tony baker arty stuff

Blind-Faith in the Free Market / Faith-Free in the Market Blind

Double-sided Print Installation with Side Plates and Cake Crumbs

From the Convenient Lies series

One of the driving forces of Thatcherism was that of a Free-Market Economy, whereby British business broke free of any regulations imposed by Government and was able to set prices for its service and production in response to supply & demand.

This deregulation of industry marked both the decline of the Public Sector epitomised by the Welfare State and the birth of what became known as Privatisation. Bit by bit, the Government absolved itself of any financial responsibility for Public services : Further Education went through ‘incorporation’ whereby institutions (formerly under the control of local councils) were made to follow a business model where profit became the driving force, transport became a network of private companies that would close unprofitable routes for financial benefit irrespective of community needs, and, along with many other industries, the National Coal Board, responsible for the energy supply of the nation, fell under private control.

This investment in the Free Market led to a blind faith in the Private Sector, where, unlike the Public Sector, who were demonised as being inefficient, lazy and prone to going on strike when terms and conditions were being threatened, they could do no wrong. But then, in 2008, the unimaginable happened - the invincible world of the financial sector started to collapse, when Lehman Brothers Bank was declared bankrupt, closely followed by a host of others, including the Royal Bank of Scotland, all of whom had to be rescued by the government - which, in the case of RBS, was to the tune of £45.5billion, of which, according to the bank's chairman, Howard Davies, it is unlikely to ever be recouped.

In addition to selling off national industries, many of those remaining have slowly become carved up, whereby increasing chunks of their service provision is outsourced to companies offering, what appears on paper, to make good economic sense - work gets done at a competitive price, and the government doesn't have to worry about such trifling overheads as buildings and salaries. But then the promises of these companies, made to look glorious when going to tender, start to fall apart, and, like the banks, they come back to the government with their tail between their legs asking for a bail out - and unlike local councils, schools and the NHS, the government pays up.

At the 2012 Olympic Games, for example, G4S were unable to fulfil their contractual obligation to provide 10,000 security guards, which resulted in the government bringing in the Army to provide the security that it had already paid for. Then last year, the construction and outsourcing firm, Carillion was made bankrupt, leaving hundreds of schools and hospitals without support services, which, despite an assertion by the government that the company's liquidation wouldn't draw on public funds, is set to cost the taxpayer £65million in redundancy payments (a figure that doesn't include those in Carillion's supply chain of subcontractors who have also gone under, as a result). And now, more recently, we have the failure of Capita to send cervical cancer screening letters to around 50,000 women as part of their £300m seven-year contract to provide administrative support to the National Health Service, for which the NHS is now going to have to sort out itself.

Sketch for : Penis as an Abusive Weapon of Male Power Against Women / Women Against Male Penis as an Abusive Weapon of Power

 Double-sided #Print #Installation with an assortment of edible novelty lollipops

 From the Convenient Lies series

It would seem that when facing charges of sexual harassment (or assault), the ‘go-to’ line of defense is to claim that it was ‘just a bit of fun’, or if you are Sir Philip Green (who has also employed the same tactic, claiming that his sexual approaches were just a bit of inoffensive #banter), you pay your former employee £1 million to keep their mouth shut - and usually they go away.

This almost inseparable relationship between #power and #abuse, (that generally tends to be a bit of a ‘man’ thing), comes from being surrounded by an entourage of ‘Yes’ people, all eager for a slice of the cake – who, in their bid to climb the ladder of #ambition, are inclined to pamper to their boss’s insecurities and egotistical whims in order to curry favour. All of which (along with other personality traits that were probably there in the first place) creates the #monster, who, believing themselves to be beyond reproach, is allowed to go about unhindered, using their position of power to satisfy their every desires, and subsequently fuel their insatiable #ego.

In the face of such institutional abuse where the perpetrator appears to be beyond the law, the individual abusee is rendered defenseless, having no clout when faced with the army of #lawyers that only #money can buy - unless, as is the case with #Green and #Weinstein, the sheer numbers of their victims and the weight of the #metoo movement are able to turn around and bite them on the bum, as they rightly receive their just desserts. The, other alternative of course, is to take the more extreme route chosen by radical feminist Valerie #Solanas , known for being the woman who shot Andy #Warhol, and sole member of #SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men), who, in her manifesto wrote of a world that she envisioned without #men, calling on “civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females” to “overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and eliminate the male sex.”

Within The Enemy / The Enemy Within 

 Double sided print installation from the Convenient Lies series

Having already brought Consensus Government to an end back in 1981, Margaret Thatcher set about stabilizing the country’s failing economy through a vicious campaign aimed at destroying what she provocatively coined as the ‘Enemy Within’ - the collateral damage of which was the erosion of the welfare state and the subsequent disunity of the working classes. Setting her sights on the Trade Unions who had previously managed to hold industry to ransom throughout the nineteen seventies, she went for the jugular, targeting the National Union of Mineworkers, in the firm belief, that if she could break them, the rest would be plain sailing.

