This is a film devoted to Jonathan Bowden’s paintings. It is called Fenris Devours Odin. In Nordic, Germanic and pagan mythology, Fenris is the great wolf who devours Odin or Wotan or Woden, the father of the gods at the end of time. The end of time is called Ragnarök and signifies the end of the world. But in accordance with this essentially pagan or heathen cosmology, the world never ends and goes round again. The reason for this title is that it concerns the doctrine of power and its morality. And I would like these pictures to be a contribution to power in art.

For my purposes, art is about the delineation of meaning and form. Art is radically non-conceptual in its objectivism. Art is about representation and about objective reality, albeit drawn in fantasy from the mind. Modern art has to make the world anew, given photography’s replication of the world of sensibility as present around us. In these pictures, ferocious and gentle, sexual and mythological, classical and ultra-modern, violent and stoical, demonic, ghoulish, gothic, gargantuan, titanic, and ferocious, there is an attempt to attack the image and to attack the sensibility of thought in the image.

This image is called A Jester’s Pox. It’s an expressionist image and the background to it is reminiscent of the Parisian school immediately after the 39-45 war, people like Van Velde and others who circled around a magazine called Transition edited by Georges Duthuit with which Beckett was concerned. But I’m not interested in abstraction per se and therefore there’s always figuration. I would like my work to be considered as violently actual and representational. Here we have a longitudinal leer, an alternative joker in a pack of 52 cards.

This image is more classical and restful in form, influenced by the early stages of Leni Riefenstahl’s revolutionary film about the Olympic Games in 1936 called Olympia. A version of the Parthenon is to the back. A Greek sculpture, slightly Medusan and yet proportionate in form, lies to one side on the left as the viewer looks at the image. But beneath both and slightly to the right is a mask upturned, neither of tragedy or comedy, but emblematic of the Greeks from which all Indo-European self-knowledgeable culture originates.

This is an auto-biographical piece called A.J. Bowden on black. It’s my father in a country and western hat with an artistic mannequin or figurine, namely an artist doll, to one side on the right. He was most concerned about the black and said to me, “Why am I on black? Is it sinister? Is it nocturnal? Is it a color that you want to indicate something by?” And I said, “Not at all. It just goes with the nature of the representationa/biographical image.” The artistic doll or mannequin was within my line of sight at the time of the execution of the piece, no more, no less.

Here’s a slightly cartoonish one, but it is meant literally and in a respectful manner. This is called Adolf and Leni and is in actual fact from a newsreel footage, a piece of the time showing Hitler and Leni Riefenstahl together against a sort of landscape backdrop. The colours are non-representational, hence the turquoise or deep post-purple like sky, although you actually can get such representational skies in Spain, in southern Europe against a ground heavy in iron and oxidized as to the viewer’s resonance. The one thing I’d like us to suggest is the extraordinary idealism in Riefenstahl’s face, which pursuant to her early films about mountains and her later films about dance, she began as a dancer, is emblematic of the sort of instrument of yearning which always seems to be part and parcel of her own visual forms.

This piece is again classical in spirit, but with quite a lot of pastel in the middle. We have two masks, one slightly militaristic and the other Thespian and theatrical. They stare out. They look towards the left as the viewer on the other side looks towards them.

Here’s a more early work with a certain sword and sorcery and Frank Frazetta dimension. One particular rather gloomy, lugubrious, and truculent hero carries a green man across his shoulder on a background of swirling clarety red perching into a purple lace blue.

This is an ideological piece which is a non-representational and themed colour portrait in more ways than one of Sir Nicholas Serota, the long-time sort of guardian and director of the Tate Gallery, now more commonly known as Tate Britain. He’s one of the initiators of the prize which became known as the Turner Prize and about which I made a brief film called, wait for it, Against the Turner Prize. On a background of ochre and yellow, Serota gazes out unashamed at the nature of his creation.

This is a piece drawn from the ideas and iconography of Alexandre Dumas, The Man in the Iron Mask, but certain early Hollywood B movies and silent films that depict the same line of imagery come into one’s line of fire. A window which slightly resembles that of a church or a cathedral with stained glass colours delineated beyond it in projection seems to have something to do with this picture up on the far left side at the top of the frame.

Here we have a rather demonic and ferocious piece, rather reminiscent of these sort of Latino wrestlers and the wrestling bouts that I used to see as a child on Dickie Davies’ World of Sport on ITV in the 1970s on Saturday afternoons. A man bays out his challenge to those who will come for him, wearing, if not a mask, then a mask within a mask that delimits the aggressive side of human personality. There’s a certain joyous grace of green to my mind in the background, green, a colour of gentleness, the earth, Eros, and quiet before the use of force.

Yes, this is a rather psychedelic image and portraying a slightly post-dated ‘60s feel. A strong use of colour, strong representation, but within the image, not just between that which lies within and without. I’ve always felt that rather like graphic novels, colour has to be used in a way which isn’t purely representational, but is emotional. In the history of modernism, there’s a movement straddling the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century called Fauvism, where colour is used in not a disproportionate manner, but in a sort of surreal manner before surrealism was invented. So you have a movement like The Blue Horses, so called, in German art in the first quarter or so of the 20th century. It’s basically just using colour non-naturalistically, but representationally, partly to avoid repetition of purpose, but also to indicate new depths of meaning and revolutionise the tired palette of the eye, particularly as it became inundated with commercial photographs and other images.

Here’s a totally ferocious one that relates to my most demonic period. Strong use of pastel, the influence of certain people like Bacon and to a minor league Sutherland and spiritually Balthus is present, but again the images are one’s own. Such images essentially come from the semiconscious part of the mind, but they also represent a tradition of strength. The purpose of the art that I’ve tried to delineate is concerned with power and the metaphysic of power and its reality. In a post-Christian society, we still look back to the art of a highly Christianised time and Christian art had two most interesting polarities. One of them was baroque complexity in relation to the depiction of angels and heaven and so on, ornateness, if you like. Either virile with the Renaissance or overdone and rococo in relation to Eastern Orthodox traditions. The other interesting polarity was the demonic. In this area artists influenced by this narrative system were given total license to do what they wanted and also a desire to luxuriate in pure ideas of power. In traditional conceptions an artist was left alone to depict the Luciferic or the ferocious in Christian terms as he willed without prior cognition and without due culturalisation. This meant that the diabolical side of Christian art is aesthetically from a modern perspective the most interesting side of that religion.

Here is something called Anarch B Man. Strong use of colour. Strong use of overpainting on pastel. A certain totem pole element. But as always with words they’re inadequate to the nature of the image. The visual is a language of its own in its own terms on its own scale by virtue of its own definitions.

Here we have a rather early work that’s slightly sort of fly-like or bee-like in form. It’s called Arachnophobia and it partly relates to a Vincent Price film in the 1950s, a classic B movie of its type called The Fly that was later remade 30 or so years later. There’s a bit of overpainting with pastel on the right side. There’s a strong use of red and blue. I’ve always believed in poster-like contrasts of thick bars of colour on occasion because of the sort of visual dialectic they set up.

Here’s a later piece that’s based upon Italian taxidermy. It’s actually a black tie scorpion in a cage which has been re-delineated on purple or magenta. Strong use of pastel within the codification of the box that contains the scorpion. The scorpion concerned is obviously dead and has been injected with either prussic or nitric acid. The power and cleanness of the form of a natural tank like this is something which the picture tries to delineate. There’s no element of non-representationism both in the colour which of course is false to the actual nature of the scorpion’s body and arachnid, a classic arachnid with eight limbs which is dark black in its natural state, but also the slightly disfigured nature of the claws and other appurtenances which are unnatural. What’s the point of replicating nature when the purpose of modern art is to express it anew and again?

Here we have a work called Atonality on green with red depending. There’s a certain auric sensibility to the backdrop because certain people’s auras can be filmed and red and green sometimes proliferates in sensual and yet philosophically proficient natures. It’s partly based upon Schoenberg and some of his early and most extreme music. There’s a version of one of the early pre-Viennese school atonal scores on one side. Atonality in music and abstraction in modernist painting are extreme forms of modernist art. They’re an attack on mass sensibility and in some ways they’re a form of anti-bourgeois art form. The purpose of doing modernism from the right rather than the left is to insist that the world can be made again, is to insist on a new version of foreseeing and is to insist on elitism in intelligence, in knowledge, in perception and in the results of what’s betrayed and seen.

Here’s in some respects a cardinal work called Behaviourism. It relates to a very early piece which was a sketch before it was worked up into its pure form. It relates to the behaviourist school of psychology which is now almost completely replaced Freudian psychoanalysis within the West within the politics of both the left and the right. We see a sort of head screaming with joy or pain, it’s not really clear, certainly not to me, on a background of hot and cool, red and blue, left and right. Behaviourism. Most of this school believes that human beings are taught very early to respond to stimulation and to avoid things and if they’re given punishments and rewards in relation to the such stimuli they will carry this forwards with them throughout life. Rats in mazes is sometimes the phrase that’s used of the work of people like Skinner and Lorenz in animal psychology. Lorenz was a key individual in relation to the development of the current of thought which became known as the New Right. But this painting as always stands on its own independent of theory, just as an image.

Here’s a later work slightly gentler in theme based upon a painting by Blake and yet transformed and transmogrified in my opinion several times over. God or the divine in multiple colours with a sort of silken veil or scarf between two outraised palms on either side lies over a man or some sort of humanoid creature who faces the ground. Two mock Grecian Socratic thinkers deliberate on either side. The world is made again. An old man in multiple colours opens his arms wide to create man.

Here’s a ferocious picture but of a later vintage than the early ones of a similar emotional character or intensity. Sort of Delilah feeding a monster or demonic labyrinth or cancer of forms crisscrossed in green ligatures or lines and tendons of imagined substance, feeds on some sort of voltaic form or kneeling initiate beneath it. Black is the background colour throughout. Although in some respects the sort of mosaic-like patterning and the extreme and non-abstract use of colour mitigates against the fury of the purported image.

Yes, here’s another biographical one on a darkish red stroke dirty scarlet background. It’s a picture of the ultra-right-wing and elitist writer Bill Hopkins. It’s based upon a thumbnail sketch in charcoal and fine pencil from the mid-1950s by Pietro Annigoni who was then very famous as the Queen’s representational portrait painter. Sort of idealised photographic painter in the supra-representational tradition stretching back to academic art at the beginning of the 20th century with people like Orpen and then on through Singer Sargent back to classic pre-photographic representational art.

Now Bill has always been an individual who’s very important in my life and merciless at the intellectual level. A man who had this society not taken the liberal turn that it has after the 1960s would have been a very important individual. Even as it was the author of a famous novel The Divine and the Decay, sometimes called The Leap, in the 1980s and an essay of a Nietzschean compass in the 1950s called Ways Without Precedent. Bill is one of the preeminent elitist and non-humanist intellectuals that Britain has produced in the 20th century. Born in Wales in 1928 approaching 80 years of age today. Bill is probably the greatest man I’ve ever met. And this picture is a testament to him.

Here is an altogether lighter piece. My work is essentially or quintessentially extremist. It tends to two polarities. One of them is sort of demonic fury and strength in images which almost.. the signification of a human sacrifice occurring beneath them. But there is another polarity which is sort of Jackanory-like and childlike and almost silly and slightly sweet or involves just a patterning of forms and relates both to the art of children and something which is called Art Brut which is raw slightly undisciplined untutored art, art that comes straight from the semiconscious to unconscious mind.

