A-Infos (en) Britain, Aanarchist journal Direct Action #41 - Reviews

Reviews: Got no Time – Drowning Dog – CD – Entartete Kunst 2007 Relive – 
Deletist – CD – Bitter Pie Records / Beats per Revolution 2006 ---- Two 
releases, one from Drowning Dog on DA’s favourite no-field electronica label 
Entartete Kunst; the other from The Deletist whose previous release was also on 
Entartete Kunst. ---- ‘Got no time’ is twelve tracks of hip hop produced by 
Malatesta and vocals delivered by Drowning Dog: it is politically up front class 
conscious anarchism. The beats are more relaxed, mixed with sampled spoken word 
and overlain by Drowning Dog’s unhurried vocal delivery – the tracks address 
class, minimum wage dead-end jobs, poverty, political power, the military 
industrial complex and the potential of anarchism to change all this for the better.

‘Relive’, a limited edition of 500, was recorded on the move across Europe and 
the US and is beautifully atmospheric music – it could be the soundtrack to a 
perfectly somnambulant European art house road movie. Mixing electronica with 
‘proper’ instrumentation and occasionally vocals set back in the mix, if this 
was on vinyl it would be in danger of being worn through by now.

For details on how to order, and for further info, check out: 
www.entartetekunst.info www.myspace.com/drowningdog www.myspace.com/djmalatesta 
www.deletist.info www.myspace.com/deletist

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Reviews: Monarchy: Politics of Tyranny and Denial
by William Gladys with illustrations by Andymac
Derek Books 2004 - 72 pages - £4.95 - ISBN: 9780954757502

The fine illustrations are laid out on alternate pages with the text on opposite 
sides explaining the issue and the cartoon. The author gets into most of the 
nooks and crannies of the ‘Royals’ and their antics – from their origins and 
name changes to querying Phillip’s (referred to as Herr Battenberg!) 
‘citizenship’ application.

William Gladys points out that this book is dedicated to parents and children 
throughout the world who still have to endure this or any other form of absolute 
rule. Although the book contains cartoons the objective is to “put a smile on 
its reader’s faces”. The main endeavour is to help
eradicate the scourge of monarchy from Britain and other countries unfortunate 
enough to continue being chained and subjugated by it into the 21st century.

The text is ‘politically’ light with the aim, no doubt, being the younger 
reader. Nevertheless it’s a fine attempt to fight back against the continual 
onslaught of ‘Betty in the big house’ propaganda and the added illustrations 
make it attractive all round to a younger readership. The author concludes with 
this plea: “Parents and children: your charge is to eliminate inequality, and 
promote justice in Britain and throughout the rest of the deprived world, where 
autocratic Monarchy exists. Monarchy is a tyranny that denies people their 
natural choice of Citizenship and so much more.”

A fun read.

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Reviews: Realizing the Impossible: Art against Authority
by Josh MacPhee and Erik Reuland
AK Press 2007 – 319 pages – £16.00 – ISBN: 9781904859321

This monochrome book arrived shortly after an interview with Banksy, the 
“graffiti artist”, had been aired on the BBC. A commentator went along to a 
working men’s (sic) club in Bethnal Green to view Banksy’s diversion of yellow 
road markings across the pavement and up the wall to blossom into a flower. 
Banksy says in the book, “Imagine a city where graffiti wasn’t illegal…a city 
which felt like a living breathing thing which belonged to everybody, not just 
real estate agents and the barons of big business”. The club secretary was quite 
pleased to leave it there. But not all graffiti is of artistic merit and many 
regard it as degrading the environment. Do graffitos adorn their own dwellings thus?


This is not one of those large-format books de-signed to grace middle-class 
shelves but is firmly entrenched in anti-authoritarian activism “towards 
anarchist art theories”. Whether we need anarchist art theories is a moot point. 
“Just do it”, perhaps.

The work is wide-ranging: Picasso and Cubism, the forgotten women of Dadaism; 
Christiania in Copenhagen; the use of discarded x-ray film to create stencils 
for spray-painting slogans by Argentinean activists; Crass album covers; 
Zapatista “Insurgent Radio” and street puppetry; YouTube; video and more. The 
illustrations vary in quality and the lack of colour lessens the impact of some. 
Obviously colour would have pushed the price through the roof. There is more 
text than illustration with lengthy essays that require attention, some being 
more academic.

As you would expect in such a work, ideas on the conventional art system and 
galleries vary. Luis Jacob, a Peruvian born artist living in Canada, manages to 
work within it, claiming that “at some level it is the gallery that must adapt 
itself to what I do as an artist”. Meanwhile Clifford Harper (“I don’t regard 
myself as an artist, by the way, I am a craftsman”) fulminates: “The whole thing 
– artists, art works, art theorists, art critics, art galleries, art schools, 
art money, the whole dismal thing is so compromised, so hopelessly fucking with 
the state – fame, greed, wealth, prestige – that it’s best left to its own 
degradation.”

Artists need to make a living in this capitalist system and in this they, like 
us, are compromised. As Marianna Cortéz, the partner of Carlos Koyuikatl Cortéz, 
interjected when he was asked how he would advise anyone struggling to support 
themselves through art, “You need to have someone else working for you!”

Rudolf Rocker said, when writing of Rembrandt, “The artist became a rebel 
against his time and drew with keen clarity the boundary between his art and the 
national Philistinism of his land (Nationalism and Culture p.502). The artists 
in this work are rebels against the manipulating Philistines of our time. In the 
final essay Cindy Milstein writes, “The creative act – the arduous task of 
seeing something other than the space of capitalism, statism, the gender binary, 
racism, and other rooms without a view – is the hope we can offer to the world”.

This book is useful, not to encourage copycat actions, but to foster the 
imagination. There is inspirational work here aplenty and this review cannot 
encompass its breadth. A good buy.
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