Broke and Baroque: In Support of Reclaiming the City

I live in treetops now, I step out onto the balcony each frosty morning I can remember to and take a picture. Since moving here I have had every form of winter thrown at me: sunbeams through blackening branches, hail stones, wind so hard it flipped the table, a torrential downpour I saw pass over half of London, a rainbow in its wake. It occurred to me that for the first time in my life I would see every graded colour into the New Year and that even in entropy, for the first time I can say I’m happy.

The council estates which enclosed my childhood were monochromatic, uniform in their despair. Walking by them now triggers a sort of retrospective claustrophobia. There were glimpses of beauty, the odd flourish of love and adornment in the occasional shoebox-flat, like flowers bursting between pavement slabs or the dignified despair of conscious street art which bursts from its frame of urban decay. Mostly though, we lived within rows and rows of unchanging and unchangeable rectangles carved into cardboard. I learned early on that there was no chance of my affecting change on my environment; I was subject to it. I recall the mood of endless summers in representations of youth emerging from nineties cinema as a way of identifying the dreamy boredom of childhood. I was affected by it but only as someone staring out of a fishbowl. I only remember endless winters, the baseline to which brief forays into anarchic bouts of liberation from concrete school grounds onto concrete estates would always return. Seasons were demarcated by the rolling realisations that nothing had changed, and nothing could change. Everyone I knew had parents who were either drunk or high, had each other up against walls, or they just weren’t there.

I was eleven years old during the Y2K hysteria. I remember watching television reporters speculate about crashing markets, blackouts, riots, planes falling out of the sky. I got excited; here was something which would undeniably impact everything. Besides that it was a good reason to stay out of school and I was running low on excuses. On New Year’s Eve I sat in the window frame of our tiny ground floor flat watching the arhythmic, violent little fireworks go off from the streets, and I waited for the end of the world. It didn’t come. Planes flew over me, markets continued strangling the poor and feeding the rich, obfuscating their crimes by disguising themselves as indecipherable numbers on scrolling marquees, and I listened to Tara, our sometimes-babysitter, screaming at her boyfriend for the third time that week. The only thing that changed was our communal ground, splattered with the lout’s clothes hurled from Tara’s window by the morning.

Depression thrives where there is no light and change cannot be enacted. When I was fifteen years old I didn’t leave bed for a week. I didn’t open the curtains. It was winter anyway and high rises made an enclave around our battered little house. Sometimes I woke not knowing if it was 5pm or 5am and sobbed. I wasn’t sad I had missed school; that was perhaps the intention of my depression. I failed to bear witness to change; the day I had planned on passing had passed me by. There is a gallows humour which arises from the smog of metropolitan life. I hear Londoners quip about not having seen the sky in months. It is possible to live in the city and never see the horizon. It is on the horizon that change occurs. It makes sense to me now that when I was fifteen we used to climb to the top of a hill on the outskirts of the city to smoke weed and drink cheap cider. My introduction to Absinthe occurred between sundown and that horizon between the tree lines where starlight invited me into an adulthood somewhere beyond that stinking suburb. When I finally got out, I was in the back of a car driving on a cliffside on Cyprus. Our driver pulled over and hurried us all out to look up at the glimmering dots and curves of the nebula. It was the first time I had seen any of the Milky Way with my naked eye. It became water and ran down my cheek, and the guy looked at me like I was mad.

The despair of poverty is bound to an atemporality, the inability to conceive of change. We inscribe ourselves onto time, and it is through time that our selves are given back to us. There is a reason that time is removed from places of forced confinement. Prisons, asylums and detention centres have all exercised experiments in distorting temporality and the environment in a way that generates sensory confusion and deprivation. White Torture is a disturbing instance of the prisoner confined to a space completely removed from the effect of time or externality. The self is lost in a space which has no effect and which cannot be affected. Growing up in drab, oppressive housing, through drab, oppressive institutions, I used to think their uniformity and endless repetition was designed to maintain despair. I believed the way state apparatus funnel the poor through systems of white walls and concrete was a weapon of a vertical class war. Now I’m watching a generation of corporate types paying the cost of a farmhouse in Wales to live in shoeboxes stacked one above the other in ugly structures of glass and steel piercing what little sky we have left. It’s a new build, they say with the same fashionable nihilism with which they drink murky water and accept inflation, but it’s close to work. Granted, they have fitted kitchens and you know what you’re getting with IKEA furniture, but an expensive cage is still a cage, and what happens when there are so many cages stacked so high, no one can see the horizon any more?

