Notes
toward the Economics and Aesthetics of the UK’s Great Building Disaster
(November
2006)
*****************
At
the turn of the millennium we (along with most others) had so much building work
we were turning away job after job almost picking and choosing to our heart’s
content. We thought this situation short of a major economic collapse would last
forever and that our skills and labour would remain in demand even if we lived
to be 100+. The bourgeoisie had emptied London of its essential service workers
as it had done Johannesburg in the era of apartheid and it was no longer
possible to go into a local pub (e.g. in Notting Hill ) and say
to the nearest electrician or plumber “there’s a job for you” for
the nearest electrician or plumber was now miles away. Building operatives had
become as rare as hen’s teeth in inner city London. Six years later the few
building workers who hadn’t quit London now find themselves pushed to the
margins with many unlikely ever to work again unless prepared to work for a
pittance that will barely cover the rent. The disaster has unfolded with
lightning rapidity.
The
likeliest outcome we thought is that essential services workers would be
domiciled in London’s periphery and bussed in like had happened in South
Africa during the apartheid era. Except this time the majority would be white.
What none of us even remotely
foresaw is that there would be a phased return to 19th century
conditions of private landlords, near slum conditions, high rents, low wages and
the practise of sleeping five,
eight, ten to a room with some beds never unoccupied for long. It has been
estimated there are 40,000 rough Polish sleepers in London alone and soup
kitchens have been opened to cater for the hungry. One rough sleeper we heard of
was running three painting and decorating jobs all at the same time. Unable to
afford proper accommodation even on his “managerial salary”, he became
depressed and took to his filthy bed of rags for days on end eventually getting
the sack from every job.
The
vast wave of immigration from Eastern Europe began in 2003, the date of the
accession to the European Union by Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic
Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. Though not quite at a stroke the wages of all
building workers skilled and unskilled had fallen by 2006 to a third of what
they were in 2000. This deflationary tendency is still spiralling downwards and
there appears to be no end in sight. As a building worker friend said:
“Thatcher destroyed the miners, Blair the building workers”. Yet all done
without the sound and fury of the miners’ strike and in fact barely commented
on and as little noticed as the wind changing direction. Even the Trades Union
Congress seems oblivious to what is really happening, divorced as they are from
all reality like all burocrazy increasingly is today. At the recent TUC
conference the Gen. Sec. of the TUC, Brendan “Demon” Barber, had the cheek
to declare there is plenty of building work for everyone (fat lot he knows!) so
lets open the doors wide brothers and sisters and welcome in our wage slashing
brethren from the EEC’s new East European states. In October 2006 the TUC even
sent a delegation to the British Days Job Fair in Warsaw which was run by the UK
Government Job Centre Plus and included Tesco’s (retailing) First Group
(transport) and Jurys Doyle hotels. “Demon” Barber went on record as saying
“hopefully this will help prevent more of the horror stories we sadly hear so
much about of workers being mistreated, paid illegal wages, made to work
excessive hours and having extortionate deductions made from their wages”.
Pious wishes like this will not “help prevent” anything and it is obvious to
anyone not blinded by the savage class prejudice of political correctness (as is
the TUC and which at best only temporarily benefits incoming migrant workers and
is not in their long term interest) that the
full admission of Rumania and Bulgaria to
the EU will lead to a situation
where the official minimum wage of £5 an hour
will become the maximum wage. Some Poles are already working for £2 an
hour and one can only wonder at just how far wages can fall. Perhaps a kind of
slavery will ensue with migrant workers fed on a diet of “show willing and
eventually there maybe some money in it for you”. Even the Poles are opposed
to further EU expansion knowing full well they will shortly find themselves
unable to compete with the incoming migrant workers from Rumania and Bulgaria.
Though trade union membership is declining overall, membership of UCATT,
the building workers union, is increasing, a fact that does not surprise us in
the least. However building trades are divided against themselves and EU
certification is a must in electrics and gas plumbing, a requirement that
protects wages in these trades from falling too precipitately. But it is
certainly not the case with carpentry, the wet trades (plastering, brick laying
etc) or non-gas plumbing for that matter. In fact it was the uproar in the press
regarding the alleged wages plumbers earned, exceeding those of GPs and lawyers,
which was used to legitimate the East European building worker invasion after
2003. According to the propaganda
the work was a piece of cake and money literally poured out the tap, a laughable
notion to anyone with even a little experience of the trade. Forget about
blocked drains, scooping out shit with your bare hands, or spending half one’s
life in contorted postures with a roll of solder in one hand and a blow torch in
the other. How about working on a power station in the Scottish Highlands with a
dead body swinging above your head for two days because it was not possible to
bring in a helicopter to winch the electrocuted corpse off as the power lines
were still live and there was a gale blowing? Mocking the media depiction of the
plumbing high life this is what a plumber told us had happened to him only quite
recently. But worst of all it attracted women into the trade, particularly
single parent mums, who, no longer permitted to claim the dole, were lured by
the prospect of easy cash. It is heart wrenching to think what might become of
them in the now unending cut and thrust of construction. We worked alongside a
couple of just such apprentice female plumbers in Sheffield earlier this year
and they were just so nice and naïve like little lambs to the slaughter. Their
instructor, a plumber and former Angry Brigade member, was shortly to have his
wages sliced in two when he lost his job at Sheffield’s major steel maker,
Outu Kumpu who had taken over Avesta Steels only three years previously. A
Finnish firm, it decided to relocate elsewhere in the EU where wages were
cheaper thus bringing to an end quantity and quality steel production in
Sheffield. What chance did the young women have in a world that had just pulled
the rug from under their instructor?
Formerly
membership of UCATT had been drawn largely from the direct labour departments of
local councils. Up until the 1980s they had been opposed to the self employed
joining its ranks but the reality of Thatcherism had forced a rethink with many
building operatives compelled to become self employed. Dropping the demand that
building trades, land and construction be nationalised and that building workers
ideally only ever work for the state, UCATT became more of a business union
emphasising fringe benefits rather than what was basically Communist Party
ideology. It is a union that has lost its way so to speak and recently was in
the news when Allen Ritchie, Gen. Sec. of UCATT, unveiled a statue to building
workers on the Thames embankment just on the periphery of “the square mile”
itself, now the financial centre of the EU and second only to Wall Street. Of
course he used the occasion to denounce the impending corporate responsibility
law as not going far enough, wanting a clause inserted that made individuals,
and not just corporate management, responsible for accidents. Such a clause
would make a difference and the rail unions (RMT) are also campaigning for it.
Had such a comprehensive law been on the statute books it is unlikely
that either the Hatfield crash or Ladbroke Grove crash of 1999 would have
happened. In the first case the company had known about the unsatisfactory
condition of the track for months and in the second had ignored repeated
warnings as to the visibility of the crucial signal. Though less dramatic there
have been needless deaths on the Wembley Stadium construction site and Ritchie
used the unveiling ceremony to emphasize the fact.
The statue to the building worker is a very traditional statue but even
so UCATT was using an artistic occasion rather than a strike situation to get
its message across, though there have been a series of stoppages on the
Wembley Stadium site with allegations of widespread corruption, gangsterism,
protection monies etc. There is a real story here though UCATT wont ever write
it, or permit it to be written under its auspices. It is the 21st
Century’s equivalent of the Barbican disputes in London from the mid to late
1960’s though it never made the headlines like the latter did especially when
running battles with the police broke out. There was never much danger of that
happening though the issue of subcontractors being brought in to finish the job
has changed little since the halcyon days of the Barbican that
was regarded by the construction workers involved as a high-rise building
project for the well off on which no expense was spared. Used to building the
meanest of council high-rises, the comparison only helped fuel their anger.
Besides,
the union’s very traditionalism will also stop it from saying anything
remotely relevant about how commoner-garden utilitarian structures are being
replaced wholesale by flashy look-at-me designs that are increasingly dependant
on cad, cam and cae (computer aided
design, manufacture and engineering) with the Wembley Stadium leading the field.
Itinerant steel fixers, many from the run down shipbuilding yards of the Tyne,
Wear and Tees, are in a manner of speaking being employed as the acrobatic
artisans and choreographed construction workers of the new installation
capitalism that increasingly resembles a mise-en-scene
theatre by Meyerhold in the Bolshevised Russia of the 1920s. Actually “The
Angel of the North” by Antony Gormley is a sickening symbol of this new art
conscious macro economy and set the tone of the mega engineering projects to
come like the Wembley Stadium. Easily visible from the motorway and the train it
dominates the skyline to the south of
Newcastle, upstaging the several bridges that cross the Tyne and once the
unaffected utilitarian symbols of
Newcastle’s former engineering eminence.
However
the Wembley effect does not end here as liesure activities like football
increasingly invade the workaday world. Some
sites are now becoming so health and safety barmy that foremen cum referees now
hand out yellow and red cards. One painter and decorator was recently issued
with two yellow cards for wearing the wrong sort of gloves. Continuing to
persist he was finally handed a red card and suspended from working. The game
was off for him for the next three days!
