics.

Conceptual artists interrogated the possibilities of art-as-idea or art-as-knowledge, and to those ends explored linguistic, mathematical, and process-oriented dimensions of thought and aesthetics, as well as invisible systems, structures, and processes.

Artists such as Joseph Kosuth and members of the Art & Language group wrote theoretical essays that questioned the ways in which art has conventionally acquired meaning. In some cases such texts served as the art works themselves.

Dinner with Nicola and Chris on Saturday night.  Lovely.  We ate oysters, game pie and vegetables.  Ended up flirting with a cute doorman with footballers thighs in some club on Dean Street.  He was ‘straight’ so I walked away.  Damn.

This evening I met Charlie at a huge ‘A’ gay Christmas event.  I met loads of people.  Lovely (sexy, charming, witty and down-to-earth) Dutch/Kiwi man and his friend but the BEST was a gallerist/singer songwriter called Robert Diament who I could totally FALL for.  I kissed him goodnight.

Out sexy gay man with a brain.  Huh?  How did that happen?

Well, it’s not going to happen  In the cold light of this sober day (Monday morning) he’s far too young and until my heart is mended…I really can’t imagine letting anyone near me.

Drove back to Whitstable with Alma who is very funny and we giggled for miles.

Anyway, as I have said before..after letting you know my initial impressions of someone ‘special’ I won’t be writing about them again.  Can you tell that I am having a nice time?  That I am happy?  Can you?  I am safe and warm (house is a bit chilly) and enveloped by love?

I forgot to mention yesterday…I bought a hat at Kokon to Zai.  It is rather splendid.

Then I went to bed…good night…sweet dreams.


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prison

Prison Romance

Prison Calendar 1983

This is the calendar that I kept in my cell.  I marked off the days one by one.

The month before I was released from my ten month stay in prison in 1983 was perhaps, like many prisoners,  the most difficult of any time I spent there.  I had what is commonly known in British prison parlance: Gate Fever.

The terror at the prospect of release.

Since my arrest the preceding February I had  spent time in both Brixton prison, at that time a holding pen for the unconvicted or remanded prisoner, then once convicted I was transferred to Wormwood Scrubbs Prison in West London.  I was offered the chance of going to an open prison which would have been very comfortable indeed but I had fallen in love with Tommy, the prisoner with whom I shared a cell.

Our relationship lasted the duration of my sentence.  I was released before him and upon his release he returned to his wife and children.

Foolish love, it seems, has always caused me unnecessary repercussions.

Why in hells name was I in prison?  Well, I hadn’t murdered/raped/robbed anyone.

I was convicted at Knightsbridge Crown for Criminal Deception a charge relating to my not paying a credit card bill..my own credit card.    Not, as commentators would have it, someone elses.

At the time it never really occurred to me that I was being unfairly treated.  I had not paid the credit card bill and had avoided doing so.  In retrospect the sentence of fifteen months in prison seems like a gross over reaction by the court to what was surely a nothing sort of crime.

Stephen Fry At 17, absconded with a credit card stolen from a family friend and as a result spent three months in Pucklechurch Prison.

Fry stole someone else’s credit card and got 3 months at exactly the same time I was handed a 15 month sentenced for over using my own.

I was 22 years old when I was sent to prison for this non-violent victimless crime.  A crime like mine in 2010 would not even be a crime in modern Britain.   It was nothing short of class warfare that sent me to prison in the first place.

Posh versus Common.

Let’s face facts, I was sent to prison for my unusual back-story.   A back-story that should never have been mentioned in court because I was pleading guilty.  A back story that included royalty, the ruling class and a working-class upstart like me.

The Lords and Ladies who had become my friends during the time I pretended to be a Lord were indignant but I don’t think any one of them would have wanted me to be sent down.  The class outrage that caused such a harsh sentence was, of course, motivated by the aspiring middle class.

Judge Babington was a bourgeoise, one-armed circuit judge who died in 2004.  His family was described embarrassingly  as ‘well-to-do’  and in so being was in awe of the aristocracy, in awe of a title and outraged that I had simply acquired mine by lying about it.

Stephen Fry took me to the Garrick Club years later and there he was, Anthony Babington sitting in an over stuffed chair reading a broad sheet.  I looked at his withered arm and chuckled.

Stephen once said to me, “They don’t want to forget that you have been in prison Duncan.  It’s very unfair.”

Prison has defined my life.  I am that guy who went to Prison.  Jay Jopling would tell people, “Duncan has an amazing story.”  In this way I became a very British performance art piece.   A social freak.

When I am scolded for treating 30 year olds who make mistakes like grown ups I often remember that I was forced in a very public way at a very young age to accept my wrongs and grow up.

Even though, when I was released,  I did not crawl away and die like Patrick Kinmonth suggested.  Prison left an indelible mark on my psyche as well as my public and private standing.

Sure, had I not been sent to prison I would never have made as much money as I consequently made from AKA or telling that story over and over for TV, Radio and the like.

