AFTERTHOUGHT
On the wall
JOHN WELLS
The exhibition of Contemporary Socialist Election Posters at the Old Queens' Gal-
lery in Marble Arch, writes Midge Rimbaud,
is quite literally stunning. One leaves the little gallery crushed, exhausted, drained, semi-conscious. And yet in a curious way purified by the dark experience of palpable horror, of fear made manifest. It is a horror that grips with a fist of vaporous steel.
Other horrors brush one with a frisson of urgent dread: this horror holds, gouges, bites, rapes, sharpens its teeth on the raw bone. Where Francis Bacon touches with cold fingertips of malaise, these posters seize and grab at the creeping flesh with razorblade fingernails that find the entrails, the windpipes, the vital tubes, and tear and tear and tear. I saw two people being sick.
The exhibition is entitled simply_ This Evening's Men. Inside, the gallery is in
darkness and loud with the howling of hyenas and jackals, the distorted screams of the tortured, the splintering thump of thin limbs broken on the wheel. Spotlights fall chillingly on each of the posters, visitors shuffle past, held with mouths dragged down in disgust for long moments and then turn glassily away to the next study in terror. The persistent rumours of a raid by the police have given the exhibition a sense of the furtive, of the pornographic: but nothing could be more powerful in stilling the blood, in shrivelling the rampant sinews, in turn- ing the bowels to iced water.
The first poster on the left of the door shows a photograph of Mr Heath smiling.
Three of his teeth have been blacked out, and across the picture in round, unsteady childish capitals there are the words 'HE IS AN OLE BORE'. At first the impact is minimal: then, as the gaps in the smile and the full portent of the insulting caption fix them- selves in the consciousness, the power of the poster rushes in like an express train emerging from a tunnel, filling the mind to overflowing with the deafening significance of it, the sheer, repulsive, concentration-camp brutality of the nose, the gleaming chin that seems a plinth of dead, innocent flesh for the terrifying cannibal smile. This is the per- sonal attack launched with napalm and nerve gas: Mr Heath is annihilated, and in his place a caricature set up of such violence that the spectator can only quail and retch.
Mr Maudling comes next. A photograph shows him leaving the boardroom of a little- known City company, smiling and carrying a bulging briefcase. In itself the picture is harmless, almost charming: the caption writ- ten across it sets the alarm bells ringing in the intestines. It is the one word 'FATTY'. One is forced to put out a hand to steady oneself against the wall, flooded with nausea.
The word, again inscribed in childish charac- ters, mocks and screams at the well-fed smile, ruffles the smoothly combed hair with foul fingers, shoots out a gangrenous tongue and fills the foetid air with the clanging laughter of demons. The destruction is ter- rible, leaving only a diseased whiff of horn- rimmed spectacles.
Mr Hogg one approaches with a stealthy caution, and with reason. The bluff bell- ringer stands smiling gleefully on a platform, in boots and a crumpled waistcoat, looking the very soul of goodwill. Then the hand of the artist makes itself felt. In a manner too horrible to describe, an outline of a bowler hat has been drawn on Mr Hogg's head, and the longer caption 'HE IS TOO BIGG FOR HIS BOOTS! HA HA!' has been added with an arrow pointing to Mr Hogg's footwear. If a clinical description sounds too unfeeling it is because the experience of disgust is too violent to recall. The handbell tolls a knell of violent death, the boots are wet with blood. The posters of Mr Macleod, of Mr Powell, and of Sir Alec Douglas-Home, with the captions `BALDIE!' 'HEIL HITLER!' and `SILLY OLD GIT' go to the very limit of human vileness and beyond.
The very fact that such public assassina- tions should be permitted indicates a de- scent into the politics of the Chicago Mafia: the degree of violence in each of these creative acts of terrorism makes the sick head reel. As a spokesman of the Conser- vative Central Office put it to me: 'They are broken men. They can take almost any- thing, but this is murder. We are thinking seriously about packing our bags and giving up without a fight. We considered a counter attack, composing a song perhaps with rude lyrics about Mr Wilson, but the spirit just isn't there. These posters are the foulest secret weapon since the atom bomb. If only, if only we'd thought of it first! All we can do now is go underground and stay there for a long, long time.'
Previous page