It is a question of proximity which primes the nature of our alienation. Our proximity to the fruits of our labour determines our alienation from it, and our capacity to inscribe onto and perceive change within our environment determines alienation just the same. Uniformity is a way of prohibiting inscription of the self, and is a necessary component of oppression from its most violent examples (the removal of hair and names from the incarcerated) to its more benign. I learned that identity was a commodity for the state to give and take at will when I was first punished for scribbling on my school books as a child. Apparently my thoughts were not permitted to run free across the covers of these work books; they were to be confined within the margins inside, until later. The transition from one school year to another involved the arbitrary command that we decorate them with whatever we liked, as long as it was suitable. I was never good at anticipating the boundaries of such values and I was punished again. Still it intrigued me; one year my school told me to keep my identity to myself, the next I was ordered to cover my books in it. At thirty years old not much has changed; it is making my mark, imprinting the signifier Home onto my home (painting a single wall) that has instigated my landowner to declare war with me.

Like most villages, my childhood estates also contained wise women, mad old matriarchs whose homes had an inherent mysticism. They usually hoarded things which were both a horror and delight to explore, and these hermits took pride in exploding their dank caves with these trinkets. There was an anarchic opulence to their decoration; a stubborn insistence on the baroque. Rows of tiny deteriorating single-glazed windows would be interrupted by sudden vibrancy, a small space crippled under the weight of cheap ornamental glory. There is comforting honesty in the performance of wealth in a space which undeniably has none. A revolutionary defiance of spirit otherwise crushed under the foot of authoritarian uniformity. Aesthetics are inescapably political and art is at its best when it is sincere. Inversely, it is an old trick of those with old money to understate their wealth in every way so as to avoid drawing unwanted attention. Almost everyone I’ve ever known with exceptional wealth works hard at hiding it. Then there’s middle class minimalism, a relatively recent disavowal of the traditional signifiers of wealth through the shirking of opulence, in favour of hiding one’s possessions in multi-functioning furniture, the adoption of Nordic this and that, and the deferral of any artistic sensibilities to overpricing and mass-producing printmakers. My childhood notions about class war were blown out of the water when I learned about new builds. All they really tell us is that uniformity is one avenue of oppression whether the victim is someone dependent on council housing or a hopeful young professional reliant on luxury housing developments. The distinction is the illusion of freedom: the former doesn’t pretend to provide it and the latter does. Dozens of young professionals move into a high rise to be close to work yet no closer to the fruits of their labour. This luxury apartment isn’t just an apartment; it’s a lifestyle. In fact it’s more than that; it is a space where the sincerity of aesthetics collapses, where wealth which at once gloats and obfuscates itself performs a dual-function. It establishes an identity for the occupant, and through his repetition, his being one-of-several-dozen in identical apartments, immediately denies him his subjectivity. As we have seen, we discover ourselves in the space we occupy. Urban atomisation is at once the worship of individualism and the denial of individuality. New builds are for people who believed that suddenly getting permission to decorate their notebooks meant liberation, that neoliberalism freedom is anything more than the freedom to spend money.

The years before I left London for university were spent in a North London suburb not far from pockets of old money. They were zones of listed buildings, actual greenery and notorious institutions. I used to climb the hill until I couldn’t hear the suffering any more. I would walk beside brick I knew I had no right to be by and pray that someday I could look out of my window to a view like this.

Nowhere have I seen a more perverse symbol of the oppression of urbanism than in the instance of the Dalston residents paying housing benefit to a landlord who sold their views from their windows to Apple. The horror of people being shut into their already dank living spaces is only rendered more monstrous by the significance of a 120 square meter monument to a technocratic monopoly which has become synonymous with gentrification. Across the city, brick is replaced with steel and glass, people are blinded with advertising which stands to replace art, and the homeless are vanished to make way for towering empty spaces. Speculative homes, a testament to the practice of speculative economics.

I’m thirty years old and I made it. I’m spending the value of a farmhouse in Wales in rent which prohibits me from accumulating any meaningful wealth. But boy, you should see my view. The idea of a view is what kept me going as I revised for exams by a broken lamp leant against a mouldy wall, the glow of TV a constant assault on cognition, the threat of violent eruption a permanent low frequency anxiety. A view, or the possibility of a view, is where I projected my escape route. A window can frame a seasonal change which might mean the difference between hope and despair. I look through a window framing a horizon of steel and glass piercing the grey and I think, we should really tear down those billboards; reclaim space with one small act of defiance at a time, like those mad old matriarchs.

Published originally in Lumpen.