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Open letter to Kirsten Lavers, Creative Director, FLACK, Cambridge

Dear Kirsten,

This is an example of that strange hybrid, the open letter, in which I will briefly outline my ideological concerns following the good news that the £65,000 required to keep FLACK in operation (in the short term) has been raised, thanks in great part to the online fundraising efforts of Tom Hardy and the support of our highly responsive green-liberal MP, Julian Huppert, a scientist by training, a humanist by inclination.

First a brief history of our working relationship. You first spotted me painting at Winter Comfort in late 2008 and reckoned my efforts were worthy of publication in FLACK’s predecessor, Willowwalker, the resulting visual-art/interview was published in the final edition in Spring 2009 at which time English Church Housing (my landlord at 222, Victoria Road) withdrew their support for you as salaried editor sparking the campaign for a replacement publication. I was very active via Nick Ward Scenarios (and privately) in this campaign to keep you in paid employment, as you know – and the online record is still available.

Here’s an example :

Hats off to Kirsten Lavers and FLACK

 

You invited me to become a Board Member of the then unnamed initiative only for me to resign (to make way for Toby Peters) when I felt that there was no real provision being predicted for commercial relationships with contributors. Toby’s progress as a film-maker is proof that I was right.

I would say that your most attractive quality is your empathy for those in trauma on the frontline of homelessness (and in recovery from it). It is a rare quality requiring enormous patience and determination. You have a profound belief that by giving the dispossessed a voice all kinds of positive outcomes can come about – most importantly, self-determination.

http://nickwardscenarios.wordpress.com/2010/02/05/debate-is-raging-in-cambridge/

Our second collaboration was the ‘Sweet Shop’ artshow which you curated in Summer 2009. I was pleased with this exhibition of prints until I realised that there was no attempt being made to sell the work and that your curatorial authority was so easily undermined by Cambridge City Council officials who shifted the artworks around to make space for their promotional logos and did so with zero regard for the ethics and aesthetics of art exhibition – and for the fact that the show had been ‘signed off’ by me after the very pleasant experience of putting it together with you. In order to protect your relationship with Cambridge City Council I did not kick up a fuss on the Nick Ward Scenarios blog to mark the occasion.

Our third collaboration was the FLACK ‘Round the Bend with Banjo Nick’ column which resulted in my resigning as a FLACK contributor when objections were raised to my piece on the Islamist ‘fatwa’ against Yoga. The Lahiri Mayasaya blog from which this rejected piece was extracted was my attempt to define ‘a language of peace’ in the frontline tribal borderlands of Afghanistan at a time when Western political military strategists were proving incapable of doing so.

On returning to FLACK in response to the recent funding crisis I set aside my reservations about your methodology and was pleased that you had argued the case for giving me blogging-space (and painting space) at FLACK and the hope that we might be able to form a creative and commercial partnership as I gain confidence as a visual artist and singer-songwriter (Banjo Nick), write poetry (‘Where Have All The Sparrows Gone?’ is in  the current edition of FLACK) and, above all, to continue to formulate production-models for a Cambridge-based theatre company – a revolutionary benefits top-up model which might prove to have national and international significance – and avoid the pitfalls of exploitation and copyright infringement.

FLACK ‘More than a magazine’ – was coined by me, I am very proud to say. ‘Flack is the new black’ was not written by me – I find it glib and racist – as I write this on ‘old’ black Muhammed Ali’s 70th birthday. My suggestion that the badge-making at FLACK should be individualised and that the profits should be split 50/50 with the makers-sellers was in response to my observation that there is a dangerous tendency to create revenue via a mechanised slave-labour mentality in the ‘homeless sector’. It is almost impossible to make a self-painted badge which does not have artistic merit – that this possibility has been sacrificed for such an offensively ‘trendy’ catch-phrase is beyond me. You told me that you agreed with me on this point but the ‘FLACK is the new black’ poster remains on the front basket of your bike and above the door of the FLACK HQ. How many ‘FLACK is the new black’ badges have been sold? Not many would be my guess. The FLACK beer can pin-hole camera industry is another example. A wonderful product for which the makers are rewarded with coffee and biscuits and the middle-men are rewarded with money and ideologically dodgy homelessness-associated street-cred. The wicker-work coffins which effectively squeezed out the daily ‘art school’ at Winter Comfort is a far more insidious example. I am not a supporter of the Coalition, I do not support the Labour Party. I am not on the Left, I am very definitely not on the Right, however, I am extremely sensitive to the general drift towards ‘disguised’ fascist models of production in which the ‘homeless community’ are simply seen as a work-force policed by a wage-earning elite. It would take a great deal more space and time than I can justify this morning to expand on this statement – and deep down I have to wonder if you would bother to read it if I did. In brief summary, I continue to argue the case for a two-tier approach.

1. Frontline trauma relief achieved through self-expression and the discipline of publication in the market place.

2. Commercial relationships with selected artists like Toby Peters and Julian R, to name but two. Julian is an excellent example of an artist whose visual artwork, particularly his paintings, could sell with the right curatorial expertise, as I have argued for some time. What part did FLACK staff members play in Julian’s recent sectioning under the Mental Health Act? Surely both FLACK and Julian would benefit from a concerted effort to sell his work and celebrate his uniqueness. The standard model is a 60/40 split in favour of the artist. I would argue the case for 70/30 in favour of the FLACK artist – with total self-sufficiency being the ultimate goal.

Warm regards,

Nick

Note added 18/19 Jan 2011

I also dislike the tag-line ‘Homelessness is destructive, FLACK is creative’ which disfigures all the sales points for the magazine. Why? Because homelessness is not necessarily destructive.  There would be no walkabout in Aboriginal Australia, there would have been no Buddha; no Mary and Joseph; no Jean Froisart; no Prophet Muhammed; no Gypsy fortune-tellers; no Atisha; no Lama Ole; no Bob Dylan; no Jongleurs; travelling acrobats; medicine men; hawkers; hobos; no Robert Johnson; no Moses; no Banjo Nick, no human race, etc, etc, if this were true. And is FLACK ‘creative’ per se? Clumsy and wrong! Who is writing this nonsense?

 Happy Birthday Ali aka Clay

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