 Led by Arthur Scargill, the NUM was the final bastion of union resistance – it was both powerful and united (unless you count the Midland collieries), and having been responsible for the collapse of the Ted Heath government in the Miners’ Strike of 1974, (that resulted in the imposition of 3 Day Weeks and the subsequent Winter of Discontent that was to follow a few years later), they were a force to be reckoned with, but, unlike the previous Conservative Government, this one wasn’t prepared to take any prisoners, and on the pretext of collieries being uneconomic (a concept that Scargill wouldn’t accept), they proposed a programme of pit closures that was to decimate mining villages, and leave the striking miners with a lifetime of debt.

 Aided and abetted by a police force on permanent overtime, who, as a result, were able to buy colour TVs and go on packaged holidays to the Costa Brava, whilst their adversaries were reliant on donated food and soup kitchens run by Miners’ Wives groups, (being an unofficial strike there was no Strike Pay’ to rely on), the governments’ campaign was deliberately divisive. Aimed at stockpiling coal and keeping collieries in production by coercing less militant mining areas to cross the picket line, the deployment of the police force in such numbers was one of aggressive provocation that was not averse to spilling blood.

 The militancy of the Miners Strike had gained itself a reputation for being violent - returning miners (Scabs) and their families had been intimidated and beaten up, and confrontations with the police were, at times, known to be volatile – the bloodiest of these being the Battle of Orgreave on June 18th, 1984, that had been co-ordinated by the South Yorkshire Police, (who had previously been responsible for the treatment of the recent Hillsborough disaster), where thousands of miners, intent on preventing deliveries being made to the local steel plants in Scunthorpe, had been deliberately allowed to converge on the fields outside the coking plant in Orgreave in a pre-planned confrontation aimed at destroying the NUM.

 This was the first time that ‘short shield’ officers were deployed, and in accordance with the police force’s ‘Public Order Tactical Options’ manual (that endorsed violent tactics to control demonstrators*), the striking miners were held in a cordon by Police dogs, whereby mounted Police galloped through the crowds, trampling and attacking with batons anybody in their way and arresting pickets on charges of rioting – something very different to previous Police policy aimed at controlling numbers on picket lines in the interest of preventing civil disorder.

 In the subsequent investigation into the Police’s conduct at Orgreave, there have been admissions of officers lying (or being told what to say) in their statements, along with allegations of collusion and cover up. Of the miners arrested on the day, nobody was prosecuted, with most cases being dropped halfway through the court proceedings, and of the thirtynine miners that took out civil proceedings against the South Yorkshire Police Force, all of these cases were settled out of court without any admission of liability for what was a pre-planned and unlawful assault on the miners at Orgreave.

 *although legally this was only in the case of self-defense or in prevention of a crime

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 The Winter of Discontent (2018)

The Brexit Triptych : Greed Feeding Ignorance In Its Pursuit Of Power 

Photographs taken at The Brexit Show at Dean Clough Galleries in Halifax

April 20th - May 2nd

Weapons Of Mass-Destruction? / Mass-Destruction Of Weapons?

Photographs from the Dualism Exhibition

Yorkshire Hub

26 East Parade

Leeds . LS1 5SH

Loving the Enemy (Reds are Under Your Bed) / Reds are Loving the Enemy Under Your Bed

 Double Sided Print Installation from the Convenient Lies series : Print with Single Bed and Pillow

 In 1950, a little-known senator, Joseph McCarthy, addressed members of the Ohio County Republican Women’s Club, proclaiming that he had in his hand, a list of state department staff who were affiliated in some way to the Communist Party, and called for their support in purging America of this odious enemy that lay within. However, there was no list – certainly not one resembling anything such as fact.

 But this didn’t seem to matter, he had said what his audience wanted to hear – he had given fuel to their fire that had been left flickering ever since the end of the Second World War – a fire that had been ignited by the establishment of the German Democratic Republic, the Peoples Republic of China and the start of the Cold War – and which, collectively, had conspired to make Communism the greatest evil of all time (they would deal with homosexuals, Mexicans and the Middle East later on).

 And it was this guileless fabrication of a lie that gave birth to the McCarthy Trials, a witch hunt, not that dissimilar from the purges of Nazi Germany, that set out to expose and eradicate all un-American Activities, and rid the nation of any Communist threat to the Ad-Man’s American Dream. It was a powerful and dangerous monster that created as much fear within American society as the Communism that it set out to destroy, and in its wake, thousands of people lost their jobs (sometimes just by being subpoenaed to attend a hearing), leaving society to pick up its pieces as paranoia successfully embedded itself into the nations psyche.

 Keeping this hysteria alive, and making reference to the Goebbels notebook, was a propaganda machine that, not only produced Public Information films on how to spot a Communist, but also inspired a plethora of Cowboy Westerns and Science Fiction films, in which good was always seen to champion over evil –  and in the case of the latter, blow all them pesky aliens (a cinematic euphemism for Communists) to smithereens, just like they’d done in Hiroshima.