At
what point does “big art” end and “big engineering” begin, now that the
“The Angel of the North” and the Wembley Stadium are in close rivalry and
each pushing the other to ever greater overkill? Gormless has now set his sights
on Sheffield’s twin cooling towers next to the M1 situated in the sewage dump
of Blackburn Meadows which this year emerged as front runners for a zillion
pound “big art” project. The towers are a
Duchampian ready-made on a grand scale and Gormless had no hesitation in
describing them as “beautiful as they are”, a comment which is a
considerable improvement on his previous Duchamp inspired cryptic idiocy which
has “new art” lovers swooning: “Things already exist: sculpture already
exists”. Apart from the fact Duchamp, at least in his early years, would never
have used such an archaic term as sculpture with reference to the ready-mades,
there is no way these towers will ever be
left as they are, just as the pit
heaps close by could never be left as they were. The twin towers are to become
“a focus of community generation”: barely
four years ago the same expression was applied to the “beautiful”
ready-made pit heaps and now the scene of
monstrous makeovers on which no expense was spared and which did not
spare the wealth of wild life to be
found there either. Former mining towns in the Sheffield area have been
designated “value added towns” by the regional planning authority. From this
angle Gormley’s meddling with Sheffield’s industrial heritage is exclusively
to do with the addition of value and inward investment into a region that only a
short while ago was defined by its heavy industry. Describing the towers also
“as a wonderful relic of the carbon age,” Gormley’s new value added towers
will, like “The Angel of the North,” act as ensigns of a new regional
identity signalling the area is now safe to invest in and which, it is now
freely admitted, was the objective driving
the pit heap makeovers. And
if you think these art historical analogies are pushing things just too far, try
looking at the “London Eye” from the perspective of a super size “Bicycle
Wheel” (the first of Duchamp’s ready-mades from 1909 and a modification of
it was certainly used in the TV promo of the “London Eye”) and you will have
some idea how closely bonded art and construction now are in the UK and in this
respect in a league of its own when compared with other countries. Recently we
got talking to an Indian civil engineer who felt he was missing out on something
and far rather than talk about public urinals, much preferred to discuss
Duchamp’s Urinal and Carl Andre’s Brick installation, which back in the late
1970s had bricklayers wondering if it was now OK to demand higher wages.
******************
Is a
return to a primitive, no-frills, naive unionism that effectively defends the
general mass of workers conditions and wages (and no more) possible today? Again
there is not the slightest sign of it and this apparent impossibility is
certainly not a consequence of young workers able to clearly see beyond the
limits of trade unionism.Yet there are heartening acts of resistance. Recently a
group of Polish building workers we heard of by word of mouth caused £60,000
worth of damage in a matter of minutes when they found out they weren’t going
to be paid. That’s the spirit and if there were more actions of this type they
would certainly begin to gain the respect of UK workers and joint action might
become possible.
But
meanwhile some fear that rising unemployment totals that broke through the 1.7
million mark for the first time since 1999 are due to the unprecedented numbers
of young migrant workers entering the country. The Office for National
Statistics has virtually said as much in its annual report published on the 18th
Oct 2006 with the rise in unemployment steepest among younger workers. This has
caused alarm bells to ring in “high places” for should unemployment jump by
another million, major riots could erupt. But that is far from being the main
concern. Above all it is feared that young black and Muslim youth especially
could be tempted into joining terrorist groups just for want of something to do.
The impact on young white workers entering the labour market is not specifically
mentioned because of the unspoken assumption that the white working class no
longer represents a danger to the ruling order. In fact we know the level of
disorientation is huge with kids of 17 who normally would have done the kinds of
jobs now occupied by immigrants taking to their beds, though for the time being
more out of laziness than angst. It is their parents who are concerned for their
futures. When not provided by the local borough, training costs an arm and a leg
and many parents simply cannot afford it. This is especially true of the
building colleges, which like higher education institutions in general are now
largely fee-paying. A young lad we know from London’s east end has been given
the chance to learn plastering for nothing provided he travels to Chelmsford
every day. Cut off the dole there is little chance he will ever be able to
afford the train fare. Significantly his siblings are beginning to feel the lure
of art aspiring to be actors, actresses, photographers etc when they “grow
up”. Creative pretensions are minimal compared to the money angle and it is
indeed heart rending to see them squabble over a film camera that belongs in the
museum of antiquities.
It
would be nice to think that should unemployment totals rise dramatically it will
be reflected in a break through in class consciousness. Sadly for the moment
mayhem is the more likely outcome and for the first time we feel the ultra right
could make big gains if they could only drop some of their extreme racial
prejudice, particularly their hostility to Asians. Fortunately for us they may
be too stupid to do that. However trouble on the streets is also likely to focus
the minds of influential members of the ruling elite who will endeavour to
inject a dose of pragmatism into the situation. For a start the quality dailies
would have to ditch their politically correct stereotyping of white working
class males as opposed to immigration solely on racial grounds. “The
Guardian” and “The Independent” are notorious in this respect. As part of
its “enlightened” contribution to the recent debate over the admission of
Rumania and Bulgaria into the EU, the latter carried a carton in which a
meathead is asking his wife “apart from supplying carpenters, plumbers,
cleaners, shop assistants and bus drivers what else has Rumania and Bulgaria
ever done for this country?” The cartoonist should have added “and at a third of the
cost” for that would have been nearer the truth. But come a situation of
breakdown this obvious truism – at least to us at the bottom of the pile –
will have to be acknowledged. What happens then is anybodies guess. The
“Workers International” has never in
the past been affirmed by the bourgeoisie and it certainly wont happen in a
hypothetical, and potentially very explosive situation like this, where many
different nationalities are jostling each other. A system of divide and rule is
the more likely outcome with British born workers (and that will include blacks
and Asians born here) given easier access to the dole and public housing. Thus a
form of welfarism could be reintroduced through the back door, though a highly
discriminatory one.
*******************
Our
first experience of working alongside Poles had occurred in 1991 when working on
a house owned by the Vestey’s whose huge untaxed income largely came from the
beef rearing pampas of Argentina. There was no friction if little actual
communication and in comparison to today they were earning good money. They may
well have been amongst the first educated immigrants forced to take any job that
came along for one was reading Camus and intending to vote for Lech Walesa in
the forth coming presidential election in Poland. It summed up in a nutshell the
weakness of Solidarity for we could no more speak to this deluded Pole about the
need for revolution than we could read Camus. For he had arrived at his
real destination in life, for London was second
only to Washington on Solidarity’s list of capitals of freedom.
There was an
Indian gang also on this site and such a mix of nationalities was not at all
unusual. One character in particular stood out called Mangit. We all took a
liking to him because he was unassuming and wore his skill with a brickies
trowel lightly. He would be called upon to perform awkward intricate detailing
which if not done would have meant the job looked rough and unfinished. His
skill was not the sort that could be learnt in western building schools. A Greek
plasterer and his black mate (also inseparable outside work) could not have done
what Mangit did. He spoke little and when he did so to the Indian foreman (who
was uncomfortable with his role as foreman and preferred to see himself as a
facilitator) it was in an Indian language.
Characters
like Mangit on the building scene were not that untypical and added to its
general lustre. We heard of many another like the Rumanian whose only
woodworking tool was a small adze and he would hew wood rather than use a saw,
even indenting door frames with it prior to fitting the hinges, the blade
serving as a screwdriver. We spoke of such practises with a kind of reverence
for it brightened up the day and it was the opposite of being a cowboy for we
could appreciate the dexterity and skill. It was also subversive for it
challenged building conventions and undermined that very orthodoxy the construction unions were
so anxious to protect and which we found so irksome and conservative.
Types like these almost
always came from rural backgrounds and it bore witness to a fundamental clash of
building cultures neatly dividing town from country, a distinction however that
only applied to the more underdeveloped parts of Europe and not to countries
like Germany and Holland though it still could be true of parts of France,
Italy, Spain, Greece and Portugal. In fact people such as these often possessed
all round skills and could turn their hands to almost anything. However they
were rarely allowed to do so. One example does come to mind and that is a barn
that was constructed by an ex Polish prisoner of war in the 1950s close to
Kiveton in the former South Yorkshire coalfield. It is consummate bit of
building and much regarded by what’s left of the local mining community who
know what they were looking at and can appreciate the all round skills. Opening
up the perspective of a more humane building future these rare examples also
merged with the alternative building scene that grew out of the late 60s,
squatting and so on.
A real wide-ranging
history of this vital movement by those who experienced it from within has yet
to be written. There is now barely a trace of it left. The building scene became
a receptacle for drop outs of all kinds who in their different ways more or less
fell into it rather than deliberately choosing to join it. It was also a public
forum for wide ranging debates with rarely a boss or foreman to enforce silence.
This has always been a mark of the building scene and in the late 1980s a couple
of booklets appeared by a former Irish building worker, Brendan Ward. Paying for
their publication out of his own pocket he hawked them around the pubs in
Kilburn. The first was memorably entitled “Builders, Chancers and the
Crack”, the second “Builders Remembered”. Both are worth reading
especially for the light they shed on the post war building scene in London and
the south east and the large numbers of Irish then employed in the building
trade. This was a rip-roaring frontier and one can often only gasp at some of
the stories he relates. Unfortunately the booklets are marred by a type of
petite bourgeoisie anti trade unionism rather than right wing hostility to them.
As well as being kindly disposed to subcontractors this libertarianism
precluded Brendan Ward from ever attacking TUs as a shackle on class struggle
whenever a direct assault upon capitalism threatened. He is merely dismissive of
them and one can imagine those CP sympathisers, Dominic and Brendan
Behan, despising the man who emphasised the fascinating histrionics of
the building game at the expense of exposing the brutal exploitation. The
booklets mark a period which, though it does not close in the late 1960s, was
essentially superseded by a different one, more lucid in its opposition, more
open to recruitment (particularly women) and with a far greater vision which
looked in its best moments beyond the present built environment and the world as
it was.
The ramifications
of this period are becoming clear and it is now obvious it transcended developed
capitalist countries to include the burgeoning shanty towns and barrios of the
undeveloped world and radically changed attitudes to housing and “planning”.
It is above all marked by crises and the building scene more than any other work
scene, a stab at resolving that
crises. As well as accommodating the “work shy” in revolt against an
increasingly pointless five day week, it had room for others in revolt against
the jobs they had been trained to do and could no longer do because they were
sickened by them.
