It’s a cold winter’s night in Barcelona. In the darkened church a single tabor beats out a slow rhythm, soaked up by the people who have crowded the aisles and nave to hear about the end of their world. A pipe howls. The sun will lose its light showing itself dark and veiled, sings a woman stood at the chancel, draped in a white smock over a dark blue gown whose capacious sleeves almost touch the cold stone slabs beneath our feet. I crane my neck around the octagonal pillars, some 12 or 15 feet thick, to see her picked out by the candlelight. She’s wearing a white wimple, in the centre of which is a jewel. In her extended hands she brandishes a sword, its tip pointed towards heaven. Around her a small choir of 8 or 10 singers are dressed entirely in black. The shuffling and murmuring of the crowd hushed as soon as she entered the nave from the rear of the church. Now she exists as the sole object of attention, thousands of eyes and souls all peering towards her. It’s late, and the world outside is quiet. Tomorrow would be Christmas Day. The moon will give no light and the whole world will be sorrow, she warns us. Fire will come from heaven. The rivers and fountains will burn. The reign of the antichrist will be short, but nonetheless catastrophic. We will lose martyrs and will visit hell. This is the end of the world.

Almost as solemnly as she arrived, she leaves, accompanied again only by the drum and the wailing drone of a Catalan bagpipe, known as a sac de gemecs — quite literally, a bag of moans. We shuffle out, having survived another warning, the warning itself a prayer to the Virgin Mary to deliver Christ, to deliver us. The basilica of Santa Maria del Mar is 700 years old, a small masterpiece of Catalan Gothic architecture, but the song is older; it had already been sung in this region for probably 400 years when the foundation stone was laid. It is said to have been sung in a handful of churches across Catalonia, the Balearics and Sardinia every Christmas Eve for a millennium. The name for this liturgical drama is El Cant de la Sibil·la, The Song of the Sybil, and now it’s something I attend every Christmas, a feast that, to my mind, requires a dark lining to add depth to the celebrations. 

The antichrist, as depicted in the Rupertsberg codex of Hildegard von Bingen’s Scivias

I have an interest in the prophecies of the end of the world, and especially those of the sibyls, who first appear in the cultures of ancient Greece as women whose prophetic visions were of the gods, channelled through these priestesses. The role was formalised, passed down through successors, and the most famous today is no doubt the sibyl who tended the Oracle at Delphi — remembered in a Western European tradition thanks to the later belief that she prophesied the birth of Christ. A few years ago I published a novel called Unknown Language, based on the mystical visions and cosmology of Hildegard von Bingen, a twelfth century German abbess whose extensive writings on her experiences led to her being known as the Sibyl of the Rhine. In my book the protagonist lives through the end of the world that Hildegard prophesied, and in some form survives it. It is this, in fact, that interests me most: not merely the apocalypse, but those who survive the apocalypse. 

Hildegard’s visions of the end of the world weren’t cut from whole cloth. A European imaginary of the apocalypse is something of a tradition, a visual world full of allegories and images that we have inherited from people of the past, and while the meanings and context have changed, the form of the terror is something so deeply ingrained in a European psyche that its descriptive powers seem to still resonate. Our understanding of it as a physical catastrophe, one marked by burning rivers and mountains laid low, for example, is a gift handed down to us by the nightmares of earlier generations. It’s a vision of climate catastrophe, malign governance, sickness and eventual redemption that we amend and alter, but it’s an intangible inheritance of fear nonetheless. Much of the visual and theological imagery for this type of apocalypse comes from Jewish and early Christian sources. These were people living under Roman occupation and in the idea of a final judgement they found a recompense for present sufferings that seemed not just deeply unjust, but almost unending. And, truly, the present suffering didn’t, doesn’t, end. The visions resonated as they spread through the Balkans, Eastern Europe, and finally to this little crescent of the Mediterranean, precisely because they were the fears of everyday life. To take some common interpretations of the four horsemen featured in the Book of Revelations; famine, war, pestilence, social breakdown, the collapse of empires, and death. These were the everyday fears of everyday Christians for millenia. Were we to be paying attention, they still would be.

