Paul Gorman

Aphasic Disturbance at CHELSEA space

//Layla Curtis: World Political detail, 2001.//

Aphasic Disturbance, the current show at CHELSEA space, is curator Stephen Bury’s response to  “Two types of language and two types of aphasic disturbance”, the 1956 essay by the linguist/literary theorist Roman Jakobson on manifestations of aphasia (the loss of power of expression through speech).

And Bury – now Andrew W. Mellon chief librarian of New York’s Frick Art Reference Library – uses artists’ books and multiples in the main from the collections he built when he was at Chelsea College of Art & Design’s library between 1978 and 2000.

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Blessed & Blasted: Group Hangman 07.07.1997

This was produced by Billy Childish and his associates before they formed The Stuckists.

I went along to a few Stuckist exhibitions and events, but preferred this manifesto to The Stuckists’; their’s seemed mere reaction when applied to artists of lesser stature than the soon-to-exit Childish.

Yet The Stuckists were worthwhile in their verbalisation of discontent at Britpop Blairite Britain’s rampant YBA smugness (and gave rise to the track with the ever-pertinent title Art Or Arse?).

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Teddy boys on the loose

//Elisabeth Photo Library, Cleveland Street, London W1. Summer 1977//

11.30am July 1977: Strolling back from a parcel delivery in the shadow of the Post Office Tower,  past The Tower Tavern.

Three Teddy Boys already in there, sitting by the ceiling to floor window. There had been several Teds picking off stragglers the previous night after the screening of Sex Pistols Number 1 at The Other Cinema in Tottenham Street.

These three were evidently having a livener after being up all night in Soho and surrounds.  My brothel creepers probably did for it, with Hoofer army greens and a 60s shirt from Acme Attractions. I had black spiked hair (the vegetable dye ran blue down my neck in the rain) and afterwards one of the cops said: “Well, what do you expect walking around like that?”

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