A Missing Lost Story relating to Notes on the Economics and Aesthetics of the UK's Great Building Disaster - David Wise

Above: This photo of London's Soho / Covent Garden in the 1950s shows the type of six story early Victorian buildings we had to deal with

What follows is a factual true life story of a huge task we took on as a building gang in the late 1970s and which somehow is missing from Notes on the Economics and Aesthetics of the UK's Great Building Disaster1 . Over many months we skilfully re-invented hundreds of mid Victorian cast iron columns and beams - before steel was invented - in Covent Garden and which held up many eight story buildings by the sides of streets.

Come the mid 1970s and some of these columns were in danger of immanent collapse. Water had slowly penetrated deep down inside them so if a fire broke out all would instantly explode if cold water jets were applied to them by fire brigades to what what would quickly become a hot, bubbling cauldron inside the cast iron boles created by the fire. Most essential columns were situated in basement areas. The fire brigade technical experts had said only proper covering of the cast iron would give them plenty of time to control a serious fire.....If not, that then would be the end for many historical buildings never mind the human deaths that would take place. (In retrospect it was a foreshadowing of the 2017 Grenfell Tower calamity cum tragedy in the making). However, the people who owned the buildings didn't want the columns covered up by ugly modern abstract constructions but wanted to keep the lyrically beautiful shapes harking back to the ancient Doric columns of Greece and Rome. Ambience mattered but the building bosses / architects in charge said sadly it couldn't be done. Then somebody suggested contacting our gang as we'd just completed some rather complex renovation nearby and were an amiable bunch who seemed to know what to do. Almost instantly, we knew the job could be done. We suggested applying an inch or more of smoothly modelled-up plaster over easily malleable chicken wire wrapped around the cast iron columns. After meetings and discussions with the bosses they decided to give us a two week trial after specifying how thick the plaster had to be covering columns plus cast iron overhead beams alike. So our gang beavered away for two weeks, then our bosses instigated a controlled fire followed by a good ole' fire brigade unit high-pressure hosing directed at newly modified columns and which once put to the test, held up brilliantly. The bosses were astonished and from then on we could do nothing wrong, so week-in week-out we remorselessly renovated where necessary every column to beam and back again. Thus a long, long routine kicked in...

Then one of us really did go off the rails. First though a digression about the culprit, name of Claude Abbo........

Slowly but surely we simply got bored with the endless columns and the usual hi-jinks and often creative repartee of a building gang simply wasn't enough. In a mad kind of way we permanently had a radio on in the background and one fixated on a Pakistani Urdu radio stn which endlessly played traditional Qawwali music. None of us could speak Urdu then early one evening a song broke forth from the radio which was a kind of yodelling. One of the gang - Steve Jacobs - and a quick-fire ad lib Jewish comic said, "Hey, it's William Patell" and all the gang fell out in a fit of uncontrollable laughter. Truth to tell Steve and Abbo were inseparable and as Steve would now and again proclaim: "Who said a Jew and a Palestinian can't be the best of mates"....

"Abbo" as he was regularly called though in a friendly way, had also been part of the King Mob scene. Years after the basement renovations knowing I was putting together a book on King Mob, Abbo politely asked me, "Please don't write about me I just want to disappear". Sadly, I went along with his wishes, Abbo knowing I would be impressed by such a final wish in a world of ultra attention-seeking. Refusal, refusal, refusal were in a way our watchwords Now, I cannot continue with this silence any longer and with profound apologies am going to say something about this remarkable guy. Abbo was from a relatively poor Palestinian background and had been to art school like most of us in the gang but also quickly dropped-out of the dominant schemata of hopes for a professional future. He'd messed around with music since a kid but knowledge of Dada-ist subversion hit him in his mid teens so with his baritone sax in hand helped form "The Bonzo Dog Doodah (Dada) Band". But then Abbo couldn't continue in the role of a musician as he had much more profound yearnings. So he upped sticks and went to Berlin sometime around 1963 quickly becoming part of the remarkable Kommune I and 2 residing along with figures like Bommi Baumann and Dieter Kunzelmann - the latter if you like - a 'card-carrying' Situationist and former close friend of Guy Debord until the inevitable falling out. Abbo had no involvement with the concomitant Red Army Faction (Baader-Meinhof Gang) - though he knew them - disliking their armed and updated Leninism and intuitively oriented towards those with an anarchist disposition though I don't think he ever read a word of Bakunin or even Kropotkin or for that matter never (I think) reading further afield individuals like say, Jean-Pierre Proudhon in France.