Art Brut as a formal movement so to say was a split from Breton’s Surrealism and was led by a French thinker and producer of this sort of work called Dubuffet. Dubuffet’s daubs which he prided himself upon saying any five-year-old could do, now average 86,000 pounds at Sotheby’s and Christie’s auctions. I partly did these as an experiment because somebody said do them as raw as you can and there’s loads of money in it. So, I started. And did them for a span, but they represent an an oppositional tendency in my own nature. That’s why I rather like them.

Here’s another one that relates to the furious period of pastel daubs. A masked and slightly armoured or reptilian figure with a hook-like hand to the right, and a sort of sabre-like sword. Sightly fishy in feel, approaches through a maelstrom of white paint on a background of fiery orange-like or desert pastel.

More birdies. Swooning like molecules in a preservation dish. They pulsate. They glow like neon daubs.

Tangerine birdies a go-go. They bob up and down like balloons. Possibly they’re bouncy castles of one’s own self.

More birdies. With a rather penile one in violent red on a blue background. Others swirl around like the dregs of some aftertaste of dream.

More birdies. This one with a sort of mosaic of sort of billiard ball type nuts that move about. And approach a certain element of abstraction over time. Was I thinking of Picasso? Was I thinking of Jocky Wilson? Was I thinking of anything at all?

Here’s a more traditional image drawn from the heavier and more lugubrious end of Greek art. This is a Medusa. Such sort of pediments, such faces as part of blocks are to be found in Greek temples throughout the Aegean. A female form actually with a tongue extended from semi-reptilian teeth, and with mosaic-like eyes. And a rather Saturn-like and matted hair held in by a band. The saurian or reptilian quality is indicated by the tincture of green.

Here’s quite an advanced piece based upon one of the most famous fantasy pictures in Western art. It’s The Temptation of St. Anthony by Hieronymus Bosch. And this is a very complicated piece within an even more complicated triptych. It contains the saint who’s over to the far right with a stick. With a sort of woman leaning over him as some sort of helpmate or Marian accomplice, but in actual fact she has a tail and is a signification in Bosch of the reptilian and the satanic which lurks indivisibly in all other forms. We have certain false and fake apostles and sort of pseudo-Arab characters over to the back of the right. Whilst moving into the centre, one has a sort of table without legs that floats in the ether of its own accord and is a sort of reptilian and demonic in spirit as well as form. Over that, you have a sort of transmogrified individual who’s neither fish nor fowl, beast nor man.

The most interesting figure apart from St. Anthony himself on the right of the picture is on the left of the picture. In occultism, of course, left, sinister, is the demonic tendency or polarity within the two halves or scans of hand, mind, and brain. But this figure is a sort of walking reptile, some sort of mendicant preacher with one leg shorter than the other, and with a reptilian and decidedly uncouth head. On the top of this there perches an owl in Bosch’s own visual lexicography, so to say. The owl is an indicator less of knowledge than of heresy.

Yes, here’s another image by Bosch which is part of a famous triptych concerning uh his perennial theme, if you like, heaven and hell. This obviously is the latter. This is one of the most famous elements of a very complicated panel. And it depicts a birdman who’s atop a sort of throne, which is also a moral toilet. And he’s eating, one imagines, soul that goes in through the beak mouth and is then defecated down again into a sort of pit beneath in a sort of bubble-like molecule. Around this figure, various other individuals play diabolical musical instruments or go skating on pits of fire or are sort of seduced, as the woman is, to the left of the picture at its bottom by some sort of reptilian form. The colour, except for human nudes, is non-representational. Plenty of green, yellow, and blue.

Yes, here’s something called Box Malefic, which is a face within a square which in itself is contained within another square of fiery pastel. There’s a certain suffocating and self-enclosed element to the conception. Green predominates in a non-naturalistic face. Rage, chaos, but not despair. One should never despair.

Yes, this one is called Bristol No Regrets and is partly based on my father gone wrong. And sort of a metamorphoses of various energies. It began as one thing and became another. In this sense, there’s a strong streak of actual ideological modernism in this picture. Because after an initial phase, I wasn’t entirely clear where I was going.

More birdies. Slightly more redolent of Picasso here. Elongated, chest-like, orange, glowing, dayglow-like on yellow. To say more is to be superfluous.

Here we have the magician, which is a tarot card called number one, the fool of wisdom, who goes forward into life with the belief that all things can be seen, known, understood, appraised, and reduced to his power. A long spindly beard, a pointed magician’s hat. Does it make fun of Waite’s iconography, or does it wish to join it at a later date?

This one is called Corbel I and relates to the gargoyle tradition, which is often found in northern churchyards and on the corners of sort of grey slaty buildings in Yorkshire, up in Northumberland and elsewhere. These images entranced Henry Moore as a child. Some of our greatest sculptors were the sort of men in these towns who produced these sorts of forms. Their names are unknown. They didn’t even etch them on the basis of the form when it was placed on the tower. But the power lives on. And as the religion which they were meant to exemplify in a grotesque manner has died, these forms live.

Yes, a welter of imagery in pastel, a sort of spectral and slightly demonic form gazes at a stargate in the distance.

An erotic image. Cruella de Ville III. The first image devoted purely to Eros on the cool blue and the wild and fiery red that’s come up for viewing in this film so far. An image of idealisation of desire of the immensity and power that the female body always has over the male mind.

This image, by contrast, is a Cycladic sculpture from ancient Greece on a cool background of radiant blue. Cycladic art is early white aboriginal art. The features are not delineated. It’s an extremely primitive, archaic, and sort of chthonian or up-from-underground type of sculpture. You can see many of these forms in the early Greek and archaic Greek sculptural cases in the British Museum.

Here we have one of the first pictures of de Sade, the notorious sexual extremist and literary debauchee. It’s called de Sade blue on red or red on blue. I wanted primal, poster-like images with strong, vibrant, dayglow colouration. De Sade is unusual in that no actual image of him, as delineated in history, comes down to us. Even though many contemporary playwrights have written plays like Marat/Sade, for example, about his time towards the end of his life when he composed plays like Oxtiern for the lunatics of the Charenton Asylum. His image remains fugitive or mysterious. Like the demonic itself in the Judeo-Christian discourse, you’re free to embroider what he may or may not have looked like. He’s supposed to have been mildly effeminate and extraordinarily obese towards the end of his life, but remained throughout the aristocrat seamlessly going towards death. The American poet Robert Lowell in the middle of the 20th century said of de Sade that he represented the violent unconscious of the French Revolution. And that something like the 120 Days of Sodom was if, you will, a dark Saturnine and poetic register, sort of Baudelairean flower of evil, which was exactly the metaphorisation of Robespierre’s terror in the year one and two between 1793 and four. Here we have a dayglow de Sade that could have been envisioned by Warhol.

Here we have another of the erotic images, blue and lightish shading into pink red. Demi-Monde IV. The hint of unattractiveness about the form is indicative of the libertinage of the gesture.

Here we have a demon bull. A confluence of sky sport and the negative side of Beardsley’s art or the openly satanic visual vocabulary that was put forward at the end of the 19th century by the Belgian Félicien Rops or the similar artist and lithographer Odilon Redon.

Another image which is slightly drawn from the impact statement of my own father, yet changed or transliterated out of all dimensions of prior strength. An image partly of morbidity and even of depression, but not necessarily in the subject or even in the viewer. The intimation is cosmic. The head shrunken. There’s a hint in the treatment of Giacometti.

Here we have a slightly lighter piece. A thespian mask worn partly in tragedy, partly not, to cover the features of an actor or performer. Found in a junk shop. The tassels are to go around the back of the head. The colours are non-representational, but the form remains clear.

Here we have another partly erotic image. A horse’s head exists between the woman’s legs. The hair is red and fiery. The presentiment is sword and sorcery or poster art circa the 1970s, for example. Plenty of flesh is on show. I believe the title adopted in a moment is Do You Want Me?

A reptilian piece which hints at the demonic or the third brain theory of man in certain ideas championed by psychologists like Eysenck and to a certain extent the explicator Koestler. The aggressive part of the mind is the reptilian stem at the bottom of the brain. Here’s a celebration of it.

Another image done at the same time, probably within months of the reptilian head just canvassed. This is a sort of iron envisaged human form where the head is more important than the body and therefore is delineated almost without the body. The actual nature of the delineated face becomes part of its own landscape, so there’s no actual distinction between background and foreground.

Here we have an image which is very famous in modernist art because it’s drawn from Epstein’s early sculptures. This was my homage stroke replication of the sculpture known as The Rock Drill.

Yes, here’s a mosaic-like pattern of three in one with a butterfly underneath on pink. The images relate to the tarot, but are actually distinct from the same. Three partly reptilian or saurian heads, one disfigured in the middle, look out upon you. What numbers, what fates do they signify? A later work done in a landscape style with a representational line, but non-representational colouration.

Here we have a slightly a sort of duller, dimmer, and earlier work based on an image from the early ‘20s by Duchamp. Strong use of purple and green and red, an unusual combination without a tincture of the blue on brown.

Here we have one of the strongest of the early pieces called Ebon Tongue. A longitudinal and rather zombie-like head triangular in tone and inflection stares down towards you, but also at the bottom of the picture. Some sort of bow tie appears in a red mist at the base of this particular configuration. Bela Lugosi from the early classic Hollywood film of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula from the early ‘30s comes into focus and then dims away suddenly.

Here is a work strongly configuring pastel partly based upon the ideas of the French novelist Pierre Boulle who wrote who wrote Monkey Planet, the work that originated that whole sort of popular cultural saga in and around the Planet of the Apes. A lot of paint on top of that which has already been done. A relative heavy quality to the piece even to hold. I believe it’s a work wherein every quarter of the square stroke rectangle which you look at, something is going on.

A more classical, serene, and understated piece on a violent red which becomes dirty in the corners. Partly based upon Arno Breker’s configuration of the classic in the neo-classical guys in mid-20th century art of a classical representational academic and restorationist type, it’s also reflected upon itself. A Nietzschean piece melding into Léger’s modernism, but striking out to depths which pre-existed. A tribute to somebody who vaults both the classical and the modernist configurations.

This is a partly biographical picture of, to my mind, the great English sculptress Elisabeth Frink. One of her slightly titanic, monumental, solemn male sculptures is delineated in yellow on red behind her. Frink, rather like Leni Riefenstahl, but in a modern context, declared that her entire work was a hymn of beauty to the male sex. The importance of the female eye in art is rarely seen, but its power when delineated should always be recognised.

Here we have a slightly ancestral piece, England’s Green Man, relating to various folk and or folkish traditions. Strong overpainting and the use of white as a surround upon a sort of dirty to orange yellow plus red. A certain savage peasant ardour afflicts our Green Man, but he stares out more bemused than angry.

Here we have a purely representational picture which is relatively configured in both colour and tone. It’s of the great German writer and diarist and war writer Ernst Jünger. Although for the title of the piece I’ve Anglicized his name to be Ernest Younger. I wanted in this piece to represent the fact that the English are essentially a Germanic people. Ernst Jünger wrote the most famous autobiographical book of the Great War called Storm of Steel and rewrote it four times in subsequent decades after the end of the 1918 conflict. A dagger loosely based on a specialist service regiment dagger and a smaller simulacrum float in midair. If you look closely upon the green, there’s an insect. Maybe a praying mantis, maybe something even more exotic on Jünger’s exposed and outstretched thumb. He wrote extensively about insect life and he harks back in a science fiction novel like The Glass Bees to Maeterlinck’s work on the structure of the hive earlier in in same century.

Here’s a very radical picture indeed called Eugene Sue’s the Eternal Jew. An ape-like form gibbering in skull cap with a robe of red gazes out on a zero fading into orange.

