12 Page Fashion Story, 1999
12 Page Fashion Story is an artwork made for gallery display that combines page-tears of a fashion shoot featuring Eva Herzigova by Ellen von Unwerth, with texts taken from King’s 1996 ‘misery diaries’, and footnotes by Matthew Worley. ‘Laying out’ von Unwerth’s fashion story was the last thing King ever did while working for i-D magazine.
12 Page Fashion Story, 1999, 6 cromalin prints, each 31.5 x 50.5cm / 12.4 x 19.8 in. Reproduced courtesy of i-D magazine.
The Explosion Point of Ideology
01/06/96: I’m trying, in the most cowardly fashion, to create a situation that demands I leave i-D. It’s clear to me that I’m no longer welcome here. It’s clear to them that I no longer want to be here – ‘Got to find a way, need to find a way to get out’. Oh dear, I’m doing it again. ‘I’ll walk on water, run through fire’. I think I’ll use this as a motto (of course I won’t, I haven’t even been swimming for five years). These ‘ideas books’ are becoming diaries of comic misery. Every time I sit down with a half idea, all that comes out is sub-Ian Curtis angst, self-pitiful rubbish. I suspect these notebooks are little more than props to be used in conjunction with the Bedford Arms. It’s becoming increasingly obvious to me that, despite my best/worst efforts: I am not a rocket, I am a milk cart.
POPLondon epitomises the façade of the media spectacle. Conversely however, POPLondon acts as a beacon to anyone with an imagination but stuck in the provinces, suburbs and housing estates. POPLondon is where you ‘make it’, where you get out of the run-down provincial town and start to live. Subsequently, British culture is localised outside of POPLondon – in the post-industrial wastelands of Coventry, Manchester, Sheffield, Glasgow, Doncaster, Newport, Macclesfield etcetera. As such, popular culture has traditionally revolved around an escape from the claustrophobic norms of society, and the defining moments of our pop cultural make-up from ‘Billy Liar’ to The Specials to Acid House to the Manic Street Preachers, have been forged from a desire to transcend socio-economic and geographic boundaries.
Beneath The Paving Stones… Concrete
07/06/96: The other day I went to Brighton. I saw a group of people in their thirties, stood in the centre, the focal point, was a toddler who was trotting around to attentive smiles from the adult group. The emphasis was on the relationship between a man (the father?) and the little girl (the daughter?). A woman (the mother?) pushed a pram and took photographs of the little girl and the man with a Polaroid camera. Instant memories. The man was clearly very ill, I think he was dying. He appeared to have some kind of ‘wasting disease’. He smoked and spoke to the woman, she apologised, she wasn’t “telling him off, just saying, that’s all”. I think the rest of the group were uneasy, like backing singers, it wasn’t their show, they were all extras intended to authenticate the enjoyment of a family get-together. I think one of them was the younger brother of the first man. I noticed the first man was wearing loose fitting tracksuit bottoms that didn’t match the stylishness of his other clothes or expensive desert boots.
Evidently, the images and personalities presented by the media show little resemblance to the intricacies of ‘life itself’. Rather they offer a snapshot of a supposed ideal. A window onto the rich and famous, where every night is Saturday night and work has given way to pleasure. Nowhere is this more evident than in the POPLondon media’s presentation of itself. An introverted and self-referential world, the cultural gurus of the TV, style press and Sunday supplements construct a hedonistic simulacrum of apparently unfettered delight. Scratch the surface however, and beneath the sheen the banality of everyday life remains in the luvvie elite: the mandatory entourage of sycophantic ‘friends’, the immortal mantra concerning the ‘transitory nature of (other people’s) fame’ and the fact that the Met Bar is simply an over-priced student union full of the most unwarranted egos and the best cocaine money can buy.
The Correct Use of Soap Opera
18/06/96: So, not for the first time – I’m in a world of strawberry nosed men being served ‘promotional’ bitter by women (who look a bit like the men) adorned in gold. This really is deeply theatrical misery. It’s hard to tell if this is melancholy drowned in lager or lager-induced melancholy. I don’t suppose it matters; the effect is the same. People are strangling themselves with their own dreams; alcoholic dads too old to succeed and bound by a parental responsibility that means they aren’t allowed to (blatantly) die. They have to see out this existence – so they’re trying to speed up the process – slowly drowning themselves, hoping nobody notices.