There is a preterist interpretation of the Book of Revelation, arguing that it was written not as a prophecy of events to come, but as a description of the trials already faced by the early Christians in the first century. Its author was John of Patmos, an elusive historical figure who we know only through his book, but who quite credibly claimed to be living in exile on the island of Patmos, where he had his visions, due to his being persecuted by the Roman authorities.

The Delphic Sibyl, as represented by Michelangelo on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel

It’s hardly a surprise he was persecuted. The Romans feared prophecy, and especially prophecy with political implications, as only true believers can. They themselves had their own Sibylline oracles: not living prophetesses, but books, the Libri Sibyllini, which they believed had been given to the last king of Rome before the formation of the Republic by a Greek sibyl, and contained oracular visions that the Romans consulted for centuries not just to understand what they were undergoing, but what rites and rituals to perform to assuage the gods and prevent catastrophe. Interestingly, they were one of the reasons why the Roman pantheon of gods came to mirror the Greek. The books were written in Greek hexameter, and the plasticity with which they could be interpreted, especially politically, would eventually be their downfall. They were destroyed around the end of the 4th century, just as the Empire was splitting between Rome and Constantinople. 

Yet the figure of the sibyl survived this end of her world. In the decades and centuries that followed her excision from Roman religion and politics, she re-emerged in a strange, almost parodical form in the books of Hellenistic Jewish and early Christian writers in the eastern Empire, who saw in her cultural legacy and form a mouth to utter new prophecies (indeed, one Greek writer, Celsus, described Christians as “sibyl-mongers” due to their tendency to prophecy). A whole series of books written at this time, aping the Greek hexameter of the Libri Sibyllini came to be known as the Oracula Sibyllina - the Sibylline Oracles. With a rich eschatological imagery describing contemporary events within the context of an unfolding, unravelling world, soon heading for judgement, these books would slowly creep up into Europe where they would foment panic, insurrection and crusades for a thousand years to come, influencing the end-of-the-worldview of not just Hildegard, but also El Cant de la Sibil·la, and many more. Peasants, priests and princes: few were immune from the terrifying charm of the end.

But it was another churchman, a bishop from Hippo named Augustine, who saw in the collapsing Western Roman Empire his own moment to fundamentally change Christian relationships with prophecy. Next week for paid subscribers I’ll talk more about St Augustine’s vision of the end of the world, the influence of the Sibylline Oracles on mediaeval Europe, and about our contemporary visions of the last unravelling of existence. 

‘Utopian Drivel’ is written by me, Huw Lemmey. If you’re a paid subscriber, thank you so much for your support. Please do forward this to anyone who might enjoy it.

If you aren’t a paid subscriber, please consider subscribing; paid subscribers also help support pieces for free subscribers! You also get access to the entire archive of 100+ essays, including posts such as this piece on the idea of a gay audience, this essay on the quality of phone screentime, , this essay on depression through a mirror, darkly, and this report on watching the Queen’s funeral at a gay sauna. Free subscribers get occasional posts, like this guided walking tour around London’s world of queer espionage, or this double-header on the Gay History of Private Eye magazine.

I learned recently that tinyletter, the email newsletter subscription service, was soon to close, which is something of an end of an era. Services like tinyletter bridged the lacuna between the golden era of blogging and our current age of subscription newsletter, something a little more professional although a little less charming that has again changed the form and the economics of writing online. This very newsletter started its life on a tinyletter I ran, and which many of you subscribed to, back in the day. To mark its demise at the end of this month, I thought I’d post one of my favourite pieces from that tinyletter, a piece that addresses cities, homosexuality, and a critic who remains of great interest to me, the late Herbert Muschamp. Enjoy.

In his history of Edward Durrell Stone’s design for 2 Columbus Circle, New York City, built in 1964 to house the Gallery of Modern Art (GMA), the architecture critic Herbert Muschamp offers an critical examination of the role a “gay audience” played in establishing an alternative narrative to modernism in the city.