I would never have developed a taste for working class heterosexual men and I might have kept on the straight and narrow.  Prisons in the UK are often described by those of us who have experienced both as reminiscent of British boarding schools.  Consequently I rather enjoyed the routine, the monotony, the sex.

Once you have been imprisoned unfairly..YES IT WAS UNFAIR!..one has a very low regard for society and the rules of society.  Part of my fearlessness comes from knowing that if sent back to prison I would know what to do immediately.  How to behave.  Whom to defer.  Who to fuck.

I would not miss the endless choices of the modern world.  I would not miss a full wardrobe, a well written menu, compulsive internet use?  No.  It would be a relief.

I would miss my dogs.

If I could only get back there without breaking the law.

I have no shame about going to prison because I should not have been there in the first place.  It was like visiting a foreign country.  That’s what it felt like when I was 22 years old..like visiting a foreign country and I, a mere anthropologist, sent to eat their food and study their culture.   My crime and the associated press amused my fellow inmates and warders (screws) alike.   Nobody took my Criminal Deception very seriously.

Some of the men that I shared cells with whilst on remand in Brixton (the red headed rapist) are still in prison.  They never left.

There was one slight man who murdered a little girl.  Tiny little thing he was.  Never wanted to leave prison.  Never applied for parole.  Wanted his own death so badly.  Already dead inside.  Sad.  Those who killed loved ones, family members were the saddest of all.  Wishing that they were dead.  These men were not abstract villains, their names writ large on the covers of tawdry newspapers, they stood beside me in line waiting for cabbage and sausages.   It amazes me now how forgiving and accepting I could be with them…however ghastly their crime.

Funny, isn’t it, that I could accept and forgive the most terrible people capable of the most terrible crimes but I could not forgive you my dear JB.

So, today I am free?

I am free?  I am free to choose?  I am free to say what I want when I want to?  I am free to love a man?  I am free?

These freedoms do not make me free.

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Auto Biography Fashion Film Gay Whitstable

Manifest Destiny

As I was stacking boxes for my move I found a whole heap of diaries from the 1980’s.   The first day to day diary I kept was in 1982 and that was primarily because life had become so exciting.

We open the first book on this day September 5th, 1982.  I am 22 years old.

I am in Greece, on the island of Spetses staying with Sir John and Lady Russell.   I am still, at this time, Lord Rendlesham and have flown from Paris to Athens with an older nobleman called Guy de la Bedoyere of whom I had tired.

It was Guy’s Turner that I had marveled in Paris a few days earlier and whose butler, much to my horror, had washed in a washing machine my new Crolla ties.

The magazine Harper’s Bazzar had published the pictures of my infamous birthday party thrown for me by Scott Crolla at the Almeida Theatre.  Word was just reaching me in Greece that people were not at all happy.  Not at all.

If you click on the diary pages you can read the original entries.

I am in love with a beautiful Swiss boy called Robert and it is he that I wave goodbye to at the beginning of the entry.

The following year September 1983 there is no diary entry until I am released from prison on the 18th November.

September 1984 I am in rehearsal for Pornography: a Spectacle at the ICA in London.   There are huge articles about us all in Time Out, The Face and a now defunct London mag called City Limits.  I am living in Balham with a girl called Victoria.  By day I am in a play about gay pornography and by night I sleep with what was effectively my girlfriend.   So was the complexity of my life.  “Every gesture must be full and complete.” says Neil.  Neil Bartlett, director of the show.   During these days he and I began to fall out.  Irrevocably as it turned out.  When we left each other in Toronto months later after our North American tour we would never speak again.

September 1985 I am writing whilst stuck in a tunnel under the alps on a train from Paris to Venice.  My and Ivan Cratwright’s great adventure to Venice.  Staying, en route with Fred Hughes in Paris.

The diary for 1986 was missing but now found.  I will transcribe the entry.  I am yet again in another heterosexual relationship with a woman called Louise.  Why?

“Oh dear, I am in The General Trading Company off Sloan Square – Louise by my side.  Firstly I did not expect the Bahamian bombshell to come back to Whitstable to see me.  I rather thought that she might have given me a miss.

Yesterday before Louise arrived my pinks from Kingstone (?) Cottage arrived, they came to me in a brown cardboard box wrapped in local newspaper.  I planted them carefully, laying a foundation of stones for good drainage and surrounded the root system with peat. Maria helped out the best she could but spent the best part of yesterday drawing on the beach.   The day before that too she had worked hard on minimalist drawings incorporating the seascape – noticeably the foreshore and the horizon, terribly witty references to dead fish – (?) a family with prawn.

Ivan (Cartwright), we collected him from Whitstable station – Korda (Marshall) and I, he was in such a good frame of mind .  He prattled on about being arrested for car thieving and told a remarkable story about having been picked up on Park Lane (London) dressed only in a full length pink, synthetic fur coat, cowboy boots and a micro polka dot bikini!  He was picked up by a vast black men in a Buick.