To take one
example: some architectural students though by no means all (for the profession
of architect is an intensely snobby one and very disdainful of manual work) were
in the habit of taking summer jobs on building site usually as general
labourers. Some did it as a matter of choice others because there was no other
temporary work available. What they found there was totally different to
anything they had previously experienced in architectural school and at odds
with it. Though a salutary experience (and one Castro in Cuba would insist on,
obliging all architectural students to take “a turn on the tools”) it was an
eye opener in other respects. For they found there, once over the initial
hurdle of animosity from some building workers and despite the sometimes
back breaking toil, a warmth, comradeship and sense of play absent in
architectural schools and offices. The memory would linger on and, many years
later, still does, even amongst the far less radically inclined. To the more
aware students it was not just about the bricks and mortar of construction, as
distinct from the abstraction of the drawing board, but a return to the roots of
architecture in human praxis and, in the process, abolishing the term
architecture and the profession of architect. At this moment even the
institutions were toying with the notion of the death of architecture as the
success of books like Rudovsky’s “Architecture without Architects” clearly
shows. It was also infinitely more radical than anything then taking place in
Cuba because Castro, despite surface appearances, was honouring the division of
labour whereas this movement was furthering, though largely unknowingly, a far
more revolutionising practice Cuba had long since crushed.
Do-It-Yourself
housing and “informal town planning”, though a major feature
in the developing world stemming from the rural urban migration from the
1950s onwards, could not possibly happen here short of a revolution. One would
have to go back to the beginnings of the industrial revolution, the roadside
hovels Cobbett described in his “Rural Rides” and London’s rookeries that
De Quincy delighted in drifting through (which he sensed marked the consummation
and transcendence of literature and anticipated psychogeography) to find their
equivalent. Apart from the Manchester born De Quincy, no one then was at all
alert to the fact this higgledy-piggedly makeshift housing, though wretched in
the extreme as regards sanitation, damp, disease and overcrowding, contained a
promise that could be rescued and turned around. It took until the 1950s/60s for
that to happen. This was not only a consequence of the revolution of modern art
and the de-sublimation of aesthetic values it entailed, but also a profound
shift away from dirigiste state
perspectives to a more relaxed “anarchism” in tune with the sensitivities,
needs and aims of people battling to survive and live. The very
influential ideologues of this development were naively proud to call themselves
anarchists, in particular the architect John Turner and the editor of
“Freedom” magazine, Colin Ward. Neither of the two expressed any unease at
the use of the term anarchist nor, in similar measure, choked over describing
themselves as architects and town planners and thus helped lay themselves wide
open to naked free market co-optation. (See "A Freewheeling Latin America"
elsewhere on this web etc).
It should be
noted there has been a move away from the “hands on” approach to
architecture and town planning since the late 60s early 70s. Not that the task
of reconstruction from the ground up has lessened in importance: in fact it is
more urgent than ever. But what has changed in the meantime is the increase in
reification meaning that henceforth the professions of architect and planner are
now cast in stone and forever immune from fundamental criticism. The decline of
class struggle has greatly assisted this development but even so a measure of
psycho geographical training is an accepted part of most architectural schools
curricula today though its origins in revolutionary history are not now just
glossed over but rather obliterated. The results as far as protest goes are
feeble in the extreme, like architects getting together to play cricket in the
streets that make up London’s financial centre. Though traffic for a brief
period is disrupted, the business of the City certainly is not and these efforts
at modifying rather than revolutionising daily
life are on the same level as contemporary street art is - merely a pretence of
provocation. And we are not talking about tags and pieces here but of a long
overdue acknowledgement of just how boring and predictable the latter, to be
honest, always were. Even Banksy now objects to, “the New York School of large
letters on subway trains that took a stranglehold everywhere else”. (The
Guardian 24.03.06) The problem now is to stop a drift from the barest minimum of
criticism turning into full-blown revolutionary critique. Banksy however is a
potent symbol of how best to do this and make protest as publicity stunt pay
enormous dividends, especially if linked to a gallery opening. For this is what
street art is all about - gallery overspill stridently affirming the profession
of artist like that of architect - and floating above the movement of history.
The
squatting movement was the closest the developed countries ever came to
anti-authoritarian, property less de-skilled reconstruction. Derelict property
had to be made habitable and many a squatter, amazed at their handy work, in no
time at all found themselves drifting willy-nilly into the building scene, women
as well as men. As time passed and squatting became more institutionalised some
were recruited by para-statist bodies nominally under the control of local
councils to work on making properties temporarily habitable. Though marking a
retreat, it was a million times preferable to what takes place today. Though the
practise still continues the work is handed over to proper firms who make no
bones about employing immigrant labour at cut-price rates, indeed are favoured
by councils if they do so.
When
we first worked for a short life housing body the property price crash of the
early 1990s was in full swing and nothing was moving in the housing market. In
fact landlords would approach short life housing and ask them to manage their
derelict properties until such times as the housing market recovered. Some of
the properties were in Hampstead and every so often we found ourselves in the
invidious position of doing highly skilled restoration work in exchange for the
right to lease the property to short life tenants. For a short while we worked
at a property just opposite the Freud Museum in Maresfield Gardens, repairing a
bad case of brick spalling using various coloured powders that were then mixed
with sand and cement. On the open market the job would have cost a fortune but
the landlord got it done for a song. On another occasion we worked on a huge
house just off Tavistock Hill the landlord had taken off the market because at
£250.000 he could not find a buyer. The house was eventually sold to the actor
celebrity Bob Hoskins and it is now, some 15 years later, worth about £5
million. When working there one of the tenants died and seeing we were employed
as jack-of-all-trades offered to dig a grave in the back garden. We all miss
this freewheeling humour that could be in the worst possible taste and which
some of the administrative staff in the short life office went into stitches
over and others just pulled a face at. Once one of the workers, who was employed
specifically to clean up junkie pads, in order to prove he was Jewish offered to
pull his trousers down and would have done so but for the cries of protest from
the office staff.
However
by degrees the set-up became more respectable – and
paradoxically, corrupt as cash gave way to cheques at the Nigerian
accountant’s insistence. He was to be sacked after being found guilty by
external auditors of siphoning off large amounts of cash ostensibly into a
Pentecostal church. Had he been more relaxed about the “informal economy,”
and less greedy, he probably would have got away with it and everyone would have
been much happier all-round. His cohort came in under a cloud and left under an
even bigger one. A Nigerian toff he particularly looked down on the manual
workers and especially a part black, part Chinese, female electrician from
Liverpool. We all loved it when Suzy was on a job with us and her fragrant scent
would drift around the site like a flower from heaven. One day the toff
physically manhandled her and demanded she suck him off. Our boss, a woman and
former plumber was outraged, and never spoke to him again even though they
worked side by side. When Suzy’s Chinese father died she was ever so upset and
wanted us to have his woks just so they would have a good home. Even so it was
her and our boss, the female plumber, who was to give Suzy the sack for
overstepping the mark. Unlike the rest of us Suzy had a mortgage to pay. Now the
reason none of us had ever taken out a mortgage was because it worked the
hardest of us all and Suzy, without first asking permission, had rewired a
house, an expensive item that cost Suzy her job. To diehard feminists of limited
experience and governed by ideology, this goes against
the grain of sisterhood but its what happens in the real world. Likewise
our boss was accused by gay short life tenants of being homophobic though none
of us full-blooded males ever were. When we took this up with her, our feminist
boss replied “oh those queens they’re always bitching”! Though younger
than us, our boss and former squatter had
done enough plumbing and general building jobs to lose her “feminism” when
it came to non-payment. Forgetting she was meant to be from Venus she could turn
every bit as warlike as we did, muttering dark threats about what she intended
to do against non payers men and women alike if ever she
got them up a dark alley one night.
The
table turning informality of this still vibrant scene continually undermined
stereotypes and was like a breath of fresh air when compared with today’s
rigid employment practises and attitudes And to think this was less than 10
years ago! What’s more we were also very efficient, getting on the case
immediately and tenants rarely had to wait long when work needed doing. The
bureaucracy was actually minimal and worked well because the whole thing more or
less functioned on trust. We were, if you like, an informal, very un-business
like, Direct Labour organisation and a total anathema to new labour that pursued
the holy grail of subcontracting with even greater determination than Thatcher.
Back in the 1980s when class struggle was
still a power in this land, the Direct Labour force in Hackney occupied the
relevant council offices to prove that the manual workers could do a better job
administrative job than the white collar staff and expedite the jobs that needed
doing more speedily and efficiently. They were continually hampered in their
endeavour and water and electricity supplies were cut off. In the press it was
presented as an inter-union conflict but it was the manual workers that had the
most to lose for they knew it was the beginning of the end for Direct Labour.
Wherever there has been social upheaval on a grand scale basic utilities have
generally continued to function remarkably well, the relevant workers taking
matter into their own hands to see that they do. Obviously the Hackney labour
force felt they were at a similar historic, though less dramatic crossroads, and
were intent on showing they really mattered. We also mattered but our jobs at
short life barely lasted the election of Labour in 1997. And New Labour
eventually got what it wanted: a complete absence of trust, a snake pit of
subcontracting rivalry, and an enormous increase in bureaucracy and computerised
paper work. To cap it all there was a huge surge in illegality of the very worst
sort. Wages went unpaid though at the same time spiralling ever downwards and more use than ever was made of “black” mainly
unregistered East European workers. And
a growing army of accountants masterminded tax evasion on a grand scale as
unspeakably vile subcontractors raked it in and ate the heart out of building.
Heart matters
in building not least because of the people you meet and work for. Short life
was especially rich in this respect. Not every job was an adventure but a
surprising number were and there were many colourful incidents, almost too many
to remember. None particularly stand out so a selection can be made at random.
Mention has
been made of the gays in short life housing but one in particular stands out. We
had been called in to do repairs to a flat in St Christopher’s Place just off
Oxford St in central London. It was in late November 1993 and the contrast
between the damp poverty of the short life flat and the Xmas glitz in the street
outside was extreme. Yet we preferred to be inside rather than out not because
it was warmer inside but because the surroundings were much more stimulating.
There was a yellowing colour photo on the wall of the sea crashing over the
marine drive of a Cornish town. Next to the dirty unmade bed a biography of
Oscar Wilde and “A Brief History of the Golders Green Crematorium” published
by the London Cremation Company Inc. But best of all was a letter from the Judy
Garland Society that read as follows:
Dear Robert,
It was indeed a pleasure to see you at the meeting on Sunday. I trust you
enjoyed the occasion.
