KLF: Chaos Magic Music Money

by Higgs, JMR

  The escape route from the nihilism of the early 1990s was, in the end, mindless optimism. Things could only get better. Adopting this belief entailed not worrying about the details. And it was fun! This, then, became the 1990s that we choose to remember, a time of Cool Britannia, the Millennium Dome and the Dot Com bubble. Ego-fuelling cocaine became the drug of choice, BritPop and the Spice Girls were on hand to entertain us, and the modern digital world created itself anew. Times were exciting again. We could not help but be swept along with that tide, and we found that it supported us to the extent that we no longer felt the need to worry about our foundations.

  How does this liminal period compare to the change of eras that preceded it? Hobsbawm pinpointed the beginning of that era, the 'short twentieth century' of 1914 -1991, as the beginning of the First World War. This was when the age of empires collapsed upon itself and the political realities of the twentieth century began. It coincides roughly to what the writer Susan Cain calls a shift from a culture of character to a culture of personality.

  This era's birth couldn't have been more different from its death in the 1990s when, having exhausted itself, it quietly lay down and died. The period of the First World War was a brutal, violent explosion, when the collapse of the Victorian narrative engulfed the whole world in sheer bloody horror. Everything - from our social structures to our relationship with technology and the nature of the human condition - was shredded before the unstoppable firestorm. Nothing survived. A time of mud, gas, and unimagined mechanised slaughter, it is no exaggeration to call this what it was: the darkest point in human history. True, the death toll was higher in the Second World War, but that war had been psychologically prepared for and made sense in the context of the time. No-one was in any way prepared for the actuality of World War One, and there is no horror greater than the arrival of the unthinkable.

  This was the period that spawned the Cabaret Voltaire. As has already been noted, the six members of this group share with Cauty and Drummond a sense of being haunted by what they did and an inability to explain or come to terms with their actions. This makes a strange sort of sense when we view this period as the liminal gap between eras. There was no narrative context at that point to explain their actions, because the preceding narrative had ended and the new one had not begun. If Cauty and Drummond had burnt their money earlier in the twentieth century, it would have been seen as a surrealist act, or perhaps a Situationist one. If they had done it ten years later it would have been understood in terms of the global anti-capitalist movement. But nothing is really explainable in liminal periods, as anyone who has attempted to understand the First World War using the Victorian worldview will have discovered. How can you explain an act, except as part of an ongoing narrative?

  The movement that the Cabaret Voltaire created is known as 'Dada' - a meaningless, idiotic word which showed their contempt for art itself. Art, as they saw it, was the product of the society which gave birth to it. It was the finest aspect of that society, its highest expression, and by the nature of its transcendent qualities it could glorify and even justify that society. What, though, when that society was rotten to the core? What if you lived in a world so misguided, flawed and terrible that it could create the unthinkable slaughter of the Somme? Any art it produced would have to be treated with contempt. Any beautiful expression that could in some way redeem the society that formed it would be unacceptable. It had to go, all of it. The sensual Art Nouveau style that had so defined the preceding decades collapsed almost overnight.

  Dada was anti-art. It was negation, a creation that saw itself as destruction. Its very nature makes it seem impossible to define or pin down, but its echoes can be heard throughout the twentieth century in movements such as Situationism, Discordianism and Punk. The word itself oscillates between being a verb and a noun, between having meaning and no meaning, between being an established movement of many years standing to being a spent force the moment the Cabaret closed. It cloaks itself in gnomic pronouncements that make it appear more of a disembodied conscious presence more than an art style. "Before there was Dada, Dada was there..." the artist Hans Arp has said. This is usually about as clear as it gets.

