Kidnapping. Boxing. Three-sided football. The art terrorists attack! A thoughtful dérive around the skewed contours of the London Psychogeographical Association.
In 1995, on a cycling holiday amid the snow-capped peaks of the Italo-Slovene border, a British conceptual artist went missing. Already famous for his boxing ceremonies – described by one critic as ‘like Japanese tea ceremonies, but with boxing instead of tea’ – Harry Kipper had hoped to make his name in Europe with a new project: to cycle a route that, when completed, would trace out the word ‘ART’ on a map of the continent. Hearing of his disappearance, Italian state TV dispatched a film crew to London. Friends and acquaintances took cameramen on tours of Lincoln’s Inn Fields – beloved by Harry because of its clear architectural debt to the Great Pyramid of Giza – and to Harry’s flat on the Isle of Dogs, which had unfortunately been bulldozed by the time they arrived.
Only when the kidnapping was publicly owned up to by former Watford FC and AC Milan striker Luther Blissett – best known for the hat-trick he scored for England in their 1982 defeat of Luxembourg – did the press begin to doubt the story. In the weeks that followed, it emerged that the whole thing was a hoax: there was no Harry Kipper, and Luther Blissett was busy playing out the twilight of his career on loan at Wimborne Town.
The ‘kidnapping’ had been simulated, in fact, in the name of art. And the perpetrators? A madcap cell of ‘art terrorists,’ whose bizarre stunts, hoaxes, and political performances would soon give rise to the most compelling movement to emerge from the British art scene during the drab interregnum between Thatcher and Blair. The London Psychogeographical Association had been born.
In certain obscure circles, the London Psychogeographical Association is legendary. It is the kind of thing you tend to have heard of if you read a lot of Alan Moore’s comics, or Will Self’s novels, or Iain Sinclair’s literary perambulations, or if you have ever described a Sunday-afternoon walk as a ‘dérive’. To a particular type of counterculturally inclined fiftysomething, the LPA is one of the great lapsed European vanguards, London’s answer to Dada and the Surrealists.
Indeed, before long the Luther Blissett hoax had set a precedent, inspiring a subgenre of Anglo-Italian pranks, from the announcement that Britain would submit a live chimpanzee to the 1995 Venice Biennale, to the 2007 declaration that pro-Ratzinger Catholic cyberterrorists had infiltrated the Bloomsbury mainframe and leaked the upcoming Harry Potter manuscript online, causing the Bloomsbury stock price to drop by 5%.
Yet when I meet one of the LPA’s founders, Stewart Home, in the Barbican, he is quick to stress that for the most part, the LPA was a half-serious, bumbling, and resolutely local affair. The name ‘London Psychogeographical Association’ wasn’t even particularly original: Home and his friend Richard Essex had taken it from dissolute older artist and founding member of the Situationist International, Ralph Rumney, with whom Home spent a few days drifting drunkenly through Paris in the 1980s under the pretext of an interview for an arts magazine.
Unusually for artist-theorists, Rumney seems to have had almost no ego: though the LPA had originally just been a rather grandiose moniker he adopted for himself while consorting with Situationists in Switzerland, he was happy to have it invoked by others provided they were doing something suitably weird and disruptive. Henceforth, a core principle of the LPA was its rejection of auteurism: the Luther Blissett project, Home tells me, was just an attempt to attract so much publicity that people would use the name spontaneously, without tracing its originators, inspired by an old Berlin Dada performance where the public was sold the right to use the name ‘Jesus Christ’ for a small fee.
Most of the LPA’s early activity was rather modest. Home and Essex spent much of their time producing a pamphlet, modelled on the old copies of the Situationist Times of which Home had found in a cache in an old bomb shelter off Oxford Street. ‘Say no to the Gregorian calendar,’ reads the first article I find online; ‘Sir Christopher Wren […] was the founder of freemasonry’, reads the second. The third article I don’t quite understand, but seems to be implying that the key to the ancient mysteries of the Priory of Sion is to be found in a painting currently on show at the Royal Academy.
The other staple in these early years was the three-sided football match, which Home and Essex liked to organise flash-mob style, in parks and pieces of spare ground across the capital. The games had a lofty justification, as a way of resisting binary logic in favour of the system of ‘trialectics’ dreamed up by Rumney’s friend Asger Jorn. Invariably though, Home admits, they ended in squabbles, since no-one really seemed to have any idea how to determine a winner when each team had both beaten one opponent and lost to the other.