I would point out that certain members have seen fit to complain about
your behaviour that day. Indeed other complaints have been received about your
conduct on at least two occasions.
It
would appear that these complaints relate to your consumption at the meetings of
immoderate amounts of alcohol.
I must state that the committee strongly disapproves of conduct tending
to the inebriate. We feel that the situation warrants forbidding you to attend
any further meetings of the club.
However in view of your recent membership and obvious support for the
activities of the club we have decided to monitor the situation during the
coming year.
Your attendance at meetings will continue to be welcome
provided the behaviour complained of
is not repeated. Should this not be the case we would have no alternative
but to decline your membership in future years.
Yours etc.
There was also a letter from a lover in prison, banged up because of
failure to pay fines. It was written in laboured capital letters and full of
misspellings. It was accompanied by a love poem. The unpretentious rubbish is
not worth reproducing and was probably copied from a greeting card: suffice to
say the thought behind it was touching and sincere, doggerel being all that’s
left of poetry today and much preferable to vain attempts at the real thing.
Short
life had been entrusted with the management of a couple of notorious asbestos
ridden tower blocks. Long standing residents fled the place in droves and short
life tenants occupied the flats on a temporary basis. The complex situated just
off the Harrow Road in West London was a muggers’ hangout but once the
residents became aware of the extent of the asbestos contamination muggings
sharply declined, and the general anomie was replaced by a communal siege
mentality. It still remained a very lively place and not for the faint hearted
yet a cap was now in place that pretty much kept the lid on things.
There
was one character Mike P. from Manchester who may or may not have been dealing
drugs but if so it never amounted to much more than small amounts of cannabis.
He also fancied himself as a biker and he had turned his flat into a garage
containing a couple of stripped down bikes and spare parts scattered across the
floor. There was also a chicken running around and straw had been spread over
the oil sumps. To one side there was a bed. Once he had hung a manikin in his
window and the police looking up from the street below had mistaken it for a
suicide and had bust in. The guy had never left the Manchester of the 19th
Century so eloquently described by Engel’s only this time his workshop, toilet
cooking facilities, bed and animals were ten stories in the sky. Anyhow one
night his door was kicked in by Hells Angels out on the prowl and we found him
next morning dressed in his leathers unhurt but plainly disturbed and reading
the bible. He was also brandishing a knife and wanted to know if the bible would
absolve him of wrong doing should he retaliate and stab the Hells Angels. Mike
was also an electronics genius but never able to hold a job down for long
because he objected to the uses electronics were put to. Fired with a passion
for pure rather than applied science this scientific and partly religious
fundamentalist would throw electronic equipment back in the face of customers
not because it was beyond repair but because it was a pointless gadget and not
worth inventing in the first place. Not surprisingly television topped his hate
list. He desperately wanted to do good and had been offered a job in
India by the VSO (Voluntary Service Overseas) repairing broken TVs and taking
them to remote villages where TV was unknown. He angrily rejected the offer
because he did not want to be held even partially responsible for introducing
the Indian poor to a corrupting media. He was absolutely right of course but he
vanished along with all the other short life odd balls that gave meaning to
life.
Replacing
doors became a regular feature of out work for short life. Most had been smashed
in usually by drunken irate boyfriends locked out by equally drunken irate girl
friends. In the case of the tower blocks it was especially difficult finding
suitable door blanks because the units had been prefabricated in America and
mass-produced to American specifications before being shipped across the
Atlantic. A scam was suspected, a councillor in the now infamous
houses-for-votes Westminster Council receiving a hefty kick back for
recommending this flawed systems approach to high-rise building which had
already been condemned in America. When the flats were constructed sometime in
the 1970s the danger of asbestos was already known about (in fact its
carcinogenic properties had been known about since the 1920s and then
hushed up) but they were still given the go ahead.
We were
even called in to deal with the asbestos, sealing off the airing cupboards with
gaffers tape in a number of flats. As soon as we left the tape was promptly
pulled off and the cupboards reclaimed for airing clothes, particularly by
families with children . We had to wear space suits and were called “asbestos
experts” by the tabloid press for the matter was now very newsworthy.
It was all very amusing particularly the gap between the media
hocus-pocus and our selves who were clueless as regards how best to safely deal
with asbestos. In fact the level of asbestos contamination was low and the air
quality was constantly monitored for signs of asbestos dust. It turned out
pedestrians were exposed to higher levels in the street from brake linings than
they were in the flats. The person charged with monitoring the levels of
asbestos Pete S. was very
environmentally aware and eco conscious and it has to be said in his support he
did live in the flats and was no outside expert. When we went to see him he was
very apologetic he had no green tea but offered each of us instead a high tar
Camel cigarette! He came from a missionary background and it was he who
recommended bringing Nigerians into the short life offices on the grounds
“they really know about poverty”. They certainly knew how to create it for
the Nigerian political class is amongst the most corrupt in the world, their
boundless avarice and kleptomania reducing Nigeria to the level of a pauper
nation when it easily could have spear headed capitalist development throughout
Central Africa to a point where it could have rivalled the West and S.E Asia and
changed the course of African history as well
as Madonna’s future career.
Working for short life from the late 1980s onwards we became aware of a
fundamental change in a number of those we were catering too. For we were
“catering” to them and not infrequently we were asked not to turn up until
after 11am because they would still be in bed. We began to refer to these people
as “the bed testers” and “dole aristocrats” and they had a habit of
treating us like we were their personal servants and permanently at their beck
and call. Sometimes they would report us to the office staff for not having done
the job properly (i.e. to their pricey, finicky standards the office would not
have worn in any case) and we would be duly reprimanded by bright eyed young
do-gooders fresh out of university and totally out of touch with what was really
taking place in the properties they were charged with managing. Unemployment had
become institutionalised as a way of life and work to them was no longer
four-letter word but a term that had dropped out of their vocabulary and off the
edge of the universe. Thus they could no longer relate to class struggle or
empathize with the world of work or comprehend as a consequence of their own
experiences that work could be
difficult, arduous and very stressful. Tending to treat workers as people to be
kicked to one side, used, demeaned and looked down on, they were also ripe for
the taking just because they worked and therefore had money. Worse still because
they could work they were also regarded as privileged human beings and no
distinction was made between them and the middle class. The “alternative”
was giving way to institutionalised unemployment and passive lumpenization,
foreshadowing the more militant fuckhead youth counter-revolution that was to
rip across Britain from the turn of the millennia. Generally incapable of work
at least they will never be used as a strike breaking force.
It
was so different from the 1970s when we had worked for an outfit called “We
People”. By adding that it was “a workers cooperative” it could claim
charity status and so be exempt from tax and interference from the Inland
Revenue. “We People’s” largely unspoken aim was to
slice the working week in half at a stoke needing no revolution to
instantly achieve that aim. Yet it also attracted its fair share of
unreconstructed grafters who sometimes were none too clear and opportunistic.
Fearing that they could be used as a strike breaking force we, and some others,
moved that “We People” specifically stress that on no account must picket
lines be crossed.
For a
while it was housed in squatted premises in Notting Hill that became known as
“The Point”. A “peoples” vegetarian restaurant also opened up on the
ground floor to vaguely elitist fanfares and there were attempts to set up a
“peoples launderette” by an Irish plumber Steve “Plum” who was a mine of
fascinating stories from his days as an Atlantic merchant seaman (and honourable
latter-day member of the celebrated Atlantic proletariat) to his experiences on
Belfast’s building sites. He returned drunk one night to his flat and set
about wrecking it. Surveying the damage next day he assured us “you’re
nobody until you wreck your flat”. Yet a few years later he was to take £1000
to get out when he could easily have asked for twenty times that amount. The
flat then was not just wrecked - it was gutted and the landlord made a fortune
out of it situated on what was to become one of the most desirable streets in a
Notting Hill increasingly empty of all content and genuine people.
Though
older than the 1960s generation which came of age in the 1970s, Steve was
attracted to its libertarian spirit as were other workers of a similar age who
also joined “We People”. Another was Mercedes Pete named because he was once
seen driving a merc but when he was working for “We People” spent much of
the time living in the back of his van just to get away from his wife. We
have a prized estwing demolition hammer that once belonged to him and
thirty years later we are still in the habit of referring to it as Mercedes
Pete’s hammer. He was at “We People” when the unemployment total shot to
over 1 million for the first time ever in post war Britain. He was convinced
people would not long stand for it because it would revive painful memories of
pre war Britain. Believing the post war consensus was here to stay (in fact we
all did but it is now apparent it was a mere blip lasting 25 years before a more
traditional capitalism would start to retrench itself) unemployment totals have
rarely dipped below a million since then and is now heading past the million and
a half mark once more.
People's
surnames were often replaced by trade names (or other such names) that added to
the area’s
richness. There was John the Hat (a plasterer) and Johnny
Six Hundred so named because he worked for a mere three weeks at the firm of
Proler Cohen’s 600, a steel stockist. There was also John the Plank
only once seen walking through the streets of Notting Hill carrying a plank of
wood and not to be confused with Class War John. And there was Underground Steve
nicknamed not because he still clung to the 60s counter-culture underground but
because he worked as a fitter for London Transport. A French woman on the
fringes of “We People” was astonished at this descriptive panoply, arguing
there was nothing remotely like it in France. The intention was not to define a
person according to their trade, as happened in medieval society, for that would
have been a mark of reification. Rather it was a signature of life and that the
person was up for it and larger than the trade they practised. And not just
larger but reached beyond the established division of labour whereas John the
Accountant or John the Solicitor is a job description denoting a definite
profession. Looking back it is easy to sneer at the wooliness and naivety of it
all but now that it’s gone there is only a gaping hole left because nothing
remotely comparable came along to fill the gap.
We sort of
fell into “We People”. By the age of 21 we had acquired a formidable range
of practical skills which we thought little of. We had been art students at
Newcastle University and the sculptural techniques we learnt would be turned to
good use on building sites later but happily not in sculpture studios
of nothingness.