  The more you look at the Dadaists’ attempts to define Dada, however, the more you are reminded of Daoists attempts to define the concept of the Dao. The Dao is the central concept in ancient Chinese thought, usually translated as the 'way' or the 'path.' It also oscillates between being a verb and a noun, between having meaning and having no meaning. The Dao de Jing, the Daoist central text, begins by declaring that the Dao that can be named is not the Dao. As first lines go, this can throw the reader a little. What it means by this is that the Dao is everything and, because a name or definition is a small part of everything, that name therefore cannot be the thing itself. The all cannot be accurately defined, as any definition is limiting. Dao is, by definition, beyond definition, beyond 'is' and 'is not.'

  When Arp said that "Before there was Dada, Dada was there," he echoed the Dao De Jing which says that the Dao is all heaven and earth, and that the Dao existed before heaven and earth. In light of these comparisons, the Dadaists attempts to describe Dada appear as if they are describing something fundamentally similar to the Dao. This may initially appear counter-intuitive, of course, because the Dao is associated with peaceful acceptance whereas Dada is violent negation. But Dada emerged during the First World War. The Dao, at that point, would also have been violent negation.

  One point that many commentators make about Dada is that, whilst its intention is to destroy or negate, it is still the product of the very thing that it is fighting against. It is a creation of the society that it rejects, and can only exist alongside that society. In the words of the writer Greil Marcus, "Dada was a protest against its time; it was also the bird on the rhinoceros, peeping and chirping, but along for the ride." Marcus also discusses the philosopher Henri Lefebvre, "...an old man, whose life's work had been the investigation of 'modernity,' he said so queerly that what was truly modern about modernity, what was actually new, what was really interesting, was not its works - technology, abundance, the welfare state, mass communication, and so on - but the peculiar character of the opposition modernity created against itself: an opposition he still called 'Dada.'"

  A Daoist would be amused by Lefebvre's observation, for a thing to carry its own opposition is anything but modern. This is one of their most fundamental principles and it is depicted in the best known Daoist symbol, the Yin/Yang. This icon shows a circle, half white and half black and seemingly rotating as if the black and white elements where continually replacing each other. This constant flow between opposites is, in Daoist thought, the fundamental nature of the world. In the centre of the black there is a white dot, and in the centre of the white there is a black dot. This symbolises that each state carries the seed of its opposite - that the Yin always contains the birth of the Yang that replaces it, and vice versa, just as Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminati carried the seed of the Discordians and the music industry gave birth to the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu. Mathematicians also recognised this truth, once they gained a grasp on the nature of chaos. Whenever they looked inside chaos, they found order, and wherever they looked closely at order they found it to be riddled with chaos.

  Dada can be thought of as a form of Dark Dao, a path that was as sick and feverish as the era that formed it. Dao is an ungraspable concept that contains both the very nature of the world and also the way the world will unfurl. In this context it is no wonder that Dadaists could not define what they had done, as Dao both contains and is more than any single definition. In this liminal period, in this time between eras as the old ways destroyed themselves and before the new order emerged there was only this fundamental nature of the world remaining, an unnameable Dao that could only be implied by the meaningless noise 'dada'.

  The subsequent liminal period of the early 1990s was a mirror opposite, a small quiet death that has almost disappeared from history. It was here t
hat the K Foundation, with their meaningless name, performed the act that they could never explain or get over. How different, then, was the fundamental nature of their act of destruction? How close to the underlying nature of the world were they working? The undercurrents that were so briefly visible in the breath between two eras were still exposed. And because the money was burnt in this liminal period between two waves of history, the meaning of the act was not absorbed or dissipated by either of them. The timing, in other words, was perfect. The subconscious was fully exposed when the deed was done.

  13: FOUNDATIONS

  “Abandon all art now,' proclaimed the adverts in the broadsheet press, 'Major rethink in progress. Await further announcements.” It was August 1993, over a year since the end of the KLF. The adverts were placed by Drummond and Cauty's latest alias, The K Foundation. After they stopped making music, Drummond and Cauty formed an art foundation.