What did they think they were achieving with all this? ‘What you have to understand,’ replies Home, ‘is when and where this was all happening.’ The LPA was dreamed up during one of the long evenings the pair spent in Richard’s little flat on the Isle of Dogs (back when people lived on the Isle of Dogs). It was the early 1990s: an international consortium had just bought the land for £1.2 billion with the intention of carrying out the development that would one day be known as Canary Wharf. Residents were subjected to forced sales and evictions; on the other side of Tower Hamlets, tensions had bubbled over into the election of an outright racist – the BNP’s Derek Beackon – as a local councillor. A familiar process to longtime London residents, Home acknowledges wearily: a natty new urban regeneration initiative; a fire-sale of public assets; and the blaming of all ensuing social tensions on those who have least.
Up in Essex’s flat, the two men flicked through the works of old Situationist firebrands, and decided that quite soon, London would be a grey, utilitarian hellhole in which citizens would be funnelled from soulless corporate offices like the Canary Wharf complex, via soulless retail developments like the warren of Jubilee Place, to the soulless new apartments already springing up in the fringes of Tower Hamlets, then back again the following morning. ‘Psychogeography’, as they saw it, was a commitment to reimagining movement through the city in defiance of these trends – of ‘invading the mind’ with so much absurdity and esoterica that people forgot to stay within these restrictive tramlines.
Home and Essex began to trace ‘ley lines:’ hidden maps of ‘earth energy’ formed by stringing together two points of occult or historic interest and finding what else falls on the same axis. One evening, a chance threading together of a few co-ordinates – the site of the first Norman landfall at Hastings, the location of the oldest British chess set in Lewes, plus a few other cultural omphaloi that Home can’t remember any more – revealed something remarkable: a brand new ley line that went through not just the proposed site of Canary Wharf tower, but also Derek Beackon’s flat. ‘It all made sense,’ Home tells me, with a grin. Clearly, there were older, richer, and stranger forces at play than any city planner or BNP councillor could ever comprehend.
Talking to Home, I am struck most by the LPA’s deep-rooted mysticism, esotericism and joyous flirtation with conspiracy theory. Many invocations of occult forces seem to have been made in jest – such as when Richard decided that Gresham College, the adult education institution, was in fact the ‘Invisible College’ of the Rosicrucian Enlightenment, and spent several days distributing flyers around the City of London bearing Rosicrucian insignia and promising that ‘the scales will fall from your eyes’ if they came to a particular mathematics lecture. ‘It was one of the best attended lectures in Gresham College’s history,’ says Home.
Still, there is an undercurrent of seriousness: I certainly get the sense that Home really does believe in ley lines, and over the course of our chat, he informs me several times that the City of London Corporation, the bizarre state-within-a-state that presides over the patch of land we are currently on, boasts a council that is ‘thirty per cent Freemasonic.’
In the years since the LPA shut up shop, psychogeography has shed, for the most part, both its guerrilla tactics and its esotericism. I am particularly fascinated by the simmering feud that Home seems to have with Will Self, whose work I make the mistake of confessing to admire a great deal at the beginning of the interview, but whose highly theoretical, jargon-friendly brand of psychogeography Home dismisses as ‘simply not cool.’ Even Iain Sinclair, who actually received the LPA newsletter back in the day, and who is probably the LPA affiliate who can best be said to have ‘made it’ by any conventional, bourgeois standard, laments what psychogeography has become in the years since. ‘It got away,’ he tells me in a wistful email, ‘escaped into academia and journalism.’ If anything of the LPA remains, it is its intellectual kernel, rather than any of its actual practices, or its beguiling weirdness.
The day after meeting Home, I get the London Overground from Peckham Rye towards Dalston. The view from the raised track is quintessential south-east London: tree-muffled terraces, industrial forecourts, the Canary Wharf development looming in the background. There is something Ozymandian about the sight: the complex, once a beacon of financial power, already seems like a relic – tenants lured back to the City proper, its fast-won status eroded by shifting capital flows. I look up at the vast, pointed obelisk of One Canada Square, the beacon that wards off planes winking through the mist. I think of ley lines, earth energies, freemasons, Rosicrucians. The LPA was right, I think to myself. It all makes sense.