In fractious dialogue with the Museum of Modern Art, the collection housed at the GMA gave new significance and space to the Pre-Raphaelites and the Surrealists, disrupting the Greenbergian hegemony of the Abstract Expressionist movement in the city at the time. The All American Men of Abstract Expressionism produced an All-American Art: “the dominance of Abstract Expressionism over Surrealism looked a lot like the dynamic between high school jocks and the fairies they'd tortured”, he notes. The GMA, in contrast, provided a home for the fairies; a place where the overlooked aesthetic and political nuances of neglected and decorative movements could find their viewer.

2 Columbus Circle then :)

A gay audience, as in the architecture of 2 Columbus Circle as well as the gallery itself, produced not a reactionary yearning for the past, but a complication of the monolithic International Style that dominated New York architecture at the time, recognising that complexities, outliers and deviations tell us as much about our culture as the hegemonic aesthetic regime. Both building and collection, he wrote,

ran counter to the prevailing standards of High Modern taste with which the city asserted its postwar hegemony in the arts.

What these phenomena had in common was audience appeal - an appeal to the varieties of desire and conflict, to show biz, to memory, and above all to the open-ended heterogeneity of city life. You didn't see that in the perpetual reiteration of abstract paintings and glass towers.

These counter-positions to modernism's restrictive codes needed a stage, and a stage requires an audience attuned to the creative logic behind seemingly wanton events and who seizes the opportunity to help shape its own moment in time. That is where gay men came in.

To me, it’s a wonderful piece of criticism; it offers complications to the narrative of the culture of a city, and to New York’s planning specifically, whilst still offering a passionate, potent and witty defence of all that is great about urban life at a time when the trend was to encourage the shrinking of cities. “By the standards of Eisenhower's America,” Muschamp writes,

gay taste was perverse. In hindsight, it seems more like a corrective to the far greater perversity of postwar "progress." What kind of normality was it to imagine that abandoning American cities was a good thing to do? Goodbye, cities! Adiós, civilization! Good riddance to the repository of cultural memory, the incubator of ideas, the heartbeat of humankind.

Upon first reading it, thrilling to its tone, by turns learned and shady, I felt its focus on a gay audience and its relationship with a city’s cultural history illuminated an important division for me in my own writing. It felt natural, when I started writing about the subject of cities and homosexuality, to call it a “queer urbanism”, or “queer psychogeography”. The phrase felt more inclusive, and trendy, like I was taking into account the broad variety positions and subjects that we now know recognise. But perhaps a “gay urbanism” is more accurate, more honest.

Queer to me is not an identity, but an approach to identities. Queer is about undermining a fixed homosexual subject as the production of a heterosexual form of discipline; it is about positionality. Gay, on the other hand, is about the production of that identity within heterosexual discipline. “The elaborating of certain erotic preferences into a “character” – into a kind of erotically determined essence – can never be a disinterested scientific enterprise” wrote Leo Bersani (adopting a voice) in his introduction to Homos – “The attempted stabilizing of identity is inherently a disciplinary project.” But, like Bersani continues, there is nonetheless political and cultural value in that elaboration, and the “discrediting of a specific gay identity...has had the curious but predictable result of eliminating the indispensable grounds for resistance to, precisely, hegemonic regimes of the normal”.

An urban gayness is the product of a shared history and culture, diverse yet with a specific focus, passed down largely through the oral tradition and through a complex ecosystem of cultural production, through art and theatre, through camp and through political agitation. To me, the queer is a forward-looking and utopian political project aiming to undermine the secure subject position, to disrupt the regime of gender and sexuality categorization that is used to punish the deviant. I’m drawn to that political project, but I have always been someone who can only see the world I live in through the spectres of history. The gay, then – the specific and contingent, the flawed and corrupt, the lost and still living – holds me in its grip when it comes to my approach to the city. It illuminates the city and culture in the explication of its very prejudices.

2 Columbus Circle now :(

A gay urbanism understands the city through an approach that is askew to the mainstream, the heterosexual, the planned, but contingent upon it, existing as a lived experience only in relation to the attempts at control, order, and policing. I think that the historical imagination is ideally suited to the specifics of the gay city, rather than the political projections of the queer city. Please do not read this as a reactionary attitude towards the queer – or, at least, please accept my apologies as I search for the value in the specifics, and try to disrupt me if you will. Bersani continues:

We have erased ourselves in the process of denaturalizing the epistemic and political regimes that have constructed us. The power of those systems is only minimally contested by demonstrations of their “merely” historical character. They don’t need to be natural in order to rule; to demystify them doesn’t render them inoperative. If many gays now reject a homosexual identity as it has been elaborated for gays by others, the dominant heterosexual society doesn’t need our belief in its own naturalness in order to continue exercising and enjoying the privileges of dominance.