Here we have a rather anatomical or piece of work based upon the sort of death-in-life sculptures of Professor Gunther von Hagens who has toured the world, the West, and even Japan with these anatomical exhibits of human corpses called alternatively body art or corpse art. Von Hagens, who like the filmmaker Syberberg, was educated and brought up in the communist statelet of East Germany, now defunct, has devoted his entire life to exposing the naked human body beneath the flesh. Like Vesalius and Galen before him, and the core objectivism of say Gray’s Anatomy in both medicine and art. The link between the body and Western perception of form is crucial. We also need to examine the link that exists between death and art and art on objectivity. There’s a strong strand of medical knowledge in art, and there are moments when art is closer to objectivity to the harshness of visual truth than science itself is.

Here’s an early form based upon a certain surrealist iconography. The vulva floats in a medley of force on pastel and green.

A more codified forget the Daily Star example of male eroticism. I’ve always believed that the female body should be approached in art, in life, in conceptual death. I have no truck with feminist strictures in relation to these desires. Pornography has to be confronted because it is part of the human mind. The only way in which it can be artistically transcended is for it to be turned into art or erotica. The criticism would be as exemplified by a text like Kingsley Amis’s or Lord Longford’s pornography written in the 1960s that erotica is just the pornography that artists and intellectuals are in favour of. But in contravention I believe that a personalised form of eros aesthetically delineated is the way out of the pornographic morass as represented by the Star and similar tabloids.

Here’s a very recent work, quite complicated in form with a multiplicity of rectangles and oblongs. Some of them blue, others red, darkish to dirty green on golden brown. An early humanoid fossil dug up possibly from Tashkent or one of the Central African Republics counterfaces against the image of a clown. The clown, carnival, the show cry barker’s oration, the puppet, the marionette, Punch and Judy, and the use of folk iconography combined with modernistic and elite culture has always obsessed me. Strength is always in the art of the people even though they don’t know it’s there on occasion.

Here we have a piece called Freud Was Wrong. As with the other slightly iconic piece, Behaviourism, Freud Was Wrong on light green is painted in oil and indicates the neurosis of a reptilian presence. In Freudian psychoanalysis, people are supposed to go back to potty training to determine their faults. This is an image which has successfully overcome the prospect of doing so.

Here we have Gaia Make Love to the Earth, which is the goat of Mendes, and the head of a goat on white swirling paint based on a pastel ground or foregrounding. Strong use of yellow or ochre which delineates the form pretty representationally. The horns, you will notice, are added in gold to brown paint as an extra swirl.

Here’s a biographical portrait of an actor who’s known to me and who now lives in New York. His name is Eric Galati, and he’s an Italian American. The background of this work and the sky is partly taken from Brueghel’s The Triumph of Death, which hangs in the Prado now in Madrid. Eric played certain Shakespearean roles like Macbeth, like Bottom, like Falstaff, like the clown in Othello and other pieces. This is him as Lear on the heath transfigured into desert. He wears green. He’s surrounded by a populist and carnival-like tent. A fool exists on his right hand. Lear always goes everywhere with his fool. In Eric’s large brown eyes, one can configure almost the pain of the world. As the fool says to the mad king in Shakespeare’s play, “Thee nuncle, thou art an O without a figure. Thou art a nothingness.” And Lear responds with the line, “Take heed, sirrah—the whip.”

Here’s an erotic piece, Genevieve’s Night Out, on red and black. The eyes sparkle, but the breasts are revealed.

Here’s a portrait which is representational in every aspect on a deep claret. But the colouring, of course, is not true to life. It’s of the famous early 20th century German playwright called Gerhart Hauptmann, who collaborated in particular with Strauss and also provided the words or libretti for many of Strauss’s modernistic operas at the turn of the 20th century such as Elektra and the almost divine Salome.

This is my only abstract work called jokingly Give Me $140 Million. The title relates to Jackson Pollock, I think he’s painting number six or some similar designation, achieved at auction possibly in Christie’s, maybe in Sotheby’s, that figure which is in and around 75-78 million pounds sterling. So, I decided to do one, but so far it’s not got up to that fiscal level, if you see what I mean. Abstract art has a power, but I’ve only done one of them. If the eye microscopically goes near a canvas at any point, you will actually see abstraction. If you squint and look at a piece of work or pieces and spectrometer-like elements within it, you will see abstraction. But for me, personally, as with somebody like Francis Bacon the painter, representational art is more powerful because it happens to relate mentally to our kind of natures. But everything should be explored, and this is my one abstraction.

Here is God Plays with Balls. Partly based unintentionally on a painter and sculptor I know, the divine aura or presence or creative chaos at the heart of all forms of energy plays with planets and interstellar systems like a billiard gamester tossing up his balls at the base of which are several neoclassical and athletic sculptures moving within cosmic wheels.

Another erotic image or simulacrum intervenes on blue with a red disc near its base. This one is goddess, ape, sword, and skull. A black-tressed woman ripe for worship, a postmodern Aphrodite, stands with her sword. There’s a hint, of course, as with a lot of my imagery, of the popular poster, elements of folk art, pulp book covers, and the graphic novel. It is possible to say I’m as much a graphic artist as a modernist one.

Here we have Gone Batty. A delineation of those mammals that people think are reptiles and that fly in the darkness and are blind because they scream and get the reverberations back into those very large ears, which causes them to avoid objects. To the human mind, there’s always something ethereal and yet sinister about the bat. Gone Batty. Non-representationally delineated within the representation of form. Again, colour is used to express emotion or power or break up the image or draw the eye back to it in a more cardinal way. My view is that ab naturalata experiences visually speaking should always be celebrated, but if you want a representational motif of a bat, true to nature, pick up a nature book or watch a TV documentary by Attenborough about bats. Gone Batty.

Here is Grand Guignol, which relates to my second feature film with Andrea Lioy, the Italian director. Grand Guignol is the French tradition of Punch and Judy and technically means great punch. We see the toy theatre above him upon a ground of slightly violent and curving green. We see the Thespian arch. Punch with his club exists below. There is a noose which Jack Ketch or the hangman is always trying to get him in. Punch and Judy, a violent tradition, never a seaside amusement for children.

Here we have a rather early work called Grimaldi’s Leo, poster painterly, solid on red, yellow shading into orange, a pantomime lion named after an Anglo-Italian clown, the patron saint of British clown and circus performers, Grimaldi, who dates from the beginning of the 18th century.

Here we have something of the mannequin, but also of the mask and even the psychotic delinquent delivered in a sort of psychedelic dream. It’s called Grinning Psycho and Dolls. What looks like the late ‘60s vision of some sort of creature in a creaking wheelchair emerges at the back on black through a spectral doorway. Possibly some of the erotic laced poster paint art is self part of pop art by somebody like Richard Lindner comes to mind. A large number of his canvases in acrylic and spray painted work, deeply formalist in spirit, was used on the book covers by Penguin for Vladimir Nabokov’s novels.

Here is a more traditional work, a happy demon frolics at the prospect of a negative ecstasy rather than equity. It’s called Happy Hell Racer.

Here’s an image green on red to orange by way of yellow fire that was done in a similar time period to the previous work. Harlequin mouth delineates a mosaic of the heart of a mouth that sucks in the eye. The eyes are coruscated, hilly. One is above the other. It’s not a mask, but a face, possibly staring at the prospect of what it would be like not to have a face if one was a harlequin with one like that.

Here we have a painting called Headless in Gaza. Another classical motif, although it really relates to a post-Renaissance art. It’s based upon the uh mythology in the Christian tradition of the head of John the Baptist. It’s from a painting by Caravaggio. And yet in a strange way, it’s also transmogrified into a Medusa. So, you have several ideas moving as one against a purple background. Purple, traditionally in Western art, the coloration both of imperialism and death. On a red and over-laced foreground, Medusa’s head with attendant snakes rears up in a Saurian aspect. It’s important to realize that these mythological statements come back and around. Although a middling to later painting, it actually relates to the more furious aspect of some of the earlier forms.

Here we have a more jokey apparel. It’s called Heavenly Droopy. I’m sure everyone remembers the cartoon character Droopy. This is a sort of bulldog of essence. These dogs, a cosmic one here in multi-coloured and psychedelic aspect, seem to exemplify a cosmic sadness. Folds of flesh and bravery compacted against two rectangles delineated by a black line. Above, there is a dirty yellow melding into orange. Beneath, a sea of blue.

Here we have another of my tokens of appreciation to Hieronymus Bosch. In all probability, the greatest fantasy artist who has come down to us in the Western tradition. It’s again part of his triptych, Heaven and Hell, the panels dealing with hell. This is a work called Hellish Heaven I, but it deals with the musical instruments of damnation. A sort of withering bellows or cranking sort of handheld organ is delineated next to a number of demons who are playing a drum. This is to the right side of the piece confounded by brown, orange, and red. Whilst on the other side, amidst a demonic medley, an individual is trapped within the wires or strings of his own harp.

Here we have, almost on cue, Hellish Heaven II. This is a secondary delineation of the same Boschian template. We see a fish, strange, vaguely humanoid presence in the far left down section on blue. In the middle, one sees some sort of plasticine fossil with what might be something of an old-fashioned musical instrument lying alongside it. Other strange anthropomorphic forms glimmer as one goes up towards the orange, yellow, and black squares near the top of the piece. At the fountainhead, there’s some sort of reverse angel merging in with a bottle carrying a shield, besporting, delirious with both the alchemy and drunkenness of song.

A quieter piece here. This here again is a biographical portrait of the great British and English sculptor Henry Moore. A sculpture of the massively feminine, of the archaic, of the figures of the primal mother, earth mother, and father, or matriarch and patriarch. Moore, the son of a miner from Yorkshire, a socialist of the old school, his brows furrowed, his fist in his cheek, dwells on great colossi in stone. He brings back the archaically primeval into the modern. A celebration on purple and green.

Here to my mind is a very dramatic painting based upon the mythology of Salome. It’s called Herodias Daughter, namely Salome. On the plate in the middle of the picture on red and to the bottom, lies the husk of the Baptist’s head after it’s been cut off. Various patriarchs, Jewish court officials, and others circulating in the background delimited in pastel forms. The great seductress, later crushed to death by the shields of guards, has danced the dance of the seven veils to prevail upon her king to give her what her mother wants.

A more classical template on a reverse zebra crossing, which is not entirely mathematically delineated and which points askew to the right. An angelic horseman with trumpet on a winged steed rises up, its belly resting upon a strange and rather elephantine tin head or warrior beneath the stony horse. It’s called Heroic Tin Head. And why not?

Here’s a more graphic novel delineation, even with a caption called I Am Agron, which as it’s there already does for a title.

This again is taken partly from the exemplification of our contemporary Vesalius or artistic anatomist, Professor Gunther von Hagens, one of whose forms was delineated earlier on, but it also relates to a thematic exhibition of pre-conquistador art from ancient Peru and elsewhere in what is today called Latin America. This was the culture of the Aztecs where sculpture delineated not just the idea but the practice of sacrifice. In their case human sacrifice. Many of these exhibits also relates to the Royal College of Surgeons Museum which is in South Kensington in Central London. I went round this museum when I was 18. It’s closed to the public because the exhibits are believed to be traditionally in accordance with the rather Protestant logic of the Anatomy Act too horrific for the local public. The skeleton of the elephant man is in a case in that particular museum together with various foetuses in jars of formaldehyde, malformed individuals, medical freaks, other chance discoveries, and genetic hybrids, and so forth. There are a large number of sort of humanoid forms which are in themselves reminiscent of Bellmer’s dolls, for example, in early surrealism. Siamese twins and other freaks besport themselves in jars.