By the mid
1960s we had begun to reject all forms of art and by 1967 had whole heartedly
embraced situationist theory. The years 1965 to 1970 were the most important and
consequential of the second half of the 20th Century. Everything we
see taking place around us today owes its origins to those few brief years –
with one crucial omission and that the most crucial of all: the need for
revolutionary transcendence. One day a fuller history of these critical years in
Newcastle, which changed the fabric of a city like no other regional city in the
country, will have to be written. The alpha of this development
was drowned in odium a long time ago and any memory of it sunk to the
drains. (See Newcastle & Icteric elsewhere on this web etc).
Convinced
by early 1967 a revolution was imminent – a belief underscored by the
thunderclap that burst over an unprepared world in France 1968 – we had handed
our power tools, planes, chisels, saws, metal and wood files etc over to a local
auctioneer to sell. But come 1973/4 we had started once more to build up an
inventory of tools.
What in the
mean time had happened? It was not just that the revolution had failed – it
had - but bit by bit the old class polarities in this the most class obsessed
society in the advanced world were beginning to reassert themselves. Without
exception all of us from lower down the social
scale felt profoundly betrayed by our erstwhile, much better off,
comrades in arms of only two/three years ago. We also felt revolutionary core
values, particularly the attack upon professionals, were being betrayed without
so much as the batting of an eye by a perfidious elite drawn from the top public
schools now rapidly reverting to type. The social democratic consensus was
beginning to unravel right at the heart of the revolutionary movement itself and
from the new the old reborn. Today there is hardly a scrap of that consensus
left as even “The Economist” acknowledges. In an article in the August 12th
2006 edition entitled “Why class still matters in Britain” it analyses the
result of a You Gov Economist pole
into class concluding it continues
to be “sticky” in Britain as much to do with tradition and birthright as it
is about money and social mobility. However in the closing sentence cultural
ascriptions of class are pushed way down the scale of what really counts,
finishing off with the most damning of gentler forewarnings: “In Britain the
perception that class is fairly fixed could become more damaging if income
inequality continues to rise and social mobility to slow”.
In 2006 we face a social divide, an “us and them” situation, which
shortly will be quite as profound as anything in the past and the equal of
anything our parents experienced. And there is little hope of an early exit from
this narrowing world in which the only people we continue to have any on-going,
wide ranging, respectful, honest, contact with tend to be drawn from the
construction industry and similar work environments like hospitals, nursing
homes, prisons and job centres by which we mean
ex cons, prison inmates, the unemployed, carers and “the sick”. The
same goes for the partners we pick and it is really startling to note how little
such essential particulars as these have altered since the 19th
century and pointed out by Steadman-Jones in his “Bitter Cry of Outcast
London”, written when he was still an honest historian and not the apologist
for capitalism he has since become. The only exception is the odd green but in
whose company we often feel profoundly constrained, the greens generally
clueless as regards where we are really coming from. The thought of stepping
outside this quite narrow circle is no longer an option and has become, in a
manner of speaking, a life sentence. This is not to say the situation cannot
ever be rescued or never was in the past. We have the greatest respect for one
Charles, a real toff with a cut glass accent, who abandoned his career as an
engineer to join a building gang becoming a superlatively skilled chippie and
eventually finding his way to Nicaragua, where he helped construct a school.
Despite their, at times, naïve goodwill it is still a pleasure to meet and
“talk shop” with such people for they are sincere and not seeking to get one
over on us. The same goes for Naill an Irish aristo’ with a double barrelled
surname dating from the Norman Conquest who, for want of a better term, became
an “alternative subcontractor” paying
himself the same wage as the people (invariably
Scots and Irish) he employed, though an exception was made in our case seeing we
came from the north!
Back
in the early 1970s the first building jobs came as a blessed relief, for it was
a pleasure to get away from the internecine “revolutionary” bickering over
nothing, the groupuscule phenomena that marked the decade essentially a sign the
revolutionary impulse was on the wane. Building sites were also a healthy
corrective to this increasingly blocked, impasse-like revolutionism.
Working
alongside simpatico comrades on building sites provided a more grounded space on
which even revolutionary thoughts could flower and many’s the time we have
returned home tired but high from the day’s debates. For building sites were
beginning to turn into forums where everything was up for discussion. Building
work can be noisy but it is rarely deafening and these discussions would
continue whilst building a wall, putting in a RSJ or fitting a window, the flow
only breaking off when we all put our heads together to consider a technical
matter like how best to deal with the damp. The point is this approach worked
and in it could be glimpsed something of what Lautreamont meant when he wrote in
1862, “poetry will be made by all”.
Perhaps
as part of this drift it’s worth noting something else which can be related to
the “all” of this maxim. A subtle redoployment of language in the media over
the last two decades or so means every building worker is now categorised as a
small business person. Seeing we always hated the business side of building,
especially subcontractors it is an effective rubbishing. For what it’s worth
and despite present day cynicism, for nigh on four decades we managed to work
collectively with equal wages between skilled and unskilled bending the rules on
some sites where management forbid any controls over wage differentials by
divvying up at the end of the week or job. Such an approach hardly exists in
today’s intensified alienation but once, in the early 1970s, though never
widespread, could quickly be found provided
you were prepared to search it out. It could easily be said that such a form of
equal work remittances is pure reformism – not questioning the law of
value or exploitation generally – or rather, merely gives alienation a more
egalitarian makeover. What truth there is in this – and it is is always worth
reiterating – fails to point out a simple but direct, pulsating relationship
with a medium of exchange demanding disdain for its relevance, a necessary
levelling which makes you in significant ways more ready to make the practical
and imaginative leap in those ever-hoped-for revolutionary months when money bit
by bit can be remorselessly abolished. It perhaps gives you an edge over those
who’ve never engaged in such practises in the here and now. Psychologically,
in any case, it always felt the right thing to do and practically it always
tended to cut out the crap in day to day work tensions as the basis for
sustained hostility, resentment and trivial envy simply wasn’t there. We were
all in the same shit more or less, exactly together and we were going to make it
into a bloody good time if we could.
Over
the years I have been struck by the divorce between the pleasure and comradeship
of the building scene and my increasing isolation as a theorist. I join hands on
the former but left alone to do the latter.This should not happen and always
before my eyes I have before me the cooperation of the building site compared
with the egotistical loneliness of theory. There must be a mean but I have yet
to find it and if I have learned anything of lasting value from building it is
that I cannot see why the cooperative behaviour demanded by building should not
be effortlessly extended into the theoretical realm. At times it has come close
though we still await the time of “practical theory made by all and not by
one”!
However it
was only a foretaste, a mere hint of what was possible so we can hardly be
described as having blazed a trail to the promised land of building made by all.
Never the less we were on the right path and if our working lives were a
failure, forever unable to make that essential revolutionary breakthrough
in building, it is because this was totally dependant on a libertarian,
anti capitalist revolution. Short of this happening building will forever remain
a cosmetic, a verdict that also applies to a
superior cosmetic like the BedZed
development (Bedlington Zero Energy Development) in Hackbridge on the Victoria/
Sutton line that uses just 10% of the energy a building of the same size
elsewhere would need. BedZed is a
design solution to global warming and though it is necessary to develop and
experiment with new sustainable building technologies it must not be done at the
expense of side-stepping the need for an anti capitalist revolution. However on
the design side of the construction industry this irreducible necessity is not
even remotely under discussion and which must be a great comfort to the rulers
of this planet that is about to fry.
Though
a failure, our working lives were not a total failure and reflecting over past
times there was much that was positive, though often overlooked and barely
noticed at the time. For example we were once employed by English Heritage as
traditional lime and wash plasterers to work on a large Georgian town house in
Soho. There were other trades people on the site each in their own way highly
specialised whether it was the leaders, carpenters, bricklayers, pointers or
painters. Of the 20 or so operatives on the site not one possessed a car, some
cycling into work from quite a distance
away others using public transport, the carpenters for example carrying on the
Tube under their arms bundles of spindles they had turned on a lathe in their
garage. Not one of these “craft supremos” showed a trace of obnoxious craft
elitism. The pointers for example were quite prepared to chat affably, when
working outside, with the drunks on the street, showing them more consideration
than we would have done in their place.
The unexpected is a fact of life on a building site and the place at
times can turn into a floorshow. A plumber was once brought in to sort out the
spaghetti like maze of pipes that ran through the house. He had left when we
came to flush the toilet prior to going home. We were lucky to escape being
scalded by the deluge of boiling hot water that flowed out.
On
another occasion we were working with a plumber who had a mate that suffered
from depression becoming so depressed that only ECT could return him to a state
of near “normality”. In the meantime, let loose on the building site, he
liked nothing better than to wire himself up to the mains to tide him over until
his next visit to the bin.
Until only recently building possessed an all round richness rarely
encountered elsewhere in today’s work scenes. Here was life a-plenty and one
has to go back to the era when docks were unregistered and containerisation a
distant dream to find its equivalent in other sectors of industry, Commonly
stranger than fiction and incomparably superior to any fiction today doing the
rounds this “you couldn’t make it up” world was yet a further reason for
the big crack down that was to come: that and
the fact that building workers had now a vice-like grip on London and the SE
East which New Labour and the
Treasury were not prepared to tolerate a moment longer.
