ABSTRACT
Eds: What do you mean by Dreaming? JF: You have to get a foot in the door as it were, find an angle that seems
to be the right one. If you’re working for Hallowe’en and November 5th, as we were at Bracknell, then we’ve got our own track record of bonfires (12 in all). There is some literature about traditional customs. So we’ve got a pattern of the way things have been done in certain traditions to draw upon. The reading we store in our heads, then we visit the place and just by talking to people in pubs, and reading local papers, looking at the place, you find what the local preoccupations are. For instance, we found at Bracknell that the local electronics industry is important. Then you think, it’s Hallowe’en, you’ve got
about black crows and you think perhaps the black crows should be missiles, because Ferranti and others make missile control gear. And you say ‘How do we update Hallowe’en, do we update it at all, or do we chuck it out of the window? ‘But if it still means something about externalised fear and getting rid of demons that are going to terrify you over the long winter, then why aren’t the demons of today black missiles up the road at Greenham Common, where the women are clambering over bulldozers trying to act out everyone else’s soul by saying ‘Let’s stop this, these are the black crows of modern technological society.’ So that gets mixed up with traditional imagery, but you have to be wary…if you make it too agitprop, you only preach to the converted, or you alienate. If you make it too sweet, all you come up with is a jolly spectacle which probably makes things worse in the long run by stopping people thinking. So you’ve got your own traditions, you’ve got the country’s traditions, you’ve got the specific preoccupations of the place, like the electronics; you’ve also got the pattern of the season and the specific geography of the place you’re in. They all start to go together in a sort of cauldron-a cauldron in my head, and hopefully in company members’ heads, and then it starts to simmer and distil, and you start to conjure a few key images in the steam.*…
Eds: Dreaming can be a very obscure, private process, can’t it? JF: For me the process is personal and private-like water divining. But
the discoveries, the images I find should be clear and common archetypes. I think at some point, whether you use Jungian phraseology or not, at some point you’re looking down into the Collective Unconscious through your own subconscious. Like a glassbottomed boat, and the artist is floating around letting people see down into the images. The job of the artist is to have antennae to pick it up and reveal it, articulate it for other people to read. It is to objectify his subjective experience in a form that’s accessible to the majority. Our job, or the job of any artist, I would submit, who works publicly, is to find the images that are the pegs a lot of other people connect with. A good example of the way this imagery grows and changes was at Haverhill. I was thinking about rats, which was a spillover from an earlier gig for scientists at Babraham where they were all cutting up rats. I was going to create an event which I thought was relevant because everybody had been moved out from the GLC to this town
I wanted to have people riding round the streets as packs of rats, with all these psychedelic jesters trying to catch them. It would actually be the Rat Race, but it would also be the Pied Piper comes to town. Then Kevin West, who was our recce man on the ground, rang and said whatever you do, don’t do the rat race.* So I said give me another idea then. So he said ‘Windmills’. Now the Ministry of Defence blew up the last windmill there in the war, because it was supposed to help German bombers to navigate. And everyone resented it because it was apparently one of the best working windmills left in the country. So this image happened to be, for whatever reason, at the back of people’s heads. People could identify with it, They love making windmills. I’d no idea about doing windmills, but having done windmills, you naturally think of Don Quixote and start to invent a character called Donald Quixotty, a development of a kind of lunatic angel Andy Burton’s been developing for years. And he went into the Bracknell gig too, left over from Haverhill. There were some bike boys in the bar at Bracknell who told me about seeing the Peter O’Toole Don Quixote film, and they immediately knew the story. Half the time your stories might be culled from ‘Tradition’, but they may also come from a James Bond movie. It’s what people know about, and what dreams they themselves put into these images. If you have, as we did, a procession of bike boys with Donald Quixotty, you’re dealing with young men with dreams, but you’re also dealing with all the films that’ve been around, be it ‘Easy Rider’ or ‘Mad Max IF. It doesn’t matter, so long as you can use the imagery in a positive way to release energy for good….