Claude Abbo's name comes up on the Wikipedia report on what became the famous Do-Dah band. Evidently he left the band in 1962. Again, he'd never talk about the band and the usual silence /refusal about his activities again kicked-in. Then, more interestingly one night in 1979 and just after the endless columns year, Abbo phoned me desperately asking me if I could put Bommi Baumann up in my gaff seeing I lived just around the corner in All St Road Notting Hill from where he resided. Essentially, Abbo just didn't have enough space in his equally small flat as his gal friend had just had a baby boy. Bommi was on the run from the German authorities so he turned to his old anarcho friend unannounced asking for help. I immediately sad "yes" and so followed some enjoyable months with Bommi. Yep, Bommi was really funny and he got on with all my other friends. All Saints Rd at that time was a permanent riot zone and very raucous. In no time everybody got to know Bommi plus his background. I kept saying to Bommi to keep quiet about it but as soon as we'd get into a local pub he let forth saying how he'd burnt this and that place down and everybody seemed to love his presence endlessly buying him pints of beer. He'd come from a German working class background and was trained as a roofer so within a few weeks I suggested he join our building gang with everybody on the same wage, skilled or unskilled. Bommi was delighted. Then one day soon after some of the permanent black rioting gangs on the street said to me, "Hey man your place is being watched". It was what I thought as I'd just seen a guy in a car looking up into my windows on the second floor. I waived and the guy immediately looked away and drove off. Sensing immanent danger I quickly managed to get Bommi into a squat on a relatively sedate street in close-by Maida Vale. But Bommi couldn't stop performing plus made more conspicuous by that fact his book, (was it How it all Began?) had just been translated and published in English. Within two days he'd managed to liberate a few copies which he proudly show off in local Maida Vale pubs. Shortly afterwards he was nicked elsewhere in London as at the same time police raided my gaff. Then poor old Bommi was deported back to Germany and jail............. Sadly when Bommi got out of jail he was a changed man and a shadow of his former radical self. Enuff said!

So goodbye to the necessary digression and back to the columns!

The boredom of endless columns was proving too much. Then Abbo went off the rails and skilfully put together in plaster an imp in next to no time on top of one of the columns and we all got excited by his cheek. Within an hour all of us started experimenting as we quickly modelled up all kinds of things on some columns and beams just for a bit of fun. Abbo's Imp with its threatening face was really, really funny. Inevitably, within hours management exploded with us and told us to remove these stoopid, whimsical add-ons otherwise they'd cut our pay. But then word had quickly got out and others in the management of the basements of these buildings really liked them and after some kind of board meeting, the latter were to win the day and our neo-gargoyle-ism stayed put.

Once finished these basement spaces were opened up as council run youth clubs for working class kids in central London. Alas, it didn't last as once Thatcherism took hold with its neo-liberal agenda, these huge basement areas were then sold-off becoming in no time really swish, expensive restaurants, etc. Surprise, surprise our neo-gothic like adornments then had lights trained on them to add to the expensive allure. We heard about this and went to have a look and were instantly thrown out by snooty management not wanting scruffs like us lurking around. Typical shit, though I believe the gargoyles and other adornments have all been painted up with a motley of colours and remain so to this day.

Anyway, Abbo and myself would over the subsequent days, months and years regularly get drunk on a Friday night then come back to my gaff - usually along with others - for free home grown marijuana and free home brewed elderberry wine (The elderberry bushes grew in profusion on nearby Wormwood Scrubs Common)..... And then the poor guy died of cancer in late 2017. I was gutted.......

In passing, as for myself, I was called "David Wise" because at the time of me birth in 1943 the Holocaust was just to say coming to light and the 'David' became a token gesture of support! In fact my 'leftist' background - obviously also along with Stuart's - was Scots / Irish. Scots on "Me Mam's" side from builders of the Dundee promenade to miners, my Grandah having acquaintance with John Mclean part of the ultra-left cabal along with Rosa Luxembourg and others, who opposed Leninism. On my Dad's side they were old Irish rebels from Cashells in Tipperary who got deported / split up and sent to Devon but also as 'convicts' deported to Australia in the second decade of the 19th century. The Devon contingent then walked up north to get jobs on the railways, mills, pits, etc and seemed to settle on the northern edge of the Cleveland Hills close by Middlesbrough.(By way of an aside, some two years ago casually watching on TV, The Yorkshire Vet, a story unfolded of a guy who lived on the moorland top in a small dwelling of his own making,- a somewhat delightfully bizarre concoction - who looks after a sizable flock of sheep. He was both articulate and pretty learned and of all things was called Moses Wise. Obviously a distant relative I knew nothing about!) Needless to say both sides of our family were shot through with early working class radicalism and many a fascinating story they had to tell. Moreover, they were commendably anti racist and anyone using racist language was utterly frowned upon whether anti Jewish, anti Asian or anti black.....