You have to expect nothing. You get nothing. You start off in school and they take your soul away, they take your brains away, you’re not allowed to have an opinion that differs from theirs. So when you leave school, your only future is to get married, and by the time you’re about 29 and you’ve got two kids, you just want to commit suicide – Johnny Rotten
This Sadness Will Last Forever
30/06/96: I met an old drunken man called John today. He told me he worked on IT magazine in 60’s. I felt sorry for him because I’d seen him before, sitting on a park bench in Mornington Crescent. He came up to me in the street because I was carrying a piece of my work. He said it looked like it was done in the Sixties and asked if he could borrow it to photocopy. I gave it to him thinking I’d never see it again. Surprisingly, he returned five minutes later with the work (and copies). He then started to tell me that he was starting a new film company called ‘Vidiotics’. His first film involved throwing buckets of pig’s blood over unsuspecting women and filming their reaction. He wanted my opinion on the project because his son had said it was misogynistic and he wasn’t sure. He then told me that he was planning another project involving pointing a replica revolver at passing cars on Camden High Street and filming the driver’s reactions. He said that he was hoping this would culminate in him being shot dead by police marksmen.
Such a chasm between the media ideal and the actual mediocrity of the spectacle inevitably leads to disappointment. Indeed, the eternal pursuit of an unobtainable happiness is the driving force behind our consumer society. With regard to POPLondon, the capital can do little more than reinforce the illusion. As such POPLondon acts as a brake on innovation, absorbing the cultures forged in the provinces before codifying them and injecting them with poisonous fashionability. It is in POPLondon that British culture is commodified. It is in POPLondon that our dreams disappear.
Freedom is Terror
03/07/96: I’ve got a theory-ette about how we might maximise our lives, how we might not get greedy or bored. I imagine it to be an ‘existential-socialism’. Everyone lives their lives in five sections until they are sixty, and then they are given a plot of land and a home. The sections are: 1. Primer; 2. Experimental; 3. Reproductive; 4. Contemplative; 5. Freedom – with each section you are given a new name, family and occupation – most importantly everyone has to be poor/rich – straight/gay – fat/thin – a bureaucrat/a non-bureaucrat – an ethnic minority. Clearly, it’s never going to work. So far, my effect on ‘Fantastic Media London’ has been something akin to a porpoise swimming headfirst into the Bismarck, hoping to sink it.
To the isolate, isolation seems an indubitable certainty; they are bewitched, on pain of losing their existence, not to perceive how mediated their isolation is – Theodor Adorno
Thirty Seconds Over Tottenham Court Road
12/07/96: My pattern of (non) work has become ridiculous. I spent a total of eight hours in i-D this week. It’s becoming embarrassing, I feel like a fraud – with an average working day of one and a half hours, I am a fraud. I will leave, they want me to, and I want to. I’ll tell them “They walked in line. They walked in line. They walked in line. They walked in line. They walked in line. They walked in line. They walked in line. They walked in line. They walked in line. They walked in line. They walked in line. They walked in line. They walked in line. They walked in line. They walked in line. They walked in line. They walked in line. They walked in line. They walked in line. They walked in line”. Or words to that effect.
Northern Soul continues to thrive in the North of England, despite numerous attempts by POPLondon to commodify and ‘revive’ it. Heavy metal records still sell more copies than any necrophiliac ‘easy listening’ revival could dream of. Where culture is formed out of desire it retains a resonance that transcends the fickle predilections of the spectacle. Alternatively, talk to a journalist over a three-month period and you’ll hear their opinion change in response to the received opinion of their ‘specialist’, closeted little world. The ever faster turnover, fragmentation and Americanisation of our cultural signifiers has compounded the problem. Culture is no longer perceived in relation to its rootedness in British life but rather to its surface appeal and salability. By responding to product and the ironic gestures of revivalism – from ABBA to easy listening to Kung Fu films to any tacky remnant of capitalist over-production – the cultural edifice constructed in the offices of Covent Garden, Soho and Shoreditch belies the desperation and imagination that continues to exist outside of POPLondon’s superficial borders. And those people who sing in praise of POPLondon’s infallibility and its place at the forefront of cultural innovation – those people have a corpse in their mouths.
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