Today the East European immigration is having the opposite effect
imposing a terrible conformity upon building practises and upon anything
remotely free-flowing. It spells the absolute end of alternative, off-beam
building practises both as a way of life and as an attitude to construction. It
is not the East Europeans’ fault and they have no choice but to be a docile
obedient workforce. Either that or instantly get the sack. And they know they
are here for the express purpose of lowering wages, which does not make for
harmonious relationships with the natives. It is noticeable how the East
European influx keep themselves to themselves especially in smaller cities as if
they are fearful of provoking assaults. I chanced on a building gang in Otley
bus station in West Yorkshire who had just knocked off work. They were all young
excepting one who was in his fifties. Occupying all the seats intended for two
in the front of the bus they immediately turned on their I Pods once aboard,
falling fast asleep within minutes. As the bus filled up the irritation grew,
for not one shifted up to allow other passengers to sit down. Some weeks later I
came across the same gang standing outside of Bradford Interchange in the rain
almost as if they were afraid to step inside. To me their initial arrogance was
perplexing but a builder friend found it entirely explicable saying that they
had swallowed the CBI’s and
Labour Government’s ideology – i.e. that they were doing essential work
British workers no longer wanted to do even though working longer hours for far
less money and so had a right, until slapped down, to behave as if they owned
the place.
Especially if
the East European migrant workers are drunk, bus drivers in the north whether
white, black and Asian are noticeably more hostile to them than they are, say,
to Africans. They know they have been brought in to take their jobs should they
step out of line. Recently bus drivers in Nottingham who were threatening strike
action were told their jobs would go to East Europeans if they did so. Word
spread rapidly far and wide.
The last time
there was an invasion of migrant workers on a equivalent scale was after the 2nd
World War when some 400,000 Irish building workers arrived in Britain.
Conditions then were very different from now and the trade unions had a lot more
clout, though it must be stressed building workers unions have never been the
force they have been in America apart from in local councils. Though used as a
wage cutting force, the Irish did not exert anything like the downward pressure
on wages the present-day East Europeans do. And beside many were left wing in
the sense of belonging to the CP and latterly Trotskyite sects. Unfortunately
the same cannot be said of the present lot who are more likely to go around with
a book by Von Hayek than Karl Marx when not listening to junk on their I Pods.
In fact during the
late 1980s and 1990s there was something of a reverse migration by building
operatives to Ireland as the Celtic tiger boomed. Not any more for Ireland also
has an open door policy for much the same reason as Britain – and that is to
destroy the new found power of Irish building workers and the rest which only
ever lasted two decades. A bricky we were friendly with left London to return to
Cork. He had been a bit alternative getting on with the job and not saying much
during the day then returning home to play his guitar at night. Expecting to
pick up work in Cork he has been idle ever since and now claims a carers
allowance for looking after his severely disabled brother. According to him the
work loop has become unstrung and he can no longer go to pubs frequented by
subcontractors and pick up work, for this informal employment exchange
of deals, booze, cards and the crack has gone just like it has in Kilburn
which he leftover three years ago. Recently he told us that Turkish building
workers had arrived in Cork and were working for the equivalent of £15 a day!
He is not one to exaggerate. We are well and truly back at mid 1970s wage
levels.
A good deal
(probably the majority) of the work performed by East European operatives is
“off the cards”. Working without a national insurance card and therefore
“illegally” (but connived at by the authorities because it’s cheap and the
possibilities for exploitation immense) they forfeit all rights to a minimum
wage and cannot seek redress by appealing to labour legislation. This is the
lump at its worst and there have been a number of programs on the radio in which
now retired Irish building workers in particular have inveighed against the
iniquities of the lump repeatedly warning the incoming East Europeans not to go
down the road they did. There was also an unmistakable whiff of Communist party
rhetoric for the party had been opposed to every manifestation of the lump,
never once discriminating between the left and right wing lump. That I now found
myself agreeing with virtually everything these former building workers said
could only mean the collapse of all alternatives in building and ineluctably
points to an increasingly closed down world in which neoliberal values have
completely triumphed.
**********************************
However it is not merely
a question of wage cutting. Building workers have to submit to the strangest of
extra economic pressures that from the dawn of building work in the mist of time
are without precedent. Prominent amongst these are aesthetic pressures, which
can reach such a degree of hyper-aesthetic neurosis that building workers simply
give up in a state of bewilderment and demoralization unable, on top of
everything else, to deal with this additional strain and the utter craziness it
brings with it. One aches for the uncomplicated utilitarianism of the not so
distant past when “building was building”. It is also inextricably bound up
with a property bonanza the like of which London has never seen (or for that
matter the U.K.) and is indicative of the degree to which housing – that most
intimate and ideological asset – is now driving the economy. For at its
avant-garde extremities housing is no longer a roof and four walls but a
solipsistic installation to be lived in. And if this is clearly not the
case on the suburban estates with eco sounding tags popping up everywhere across
Britain, their time may yet come. For there is a gradual creeping north effect.
And eco-lite is an entrée to this home fixated world of interior aesthetic
mental illness which cannot externalise itself and is therefore so traumatising
to building workers and clients alike.
The centre of this drift has its real base: it is the house – hardly
the home – as the be all and end all of society simply because it is the very
essence of the UK economy where the mile high wall of money is somewhat
democratised and credit is seemingly infinite. For a sizeable minority who now
own bricks and mortar worth over a million pounds, not only are the walls,
upstairs and down, spaces for all the fabulously hyped excrescences of Brit Art,
the house must give off an aesthetic ambience. It is a must have
ambience. Punters who pay nigh on £5,000 (cheap at the price!) for 15 minute
cheeky self-portraits by say, the Chapman Bros who, incidentally, fancying
themselves as intellectuals, cynically deploy essential critiques like
recuperation in a mild (and recuperated) situationist
sense of the term – nonetheless baulk at paying reasonable wages to their
building workers who put their aesthetic masterpieces together. These punters really
do demand a masterpiece and increasingly employ aesthetically brutalised
subcontractors to keep those shits of building workers down. Dock ‘em a weeks
pay that’ll keep the cunts in order!
The aesthetic effect is everything, but it must increasingly be executed
on wages now heading towards pauperisation.
Grimly
we slowly realised we were beginning to face the full horrors of the aesthetic
economy with all its breathtaking contradictions. Not only was art becoming the
central drift and gist it was also becoming the mode of activity and
participation as installation triumphed and reification and passivity extended
its vice-like grip over the very heart beat of sentinent life. Any impulse
towards emancipatory and genuine
spontaneous riot is now subsumed in aesthetic substitute activity. It’s like
as though art has been realised in a popular everyday life but without the
essential transcendence of art inherent in the movement of formal disintegration
as, contradictorily, the role of artist becomes ever more grandiose and
imperial.
Clients increasingly require that
building workers be artist without actually being such for that would confer on
them a status clients would instantly defer to and become the helpless victims
of: such is the unprecedented reverence for “art” today where everything is
in the name and does just what it says on the label. In fact, unlike artists,
building workers today are made to feel more degraded, incompetent, avaricious
and downright criminal than ever before. Even the present pittance they get is
regarded as outrageous and of course they are bound to be up to every fiddle in
the book, not least cheating on the cost of raw materials. For the bourgeoisie
is gripped by deflationary expectations when it comes to having work done on
their properties and every builder can sight instances when they bought raw
materials and in addition to not being paid for the work done, are not
compensated for the raw materials they laid out on. It is a kind of super
slavery where the slave pays the slave owner for the privilege of working for
them.
House
owners have tended to traditionally resent building workers but at the same time
regarded them as a necessary evil to be tolerated if the job was to get done. In
this society where to think the unthinkable has become one of its guiding maxims
the final elimination of building workers through their progressive
dehumanisation is an unmistakeable tendency. In the past, prefabrication, self
assembly and machined interiors “untouched by human hand” had been the main
way forward to achieving this goal which on the side of the angels was aimed at
eliminating drudgery but more realistically to do with getting rid of
troublesome crews of skilled, on site, operatives who threatened profit margins.
Nowadays the aim is to reduce them to the status of pixels on a computer screen,
building worker avatars that complete the designs that,
like magic, electronically spring into being when using Power Point
software. This and other programs like the omniscient use of Photoshop in the
property sections of newspapers and magazines more than ever signifies - and not
only in building - the triumph of representation over a reality which now bathed
in other worldly shapes and light, shine forth like interiors on mail order from
paradise. Building workers then become souls rather than bodies and to be
rebuked for permitting the profanity of even having dust on their T-shirts as
recently happened to a friend. He was also taken into the bathroom to show where
he had allegedly left a drop of urine on the toilet seat for pixels neither eat,
drink, defecate or piss. However since a perfect silicon building operative has
yet to be invented in the meantime one can always settle for second best and
employ carbon based East European life forms that don’t speak much English.
All building workers are beneath contempt but with East Europeans one is at
least spared the annoying civility of ever having to say hello.
Not so long
ago it was not uncommon for skilled building operatives especially those more
accustomed to working with there
hands, like carpenters and plasterers, to be objects of envy as if they
possessed the key to non-reified,
non mechanical, far happier working practises. We have even been referred to as
“maestros” and it is actually quite flattering though we would instantly
debunk the term wishing to remain masters of nothing or, less pretentiously,
bums. But not anymore. For concept is swiftly replacing craft, reflecting the
shift that is taking place in the economy overall toward a value added economy
of ideas. This also explains the irresistible rise of installation and concept
art that just goes on growing and growing until not a day goes by without it
headlining the news somewhere in the country.
We were
once working in Covent Gardens when a not then instantly recognisable face
appeared at the doorway. It was Bob Geldof out doing a cultural round, the idea
of staging a live aid concert just to stay germinating in his head. The mission
of redefining himself as a philanthropic entrepreneur still some way off (and
which Bono was later to profit handsomely from gaining possession of Forbes
magazine America’s leading business magazine in recognition of his services to
the poor) he was rightly more impressed with our unpretentious solid plastering
than the final year exhibitions he
had come to see. He obviously felt more at ease on our building site than
in the art galleries, for here he was at least
free to speak his mind. Yet there was more to it than that for his
comments implied a latent critique of art he was not remotely able to follow
through. In fact he was to become one of the leading innovators and brokers of
the valorization of personality by means of which individuals became brand names
as transpired with the likes of Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin.
