AFTERTHOUGHT
Law and ordure
JOHN WELLS
A Rubbish Collection Depot. Deserted dust- carts are parked behind a wire mesh fence, and on the pavement in the foreground there is a little heap of torn paper, orange peel, flattened Coca-Cola tins, cinders and fluff. Sir Kenneth Clark, now Lord Clark of The Works, enters from the right in a grey tweed suit, a cobalt blue silk tie, and well-polished brown shoes. His thumbs are hooked casually over the front of his jacket pockets, and his nose is cocked at a rakish angle. He takes up his position on a chalk circle marked on the pavement, and turns to address us.
It is extraordinary, isn't it, how entire movements, whole chapters in the history of what we call Civilisation, the total expression, if you like, of a generation's artistic and aesthetic aspirations, are so often saved from oblivion by some rela- tively trivial circumstance. I'm standing now in front of the Barking Borough Engineer and Surveyor's Department depot in Gas- works Terrace. Not a very distinguished building, you might think. Vanbrugh would almost certainly have been appalled by it, and I don't much care for it myself. But it was here, and in other depots like it, that a decision was made a few days ago which may well have been as fortunate and as important for the art historian as the erup-
tion of Vesuvius that engulfed Pompeii. Not that the unofficial strike the dustmen initi- ated is ever likely to bury anyone under the suffocating weight of the detritus, though that might appeal to those with a taste for the sensational: what is fortunate and important for the connoisseur is that a whole cross-section, if you like, of a culture has been preserved for posterity.
(Four dustbins, surrounded by -plastic bags filled with rubbish, stand in a litter of unsavoury refuse on a slimy pavement. Sir Kenneth looks at them, and then at us.) But is it altogether fair, first of all, to judge a civilisation by the rubbish it leaves behind, even if that rubbish, as here, is in almost mint condition? Would, for ex- ample, the fly-blown heap of smashed canvases, broken marble torsoes, slashed breeches and cast-off codpieces behind the studio of Leonardo da Vinci, have been as valuable for an understanding of the Renaissance Mind as the Mona Lisa? Many would say no. The conscious expression of what Leonardo thought about women in general, and about that plump and mal- odorous burgess in particular, must be, or so they would tell us, more indicative of the aspirations of the civilisation to which he belonged than the thoughtlessly accumu- lated evidence of his kitchen midden. And yet I wonder. With our knowledge of psychology still in so primitive a state, which of us can say whether we express ourselves more completely in the conscious or the unconscious product, the voluntary or the involuntary? And even on the most superficial level, are we not justified in judging a civilisation by its artefacts, how- ever humble their purpose, as much as by its most pretentious works of art?
Look at this washing powder packet, for example. As much thought, certainly as much financial patronage, has gone into its production as has gone into any lonely exhibit hanging on the wall of our most progressive gallery. Its design is primi- tive in the extreme, incorporating the crude letters of the brand name surrounded by a debased aureole of jagged light, a series of clumsily applied claims and slogans, all outlined in harsh colours, a photo- graph of an undistinguished female in early middle age busy with her personal laundry, and various pieces of propaganda in a smaller type. Comparing this to the artefacts of earlier civilisations we are shocked by its lack of repose, its shrill agony of competitiveness, its angular terror. But we should also notice the primitive simplicity of its shape: a rectangular box. Or this Coca-Cola tin: a simple cylindrical form, closed at both ends. Or this plastic sack: the material may be novel, and to my mind repulsive, but the form remains ancient and unchanged.
(An immense heap of refuse and junk. Sir Kenneth appears at the summit wearing a brown felt hat, a light grey overcoat and gloves. He climbs effortlessly down the slope and stands with one foot on a rusty cistern.)
In the realm of the more advanced tech- nology, as, for example, in this abandoned and now windowless double-decker bus, or in that rather charming old ocean liner you can see lying on its side over there behind the hillock of yellowing forms dumped by the Home Office, we can recog- nise new elements of design, I would admit. But they are for the most part elements taken from nature herself—the shape ef a pebble Wortfifiloofff iff. the sea, the curve
of a blrtrs wing—and only superficially touched by the neurotic angularity of the age. And what is more important than any of these details, surely, is the glorious overall effect. The overwhelming impact is that of nature joyfully asserting herself. Do what you will, she seems to be saying to us, the old order and the old law will triumph: things jog along very nicely with- out you, little man, and you may as well reconcile yourself to that fact.
(A portrait in oils of the Prime Minister. As we pull back we see that we are in Transport House, and that Sir Kenneth is standing beneath the picture.) And that is precisely what this man did. Prime Minister James Harold Wilson. Just look at that crafty old face. Prime Ministers, he seems to be saying to us, go on being Prime Ministers, it is part of the natu- ral order. It will take more than a lot of shrill advertising and neurotic designing to get rid of me. Lesser men may rant like Canute against the rising tide of garbage, against the rising cost of living, against the rising tide of wage demands, even trying to make political capital out of him in doing so. But he sits tight, choosing disengage- ment in place of strife. The eyelids are a little weary. He is older than the rocks among which he sits; like the vampire, he has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about him; he has trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants.
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