This picture is called I Want Pierre Boulle. Boulle wrote Monkey Planet which began that whole thematic course of Planet of the Apes type material. I think five Hollywood films, a TV series, various other things. Pierre Boulle also wrote The Bridge over the River Kwai. So, he was quite a gifted middling sort of French popular author with an imaginative flourish. This is a squat orangutan type in lightish blue, the mouth open and gaping. Certain famous scientists like Richard Dawkins want to extend human rights to the great apes. This picture could possibly be construed as a critique of that.

Here we have a truly ferocious and macabre work. Iron Breath which comes probably from the period of sort of pastel-like demonic fury. My middle period, so to say. Strong amount of paint on the paper overlying the pastel beneath. Some sort of cripple or cretinous retard with one eye larger than the other gasps in the midst of a metallic frame. It might be a development out of the fact that in Crowthorne in Berkshire there’s the hospital for the criminally insane called Broadmoor. In Broadmoor some of the most notorious psychopaths on the A wing or the one designate within the A wing have metal cages around their heads to stop them biting the ears of warders and fellow inmates.

Here we have Jaggta-Noga, a demonic presence from the same period of Iron Breath and the other sort of ferocious pastel in black reliefs. He stares on. One of Lilith’s children. One of Behemoth’s retinue.

Here we have a tribute to American popular culture up to a point. It’s called John Wayne’s Green Berets. If you recall a’right, Wayne made a largely forgotten anti-communist film a Western in jungle guise where the Green Berets or advanced American paratroops fought the Viet Cong in a war where America was destined to go down to defeat.

Here we have an earlier work an African mask Ju-Ju Jigsaw a savage mask of death and transmogrification a sort of initiatory covering of the front of the face. These masks usually represents an anthropological rite of passage where you pass from any form of childhood into adulthood in one ceremony. The background is green. Fluff or fabric tapers from the bottom of the mask which contains a lot of leather and metal. Mosaics transfigure the whole. Would you want to meet somebody after midnight wearing that?

Here we have of the return of an essential motif upon brown shading into gold. This is Punch and Judy. To have a bit of a differentiation we call it Judy & Punch. Notice that she is on the left side as a glove puppet and he is on the right. The left stands for death and transition. The professor or the controller of the Punch booth has both figurines in his hands. They’re over his head in the booth which usually consists of yellow and red stripes on Brighton seafront, for example. The children are screaming in front. The puppeteer, known as the professor sits in the booth under the stage. These puppets come up over his head. It’s a celebration of what I regard as a major folk art form the tragical comedy and comic tragedy of Punch and Judy.

Here we have a biographical statement of somebody known to me. A few of my works are portraits, just as there’s one abstraction, just as there are forms of art brut or child art, just as there are tokens of neoclassicism or extremist modernism. But occasionally I wish to do a relatively straight biographical portrait. Nearly always of a woman but occasionally not so. This is one of these pieces known to me. On greyish black one gazes upon the blue-eyed vista of the Nordic blonde.

Here is a part of a Shakespearean motif which consisted of two works spliced together and covering the same panorama, hence the use of the term diptych in the title of the work. It relates to Shakespeare’s sort of middling and early tragedy King John. Two guards, one larger than the other, one in fact a potential dwarf, under some arches with whole beards or sort of axe-stroke spear weapons gaze on. The other part of the twofold work is King John blinding the young prince in the tower or attempting to do so.

Here we have a simpler piece. When the transliteration in the ground behind the chess piece a knight. Knights don’t castle, of course. The joke-stroke axiom is that only rooks and kings can castle or exchange positions with one another on the back of the board. The planes alter behind the central motif. Purple limbs on a pawn is seen on the back to the left alone waiting to be taken.

Yes, this is perhaps my most emblematic picture of all although others might doubt that. This is Kratos which was probably first designed when I was about 18 or 19 and was overpainted subsequently. Sketches of this in an earlier modulation exist and are elsewhere on my website. Kratos is an image of fury that emerged in a modernistic way. I didn’t entirely know where I was going and so the architecture of the face and surround comes from deep within my own unconscious mind. The blood red backing with green beneath is also surprisingly appropriate. On a point of notice, the term Kratos relates to a Titan in ancient Greek mythology. It means pure power. The ecstasy either of a giant or a juggernaut. The amorality of the pre-gods before the gods such as Zeus and so on or Hera that have come down to us and at least have the possibility or prospect of moral consciousness. These Titans exist before in front of everything including morality. It is interesting to note as a byproduct of the above or possibly a footnote that when Jean Charles de Menezes was shot dead in South London at Stockwell tube station the shoot-to-kill policy of the Metropolitan Police as articulated by the commissioner of that time was called Operation Kratos. Obviously somebody at New Scotland Yard knows something about classical civilisation.

Here we have a delineation of Kratos yet again, Kratos II as against I. Delivery is different, the green has changed. The form remains, its treatment alters. Perhaps there’s a softening in the fury of the blizzard which the image represents.

Here we have a style depressive and mordant and Kratos. Kratos III. A stepping away from the original fount, fountainhead or trough of fury. Here we see a titan in reflective mood. Surrounded by almost translucent and phosphorescent swirls of oil paint.

A Leo or a lion crosses a zebra, namely a zebra crossing. This is actually based upon an image which is drawn from a form of primitive wood carving which I found in a charity or junk shop. The purity of carving straight from wood or from any other resource should never be lost. Although I have never practiced sculpture personally, it is truly a great art. Painting which overlaps with the corporeal and three-dimensional metaphysic of sculpture portends to the divine. One only has to witness, for example, the Renaissance work of Mantegna.

Here is another classical motif proving that I am a conservative, restorationist, and partly traditional artist of classic vintage as well as a modernist. A lion bites into the calf of a Grecian youth. Alexandrian in concept. Held within a storm centre of lines. Albeit within the heart of an orange rectangle. Leo Discus Bite is what I chose to call it retrospectively.

Here we have Leroux’s Gemini. A positioning of multiplicity. The two facial masks. One face, one mask, and yet reversed in a mirror of its own self come together. There is a fury of paint in the surround. Gaston Leroux, of course, was the author in French gothic or supernatural fiction of The Phantom of the Opera. A story which in turn led to the very famous silent film classic of the late ‘20s with Lon Chaney of the same name.

Here we have Lion-Hippo. Again, from a wood carving similar to the lion wrought before. This one is more solid. Less fugitive. Less appealing to the eye. More monstrous. And yet statuesque. It’s divided into rectangles of orange, yellow, and red.

This should be called Kratos IV, but I’ve called it Loki’s Maelstrom because it differentiates from the previous pictures of the same vintage. A fugitive Kratos now is beginning to disappear in swirls of black pastel. Less formally delineated. He’s becoming part of an abstract expressionist background of lightning and storm.

A politically incorrect piece called Louisiana Lynching. A clansman’s head in deep purple looks out upon a livery of light green arrested with fire. The mouth is a mosaic. Possibly it relates to the great politically incorrect piece of cinema from the tag end of the second decade of the 20th century just passed. This was D.W. Griffith’s film in two parts called Birth of a Nation.

Ah, yes, another erotic piece. A blonde Lovenest Supra lassos a willing victim. The hair comes down over one side of the face, the left side, to retrieve the pale blue of the resultant eye.

An early piece akin to the work known as Behaviourism. And this is called Lycanthropy Now. And lycanthropy, of course, refers to the culture of the wolfman as celebrated in popular fiction and would-be gothic cinema. First came the idea. But the idea emerged in the markings. In this case it is possibly a truly modernist work. On lightish blue anti-therapeutic art capers before you.

Another erotic piece, mildly so, possibly of a Swedish or Nordic-looking blonde on lightish blue fading into pinkish red beneath. Mammary Plus Yield. One yields to nothing but it.

Here is one of my religious pictures. On a paleish pink to darker pink to red surround and backing. It’s actually called Marian Holiday and relates to the cult of the Virgin Mary. From a block of alabaster or pure stone her form gentle as a synonym for the universal mother peeps out amidst a mosaic of daylight.

A more representational image follows it. It’s called Marlene Hopeful and relates to a postcard image of the great screen diva of yesteryear, Marlene Dietrich. The hair is violently red. The look greenish. Erotic and yet thoughtful.

Here’s another of my more iconic pieces. An even more boosted image of this particular presentation can be found on the Saatchi upload your own gallery website. It depicts the Marquis de Sade and is the second of three variants or takes on his visual delineation. This particular work just called simply The Marquis de Sade illustrates his mania. The madness of the swirls of yellow around him. The fury of the combative surrounds and asides. One eye, a monocle possibly larger than the other. He appears as a madly insane erotic clown with overly done and ripe red lips.

This piece is a take off on Blake. It’s called matter and anti-matter conversely. The one with the other. On a surround of lightish to darkish blue an image of God with wings contained in parallel bars of colour floats over Adam or the first man. The snake of knowledge and wisdom curls around his lower extremities and limbs. Unlike a similar treatment of the image by Michelangelo on the roof of the Sistine Chapel lightning doesn’t pass between the fingers of one and the other. Here the very temple of the humanoid receives upon it a gigantic grip.

This painting known as Mechanical Harlequin exemplifies the artist’s fascination with popular culture. With figurines. With dolls. Carnival, circus, and puppets. A mechanical toy slightly sinister. This figurine also recommences and comes back and is in turn depicted in other pictures. One of them that I can recall off the top of my head is Eric Galati’s Lear. Wherein this image, repositioned yet again as the fool or Tom o’ Bedlam associates with the mad king on the heath by his right hand.

This was one of my early primal or cardinal images which also spawned various parts I, II, III, IV, and so forth. It’s called Medusa Now Ventrix and is a sort of post-humanoid, partly metallic partly anatomical partly related to the death art of Von Hagens before it even came into mass consciousness and I in turn was aware of it. Hands grasp at a face which peels away to reveal the brain and jaw of monstrousness.

Yes, here we have a second version of Medusa Now Ventrix. It follows on before and slightly softens the issue and in turn the image. Pastel is used in a more thoroughgoing way in this secondary motif.

Yes, here is another of possibly not of the earlier images, but of the middling ones, but it portends in my estimation to iconic status. Known by my own reckoning as Mendes Goat-Boy. This mosaic depiction of the demonic with a sort of latticed eyes and mouth occurs against pure fire. Darkish pastel intrudes both in line and in colour mass.

Bird is returned as an alternation of molten fury, one can only experience the architectonics of play school.

Morbid. Less in the viewer or even in the artist than as a projection of societal woes. A deep brown tending almost to black with an invisible grey surrounds the piece. One half of the face on the left as the viewer’s eye looks at it is non-disclosed rather like the other side of the moon. One notices that the line here and a form of abstract calligraphy turned even on itself is the purpose of this sort of work. I personally believe that the use of linearity is cardinal to British artists in particular stretching from the caricaturists of the early 18th century like from the late 18th and early 19th century rather like Hogarth or Cruikshank or Richardson or Gillray through to the Ralph Steadmans of our own era by way of people like Roberts, Lewis, and Nevinson in the early part of the 20th century.

A fascistic piece of iconography this related to Italian Futurism shows Mussolini on a background of green. Biplanes fly above. In non-representational colour but represented effect the architect of Italian Romanism in the 20th century the world’s first skinhead glowers on. It’s called somewhat inevitably Mussolini With Bi-Planes.

Another erotic piece. Napalm Blonde. Enough said. After all it is on a background of blue.

Here we have what I’ve chosen to call a rejected film poster. This relates to the film which is available on Google video via my own website of a mask that is used by the central character in Venus Flytrap on a background of pale and almost fluorescent yellow reminiscent of the poster paint art and pop art of the ‘60s this mask is delineated. It’s open to form heavily patented representational yet lyrically coloured.