The mere mention of their names will cause money to stick to them like
glue. However for this to happen their names must
constantly be in circulation like money, media exposure being an
essential part of this monetary artistic counterfeit. Thus a concept could be
floated on the stock exchange and the job of realizing the concept, should any
manufacturing be required, leased to subcontractors employing conceptless
nitwits who not so long ago might
have qualified as skilled artisans. The same goes for us, our artisanal skills
all but redundant in a world that is becoming over populated with concept
artists and, at the risk of bringing on a devastating economic crises, a world
at the same time in mortal dread of being judged philistine and afraid to say
the emperor has no clothes. The immanence of revolution once dogged the
footsteps of “happening artists” - to employ a redundant term. Forty years
on it no longer does and yet if there is to be a drift into revolution it will,
if it is to have any relevance, leach out of the fatigued, endless repeats of
contemporary happeners rather than from a return to stuckist art. And the same
goes for craft fetishisms it is important to maintain a distance from.
Building workers unable
to realize the blocked visions of their clients are no longer just the invaders
they were twenty years previously. Now they are the
despoilers of visionary interiors, the creatures of nightmares not
dreams. Not even supplying makeshift sketches with at best a few hints to go
upon, one is left to divine this skewed “non objective vision” – hardly
the stuff of the promise in Malevich - of the new propertied classes. And what
they get is never even remotely what they want. Manipulated by degrees of
photographic falsehood they have lost all truth to materials. What is left is a
near hallucinatory world in which
walls part like an electronic Moses before the red sea, and concrete bends like
rubber. This was starkly brought home to us a few years ago when we assembled a
number of IKEA carcasses for a kitchen leaving off the doors and fitting instead
plain pine doors we made ourselves. The effect was different even a bit striking
in so far as such things are possible today. To our astonishment the client on
seeing it said “what are we going to do about the knots?”. We came back
quickly “not a lot” pointing out the obvious that knots were an intrinsic
part of wood and integral to tree growth. The same woman had asked us to paint
part of her kitchen a particular shade of yellow but then insisted we changed
the colour simply because she had seen a gang of workmen dressed in jackets the
very same shade of yellow! The difference between then and now - barely eight years ago – is that after having the
work done all over again the client paid up without a murmur. Chances are today
you would have had to re-do it for nothing and be blamed for not pointing out
the particular shade of yellow was one worn by workers and therefore
intrinsically hideous.
This new clientele,
despite being totally controlled by media representations on TV and in magazines
are completely unable to visualize things for themselves and to listen to and
heed advice. They are literally deaf to reason and are able to muster others of
the same ilk such that in the end you begin to doubt your own sanity and years
of experience. Thus for example a woman insisted she wanted wooden shutters.
“OK” we said, “that’s fine but they will tend to shut out light because
there is a limit to how far it is possible to fold them back”. She felt we
were pulling the wool and that the shutters would fold away to nothing pointing
out that in Victorian times there would have been shutters there and not
curtains. To which we replied: “Yes, probably, but brightly lit interiors were
then the exception”. She replied saying she “didn’t want a Victorian
interior but a sunny contemporary interior”. Our objections were regarded as
little less than outright deceit, a shirker’s response to a difficult problem.
The more we protested the more convinced she became we were simply covering up
our own incompetence. She also asked us to put up white wood shelving. We had
said it was possible to get bleached wood as we had once constructed a huge
computer table made from wood salvaged from an Aberdonian tramp steamer. When
sanded the wood was indeed beautiful and seemed to glisten like salt spray.
However as it was taking the weight of several large computers and other
electronic equipment we had to harden the surface which meant it lost some of
its intrinsic beauty. Besides had we not coated the wood it would rapidly have
become stained with spillages – ink, tea, coffee and so on. She definitely did
not fancy this but never the less wanted an undetectable protective coat. We
knew of no such material - another sign we did not know our job. (I was reminded
of the day at around the time of Tony Blair’s election victory in 1997 when I
was assured by an irate tenant there was such a thing as rubber plaster for
ceilings which did away with the problem of cracking and why if we were any good
didn’t we know about it. Of course rubber does eventually perish and crack and
any such stuff is as fictional as rubber nails, which builders are forever
teasing each other about. Not knowing about this miraculous product was proof we
were chancers - and a stark pointer to an increasingly terrible future.) The
only way around this was to give the wood an artificial, distressed look. This
she rejected out of hand saying she wanted the bleached look to remain.
She may have had a thing about bleached wood for she had a framed
photograph of Derek Jarman`s clapboard timber house on the kitchen wall. Jarman
had bought the house for a song in the early eighties, one of many dotted around
the raised shingle beach of Dungeness on the Kent coast. Notorious as the site
of the Dungeness nuclear power station many of these ramshackle houses,
constructed in the 1930s before the post war town and country planning acts, had
been abandoned and in the 1970s
were squatted. It is an idyllic location and Jarman had constructed an informal
garden that melted into the transitional habitat between sea and land that surrounded
these casual houses, making use of what was to hand. Slowly dying of aids it was
by far the best thing he ever did -
in fact the only thing. Yet none the less it marked a turning point for
that mesmeric shingle beach with its makeshift huts and houses tossed like dice
from an unseen hand on the fringes of that legendary haunt of smugglers, Romney
Marsh. For now it had started to become prime property changing forever the
wild, undisciplined character of the area. This was the reason a nuclear power
station had been constructed on the point in the first place for only misfits
and undesirables ever went there.
J was in that artistic mould
though initially the property boom that was to follow it was not as intentional
as it has since become. And this was J’s problem; she wanted not mere value
for money but the added value that only an art conscious property boom can today
deliver. With no guide lines to follow, though with a keen eye to a huge
potential increase in the price of her property, she was meddling in the extreme
in a way Jarman would never have been. (Besides he did not employ professional
gardeners or landscape designers who would only have imposed themselves upon
that unforced environment doing it all by himself as everyone should with a
little help from others here and there.) The same was not quite true of her
other design mentor, Janet Street Porter whom she was constantly mentioning. She
had seen her house and was “bowled over by it” asking us if we had ever
worked on it. “No” we replied but we easily could have done back in the
early eighties smiling as we recalled how returning one night she found sheets
of expanded metal lathing (wire mesh) nailed to the walls. “Leave it just like
that” she had said to the builders – and they did though we did wonder at
the time how long it would be before she ripped her fingers to bits on the razor
sharp edges. And would the blood stains be turned into art as they are today by
Pete Doherty? Probably not, for this was just at the beginning of Thatcher’s
reign and the capitalisation of installation art (a term not then current) in
its infancy not to mention the constantly reiterated pseudo challenges it poses
to the arts and picked over without let-up by the sneering “right” and
approving “left” wing media. (Whether for or against it is the publicity
that guarantees the financial rewards, which is what
it’s all about.) However J took our smiles as a philistine lack of art
appreciation and want of culture, though we very well aware that until a year
ago she was still heavily junked on IKEA. Midway between house beautiful and the
tired affectation of house bizarre, she was not ready for the outré commodity.
Next to the photo of Jarman’s house and garden was a reproduction of a
famous collage “Words in Liberty” by Gino Severini, an Italian futurist. J
would never have guessed we were familiar with the work or were able to offer a
critique of these words in liberty, which, taken from newspaper
headlines, advertising and little else, belied the promise of its title. J
tail-ends “innovation” which makes her doubly impossible to work for because
she herself is a design fault, an end of the line cock-up. Her conservatism is
such one would not expect to find a Banksy on her wall just yet. But since J.S.
Porter has recently praised Banksy to the skies as “Britain’s most
subversive artist” that day may not be far off. (Porter is quite unable to see
that Banksy’s smuggling of an inflatable doll dressed in the orange overalls
of a Guantanamo Bay detainee into Disney world was a grotesque parody of a real
intervention like the shooting of the Abe Lincoln manikin in the same place in
the late 1960s. Banksy hit the headlines – as his prices than hit record
levels and A-list celebs queued up for his American show.) But J flattering
herself she is out in front though actually bringing up the rear, will pay top
dollar for an original whilst seeking to reduce the wages of, in particular, wet
trade building operatives, joiners and other zeros below subsistence level to
make them pay for a fashionable pretension she fondly believes is challenging
rather than subversive.
J had also asked us to sand the floor of her living room and kitchen.
When finished she was disappointed to find it looked like ----- wood! She
thought it was possible to sand away the wood’s natural colours to reveal the
white interior that, as everyone knows, lies at the heart of all wood. The pine
floorboards were the softest we had ever encountered more typically used for
palettes and soft enough to drive paper staples into with ease. We had gone to
great lengths to clean off all the stains in out of the way places like under
radiators around pipes, in corners etc where it is only possible to use machine
tool to a limited extent. The floorboards were also very pitted and we’d gone
to considerable pains getting rid of the pitting. She then had the cheek to say
we hadn’t done a very good job and that people who “really knew about
floors” were of the same opinion. In fact they were experts like she was –
experts at flicking through design/property magazines and utterly conditioned by
what they saw in their dematerialised world of Photoshop appearances.
She
had also asked us to block up a doorway, which was a no fuss straightforward
job. She then decided all of a sudden she wanted a strip of glass 10 centimetres
wide to run from floor to ceiling right where the blocked up door had been. We
explained that behind the plaster board there were several lengths of studding
and many cross pieces or noggins a fact that seemed to surprise her. Not only
that she wanted the glass to be flush with the plaster and not rebated in or
held in by a frame. We asked “how are you going to fix the frame”? To which
she replied it’s your business to know that - or words to that effect. In
junior school we learnt about the existence of imaginary hooks –
sky hooks - that could counteract gravitational forces. They were spoken
of in jest but this in all seriousness was what was required here for her
hare-brained scheme to work. And so it goes on and on and on.
This
particular client was a senior administrator in the NHS. In keeping with the
bullying culture of our times she was perfectly at ease handing out punishment
to those below and very used to being obeyed. In fact her unreal aesthetic
demands perfectly reflected her work situation in which reality must never be
allowed to intrude whether in the shape of laid-off doctors and nurses, ward
closures or the scandalous truth about PPI. The gap between reality and
representation apparent from her indefinable plans for her house reflected the
growing global disjuncture at every level between reality and representation.