Below an individual example of the cast iron columns and - from then on - how we messed with them

Above: Original cast iron column

Above: A newly renovated column plus adjacent cast iron beam all covered in plaster giving greater resistance in the event of a fire

Above: Portrait of plasterer David Wise

Above: a modelled up grove of trees by Stuart Wise

Above: Abbo's magnificent 'Imp' with a plasterer's trowel in his hand. only took less than two hours to make from a thick mix of browning undercoat followed by finish plaster using a sculpting tool for use on wet clay, etc..........

Above: A leaf modelled up from what tree? / Plus a slow worm messing about. By Stuart Wise

Then a Final Digression

Doing these casual creative improvisations didn't come from anywhere. They were like a form of jazz be-bop which all of us musically had previously had been involved in though transposed into another drift, another form.

Essentially on a broader level, all of us had stepped outside of traditional artistic paradigms and much influenced by the then flourishing counter-culture (before it became a culture-counter) were moving somewhere else, one that subverted reification and the capitalist mode of production and especially the domination of money, nay, its abolition along with so many other alienations contaminating everyday life.

This journey wasn't by any means an overnight 'rational' decision as basically it seemed like something ineluctable that crept up on us behind our collective backs. Thus sculpture and nature seemed to increasingly elide with each other. Looking back over, there was suddenly in 1966 this gigantic imitation of a moth's egg modelled up in clay and then cast into resin and fibreglass followed by a splash of white paint. All this inseparable from a gigantic caterpillar and pupa, most likely from what I can remember, a Privet Hawk moth. This was part of the journey of the brief moment of Icteric in Newcastle-upon-Tyne and which has been well documented elsewhere. Thus, small mushrooms were enlarged via the same process and transformed into hoped for fountains to be placed in liberated public spaces in Newcastle or elsewhere, freed from the domination of the ubiquitous car, the latter a modern invention we wanted to see utterly consigned to history precisely because it destroyed public space and simple relaxed communication whether one-to-one or in groups small or large .

What we didn't realise at that brief moment was that we were heading down the track towards a rejuvenated nature one freed from all forms of commodification. So goodbye to resin sculptures and hello for a brief moment to Surrealist juxtaposition with Privet Hawk larvae crawling over our faces. "As beautiful as", etc, re Lautreamont's maxim.

And then we were faced with the stark choice: What's the point of sub-artistic imitation when so much more was / is needed. So it was another final goodbye to pastiche when life itself needed to be reinvented hence the dramatic intervention of Situationist critique. To bring home the point, our gigantic beetle was unceremoniously washed away by the tides on Tynemouth beach in 1967. So what happened to other previous sculptural adornments? Well, I have no idea so presumably they are lost forever. What's more, we couldn't give a damn about them. More importantly, we then bit by bit tried to begin, tried to rebuild, a world without artefact or more to the point, commodification. Therefore down with success, down with money, and down with the movie /TV screen of substitute life.........

Alas, we didn't see what was around the corner as the great uprising of the late 1960s utterly lost its way disappearing into what turned into an abyss. What replaced it was slowly but surely - and then moving at something like the speed of light - an obsession with money the likes of which is unknown in history moving from millionaires to billionaires to trillionaires. Thus art = money in overplus, shorn of all quality as the death of art transmogrified into the aestheticisation of money giving an added cutting edge to Hegel's comment: "Money, the life of what is dead, moving within itself". Goodbye then to transcendence as screen life via the invention of I phones, etc takes over with an intensity that even Debord couldn't have envisaged never forgetting his attack on the early days of the Internet prior to his suicide in 1994 ......

Above: Pointless dead butterfly shoes / and an Icteric Surrealist juxtaposition

Above: The gigantic egg, larvae and pupa

Above: the giant mushroom fountains behind scaffolding on a building in Newcastle-upon-Tyne

Above: 1967. Saying goodbye / goodbye / goodbye to the Icteric beetle on Tynemouth beach

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