This is an early work called Neo-Classical High Jinx. It partly relates to a an academic artist known to me called SHP Steadman. Stead as some people call him and as indeed he has called himself was educated at the Royal College of Art and does superrealist portraits of a traditionalist cast. A classicist and a former member of the Grey movement a small artistic groupuscule that in British terms was related to New Slovenian Art that of course produced the rock band known as Laibach.

Here we have more birds themselves delineated on neon. They flourish they relate to the art in the Maudsley Hospital they move forwards to near abstraction.

Yes, here we have another image whereby a sort of Medusian figure devours a shadow in colour of the male. She bears down upon him. Gold surrounds her form whereas his, tending to the right, is viewed with a dirty pink surround.

Another work that relates to Marlene Dietrich. This one is called Nothing But Marlene. It possibly relates to one of those gaudy sort of Persian, Aryan-esque and sort of fake Orientalist films that she made in the late 1940s possibly with Korda and with other producers and directors. A reptilian form strangely friendly in its allure lies behind her. The eternal vamp never knows when to stop being what she called one of her biographers a soldier of love.

Here we have a purely classical piece which relates to a primary form of Hellenistic art. Hercules wrestles on blue the half-man half-horse or centaur known as Nessus. The whole point is to place a shirt or restrictive garment upon the creature the shirt of Nessus so that he loses his strength. The nudes are male and naked even if half-horse. Olympia On Blue is a tribute to classicism.

Here we have a tribute perforce to medievalism. This is taken from Chartres or one of the other great cathedrals. It’s a relief of the devil or Satan grasping a Christian interpretation of the tree of life. It will be three-dimensional Gothic in solid stone on a church spire. Violent red or scarlet superintends the whole. At the bottom of the image a snake the symbol of power in most Western forms of iconography pagan or Christian can be seen. An enormous dexterity of the mouth underneath the flaming hair and wings is also apparent. The extraordinary imagination whereby the Luciferian influence is perceived in Christian culture is actually a recrudescence of pagan law. After all one of the most interesting elements in say Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ is his female or androgynous depiction of Satan.

In this particular image called Orgasm One we see the primary heterosexual impulse of the male cleaving to the female and results of the same on red. Without such intercourse there can be no life.

Here we have another of the more primordial or cardinal images which I believe that I produced down the years. This is a piece called Otto Dix Eritrean. A skull, an anthropological piece with a limbed brain on fiery pastel looks to the left. Otto Dix of course was one of the key dark cynical highly edged representational German artists within modernism at the early part of the last century.

This relates to a classical painting in German and or North European art. Patcher’s picture of a particular archbishop forcing in that particular Christian iconography the devil to open and then change the pages of his own prayer book. In the original it’s on a lectern. The bishop has his hat and his staff. The devil of course is extraordinarily depicted as part tree man part human stick insect part reptilian twig. It will be noticed that even his rectum or anus contains within it a lascivious face.

This particular image is one of the most complicated and internally advanced that I have ever done. I sought like Wyndham Lewis with an image like The Siege of Barcelona relating to the Spanish Civil War in the mid-’30s of the past century to delineate an enormous number of internal goings-on. It’s called a Papier Mache Heads Live! and yet it relates to a photograph probably by Wal Lanchester the well-known puppet master and punchman or professor of a case of Victorian dolls. These are papier-mache figurines and Punch and Judy puppets that date from the 19th century. One thing you’ll notice is the grotesque grand guignol nature of the heads. They’re sort of fury and macabre qualities. If you look very closely amidst the fluorescent colour you can see the crocodile, you can see the negroid Jim Crow, Punch himself, the skeleton which is supposed to be his moral conscience considering the murder of Judy, you can see the bishop, you can see the policeman, you can see the devil whom he defeats in a concordance with a non-dualist view of morality and so on. It’s the spectacle of Punch and Judy which for the Victorians wasn’t entirely conceived of as a playlet for children.

Penile Birdy orange on red with pastel swirls surely more words are superfluous.

Now here is another birdie, fluorescent upon yellow. It’s called Piccadilly Circus Birdy, ubiquitously so, partly because of the well-known semi-photographic images on the other side of Piccadilly Circus. If you come out of the station or its multiple entrances, you see the statue, neoclassical statue par excellence, of Eros, but on the other side there’s an enormous advertising hoarding. It delineates Coca-Cola and sort of the garbage products of American mass capitalism. Why not chuck in a few birdies?

Here we have Pieta. Technically not a Pieta in the traditional Christian sense, because in those images, the Madonna or mother of the presumed God is cut down from the cross of Golgotha, and she nurtures or cradles his doomed head in her lap or similar imagery. An enormous number of great Renaissance artists and artists of all periods, um from Fra Angelico through to Buffet, say, with his stick men, Pieta at the middle of the 20th century based on existentialist discourse, a wide range of such artists have delineated the Christ figure. A picture on pastel and orange and fiery ground this, which has more to do with the crucifixion than traditionally any Italianate response to the Pietà a la Mantegna or Cimabue or Giotto or Velázquez or any of these other masters, but still anachronistically a figure screaming and transfixed on wires relates both to that, to this, and to other images of mine, such as behaviorism.

Here we have another in the sequence which is to do with Grand Guignol or Punch and Judy. Punch on blue at the bottom of the frame lies comatose, hence the title of the piece, Punch Lies Comatose, if you take my drift. He’s outside the hand of the professor which controls him. Punch lies with a hand up on a yellow square. He’s prone, dead, but because he’s right-handed and spiritually represents the right within this particular iconography, he can never die. Punch is never destroyed. Above him lies carnival, a lion mask, the wheel of the sun, and a depiction of the fate, the circus crier’s mask, comedy and tragedy combined in terms of the token iconography of the ancient world.

Here we have another in the Pulcinello sequence. It’s called Punch’s Tambourine. On a gold sky with some mountains in relief and green grass or wetlands before him, Punch looks out from a Luciferic booth. Faces and masks in green and lightish blue adorn the whole. His depiction is beyond good and evil, beyond left and right, eternal in its ordered and yet chaotic prism.

Here we have Punkette, a vision lurid in divided ochre and blue shading on white poster paint from the late ‘70s and early ‘80s of the last century gone. Was punk a revolution in accordance with the ideology of an ex-etonian like the cultural critic Jonathan Savage or just some white kids having fun in garages? Who can say? But here is Punkette, tending to the left even though an eye drifts sideways seeing what’s really going on to the right of center. Was it or was it not based, albeit in cartoon, on somebody I knew?

Here we have Raging Bull, less the cinematography of Scorsese and more graphic novel art, which reverts to the visual delineation of a Gene Colan or a Chris Claremont or a John Buscema or even a Steve Ditko. The cry “Ya!” in the corner right of the piece indicates uh the fulfillment of a graphic novel by somebody like Jim Aparo.

Here we have Raptor Head, tending to an asteroid moon around a circulation of fiery brimstone and alternative notes, a head which is reptilian, bling-related given the neck chain, and somehow fossilised. A heavy use of white pastel overlay the original image.

Here we have a scene drawn from this classic silent cinema. This is taken from Fritz Lang’s Metropolis in the late ‘20s. Rotwang, the mad scientist who has a metallic hand, the first of many villains with metallic hands to figure in world cinema, confronts a state official, a sort of policeman, with his robot woman, his sort of Igor or plenipotentiary victim stroke aide-de-camp to one side. Metropolis. Adolf Hitler wanted Lang to be the head of the German film industry as a result of this futurist epic.

Here we have an early iconographical picture called Rex Vivant. This means the king of the revels or the master of the dance. A modernistic work, it grew up autonomously on its own before I knew where I was going and applied the orange or light blue.

Here we have a piece of theatrical art, representational. It’s called Royal Court Ballistic, and it relates to a performance, indeed I think the first meaningful performance not done by students of Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker. The Welsh tramp Davies, who searches for his identity via Sidcup Papers, is played by Donald Pleasence. He stares into the foreground amidst a middling background of gold. In the background, Alan Bates throws the Buddha at the gas stove in order to smash any form of illusion. He plays Mick, the Cockney wide boy spiv and man about town. Violence is always subdued inarticulacy of postmodern language. Pinter believes that humans don’t communicate. They merely sidle up to each other with fawning mock aggressions covered by comedy, silence, and menace.

More birdies to provide an interlude of throbbing childlike pulsation. Think of a softball game crossed with a bouncy castle in a suburban garden.

More birdies, more gardens, more balls, more toys, more laughter, more molecular bouncy castles of yore.

Here again, albeit the colour isn’t representational academic, is to my mind a biographical picture of the folk artist L.S. Lowry. Lowry, once despised, is now an icon of the popular art of in particular the northwest of England. Manchester and Salford councils, municipal and otherwise, fight over every canvas. He couldn’t give them away and they laughed at his work, but now each one is worth the better part of half a million pounds sterling. But this picture is taken, probably by a Manchester Guardian journalist, photojournalist, towards the end of his life. And to me, it betrays what can only be described as an ineffable sadness.

Sappho was married. Sappho, the ancient Greek poetess, the first great female poet in the tradition, on the island of Lesbos, hence the term lesbian, a heterosexualist image which refutes the ideology of the pink triangle, but remains loyal to her memory. Two female fauns swoon with butterflies on yellow and gold.

Here we have a female bullfighter, I believe originally from Bolivia. A biography of her appeared about 30 years ago with a frontispiece by the macho-oriented American popular writer known as James A. Michener. Hemingway also was in love with her. Franco, the Spanish right-wing authoritarian dictator, wouldn’t allow a woman to bullfight in Spain, so she was essentially restricted to Latin America. Her face clearly delineates in female guise the mask of a killer.

Here we have an element of Beardsley-like draughtsmanship. The Divine Woman relating if only pictorially and metaphorically to Rider Haggard’s novel She. A blonde on a stool sits amidst penile architecture staring into a mirror.

This work is an early and iconic feature. Shy Titan a pre-god in Greek lineage, pastel upon dark blue oils with one enormous cyclopean red eye turns away from the viewer and hides in primeval shyness. Could it be the social insecurity of a pre-god? One remembers distantly that Mahler’s first symphony had the alternative title of the Titan. Those who came before the gods that even apprise the nature of their own barbarous morals.

A profile here fluorescent and fauvist populist and highly coloured Sibelius, the great Finnish composer of the early part of the 20th century. For some, the greatest classical composer in purely classical and pre-modern terms.

Here we have another classical motif that relates to a particularly British or English field of sculpture. This Skeletal Rebirth so to say relates to the sort of thing you will find in many a gothic churchyard. There’s an extraordinary mausoleum-laced churchyard in Stoke Newington in North Hackney in Central London. It represents high Victoriana with these extremely gothic mausoleums and heavy family burial places. They’re redolent of the late Christian tradition which was in turn very early within that subculture concerning the resurrection of the body. You have these extraordinary griffins and angels on graves and dragons and extremely luscious and romantic sculpture which is regarded now as deeply unfashionable yet is strangely arresting in its power particularly as these places are often grassy and unkempt and partly historically forgotten. Here we see an angel lifting the urn to reveal the skeleton at the end in accordance with the doctrine of the second coming. Allegedly to occur at the world’s end.

Soldier Number Two on a pedestal background of green shading into yellow loam beneath a soldier’s visage, bulbous, non-hieratic, brutal, partly Elizabeth Frink-like gazes on. Could it really be the nethermost face of Seneca’s tragedies?

Here we have another classical motif. Icons of this sort will be found in Greece in the Louvre and of course in the British Museum in the centre of London. Sparta! Sparta! my version of the 300. A Greek warrior looks out from the side with a hulking upper torso one shoulder to the eye. He wears the plumed headdress which is typical of all the warriors in Homer’s Iliad whether on the Trojan side by Hector or the Greeks under Agamemnon but championed by Achilles.