Building
workers are being increasingly asked to do things that formerly no one would
ever have dreamt of asking them to do. They are required to be “artists”
without the status that goes with that wretched occupation; a status that is
higher today at the moment of arts utter bankruptcy than ever before. And what
goes with it is a complete failure to appreciate building skills because it is
increasingly widely held anyone is able to do skilled building work. We can
recall working on the house of a lecturer from London University in the early
1980s. At one point we were approached by his young son who said to the gang:
“Daddy says you must be very stupid to do this kind of work”. Many years
later we were engaged in doing up a house in Leeds. It was in a conservation
area and many of the original window frames were rotten. To have run up
duplicates would have cost a small fortune. We succeeded in taking out the
hinged frames without even breaking a pane of glass and replacing the rotten
wood. While carrying out this very tricky operation that required a considerable
amount of care and skill the client turned to one of us and said: “Do you ever
do anything creative”. Worse still she was French and one would have thought
she would have at least some familiarity with the French anti-art tradition that
would have mocked the very idea. That summer she had been on the Larzac plateau
supporting Jose Bove but it was obvious she had never heard of Rene Riesel and
even more surprisingly, R Vaneigem.
These people live
on their nerves; walk a tightrope between a doubtful sanity and certain madness
from whose clutches they rarely escape. They are frequently single, unable to
make a relationship of any sort, even an “odd couple” mismatch, that could
provide some kind of shelter from the worst of life’s storms. They also hanker
after the perfect relationship and worse for them really believe that it’s
possible. Building alterations then become a prelude to ultimate bliss not, as
so often happens, a forerunner to tragedy. Rather than house beautiful, asylum
chic would be more accurate description and our dirty work togs likely to be
replaced by laundered white coats in quick succession. Destroyers of
dreams and slayers of last hopes we are then type cast as ultimate
barbarians for failing to waft them to the promised land of property heaven.
The punters being
the wretched, long-living bourgeoisie themselves cannot even begin to know the
extent of their hypocrisy and ignorance. They yearn – in that parrot-like,
everywhere term that perfection – be made reality. Pronto. Utopia
resides in the aesthetics of everyday life where with a few twists and turns - a
career location move and new home etc - you are on course for possibly absolute
fulfillment. Three or four decades ago, utopia was very different. It was to be
a practical reality involving the abolition of money and commodities and
achieved through social revolution and we were certain – very certain – it
was achievable. It was! Nowadays, with reaction turning the aims of revolution
upside down, utopia becomes an illusive, highly prised product of skillful
commodity choices. However, unlike social revolution, the commodity, despite its
manifest subtleties is truly incapable of creating a durable utopia. The let
down is instant and the fury at the amount of money spent on a home achievment
that can never be what was intended, is vented on those who put the wretched
fantasy together, meaning final wages for a job becomes nothing but
wish-fulfillment.
But, and not so long ago, we
often found ourselves in the role of informal therapists. Being covered in
building muck must have been part of the attraction, a signature of integral
honesty and plain speaking denoting a time when there was still some honour to
manual work and hope for society. To be honest it was mainly women who would
break down in front of us. One also formed the impression that they were unable
to speak to anyone but us, and that their other relationships both in and out of
work were hollow. Working in a non-hierarchical gang we have always felt free to
speak our minds and have rarely minced our words even when we realised clients
were eves dropping. Inevitably they must have compared it to their own
repressive work situations and the increasingly pervasive monitoring of words in
liberty. Added to which there was all the ribaldry and sheer good fun. Who could
not be envious? In fact this temporary doubling of a building site and a
therapist’s consulting room only really happened during the 1990s reflecting
rising constraints at work and a general crack down on genuine self expression.
We never recall it happening during the 1970s or 1980s when things were a lot
less repressive. The emotional need for it was only felt during the 1990s when
there was still a smidgeon of hope and “the workers” (particularly manual
workers) were still a reality and a force to be reckoned with even if a rapidly
fading one. This disarming psychological reaction to building workers did not
survive the dawn of the millennium and we are now lower than vermin, lower even
than we were in the 19th Century. For poverty wages and extreme
underemployment has become, thanks largely to TV and the constant stream of
reports in the media of cowboy builders cheating a pensioner out of their
life’s savings, the gorging at the rich man’s table compared to which fury
provoking executive pay rises are commendable for their moderation.
Often in their late twenties and
early thirties couples have a baby in the desperate hope it will bring them
together once more. One wonders how many millions of children in Britain alone
are the fruit of this truly desperate stratagem. To this must be added another
that takes place usually a little later in life - a housing makeover that also
is about asset appreciation and the family as a home owning unit. And like
having an unwanted baby it only ever succeeds in temporally papering over the
cracks. Relationships become more fraught as a consequence and increasingly it
is the construction workers that get the blame for it for failing to create the
masterpiece that could bring salvation like the pieta above the altar. This
shifting of the blame is fundamentally necessary for otherwise it could lead to
a revolutionary indictment of a social system that has placed housing not as
shelter but as a financial asset at its reproductive centre. At least in the
west and particularly Britain and America it has become the motor and emotional,
psychological, aesthetic quintessence of contemporary capitalism which is also
that of ever growing solipsistic isolation. And ever since the defeat of the
miners it is manual workers who have been made to shoulder the burden of
society’s ills especially in the UK where traditionally there is a deeply
entrenched hostility to them. What is most remarkable is that down and out
though they are, they still head the hate list. This is symptomatic, meaning
they are one of the last remaining legitimate targets of hate in a society which
has officially abolished antagonisms but continues
to accumulates hate with profit and is then stopped from venting it in a lasting
manner by overthrowing capitalism.
This desperation to get things right
aesthetically in the last chance saloon that housing increasingly has become is
also part of a strategy of control and “staying in control”. It is the
aesthetic adjunct of cognitive behaviour therapy, the now near universal
re-action and reactionary panacea to a world spiralling completely out of
control and perilously close to destruction. As self-assertion is out of the
question in the work place the second best place, and a poor second it is, to
commence reconstructing the perfect life and truly feel in charge is by changing
rooms (the title of a TV serial) in the home. But since these (invariably)
loners have no one o boss about,
building workers become the object of their control freaking. Nothing is ever
right – nor ever can be. It is not just carping criticism (which is bad
enough) but a demolition of self that is the ultimate goal. Not one detail is
overlooked or spared including a sharp rebuke about how one pockets money
following a never-ending catalogue of mad and maddening complaints about the
work being done. One wonders where it will stop and if next time objection will
be taken to eye colour, length of fingernails and body weight. Behind it of
course there lurks the presence of money and such responses are by no means
general. In fact the majority are the victims of it. It is also extraordinarily
similar to what tends to happen or did happen, particularly in the 1970s, in
“revolutionary” milieus and groupuscules.
But there is another
aspect to this constant nit-picking something uniquely avant-garde or post
avant-garde. Certain things were expected of a skilled building worker a 100
year ago like an intimate knowledge of the trade. They were required, more or
less, to do a specific job and there were certain well-worn guidelines. In the
kind of building under discussion here that no longer applies. Round about the
mid 1980s we were asked to render a gallery in gesso. Of course we knew
everything about the material (like shit we did!) but after a visit to the
library and a quick dip into a book on Renaissance and pre Renaissance
techniques we were “experts”. We
could not pour the material, as traditionally was the case prior to the
application of egg tempera, so instead we heated up the rabbit glue and used
plastering trowels to spread it on the walls of the gallery. Unlike plaster it
really did stick to out trowels and we would pull the trowel off the wall
leaving suction marks behind. Finding we could not smooth the gesso out as one
could plaster, we had no choice but to
paper it down, a recognised procedure in any case, once we had covered the
walls. However we were stopped by the owner of the gallery who liked the trowel
marks and wanted them left just as they were - which incidentally also hit us in
the pocket. However try as we might we were not able to repeat what we had
previously done unselfconsciously. But no matter, we still got paid and there
were no complaints. Now, more like as not, we would be accused of not “knowing
our job” because we were unable to replicate random markings which no one is
ever trained to do, and can never be trained to do, or learn how to do, because
they are essentially products of chance and unrepeatable. Formerly this was
“action building” for an understanding client, understanding, at least, as
far as the job was concerned but never guessing for one moment that we knew
exactly where she was coming from and that, revelling in our philistine identity
tags, we were secretly laughing at
the pretence and the passé content of such “innovations” that were then
starting to become all the rage. However we enjoyed doing the job, treating it
as a joke we were being paid for. Today we would be kept awake at night because
of worry over this piece of avant-garde nothingness that now carries a deadly
sting in its tail.
Because of a total breakdown in
the critique of art, which includes building and the new construction worker,
this boring nonsense is now invariably called cutting edge, which is the last
thing it is though it can easily rip a building worker apart. On the other hand
there is an increase in the machine finish, shop fitting, aesthetic and the
hyper division of labour that goes with it.
But both share in common an obsessive need
to control every detail which includes maximum control over the building
operatives. And both are equally joyless and unimaginative though it has to be
admitted construction workers accustomed to the latter are unable to cope with
the former. (We knew a plasterer who could do one thing only and that was
plaster flat walls or boards giving them a polished, machine like, finish that
decorators loathe because paint rollers slide around on them as if on glass. He
was at a loss when confronted with anything other than a flat surface. His mind
was as narrow as his plastering and past military battles practically his soul
topic of conversation. His sub contractor sidekick came from Ashington a former
mining town in Northumberland. Having supported the miners’ strike he had
subsequently lost his way claiming Hitler “had a good class analysis”. We
last heard whilst working on a house belonging to the Mosley family had shaken
hands with one of Mosley’s son’s saying it was a pleasure to shake hands
with someone whose father had shaken hands with Hitler!) Make of it what you
will this type of detail is in the Tresell, Ragged Trousered Philanthropists,
tradition and anyone with a long experience of the building game will have many
to ponder on, some revealing others less so.
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