BHO

Art is sex.

It is the mystery and the solution, the extreme moment a light is switched on. It’s the cure for something but I forget what.
Education is the intangible, the endless beginning of life, the enjoyable method that does not reach a goal, though we strive as artists to achieve this inexplicable feeling of complete fulfilment and genius.
You are never sated and everything always seems to end.

Does this switch even work?

How come if you only gave me two, I’ve got four left?
…and have you noticed how everyone orders their puddings here like they’re ordering wine?
You’ve got to keep drinking through your generation.

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PROPOSALS FOR THE REDEVELOPMENT OF ELEPHANT AND CASTLE

ONE. The underpass is to become an overpass; no more murky little tunnels under a round-a-bout but a giant staircase that travels 100 metres over it. A place to reflect and watch city planners scurry about below you, desperately trying to think of ways to make the area suitable for young, urban professionals.

TWO. Ministry of Sound is to be closed down and then reopened as a giant community centre for us to use a base to expand and turn the whole city into a giant board game.

THREE. The giant tabernacle church is to be demolished – the bricks are to be used to construct a giant and pointless tower.

FOUR. Elephant and Castle is based upon two round-a-bouts. We are to take this idea and follow it through to its illogical conclusion that the area must become impossible to leave. The whole area is to be redesigned as a series of interlocking streets that lead no where but only back onto themselves. This is to enable a pure form of exploration. In an area you cannot leave you will be forced to use everywhere and everything that is available. Instead of Elephant and Castle being one facet of London, a whole new city will develop inside it.

THE O.M. MANIFESTO

‘WE ARE BORED IN THE CITY – THERE IS NO LONGER ANY TEMPLE OF THE
SUN’

OFFMODERN? It doesn’t mean anything,

a) OM (aum) IS A SACRED HINDU SYMBOL – THEY WRITE IT ON THEIR CHILDREN’S TONGUES.

or

b) It is the scenic route through the unmarked ordinance survey map of history; it’s the movement of a chess knight; no more neos or posts or avants, only OFF

It doesn’t matter which one you think is the real definition.

* * *

Svetlana Boym says the architecture of the Off Modern is the architecture of adventure; we dream of South East London as a giant playground, can we fit the streetlamps with light-switches? – Give Maurits Escher the keys to the city and have done with it. They are going to tear down the Aylesbury Estate, the ominously titled ‘PHASE 1a’ is underway, I thought we were past government sponsored utopian council estates? Give it twenty years and they’ll just have to tear it all down again. Leave it as a headstone to the failure of government sponsored utopian council estates. They turned Highgate Cemetery into a tourist destination; for people to marvel at the graves. Do the same for Elephant & Castle.  They put Chtcheglov in an asylum for five years because he wanted to deconstruct the Eiffel Tower. Phil Spector said he created Tina Turner just so he could destroy The Beatles (A spectre is haunting Europe, Phil Spector). The Off Modern is an attempt take over the U.N.E.S.C.O. building and use it for the distribution of cultish leaflets on the prophecies of Madame Sosostris.

* * *

We, the bankrupt benefactors of the last 600 years of human history have decided to fly tip it in the regent’s canal with other broken down white goods.

And one day Leon Battista Alberti will rise up from his unmarked grave and everyone will know you don’t have to paint to be a painter. Bring us the exhumed corpses of da Vinci and Michelangelo to use as stage props for our Las Vegas retrospectives and million dollar lecture tours.

Is this it? The last 600 years of human history fit for nothing more than being fly tipped in the regent’s canal. We hope the next 600 years will be fit for more.

* * *

One more government sponsored utopian council estate.
One more revolt in music and cinema.
Can we get an arts council grant?
Can we get interns?
We will need them for our lecture tours.
Is it too late to take credit for the invention of the electric guitar and
vinyl record?
Can we position ourselves as the inventors of jazz?
Or the pioneers of Brutalism?

* * *

We are from the other country, and twenty years behind the times we already have an audience.

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