Here we have an early work that relates to the tradition of the speakers who were once icons of fury and the bizarre and the grotesque at Hyde Park Corner. George Orwell, the writer of Animal Farm and 1984 once described Hyde Park-4

I’m often asked which of Jonathan Bowden’s many books I recommend. My answer used to be, “Whatever you can get your hands on.” Most of his early work, republished by Alex Kurtagić, is no longer available through online retailers, and the physical editions that remain are largely collections of his speeches, essays, and interviews. It is usually these collections, including Why I Am Not A Liberal and The Cultured Thug, that people are looking for. Now, however, I will always recommend Apocalypse TV: Philosophical Dialogues, a book he jokingly refers to as his ‘magnum opus’, a description I believe is entirely deserved.1

Bowden’s prose has a reputation for being simultaneously turgid and rhapsodic, often sprawling beyond the limits of any obvious structure. A.E. Housman’s judgement on Swinburne’s lyric poetry could almost have been written for much of Bowden’s prose work: “There is no reason why they should begin where they do or end where they do; there is no reason why the middle should be in the middle; there is hardly a reason why, having once begun, they should ever end at all.”2 Apocalypse TV avoids these faults, partly because the dialogue form acts as a check on his rhetorical exuberance, allowing him to reconsider an idea, qualify a proposition, and test it through an exchange between two contrasting archetypal voices.

The two characters are named Jonathan and Samuel, though they refer to each other as Frederick and Thomas. In his own review of the book, Bowden explains that they are “obvious stand-ins for Nietzsche and Thomas Aquinas.”3 It’s no coincidence the traditional Catholic is given an Old Testament name: in the second chapter they debate the Jewish provenance of Christianity and of its relationship to the decline of the West, but Bowden delays a revelation until the final chapter, where he discloses that Samuel’s full name is Dr Samuel Meyer. Jonathan is unmistakably Bowden’s own voice, yet there is also something of the reactionary traditionalist within him, perhaps inherited from his tory father. He once said “There’s a northern streak to me. I’m very direct for a southerner. I come straight out with it, which is slightly odd. And maybe it’s my mother, because my mother had two personalities.”4 He was a combination of conflicting tendencies, radical modernist and traditionalist, revolutionary and conservative, and it makes him ideally suited to the dialogue form.

Since Edward Dutton’s 2025 biography Shaman of the Radical Right, Bowden’s reputation has been complicated by accusations that he embellished or fabricated aspects of his own life, yet whatever disputes surround his personal mythology, no such evasions are apparent in this work.5 He is brutally honest and direct, but as an artist he uses the mask to tell the deeper truths, and he revels in the theatricality of the puppet show. Outside of his film Grand Guignol, and his speech on the subject, it is as close as we will get to his own rendition of a Punch and Judy act. It is precisely this ventilation of repressed truths through artistic performance that runs like a golden thread through his political and cultural speeches; if Bowden can be said to have a philosophy of his own, it begins here. The book is thick-laden with subversive wit and a love for epigrammatic paradox which brings to mind Wilde’s dialogues more than Plato’s. Bowden declared “It is the nearest thing you will ever get to the debates between the Philosophers in Ancient Greece — yet it hails from a primordial standpoint.”6 But don’t expect a carefully reasoned philosophy, this is a polemic on cultural matters, often of the most obscure and taboo subjects. Troy Southgate comes closer to describing the experience of reading it:

“‘Apocalypse TV’ is like spending several hours sitting in a room with Jonathan Bowden and his Christian alter-ego.”7

Apocalypse TV is essentially a written speech. Anyone familiar with Bowden’s oratory will recognise this immediately, it is exactly how one imagines he would write. Unlike much of his other prose, it is eminently quotable, and this review is intended as a showcase for some of the finest passages from each of the six chapters, though I could easily have chosen many more. Although he wrote it in 1997, in the aftermath of Tony Blair’s election victory, it was not published until 2007, after Bowden resigned from the BNP and declared: “I shall devote myself to the world of the arts from which I originate and to which I shall return.”8 As we shall see, Apocalypse TV is both a snapshot of the cultural anxieties of the late 1990s and a remarkably prophetic work whose insights seem more relevant now than ever. Bowden was a man of apocalyptic extremes and he speaks to us because we live in extreme times. The 1990s now appear almost placid in retrospect, yet he sensed the destructive energies lying dormant beneath the surface of society, waiting to awaken in the decades that followed.

The first chapter is titled SEX, DEATH, FRED AND ROSE WEST, and is primarily a critique of the liberal understanding of sex and morality. The two characters are initialised as S and J, and I shall refer to them in the same way throughout this review. S points to a central liberal paradox, that acceptable behaviour must be based on a form of choice called consent (a “magic line”) while humans are simultaneously understood to be products of circumstance and environment.9

“Choice is good of itself as the act of an autonomous agent - who instantly ceases to be autonomous when he does something liberals or society at large find offensive! Their attitude is thoroughly paradoxical.”10

J replies that morality is relative, and from a liberal perspective the position is perfectly coherent. The mistake is to judge it by an absolute standard that they do not believe in themselves. The argument has obvious contemporary echoes, such as the attempts to restrict children’s access to social media while simultaneously extending them the right to vote. The discussion culminates in one of the book’s central declarations, where J lays his philosophical cards on the table:

“In my perspective, my dear chap, you cannot have civilization without barbarism. Barbarism is necessary for civilization. You cannot create great art without it - and art is the highest value in a society without God.”11

The next liberal idol Bowden takes the hammer to is the pornographic industry. J argues that men who consume porn are exploited victims of an industry that reduces sexuality to another branch of mass production:

“A lot in this society is standardised, mechanised, just so many units of production and consumption. The pornographic industry is a part of that cycle. It’s almost the sexual equivalent of the ball bearing industry.”12

When S pivots him back from this curiously socialist sounding remark to consider the “individual need” J answers by returning to one of the book’s central themes: the necessity of artistic and spiritual creation in modern society.

“The great sadness which the pornographic industry feeds off, in both women and men - men and women who are trapped in the body, who can’t go beyond the body, into their own minds, into culture, into language, into the use of their intellects and spiritual faculties to create.”13

The discussion then turns to what Bowden sees as the naïve optimism and snobbery underlying liberal anthropology. He likens the liberal faith in human perfectibility to the Pelagian belief that man is naturally good, illustrating the point through the case of the liberal novelist C. P. Snow:

“Snow is saying, in effect, that if everyone were a don, if every one were a scientist like him, if everyone had civilized and creative lives, perhaps the law would never need to coerce, and everyone would obey it instinctively. But, of course, life is not like that, and not everyone, thank goodness, is like C.P. Snow.”14

J ironically likens the inner lives of these “luvvies” to the serial killer Fred West who was introduced at the start of the book as an emblem of liberal society’s deepest horror. He concludes with one of the chapter’s sharpest aphorisms:

“It is often the ones in society who affect the softest values, who also have the hardest hearts.”15

Chapter 2 is perhaps controversially titled HITLER WAS A FEDERALIST! The conversation takes place in the lobby of a comfortable hotel with the two musing on the nature of liberalism over the sounds of a symphony orchestra playing Beatles muzak, which is intended to be symbolic of the dumbed down domestication of high culture.

“S: What our views have in common is the idea that this is a mediocre society, without a profound view of itself.

J: Yes, in which even so-called ‘high’ art does not deal with the most profound issues of human life and destiny. Everything has been flattened out: it’s the religion of the small man, the war of the small man.”16

The question of religion brings them on to their disagreements, whether liberalism is endemic to Christianity or a move away from a true understanding of it. This discussion is very familiar to anyone on the right-wing so I will spare the quotes but it is funny to see Bowden parody it. He clearly delights in staging the argument, and one can almost hear the relish with which he wrote the exchange. They agree to return to the question of the mediocrity of modern liberal society:

J: For most people, their ideology is neutrality: the safety of the bank clerk, the safety of the man in the middle. Of course, the minute people start really believing in things, and rejecting other things, you have division, factions, mutual distrust -

S: One of the main things liberal society cannot tolerate - the absence of concord.”17

This leads him to recollect the time he was kicked out of a London intellectual salon for saying he didn’t care about what was happening in Bosnia.

“J: Monsieur G was apoplectic. What did he say? ‘I was in the war, you know, and I killed many people; if I had a gun I’d shoot you now’.”18

This episode may well be autobiographical. Bowden frequently mentioned attending London intellectual salons in his speeches and interviews, and “Monsieur G” is almost certainly Jean Gimpel, whose The Cult of Art he cites elsewhere in his work. He notes with satisfaction that his expulsion places him in the company of the outsider artist Albert Louden, who was allegedly excluded for having “‘a thuggish face’. The implication being that he was too working class for a salon in Chelsea.”19 True or not it illustrates his fascination with the figure of the cultured outsider.

The discussion then turns to the possibility that liberalism may ultimately collapse under the weight of its own contradictions. Artificial political structures cannot indefinitely suppress human nature; sooner or later, bread and circuses give way to “meat and warfare”.20

“J: Concord and harmony, such as there is at the moment - itself debatable - only ever exists among peoples who are declining, and who need to huddle together for mutual protection.

S: Well, the federalists in Britain do, it is true, appeal regularly to Britain’s decline, her loss of Empire, and so on, to support their project. What other place can Britain have in the world if not as part of such a powerful bloc as the EU? This is their claim, at least.”21

From this follows a bizarre discussion of the necessity of European leaders to integrate politically incorrect aspects of European history, including Adolf Hitler, into their self-conception.

“J: This idea of ‘the end of history’ - remember Fukuyama’s book - seems to be casting its shadow over politics and society. Everything can be brought in, harmonised with everything else in larger and larger systems. It’s almost a Hindu way of thinking! Even the demons can come in from the cold.”22

Today this feels unmistakably of its moment, but ‘the end of history’ was itself a sort of recapitulation of James Burnham’s much older thesis in the Managerial Revolution, which incorporated Hitler into a broader historical analysis without treating him as an inexplicable moral aberration.

His closing comment would apply better to other elements that Europe has ingested in the last thirty years:

“J: It may collapse through not being able to ingest this sort of material. Maybe, in the end, there is meat that is just a bit too strong, too raw and bloody. They may well choke on it.”23

Chapter 3 ROOM 101, DOWNING STREET, takes us to a park in central London where Bowden’s two “puppets”, as he calls them in his own review of the book, discuss one of his favourite novels, Nineteen Eighty-Four, and its relevance to Tony Blair’s recent election victory.

“S: I knew that nothing had changed, everything would remain the same. One set of middle managers replaced by another set. I thought of Orwell’s book - Eastasia, Eurasia, who were Oceania at war with? It didn’t matter. Who was ruling them? Identities didn’t matter - just the Party. And so it seems here and now: one big party, Tory, Labour, Liberal Democrat - it’s all the same. And the electorate know it.”24

As throughout the book, Bowden uses a familiar cultural reference as a springboard into a broader critique of liberal society. From Orwell the discussion moves naturally to censorship, and the brief intellectual thaw period in the 1990s, when books such as the Bell Curve could find mainstream publishers. He contrasts this with the case of Chris Brand, whose The G Factor, he notes, “was dropped by the publisher and still hasn’t been published, and which led to Brand’s being virtually ostracized at his own university.”25 J then observes an ironic reversal in the boundaries of acceptable opinion, whereas in the 1860s and 1870s “virtually no intellectual discussion of sexuality was possible”, one could speak freely about race; but today the opposite is true.26

One of the great strengths of Apocalypse TV is the range of obscure cultural episodes Bowden draws into the conversation. One example is the Helen Demidenko affair, of which I was completely unaware (not to sound like Ron Unz).27 Her novel The Hand That Signed the Paper, which dealt with Ukrainian participation in the persecution of Jews in World War II, won several major literary awards before becoming engulfed in controversy. Critics attacked both Demidenko’s public comments on Ukrainian moral responsibility and later revelations concerning her own identity when her real name was revealed to be Helen Dale. This kind of cancellation has become commonplace now but to Bowden, writing in 1997, it was a harbinger of liberalism’s future, a society that practises censorship while claiming to oppose it. He was fascinated by this contradiction and determined to expose its irony:

“S: Most censorship in our society is, in fact, self-censorship. No one passes an edict, unlike Nazi Germany where there were public book burnings and everyone was invited along to watch.