In historical specifics we can understand better a gay relation to the city as the city relates to gays. The city and homosexuality are almost coterminous in both history, homosexuality as a category emerging out of bourgeois moral panics of the new sexual conditions created by urbanisation, and physically, with urban centres providing the unique mix of darkness and light needed to generate a resistant sexual subculture. From those temporal and physical specificities emerge the stories necessary to create the contradictions and counter-narratives that offer alternatives, in the same way that the contesting cultures of cities provide counternarratives to the isolation of rural fags who find themselves drawn to urban spaces.

As Muschamp elaborates, those contingent new cultures of cities produce not just artists, or performers, but also new audiences. Audiences are themselves silos of memories and references, and are the catalyst that produces meaning and takes it out, from inside the galleries or clubs or theatres, into the world, in order to change perspectives, to change urban space. “In the 60's, the space of the audience expanded from the theater to the city at large. The energy that flowed into that setting was driven by adolescent hormones. We were eager to attach ourselves not only to one another but to the streets.”

Perhaps in further exploring our relationship with the city as a specifically gay experience, we can understand ourselves as an important receptive and productive audience. The AIDS crisis represented both a massive loss of, and a discontinuity in the oral culture that helped created, a gay audience. Muschamp laments this loss as being under-recognised in its significance:

Early on in the AIDS crisis, the city registered the cultural impact caused by the loss of gay artists. The effect produced by the loss of the gay audience is more insidious, however. An audience retains the memory of a performance. What happens to that memory when the audience is gone?

Those memories were never recounted to younger gays like myself; the skills never transferred, the slow realisation of the impact of urban histories on our senses of self having to be learnt from experience, rather than taught from experience. In picking up the pieces of our specific histories, we can produce challenges to a hegemonic regime which wishes to plaster our city in glass facades, much like they’ve done to 2 Columbus Circle, covering up the distasteful Venetian motifs, the Tiffany lamps, the dirty gay bars, the darkened nooks and crannies, the complex counter-histories to capitalism that don’t sell well but produce lives and loves and meanings and memories. Muschamp understands that “a vibrant city is perpetually recreated from the emotional depths, and from our socialized capacity to empathize with the memories of others”, and in remembering we can recreate our cities too.

‘Utopian Drivel’ is written by me, Huw Lemmey. If you’re a paid subscriber, thank you so much for your support. Please do forward this to anyone who might enjoy it.

If you aren’t a paid subscriber, please consider subscribing; paid subscribers also help support pieces for free subscribers! You also get access to the entire archive of 100+ essays, including posts such as this essay on the quality of phone screentime, this piece on Orton and Halliwell, this essay on depression through a mirror, darkly, and this report on watching the Queen’s funeral at a gay sauna. Free subscribers get occasional posts, like this guided walking tour around London’s world of queer espionage, or this double-header on the Gay History of Private Eye magazine.

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The Convent of Santa Madrona, which stood where Plaça Reial now sits

Some streets are good streets. Some streets are bad streets. I don’t why but I do know the difference. Some streets are cut-throughs. All streets are cut-throughs, really; even a cul-de-sac takes you somewhere. Their job is to link. But cut-throughs are even more linky than regular links, like the terrace back alley I used to walk down as a kid, taking me from my street down to the newsagents where once I bought sweets, and then Hooch Lemon. Those streets linked me to all kinds of fucked up. That’s where streets take you: to memories. It’s one of those Morrissey lyrics you’ll never be able to expunge, thank god, but I would rather not go back to the old house.

