SCAMMING in the NAME of the LORD

So you’re Bill Drummond. You stage-manage the theatrical premiere of Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea’s Illuminatus trilogy, choreograph the affairs of both Teardrop Explodes and Echo & The Bunnymen, briefly besuit yourself in Warners A&R department, mastermind the KLF conspiracy to terrorise the pop industry and then burn £1,000,000 as the K Foundation, striking aesthetic fear and loathing in all those polished folks who civilise the avant-garde on such outposts of reasonable tastefulness as BBC 2’s The Late Show. What happens next?

So you’re Matthew Manning. Under your Catholic baptismal name, you attend art college in Leeds, marry at 19, escape that doomed partnership in London, design a cartoon strip about a pig, Gruntwazzock Pork whose sleaze-ridden exploits deter even the most hardened editors and then finally reinvent yourself as Zodiac Mindwarp, the cartoon stud hero of your own personalised rock dreams in your own band, the Love Reaction, giving brilliantly ridiculous copy to amenable rock hacks but without ever quite convincing the dullard record-buying public that you are the ultimate answer to all their most blasphemous prayers. What happens next?

Obviously, you found a publishing company and base it in the navel of the world, that sylvan, seaside Antrim parish of Cushendall.

But the pair of you inhabit a different mind map and territory from those goodly Antrim folk. The first book from your publishing company, the Curfew Press will be a most special edition of only 200 copies, hand-printed, bound in calf-leather and costing £500 each. On March 2nd, you will launch it in Dublin. Only five copies will be sold in Ireland.

It’s called The Bible Of Dreams, the title echoing Sylvia Plath’s short story, ‘Johnny Panic and the Bible Of Dreams’. Its contents: 48 photo-collages from Mr. Manning; an accompanying commentary from Mr. Drummond.

Here be wizards? Well, the Thing definitely bears some similarity to the more comic occult publishing scams of the late Aleisteir Crowley as an exercise wherein wisdom and folly link hands as one. And inevitably it may also be viewed as one of those art-scams which according either to the observer’s theoretical inclinations or possibly, lack of nerve, is either tediously self-referential, a vacuous not a vicious circle, or a further demonstration of the punk maxim that publicity and true non-elitist performance art can be combined to remove the scales from our eyes.

In which case, I too am an evasive, ambiguous artist, adding or subtracting to your perception of this EVENT of the BOOK of the infinite media regress of the . . .? And according to this tag-team’s representative in Dublin, Suzanne Bissett of Gutart, it is also intended that invited guests from both Ireland and Britain will contribute to a videoed seminar about the EVENT of the BOOK of the infinite media regress of the . . .? Expect also prayers for the imminent beatification of Mr. Trellis. The evening’s pun : (A)Maze, elsewhere in Antrim.

Nor is this an end to the delights of CONTROVERSY. The Bible Of Dreams does not lack its quotient of PORNOGRAPHIC images. After all, Manning patched together these collages on Zodiac Mindwarp and the Love Reaction’s last Scandinavian campaign. When in Copenhagen, all-male rock bands do not sprint from the tour bus to plunder copies of Gardening Weekly.

So another potentially infinite regress. Riddle us this: can a visual artist comment on pornography without using such material? Elsewhere that critical question may have been answered in the chip-papers of yesterday’s art-mags but not in Ireland. Conveniently, our artists profess to be above and beyond the puerile dualisms of Catholic repression. We are LIBERATED; such material is now UNNECESSARY.

Funny, then what recently happened to the painter, Michael Farrell. Last August, he exhibited a set of etchings and two sculptures of Bishop Casey and Annie Murphy in flagrante but Dublin’s Taylor Gallery dismounted these works, forcing Farrell into a corner where he could only display them on a special Bank Holiday showing. Patently Farrell was unacceptably IRRESPONSIBLE.

And of course, the cultural codes used to interpret Manning’s images are triply different in Ireland, the United Kingdom and Scandinavia. The Swedes and most post-Calvinist Northern European societies permit it; the Irish ban it. So discuss this question : IS there a higher incidence of child abuse in Stockholm than Dublin?

But the intentional use of such provocative material also puts questions to the theorists of the art world. They may describe the workings of their explosive artistic devices but they always also ensure they’re defused. Avant-garde art can always hang on the boardroom wall but it must never shatter the windows of City skyscrapers. The gallery clique never really have the courage or desire to take their theories into the public arena where pop provocateurs like Drummond and Manning learned their trade. First message of the K Foundation: we have just murdered British pop-art. £1 million burned and scattered to the wind was the hit-men’s price.

(A)maze again. The Bible Of Dreams is an invitation to a publicity puzzle that better-behaved artists don’t usually enter. Some may deem it a silly stink-bomb . . . It is, it is . . . for once however, they won’t sniff at art.

But now a lone fact must halt the march of speculation. Accord-ing to Drummond’s text, among the reasons they limited this book to such a “small run, is that no printer would touch the stuff, not only because of its pornographic explorations, but the copyright nightmare that would ensue and ensnare all those that had been involved. I mean, is the Curfew Press ready to take on Walt Disney and the massed ranks of the cartel of European pornographers? I don’t think so.” Not pornography but the purloined images of Dumbo and Mickey Mouse compel the cunning and stealth in the publication of The Bible Of Dreams.

Drummond even accepts the book has its mysognistic elements. Among his justifications: rock has always been a politically incorrect boyzone. Manning’s collages reflect the fantasies of any scurvy tour-bus.

Besides, there is more like the photo of the adolescent Elvis, his puppy-fat larded with lurve, here reprinted. And among Drummond and Manning’s other notions was a scheme to plant an image of Presley on the North Pole where his redeeming psychic energies would flood through the globe’s nervous system of latitudes, longitudes and ley-lines. Their art too has a sacred function.