J: Or like the Soviet Union, where a certain proportion of books were taken to a secret annex of the Moscow Central Library, and stored there. You had this amazing mishmash of Playboy magazine next to Solzhenitsyn, highbrow banned books next to trash which ‘corrupted’ public morals.

S: Well, they got that last bit right!”28

The dialogue anticipates what we would today call Woke Capital:

“J: You also have the phenomenon where enormous capitalist monopolies and multinationals are adopting left-wing views - synthetic, standardised, politically correct gestures. … corporations are adopting synthetic liberal positions in order to neutralise all hostility: environmental destruction, much of which multinationals contribute to themselves, endangered species, pollution, racial division – all of it grist for the capitalist mill. The system contains all contradictions within itself.”29

His final observation in this chapter is that liberalism survives by feeding on the intellectual torpor of the masses:

“It goes with the sort of mental sleep in which most people spend their lives, at least in prosperous and technologically advanced countries.”30

Readers interested in this aspect of Bowden’s thought should also seek out his lecture on Nineteen Eighty-Four, where many of these themes are developed at greater length.31

Chapter 4, ALIEN NATION, takes place in a cafe in York. Here Bowden turns to more explicitly apocalyptic themes: pandemics, environmental destruction, urban decay, economic collapse, HIV/AIDS, and the wider catalogue of disasters that populate the modern imagination. Reading this chapter now, it is impossible not to wish Bowden had lived long enough to give his thoughts on Covid. He argues that such apocalyptic narratives in the media serve a psychological function: they satisfy a public desire to feel threatened and energised in a world from which traditional religious frameworks have disappeared.

“J: But they don’t want too much risk. They don’t want too much violence, or danger, or pain, but they are hunting for some sort of prospect of destruction, some sort of manageable risk.

S: Naturally, when you stop believing in Hell - the real risk of endless destruction and pain - you look for a surrogate, though one you can cope with. Or maybe one you cannot cope with, if society takes its death wish to the ultimate conclusion to which it leads.”32

This echoes Burke’s conception of the sublime, the human attraction to experiences of terror and magnitude when encountered from a position of safety. The discussion then takes a strange detour into the possible overlap between right-wing politics and environmentalism, before the dialogue turns in on itself:

“S: We’re getting a bit self-reflexive. Should this be in the dialogue?

J: But I believe in self-reflexiveness in all things, including my monologues, and our dialogues.

S: Now you’re being self-reflexive about your self-reflexiveness. Should that also be in the dialogue? We’re in danger of entering an endless loop.”33

The joy of experiencing the banter throughout with his voice in your head is difficult to express, I urge you to read it for yourself if you get a kick out of Bowden’s eccentric humour. The theatrical structure of the dialogue allows the conversation to keep moving when the collision of ideas threatens to disappear into abstraction, which leads the discussion to deepen into an exploration of J’s metaphysical beliefs.

“I believe in an endless succession of Big Crunches. Disaster will happen, but we will go on.”34

Also worth highlighting is Bowden’s argument that drug use represents an attempt by the uncreative to artificially simulate a state of mind that the true artist reaches naturally.

“J: For the truly creative person drugs are unnecessary, if not a positive hindrance, whilst for the uncreative person they are pointless, and will never supply their creative lack.

S: So drugs have a certain kind of immorality about them on your perspective as well, don’t they? Drug-taking is at least in some cases a kind of ‘sin’ against creativity.

J: Yes, in a very attenuated sense of ‘sin’, old man.”35

I could have included dozens of other passages from this chapter, but the ones that demand most attention concern the internet.

“J: Because of the Internet it is now virtually impossible to keep many once-forbidden ideas from mass circulation. In that sense the playing field has changed greatly.”36

Yet he also anticipated the counter-movement that would follow:

“S: More and more of the Internet will be ‘tamed’ and domesticated, sanitized and filtered. And we may end up back where we were before it came on the scene.”37

This is a strikingly prophetic prediction considering it was written in 1997. Part of Bowden’s wisdom is in recognising that every energy has a double aspect: creation and destruction.

Chapter 5, ART ATTACK, takes place in a park near a London gallery, where J and S discuss recent exhibitions they have visited. The chapter contains one of the book’s funniest passages, Bowden’s attack on Tracey Emin and her notorious installation Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995, which J suggests should have resulted in her arrest.

“J: Pornographic artistes like Sarah Young make videos of themselves having sex with twenty men at once, so Tracey’s tent is hardly a novel contribution. She just stitched up a tent to say the same thing.

S: Ah, a tent you have to enter into in order to read little stories about her bed partners and her aborted unborn child. What an unsubtle concept: Tracey’s patchwork womb.”38

Picking up on a recurrent theme in his work, Bowden argues that modernity has failed to realise its own possibilities. He laments that television “could be an extraordinary art from - it should be total art, sound, imagery, movement - and yet look how poor most television is.”39 His comments on ‘cyber-art’ could apply almost unchanged to the current debate surrounding AI generated art:

“In the right hands cyber-art could also be extraordinary, but I doubt whether any minds currently at work, and which could make something aesthetic out of cybertechnology, are even interested in it.”40

This chapter is the most surreal in the book. It seems that Bowden wanted his discussion of art and his aesthetics to be a work of art in itself, or an example of his own peculiar artistic philosophy in practice. In the course of this exchange he produces the following line:

“Ah, so that’s where the missing genitals went”41

I will leave it to you to discover the context for yourself.

The final chapter SPEAK NOW OR FOREVER HOLD YOUR PC, set in a coach bound for Edinburgh, turns the banter to full volume. It’s the funniest chapter and serves as a reflection on the themes explored throughout. Bowden manages to accurately describe the oddities of our age in a style few, if any, other writers could match:

“J: Maybe there’s a subconscious attempt on the part of many people, at the end of the millennium, to revert to the lowest forms of life, behaving like insects and amoebae, reproducing asexually, pleasuring themselves in their multimedia sex-cocoons, like Japanese newly-weds.”42

He does an imitation of Bill Clinton with his secretary under the table, which I suspect would work better in performance than on the page:

“Hey Hillary, hey there darlin’, fetch me them budget papers while...oh, Jessie-Mae, oh, don’t stop, oh Hillary, can you check whether...oh Jessie-Mae, yeah, I like it like that, you’re fantastic, babes...your kneepads, darlin’...OJ...balance mah budget...hell of a way to eat a tortilla...mmmmmmm....”43

At this point in the book Bowden is having a lot of fun. But he’s also trying to be outrageous and politically incorrect, partly because, well, because it is fun, but also because he’s leading by example, pushing against the restrictions he has spent much of the book criticising. When S raises the subject of disability rights, J doesn’t miss the opportunity to be outrageous:

“The fact is, I do not go all gooey-eyed when the Elephant Man turns up on my doorstep.”44

S responds by identifying the broader issue:

“Political correctness has brought us to the point where you can talk about anything trivial until the cows come home, but if it’s serious, potentially divisive, ideological, then no, sweep it under the carpet.”45

This is the purpose of Apocalypse TV. It is an attempt to seriously examine subjects that Bowden believed the mainstream media avoided precisely because they were controversial or ideologically inconvenient. As J puts it:

“J: What they’re really interested in is Gazza and Ginger Spice!

S: You have injected some more soon-to-be-meaningless references in what is supposed to be a timeless piece of literature by us.”46

Bowden’s review, which I believe was written in 2010, recommended swapping out all these names with contemporary equivalents and the point would remain true. His impression of “a lisping David Attenborough” will probably have a longer comedic half-life.47 He jokes that it makes sense Blair declared his favourite novel to be Ivanhoe because he “would enjoy reading about knights jousting over fair maidens given that he has to look at Cherie over the breakfast table every morning.”48 When S questions whether to put that in the book J responds that “the only way we’ll have a chance is if we make this book the moral equivalent of heroin.” By which he meant “dangerous and addictive.”49 I should add that although there are some things covered in this book that I haven’t touched for hygienic reasons, it is safe to read, mandatory in fact.

The chapter includes a discussion of Critical Race Theory which prefigures later debates around wokeness:

“There has also been a more extreme but less successful version of PC - Critical Race Theory. It’s one step beyond PC, and aims at banning all texts containing generic references to classes of human beings, whether racial, sexual, religious, political, whatever. But ‘mainstream’ PC intellectuals want nothing to do with it.”50

S points out that even the term ‘sexual politics’ is a politically correct formulation: “As if sex was really a matter of power rather than morality.”51 J then deconstructs it further, exploring the origins and reappropriation of several PC terms. S concludes with a final condemnation of liberalism:

“Liberalism is a velvet glove which contains an iron fist. Thought crimes are essential to liberal thinking, which like any ideology wants people to think a certain way, and stigmatizes them for not doing so.”52

Bowden believed liberalism was heading for collapse under the weight of its own contradictions, but Apocalypse TV is not merely an observation of that collapse, it is intended as an artistic intervention. As he put it in his Heidegger speech: “There’s ruins around you, so you give them a bit of a push.”53

7

Troy Southgate, Book Review: ‘Apocalypse TV’ by Jonathan Bowden

Troy Southgate

Book Review: 'Apocalypse TV' by Jonathan Bowden

Apocalypse TV, The Spinning Top Club, 2007…

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2 years ago · 2 likes · Troy Southgate

Jonathan Bowden (1962-2012) was an artist, writer, and orator known for his speeches at right-wing cultural groups such as the New Right and the London Forum, he also gave many speeches for the British National Party in his role as Cultural Officer. Bowden argued that political action must be fused with cultural knowledge if Britain is to be revived.

He was a Nietzschean and advanced a forward thinking conception of culture that stepped over the reactionary preoccupations that had long mired the right in battles that were either unwinnable or already lost. Following his death, his reputation continued to grow through the widespread circulation of his speeches on the internet. Recognising the potential of the medium, he often seemed to speak not only to the handful of men gathered in a dingy pub room before him, but also to future generations who would encounter his ideas online.

Although he produced a substantial body of work, including books, paintings, and several films, he is best appreciated through his speeches. Among the most notable are: Credo: A Nietzschean Testament, Vanguardism - Hope for the Future, and The Real Meaning of Punch and Judy. He is extremely quotable and many of his concepts and turns of phrase have entered the vocabulary of the internet right.

The quotations collected here are drawn from his speeches and essays and represent some of his sharpest, most provocative, and memorable observations and exhortations. Many more could have been included. While some of his work remains unavailable online, and I hope this will encourage others to share his unreleased works, there is a wealth of content available for you to read, watch, and listen to.

Hear the voice of a bohemian intellectual, an outsider artist, a man who spoke to the future with conviction, vision, and fire.

I give you Jonathan Bowden, in quotes.

Thank you very much!