So this morning I was waiting at the haberdashery on Carrer de Francesc Pujol. In the square in front is an excavation of the tombs of Roman citizens buried along the road that left the city two thousand years ago. Romans always buried their dead on the roads outside the city walls, I believe. The haberdashers is a traditional shop, with racks of wooden drawers and shelves filled with reams of cloth samples and boxes of pins. Ahead of me each little old lady was ordering a few little things: a sample of offcuts used for quilting, a new set of needles for a sewing machine, and so on. Each one would order an item, and the shopkeeper would disappear into the back room and reappear, perhaps with a roll of cloth in hand, which he would lay on the long, dark wooden counter and unroll. With a pair of pinking shears and a wooden metre rule he’d cut the required length, then ask the old lady, in Catalan, “alguna cosa més?” - “anything else?” And there would be something else, and then something more. And with each lady the shopkeeper would exchange a few words, and then the lady would exchange a few words with another lady stood in the shop, and then would leave, and the second lady would walk to the counter and begin the whole process again. I stood leaning on a pillar, a bundle of bobbins and reels in my hand, feeling that strange sensation of frustration arising, a sort of pins and needles of the soul. But then I realised, and set myself straight. If, through the twists and turns of your fate, you’ve found yourself waiting in a haberdasher’s shop on a Monday morning, nothing in your life can be that urgent that you can’t wait your turn. So I wait.

Just off Carrer Ferran is a street that’s always been bad. That’s not something empirical, of course. Nor is it something negative; I like it, as a bad street, dark even though it’s well lit, too thin for anything much wider that a bicycle, quiet, and long, with no side exits. Its false prospect seems born from the fact that Plaça Reial was built much later than the surrounding neighbourhood, a 19th century bourgeois conceit fucked into the mediaeval city, to paraphrase Owen Hatherley on the Shard. Well, that’s how cities work; sometimes here the urban metaphors are a little too on the nose. The pretty neoclassical square replaced the Capuchin Convent of Santa Madrona (itself only early 18th century), the new order subsuming the old, just as Via Laietana, the broad avenue linking the homes of the new bourgeoisie in the extension district uptown with their warehouses at the ports, was smashed through the neighbourhood in which the mediaeval guilds had long resided. But this bad street has been here since the Romans, I reckon, with remnants of the city wall found at its edges, and since it’s held lionesses and women of the night, and all inbetween. It backs on to an old nightclub, one built as the dictatorship crumbled, and one that became a nail in it, a nail with all the threads of the counterculture snagging on to it. As I walked down it a few nights ago I walked down the bad street and saw a man stood, bent over against the wall by the nightclub fire escape. He leant his head against his arm, his leather sleeve a little cushion against the swaying stone. He rocked like he was on a ship. As we passed, we heard that unmistakable sound, when the stomach overrides the limits of the body and the throat opens to release a thick, heavy jet of vomit and bile. Flush, pause, flush, pause, flush. Across the feet, his shoes, and rising into the air, a miasma of acidic vodka painted the surfaces. He would still smell of it in the morning, but the street would be cleaned.

The plan of the convent overlayed over the street plan for the neoclassical plaça. Carrer Ferran was called Calle de Fernando VII

I arrived at my office on Plaça Reial a little after 11am, later than I had wanted. I sat at my desk and answered the emails that had accrued over the weekend. Pati, the little cat who lives in the office, was padding at my chest. The grim grey cloud that had loomed over the city when I left the house had dissipated and I looked out of the window of my office, which sits in a little attic on the top floor, onto the rhomboid of crisp blue sky that the neoclassical square frames. Around the top of the winter palms seagulls swooped and pigeons fluttered. As I looked back to my work, I got the sudden sense of commotion, perhaps in the corner of my eye. Like when there’s a fight on the very verge of kicking off on the street, sometimes you just sense in your shoulders that something is happening. I looked up and directly in front of my window, on the deep ledge overlooking the square, a seagull had a pigeon pinned to the stone. With an unexpected rigour he was pushing his beak deeper into the chest of the little bird, who, by the time I realised the gravity of the situation, was making his last moments on this earth, a few aggressive but stilted flaps of its wings, attempting to pound against the body of the gull. The enormous seagull had broken through the pigeon’s ribcage and had plucked its heart from its chest. Then it left back into the big blue square. I summoned the courage to assess the grizzly scene, but it was surprisingly bloodless, almost surgical: a small impact wound exactly in the middle of its broad, fluffy chest, and no heart, and its quiet, sad little face resting on the cold slab, eyes now closed to the winter, and that was all that. Another memory.