 By portraying evil as a metaphor for the fight against Communism in this fictional world of both past and future, it was easy to establish a moral code, where the gunslinger’s solution to a situation could be applied to the present day, and because the nation had already swallowed the pill, it was easy to continue fabricating the lies whilst America went about its’ business of creating its’ great fictional truth – something that rings true today, where the daily lies presented by politicians, spin doctors and the media, merely feed the big lie that had been sold a long time ago.

 Although McCarthy had been successful in whooping up an anti-communist hysteria, his campaign came to an end when he focused his attention on the military – unlike with entertainment industry, where he had been able to terrorize Tinsel Town through a tyrannical victimization of left wing writers, actors and studio staff (generally based on unfounded accusations), the military were having none of it, and by accusing ‘Tailgunner Joe’ of having no sense of decency, brought the trials to an abrupt end. However, the Cold War was now in full swing, and Communism had become both the personification of all evil as well as America’s prime adversary in war, sport and the space race, where the USSR and America, were to battle it out in the new Wild West of outer space in their bid for world supremacy (Russia had put the first dog and man into space, Laika and Yuri Gagarin, whilst America had successfully landed on the moon, when Neil Armstrong had taken his ‘one giant step).

 It wasn’t until Perestroika and the fall of the iron curtain, that the threat of Communism began to lose its appeal, which meant that America, now finding itself without a scapegoat, had to start the frustrating process of looking somewhere else for a suitable nemesis upon which to focus its attention – because, as everybody knows, you always need an enemy to deflect attention from your own wrongdoings in order to publicly absolve yourself of all guilt.

 World Paranoia : lyrics written for Household Name 12” ep

Prayer to a Burning Cross (White Supremacist Hokum) / Burning White Supremacist (Prayer to a Hokum Cross)

Double Sided Print Installation (reverse side)

from Convenient Lies series

The notion of killing in the name of God, and using what is essentially a doctrine of peace and love to justify bloodshed, has always appeared, at the very least, to be contradictory - nonetheless, this form of righteously sanctioned terrorism seems to have been very much in evidence ever since the Crusades, when medieval Christians set off to reclaim Jerusalem from its Muslim invaders -  and, although it may manifest itself in different guises, there are no obvious signs of anything ever changing.

This appropriation of religious doctrine to meet the necessary requirements of whatever the pervading tribal ideology of the time might be, is never more evident than with the Ku Klux Klan (a name, allegedly taken from the sound made when loading a rifle), who, having adopted the burning cross from D W Griffith's film, Birth of a Nation, maintain that they are not, as it might appear, burning the cross, but, instead, illuminating it, as it would be in a church - and claim that each time a Klan member participates in a 'cross lighting' ceremony, they are, in fact, reaffirming their continued commitment to the Christian faith.

Through this self-serving theology, of bad religion, the Klan see no issues in burning the symbol of Christ's ascension into heaven alongside that of a flaming swastika (as was witnessed recently in a Klan gathering at a 'White Pride' rally in Paulding County, Georgia), and consequently see Christianity as a solely White Religion, whose order, it is their duty to preserve.

One of these defenders of White Christianity was the former pastor and Ku Klux Klan leader, Edgar Ray Killen who died last year in prison, aged 92, and was the only person to face state murder charges in the killings of the three Civil Rights activists, James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, who were abducted and murdered in June 1964 in what was known as the "Mississippi Burning" murders.

Chaney, the only black member of the activists had been beaten with chains by the mob recruited by Killen,  before being subsequently castrated and shot, whilst Goodman and Schwerner were forced to watch his systematic assassination in advance of their own brutal death.

In the original trials, Killen was able to escape justice because one member of the jury held out against his conviction, because she couldn't bring herself to send a preacher to jail. Of the other Klan members involved in the killing, none served longer than six years, whilst Killen who had been subsequently sentenced to sixty years for manslaughter in 2006, based on fresh evidence, served twelve years before his own death in incarceration.

It is both this injustice and the contradiction of barbaric atrocities being hidden behind the flag (or in the case of the KKK, the white hoods and cloaks) of righteousness and high moral standing, that I find the most abhorrent. It is therefore both interesting, and distinctively disturbing to note that this always seems to go to the top, with present-day evangelicals such as Paula White claiming that “Trump has been raised up by God for such a time as this" - I can only assume that power was put there to be abused.

Unsurprisingly, this abuse of power and racial oppression seems to have featured in much of my songwriting over the years

LYNCH MOB TACTICS : Lynch Mob Tactics / Kill the bastards they killed my mum / eye for eye and tooth for tooth / now in power, we're the truth).  

KLANSMAN :  and it's politics and white men/ and it's whiskey and the klan / if you're going to bring back hanging / then you'll be the ones to hang.

Weapons of Mass Destruction

Sketch for Print Installation for Dualism Show at Yorkshire Hub, Leeds .

The Brexit Triptych : Greed Feeding Ignorance in its Pursuit of Power

In July 2018 I curated The Tony Tomlin Show at Studio 24 in Leeds - to see all the collections and videos from the opening event, which includes The Art Cowboys singing the Tony Tomlin song

This is a proposal for a collaborative project produced in May 2018 that has still to to be fully realised. The proposal is for a 100 fold out book, mural and set of panoramic prints based on a prose-like written text.