“All of our great thinkers are shooting arrows into the future.”1

“Truthfully, in this age those with intellect have no courage and those with some modicum of physical courage have no intellect. If things are to alter during the next fifty years then we must re-embrace Byron’s ideal: the cultured thug.”2

“I personally think it’s a moral revolution, not anything political, that will save the West, because all the technology is here, all the systems of power are here. You only have to change what’s in people’s minds. It’s very difficult though.”3

“No people can survive if it incorporates as a mental substructure an anti-heroic myth about itself.”4

“Just because most of the politics of this era seems to running well and truly against us does not mean that the situation is hopeless, because situations are never hopeless.”5

“Inequality is what right-wing ideas really mean. Right-wing ideas aren’t just a bit of flag-waving and baiting a few Muslims. Right-wing ideas are spiritually about inequality. The left loves equality. It believes we’re all the same. We must be treated the same. And they believe that as a morality. As a moral good which will be imposed.”6

“Inequality is the truth. Because nature is unjust, but also fair in its injustice. Because there’s always a balance. People who are very gifted in one area will have grotesque weaknesses in another. People who are strong in one area will be weak in another. People who are at the bottom within a hierarchy have a role and have a place in a naturally ordered society. And will be looked after, because patriotism really is the only socialism. That’s why the right appeals to all parties. And to all groups within a culture. Because all have a place.”7

“The danger of the ideology of the victim, which I don’t really subscribe to except as a tactic on occasion, is that you begin to think like a victim, and you begin to act like a victim.”8

“Most people, particularly teenage boys, have a sort of yearning for vanguardism when they’re early in life, and then they forget it as they get older, and it becomes smeared and smudged over by various forms of liberal orthodoxy.”9

“There is a degree to which we have to understand that in our politics all is open, and anything can happen, and the future is ours if we want it to be and that the point of the elitist view that I’m putting forward is that the absence of despair is always necessary for our way of thinking and our way of looking at things. I ask you not to despair. I ask you to look to the future and to the present and to the past. I ask you to remain in faith with vanguardistic and elitist views.”10

“One man alone in a room with a computer, a typewriter as it was, can change the world. A few people alone in a room, if they cleave to an idea whose time has come, can still change the world.”11

“I think that the worst thing that can be uttered at this time is despair, because there are more than enough of us to provide the vanguard which is necessary. The trick is to link the vanguard to the popular will and to find a way to link the vanguard to the popular will.”12

“What you have to do in my opinion is reconnect with that which is primal and that which is glorious. Everyone has it. People basically manifest it at different levels of intellectual complexity, but everyone has primordial emotions.”13

“Hierarchical elitism is so important, because if there is nothing above you, then there’s nothing to look forward to, there’s nothing to transcend to, there’s nothing to abide by that is beyond and outside one’s often quite trivial concerns.”14

“When people cease to believe in anything higher and above themselves they render themselves open to the prospect of slaughter in my opinion. Therefore, it’s very important if there are prior artists in the tradition to go back to the prospect of the existence of identity even in attenuated forms.”15

“Once a people loses its ability to recognise its own side, its own semiotic of being, it’s finished as a people unless things get so bad that there’s a return to forms of identity by looking at the very small vanguard of people who haven’t given up on them.”16

“All art begins with a folk. It begins with a people, and you go up from that, depending upon the intellectual level that you want to ascend to and lead in accordance with your aptitude, your mind, your circumstances, and your desire to be ennobled.”17

“In terms of the right, you can have a very low view of the right, or a sort of low version of right-wing ideas, or you can have a very high version of right-wing ideas. If you have the very high version, you end up almost speaking to yourself. If you have the very low version, you face complete demonisation by the forces of media power which exists completely against you. I personally think that, in this moment of maximum difficulty for our way of looking at things, it’s important to pitch the level as high as possible, partly in relation to the baton that you’re going to hand on.”18

“I am not arguing for a surrogate religiosity of culture, but I think that something which mildly approaches it is necessary. If people give up on the highest things that their people as individuals have created they are opening the space for themselves to be destroyed in the future by people who will not give up on their greatest gifts.”19

“Self-pride is very emblematic of an ethnic sense of purpose and also a joie-de-vivre in relation to this life. If you strip that out and take it away from people, they lose something, they lose spirit. They become morbid and depressed. Everyone needs great cultural icons, whether they’re interested in them or not. They are part of the fabric that gives an individual life some sort of meaning.”20

“The reason that I talk about Eliot, talk about Pound … is to keep alive these figures of power. These are figures of cultural power who should not be lost sight of. They are not just an area of hedonist decadence and celebration of everything falling to pieces. They can be an area of restoration and renewal both individually and collectively. People need the heroic in their own life, and considerable artistic achievements border on the heroic at times. Other people can feed off that and feed the nature of their identity.”21

“The point of high culture is to give ideas to our people even if they don’t subscribe to it. The point is always to live outside one’s own cultural comfort zone. The point is always to try to strive for that which is higher and that which is above. I partly preach artistic concerns and considerations of what I believe to be a higher type because I think they are a way to go for people who are totally blocked in relation to expression of their own identity. Lots of people today yearn for a clean and a new way in which to express their own identity.”22

“We need to revive as a people. We need to show some vigour and some strength again! We need to show some will again! We need to show some patriotism again! As our people huddle before the conformity of the television, some of them secretly think these thoughts. It’s time no longer to be secret about them. It’s time no longer to be sort of locked in rooms with mildly ‘incorrect’ thoughts. People have to ventilate those thoughts!”23

“We must make sure that essentially the only form of social concern that is left is patriotism, because it ties people together in their difference within a coherent group and in their inequality. It ties them together. It is the only social glue that is left. It is the only trump that allows individual freedom but allows group identity, allows both.”24

“Art is the creation in objective form of the spiritual nature of a people.”25

“For my purposes art is the delineation of meaning and form, art is radically non-conceptual in its objectivism, art is about representation and about objective reality albeit drawn in fantasy from the mind.”26

“The purpose of doing modernism from the right rather than the left is to insist that the world can be made again, is to insist on a new version of foreseeing and is to insist on elitism in intelligence, in knowledge, in perception, and in the results of what’s betrayed and seen.”27

“We have lost our dynamism as a people: mentally and in every other way. Our people are still quite strong when it comes to the fist, and a bit of pushing and shoving. But what’s up here, is lacking. A thug is not a soldier, and a soldier is not a warrior. And it’s the strength which exists up here which is the thing that we have to cultivate. I believe that strength comes from belief, in things which are philosophically grounded and appear real to you.”28

“There’s a concept in my philosophy which is called self-overbecoming. Where you take things which exist at a lower level, that you feel uncomfortable with, and you sublimate them, you throw them forward, you ventilate them. You take that which you don’t like, and you transmute it alchemically, psychologically, and intellectually, and you change it.”29

“If we can’t overcome the weapons which are used against us, we will disappear. These are the facts. And therefore we have to do so in our own minds.”30

“So my view is that we must return again to certain sets of ideas which suit us, that are cardinal for us, that are metaphysically objective and subjective, that see the flux and warp and weft of life, and its complicatedness, but know there are absolute standards upon which things are based.”31

“I am a modernist in many ways because I believe we created a modern world that has been taken away from what it could have been. The modern and that which preceded it are not necessarily in complete opposition.”32

“Stoicism should be our way. Courage should be our way. When somebody pushes you, you push them back. When somebody’s false to you, you’re false to them. When somebody’s friendly to you, you are to them. You fight for your own country, and your own group, and your own culture, and your own civilisation, at your own level, and in your own way. And when somebody says, ‘Apologise for this, or that’ you say: ‘No. I regret nothing.’”33

“One’s life is a bullet that goes through screens. You hit your final screen, and you’re dead. What happens after, none of us know. There’s either a spiritual world, as all the cardinal and metaphysically objectivist religions of every type for every culture and every group say there is, or there’s not. In my philosophy, the energy that’s in us goes out into everything which exists. That there is an end after the end, but it’s not finite or conscious. That’s what I think.”34

“I urge all white people in this era to look into the mirror and to ask themselves, “What do you know about what you are?” And if you don’t know enough, put your hand on that mirror, and move towards greater knowledge of what you can become. We’re all going to die. Make use of that time which remains.”35

“Liberalism also feeds on indifference. Indifference to the future and indifference to the generations that are coming in the future.”36

“Liberal society is cancerous, ultimately, of real culture because it divides the interconnectedness between the high and the low and prevents the energy coming up from beneath, from the bottom to the top. A real culture has everyone involved in the culture.”37

“Liberalism is moral syphilis and I’m stepping over it.”38

“It can be turned around. It can be changed. The whole system fears that this could occur. We must make sure that it does occur here in Wales and in Britain. This country is not over. We are still alive. There is still plenty to do.”39

“Speeches are about energy, and are about power, and about how you utilise power and how you channel it.”40

“I believe in a mixture of the past and the present. I’m an optimistic person, actually. I believe very much in the future. I don’t share the pessimism that most right-wing people do. Most right-wingers are pessimistic people and have a strong streak of Puritanism in their personalities. Although there are Puritanical sides to me, they tend to be part of a starkness and part of an aesthetic that is thrown beyond itself. ”41

“To me, artistic things are so much more important than anything else, and politics is a way to achieve certain artistic goals that otherwise would fall fallow.”42

“To have a future, people need to be aware of their past, and they need to be aware of the glory of that past.”43

“Political correctness is a methodology and a grammar. It is designed to restrict the prospect of a thought before the thought is even enunciated.”44

“People will be attracted in the future not by reason. They will read up with their reason once they have decided to emotionally commit. The important thing is to get people emotionally. And it’s to appeal to the forces and wellsprings in their mind which are eternal, and which underpin rationality. The power of irrational belief as spiritual codification, of mystical belief, of belief in identity, of the need for communitarianism, and the need to belong, is immensely powerful. Far more powerful than the anything the Left can offer.”45

“In politics you don’t speak to people’s minds. You speak to them physiologically. You speak to what’s underneath the mind. Do you think you can raise men up into battle just by talking to what’s mentally up here? You influence the brains of the men who will influence them. Your discourse will influence them by doing that, but you don’t influence them by doing that.”46

“I believe in the future. I’m a progressive, you see, in a strange sort of way. I just want to progress somewhere else. Nietzsche’s a progressive who wants to go on with inequality. The modern world’s happened. We’re in it.”47

“I’m a very conservative person, but I’m also a revolutionary. You need the two combined, you see. That’s why I call myself a revolutionary conservative, which most people think, “What is he talking about?” But it’s true. That’s what I am really.”48

“The right will only defeat the left and the centre if it’s more creative, more energetic, more radical, more intelligent, more sassy, cooler. That’s the only way we’ll win. The trouble with right-wing people, on the whole, is they’re sort of pessimistic, slightly unimaginative. They’re deeply conservative people. They’re very decent people, but they’re conservative. You’ve got to be more radical than that.”49

“The ’60s revolution is a cultural revolution, not really an economic one, but a cultural and social revolution and it needs to be reversed or changed. The energy can be taken and changed and moved in a new direction, you see? Everything’s about energy. Master it, control it, and you can control the world.”50

“Life’s totally open. Anything can change. A man could have an idea, not with a typewriter anymore now, but with a computer on his own in a room alone, a laptop and the world can change. Everything is possible. Our group believes that it’s all open. Everything is still possible. We’re here. We’ve had some nice wine and crisps. It’s not always totally as bad as everyone thinks. The changes that need to happen are moral and mental and spiritual. If they happen, enormous changes can occur.”51

“Greatness is in the mind and in the fist. The glory of our type is not behind us. We can be great again. But the first thing that we have to do is to say, ‘I walk towards the tunnel, and I’m on my own, and I’m not afraid. And I have no regrets.’”52