These linking streets in my mind are all dead ends recently. Old sadnesses bring old depressions. When I walk through the city I get a taste of what life had been for me. This restaurant here, the smile of a drunken friend in love, that corner there, a debt I had to pay. Up here an apartment where I had sex with a tourist, and there where I bought a bag of drugs, even though this morning everything is closed for Constitution Day. This is what makes streets, cities, the urb. It’s why I love some given neighbourhood, even though I remember my own vile sensation of vomit streaming through my own body, and why I can’t visit other ones, even though my mother held my hand there — or maybe not though, but because. Sometimes the streets don’t fit together in our minds; you take one thinking you know where it comes out, and you find yourself in a place you never wanted to be. So things close down. For others, it’s a public holiday, but for you, wanting to live, it’s just a row of shuttered stores. 

If you aren’t a paid subscriber, please consider subscribing; paid subscribers also help support pieces for free subscribers! You also get access to the entire archive of 100+ essays, including posts such as this short story, “The Fantasist”, this essay on depression through a mirror, darkly, this one on “normalising everything”, this piece on Vox and homonationalism, and this essay on watching the Queen’s funeral at a gay sauna. Free subscribers get occasional posts, like this guided walking tour around London’s world of queer espionage, or this double-header on the Gay History of Private Eye magazine.

Vandals

On Orton and Halliwell and library books

Last week I visited Rock, Paper, Scissors, a new exhibition by Alex Margo Arden installed at the Royal Academy, London. The show includes the artist’s own reworking of Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell’s famous vandalised — or detourned, if you rather — library book covers. These original books were withdrawn by the two writers and lovers, Orton and Halliwell, from Islington Library in the early 1960s, reimagined with wit through collage, and reintroduced into the library system to circulate. Arden reproduces the vandalised books again, and her attention to detail is amazing; to remake the covers she spent six years meticulously researching not just the book covers they reworked, but the exact editions they sourced their collaged images from. It’s a strange, beautiful and almost uncanny show, not least because Islington Library loaned the artist the original works by Orton and Halliwell, which Arden has installed with her reproductions. The show runs until January 7th and is well worth a visit, both as an artistic intervention and as a historical archive, and, as in Orton and Halliwell’s original works, as a place where the two concepts meet. Arden asked me to write a short text to accompany the show, and has kindly allowed me to reproduce my essay here, for you.

Orton and Halliwell getting a moment in the London sun

It’s strange to think about what is left of Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell. The moment their lives were cut brutally short - Orton’s by Halliwell’s hand, Halliwell’s by his own - they ceased to be writers, artists, collaborators, lovers. Instead they became something lost: chances, opportunities, tragedies, their work as playwrights forever defaced by their murder-suicide. Perhaps that sense of missed opportunities, felt by us, their posthumous audience, is all the more palpable and affecting because it seems to mirror a sensation in their own life and work. Orton’s plays were early manifestations of a liberal and more caustic nation, freer and less hypocritical but crueller and less polite: a Britain he foreshadowed and even midwifed, but never lived to see. Living in the damp and stuffy old Britain, their lives were marked by frustration. Kenneth was frustrated by the lack of recognition he received as a writer in his own right, especially as Joe’s career took off. Joe, in turn, was frustrated by Kenneth, by the hypocrisy and repression of Britain, and by a repressive sexual and social regime. There must be more to life than this.

Their dramatic deaths in 1967, right on the crest of a liberalising social change, seems to have fixed them in history as martyrs of that transforming society, and like all good martyrs, they have left us with a bewitching set of relics. Starting in 1959, the two men began a campaign of vandalism against the stock of the Islington Library system. The couple, who had been lovers and flatmates for almost 8 years, started to withdraw books from the library, then carefully rework their dust jackets, collaging new images and rewriting texts, before putting the books back into the library system. Over the following three years, the pair reworked upwards of seventy covers. For their pains, the two men were convicted of theft and malicious damage, fined, and jailed for the summer of 1962. For Kenneth, the sentence further broke him. For Orton, it released him, unshackling him of the demands of both society and Kenneth.