Korda was completely freaked out by Ivan and as soon as he had the opportunity – left.  However, Ivan enchanted both Rachel (Whiteread) and (?) with his wit and intelligence.  We left for the pub far too late.  Ivan was wearing a pair of black cotton stockings, a black tee-shirt and short black sweat pants all topped off with this platinum blond hair and that face which as you know contorts like nobodies business.

We all slept late and woke early, that’s why when big bertha arrived (Louise) I was knackered.  We took off for a long adventurous but utterly fruitless journey to a closed park.  We did go to Beech House (Hospital School in Chartham)  I remembered yet again the horror of being taken there when I was a child – I remember that it was in that place that my life changed direction and I began to fight, so it was rather apt that I went there – my life again on the edge of a potential nightmare.  India,  8th October 10.15 – 9 months.   It rings in my ears.

As we drove to London yesterday Louise and (?) wrote that evening’s narrative.  For she as an eye for the ironic.  Firstly we locked ourselves out of Louise’s car and house then we saw the corpse of a man freshly killed, his legs crossed at the ankles, in the road.  His clothing partially hidden under a green waterproof police modesty blanket.  All of us knew that ambulances take only the living to be mended as best they can.  Death has no care.  I wondered about his family.  The pulse stopped and the narrative ending for him.  We drove slowly.  Later the image of the corpse quietened me and made me listen.

Louise is my strength whom I do not deserve.  Late last night I felt truly happy and secure.  That’s enough isn’t it?  Enough for a man who rarely lives safely, who is destined to become a lonely old man with personality problems.”

September 1987 I am a patient in the Henderson Hospital in Sutton Surrey where I spent the majority of that year.   I had a breakdown after a particularly bad bout of Hep B.  The Jay who would be fetching me from hospital is, of course, Jay Jopling.

For some odd reason I did not keep a complete diary in 1988.   I am not fully well from my breakdown but have decided to go to New York to see Ana Corbero and Colin Cawdor.  Paul Benny the artist was also staying in the huge apartment.  An entire floor of a converted girls school just over the Williamsburg Bridge.

There is no entry for these dates in 1989.

1990, my thirtieth year.  Living in Chelsea with Phillipa having what looks like a rather glamorous time.

1991 Coppers Bottom has opened at Sadler’s Wells.  Karen, the lead actress is threatening to walk.  I am now living with Anthony H. in South London.

1992 Tim and I are laughing about Damien Hirst not winning the Turner Prize that he seemed so certain to win.  I rather cruelly called Jay and told him how sorry I was whilst sniggering with Tim.

Not long before I get sober.  Just another 5 years.

After 1992 I kept a journal less and less.  I began every year enthusiastically writing everyday like I do now in the blog but by July had lost interest or life was simply too overwhelming.

Anyway, that was fun?

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art Auto Biography

Picture Perfect

I wanted to post a few pictures. I want to remind myself that it has all been an incredible journey.

I wanted to include this one because I have a man’s legs wrapped around my shoulders. He is called Chris Boot. He was in South Africa with Tilda Swinton. Tilda came to the dinner thrown for me at Sundance when AKA played there. She came with Jamie Johnson.

Boom Boom Boom (The Sublime) 1982 Peter Doig

 You can see half of the Peter Doig painting I bought at his St Martin’s degree show.  It hung in my Furlong Road, Islington sittingroom until I was arrested.  At which point Doig decided to snatch it back and I never saw it again. It is probably worth in excess of $1, 000, 000 now.

Matt Rowe and Marie Palmer, we met at the Mercer Hotel in NYC with Mel C from the Spice Girls.  Matt had been one half of the duo who wrote all of their best tunes. New Years Eve 1999, Mercer Hotel with Calvin Klein, Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman, Alan Cummings and Fran Leibowitz. A cool very night.  Matt is still a great friend.

I’ve written loads about Jay Jopling in this blog. This is the night he met my sister Jessica.

Justin Lee-Aliston was my best gay friend in Whitstable. He was the sweetest boy. He killed himself a few months after he was gay bashed in Camberwell South London.  Here he is in happier times with my friend Tracy at the Island Wall, Whitstable house.

Celia Lyttleton, I can’t remember where we met but she is a doll and this picture was taken at a fancy dress party at the artist Glynn Boyd Hart’s house during the 1980’s.

Celia introduced me to the artist Ana Corbero at her Albermarle St gallery. She in turn introduced me to Colin Cawdor , the Thane of Cawdor-Macbeth. Duncan and Macbeth in NYC, in a sprawling apartment in Williamsburg. Long before anybody else was living there.

Our view.

Colin and Anna. Now, Colin lives in the North of Scotland in his castle, a castle he had to wrestle from his step-mother. Ana lives in Spain with her husband. I remember that he dressed Ana in Azzadine Alaia-and the moths ate clean through her fur coat.

I’ll post some more soon.

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