Why The Master's Tools Won't Work
Title: Why The Master’s Tool Won’t Work
Object: Victorian Engines
12 associations
- Lid flipped off
- Your heart cannot outweigh a feather
- The Science and Industry Museum
- Filigree
- Silence
- Railway
- Bunsen burner
- A ship in a bottle
- Rock art
- Feed the birds on the trees
- 8 Premies in the Reno
- Cornelia Parker
So, the person who wants me to have the Reno highlighted, who I am overjoyed to have the money from, who I then turn down, flips their lid when they read last week’s newsletter. Understandable. They feel I am betraying them. Understandable. This is a few times this year that people have felt this. But that is a projection because they are betraying themselves. It is not my job to make sure your heart does not outweigh a feather
I don’t give a fuck where they get their money. How they pay their mortgage. It is nothing to do with me. That’s not the point. You do that, you live with that. I don’t do that. I live with poverty. Feast and famine. They live with certainty. Good luck to them. Not just to that person. But to everyone else who wants to be an artist but is stuck in an institution.
1996. I get a job in an institution part time. The Post Office. The first day I arrive the women are putting out the new greeting cards, doing the shelves like their lives depend on it. Orders from on high. I am thinking — this is a bit of an aside — maybe the Reno is resistance, maybe it teaches me how to be resistant — I am thinking I will never do that. I will never end up conquered, manipulated, infiltrated, like that. I will remain me.
I stand behind the card counter for the first time, watching the birds in the trees, free — kill me — free — fucking hell, free. Every fucking hour when I am not working. I am planning my freedom. 2 0’clock in the morning. 4 0’clock in the morning. What more can the mind-maps reveal? I know underneath it all there has to be a pattern. There has to be a way. It is not all ramshackle. Haphazard. That you have to pray to God. There has to be a science behind writing.
Around the same time, I love the Science and Industry Museum. I go to stare at the giant engines. Their cogs and wheels. And the filigree they can be bothered doing. The Victoriana. I now take a different view of this. I have opened the lid and realised they can be bothered because they have an abundance of time, an abundance of materials, on the backs of a black man and a black woman and bags of sugar and bags of cotton. And poor white people with mites on their chests and in their lungs and infested Mancunian homes with rats and bed bugs if they have a bed. I love the Science and Industry Museum at this time. I love taking Rachel to see the Little Prince in Contact Theatre when she is 10. I love both these institutions way back when before they begin to manipulate the artefact, the memory, the meaning, the art and what we unadulterated take from it. If I walk into a dress shop, even a second-hand dress shop, and the owner says hello and keeps hovering, I walk out. Your goods should speak for themselves. But, no, all the institutions, have these programmes, like in the background all their computer history is on show, to funnel you into one way of thinking. The master’s tool. You can look this deep but not any deeper.
Back to my point, from a different angle. I do not mean to irritate this person. I am actually smiling. I do not mean to make them flip their lid. I just want to exercise my mind and all the knowledge I have acquired by living in uncertainty. Trusting that like the birds on the trees, God will feed me. My art will feed me. It will live on the rocks. Rock art. Indelible. Noticeable. Overlooked now. Derided. Blasphemy. Then one day — pop — Linda has vision. The person says they cannot agree with me, the Reno was resistance. I almost jump to my computer to fence it out. But then think fuck off. You weren’t even there. How the fuck can you hold your research against my reality? I am there. Thursday to Sunday, inclusive. For at least 4 fucking years. 1976 to 1981, I am in the thick of it. I know everybody. Resistance is learnt language in the 2000. When the institutions including the Arts Council begin to manipulate the innocence of the integrity of these big Victorian machines and the beauty behind the Little Prince, and the art that people want to see, by putting their research in the middle, telling us what to think, so their jobs appear important.
Wow! I sound bitter and twisted. Maybe I am.
You cannot shoehorn yourself into the Reno experience like a ship in a bottle. I am not raising the sails of your ship in our bottle.
Why do the master’s tools not work? Silence. There is no silence. 1996 when I visit the engines there is silence. I can imagine the engines’ noise. The hands that make them. The machines they power. The beauty of their maker’s minds. Slowly in that silence, I unpack, using my own tools, what this means to me Linda Brogan whose dad is Jamaican, whose nana is closer to cutting cane for the master. How does that horror sit with that beauty?
I’ll tell you how. In the Ruins of the Big House, 2024, November, Factory International, that sits where that sugar is stored, I am wearing a bespoke denim ballgown. I am declaring myself the mistress of my dad’s plantation, using my white mum’s status. I do not know what this will do to me.
I am standing, at the top of my Bette Davis stairs. A predominantly black audience of 12 enter, to join me at my candlelit decadent table. They remain by the wall. They are afraid to approach the table. I have to come down the stairs and beckon them to me.
The same night a predominantly industry audience of 12 — one is not white — come to join me at my table. They do not even look up at me. Whereas the black audience are in awe, this lot pour themselves water, eat the grapes, circle the table to see if there is anything more they can help themselves to. They don’t even care if it is my props.
The black audience, started by D with his well-paying job, open their heart. Including my niece who talks about being the only dark-skinned in a family of light skinned. All his life D has been told, including by his family, if he wants to have more, he must act less than. This is why he is envious of the violence of the language I use in the part of the narrative he reads out.
At the industry table when they are satiated, they are now ready to dominate me. A blonde woman, clearly a leader in some institution somewhere asks, ‘What do you want to audience to take away?'
I reply, ‘I don’t give a fuck. I just want to wear the dress.’ One of my finest moments.
Maybe, the irate person is right. Maybe the Reno is a test tube and the other players the Bunsen burners, where I am crucibled, alchemised into the person who embodies resistance today. But you still had to be there. There are 8 Premies, followers of Prem Rawat, in the Reno too. I see us then as disciples of God with my 1970s eyes. I am the only one who takes root.
In 2002, when I leave the Post Office. No, it is gentler than that. Every day, beside my practise of mind-mapping and journalling and understanding the mechanics of the universe to align my creativity with creation, I feed my heart with one hour of Prem Rawat’s 4 techniques of meditation, every morning. Since 1989. This is the only resistance I have ever needed. The day I leave the Post Office; I do position all the new greetings cards. What saves me is I am so aligned with what is inside me that never changes, what I know, who I am, mindful of my heart never outweighing the feather, my obligation to the institution ends with the last cheque.
From that moment I have dedicated my life to laying the railway tracks of my art. I think the track at the moment consists of 8-stations.
- Last weeks, Fallen Angel (The Protagonist) is The Master’s Tools.
- This week’s Crosshatch Circle (The Theme/Backdrop). The cataracts caused by the lens of time.
- And will end with Cornelia Parker. The Sword (The Final Choice/Resolution.) It can stab me to death. Or like Arthur, I can pull it from the stone. I’m not ready, or able, to make my point yet.