In Rock, Paper, Scissors the artist Alex Margo Arden has returned to the original covers defaced by the pair in order to look at them with fresh eyes, as books, as artworks, and as a performance. Through a process of meticulous research she has rematerialised them, both as a set of reimagined collages and in their original form, as a shelf of library books. As such, we see them in both states, and the act of making them — of Orton and Halliwell hunched over them in their poky Islington flat, scissors and glue in hand, giggling to themselves — comes back into focus. Their handiwork was an artwork, a provocation, and a performance: in its reproduction, Arden allows us to see them again not as criminal exhibits in a court case, evidence of a crime, but as a creative intervention into a boring and repressive social order.

Ironically, Arden has approached the task with a detective’s attention to process and procedure. In reproducing the collages, she has investigated archives and library collections attempting to piece together exactly which colour plates from which books were used in the collages, and then sourced withdrawn library editions of the correct titles from across the world. Comparing catalogues and editions, the new works use genuine contemporary editions to re-present the old. Yet the new works are not, and cannot be, exact replicas of Orton and Halliwell’s originals. 

The protocols of publishing exist to ensure cataloguing, referencing and tracking of editions is possible. It’s not just the ISBN — the international serial numbers listed on the back of the book — or library cataloguing systems that allow titles of different books to be distinguished from each other. It’s also the printer's key - that indecipherable  list of numbers before the title page of the book - that allow editions of the same book to be told apart, allowing errors to be corrected, just as editions and page numbers allow specific ideas and phrases to be referenced in footnotes. The carefully evolved protocols of publishing are based upon seriality, just as publishing itself is based on reproducibility. Unlike artworks, whose value and aura lies in its scarcity, the value of books lies in their abundance and reproduction. In Orton and Halliwell’s criminal act, they shifted the book from one register to another. In Arden’s artwork, she starts to shift the meaning back.

In Arden’s collages, her hand is visible in them, in each cut; like in the originals, the performance of making and recirculating the books is what activates them. While their work was removed from circulation, first as evidence and then as artefact, Arden’s remained true to their function and continued to circulate in the world’s library system, gaining the wear and damage that books receive through proper use. Despite the best efforts of publishers, printers, booksellers and buyers, librarians and collectors, books never remain identical, exchangeable things. The moment their spine is cracked, their leaves opened, they begin to retain their own unique histories. Dog-ears and pencilled notes, coffee marks and biscuit crumbs, the sun’s fading touch: you can never step into the same book twice. Arden’s books bear a history that Orton and Halliwell’s were denied.

So if all books retain their histories in their pages, why are Orton’s and Halliwell’s observed like relics, untouched and archived? Well, in no small part because they died. The meanings of their lives — lost potentials, frustrations, rebellions — became fixed. When society changed in their absence, those frustrations became all the more poignant. They came to represent that change, and the criminal trial and their imprisonment seemed to mark the moment where their collaboration split and they realised those two worlds. Kenneth represented the old type of homosexual: neurotic, self-loathing, pathetic; while Joe represented the new type of gay: attractive, horny, liberated. Perhaps with Arden’s performance as a prompt, we can reappraise those fixed meanings in their lives, and see them as they were when they were in the act of making. Between the two of them they inhabited so much of what it means to be human and to be gay; rebellious, hilarious, traumatised and defiant, mischievous, cutting, unlovable and yet loved. Arden’s work highlights the act of creation, and in the act of creation, not in the remnants and relics, they are alive again. 

If you aren’t a paid subscriber, please consider subscribing; paid subscribers also help support pieces for free subscribers! You also get access to the entire archive of 100+ essays, including posts such as this short story, “The Fantasist”, this essay on depression through a mirror, darkly, this one on “normalising everything”, this piece on Vox and homonationalism, and this essay on watching the Queen’s funeral at a gay sauna. Free subscribers get occasional posts, like this guided walking tour around London’s world of queer espionage, or this double-header on the Gay History of Private Eye magazine.