  This in itself is unusual. There is no precedent for musicians working together in a non-music related capacity after their band has split up. At best, you can point to members of bands who have later married. Cauty and Drummond's continued working relationship may even be unique in musical history. It suggests that their work was not actually about music, and that the music was a means to an end rather than the ultimate goal of their partnership. Even when the music stopped, the work continued.

  In general, the art world took a dim view of The K Foundation. Their activities began shortly after The KLF split, when a series of adverts were placed in the press complete with Illuminatus!-style pyramid symbols and cryptic slogans such as 'Time Is Running In' or 'Divide and Kreate.' They were initially concerned with the nature of time, and promised a move away from our current understanding of time into a more 'eternal' state. These adverts were frequently described as being Situationist inspired, but The K Foundation were not détourning existing advertisements. They were paying many thousands of pounds to create new advertisements. They may not have been advertising anything, other than themselves, but it was a noticeably different approach than the one the Situationists took.

  The 'Abandon All Art Now' advert of August 1993 was the first that concerned itself with the subject of art rather than time. It was followed two weeks later by another, which read, "It has come to our attention that you did not abandon all art now. Further direct action is thus necessary." They went on to announce a short-list of four artists for their 'worst artist of the year prize,' whose work would be exhibited at the Tate. As that short-list was the same as that year's Turner prize, which was the reason for their work appearing at the Tate, this was first assumed to be nothing more than a joke.

  It soon became apparent, however, that this was not the end of it. The K Foundation prize was £40,000, exactly twice that awarded by the Turner Prize. On the day of the Turner award, 23rd November, they bought TV advertisements around the broadcast of the ceremony on Channel 4. They announced that their 'winner' was the artist Rachael Whiteread, seemingly before it was announced that Whiteread had also won the Turner Prize. Their forty grand prize was nailed to a board and chained to the railings outside the Tate. Whiteread refused to come and collect it, and was informed that if she didn't claim it by 11pm, it would be burnt.

  11pm arrived and Whiteread still didn't show. The money was doused in petrol. Gimpo fumbled with the matches. It was just about to be torched when Whiteread appeared, deeply irritated, and said that she would donate the money to young artists.

  If she had been delayed, then Drummond and Cauty's futures could have been very different. The burning money on the steps of the Tate would have had a far greater impact on the art world than anything else the pair had planned, and the later burning of the million pounds would probably never have happened. As it was, their actions produced a lot of comment and discussion, but also a deeper sense of annoyance and dismissal.

  The art world assumed an air of polite remove from the activities of the K Foundation from then on in, and it soon became apparent that no suitable gallery was going to host their inaugural exhibition. This was called Money: A Major Body of Cash, and largely consisted of what money the pair still had from The KLF years nailed to things. The key piece was called Nailed To The Wall, and consisted of a million pounds in fifty pound notes nailed to a board. The reserve price for this was going to be half a million pounds. The purchaser could therefore double their money by simply taking it apart. If they hung it on the wall, however, the value of the notes would decrease over time, but the value of the art might well increase. The exhibition, then, raised many thorny issues about the relationship between art and money. Or at least it would have done, if a gallery had been found to put it on.

  The art world is a very different place to the music industry. It is considerably less sure of itself. The music industry knows that the power of a perfect song is universal and that there is no way to deny this. This is why, as previously noted, it can absorb any attack. The art world is on far shakier ground. To generalise, the products of the art world can be very easy to deny. The importance of the strange magical glamours of context and reputation are paramount, for it is only with context and reputation that careers are built. The attack on the Turner Prize came dangerously close to damaging these vital spells, so the art world had no choice but to close ranks and keep them out.

  A crucial tool in this respect is the art world's ability to declare who is or is not an artist. In their view, the K Foundation were not artists. As a gallery owner put it in the BBC documentary about the burning, "I just don't think you can want to be an artist, you're either an artist or you're not an artist." The remains of the burnt money, in this context "would have been art - if they had been made by an artist." To be accepted as an artist, it is usual to be young, dedicated and fresh from a good art school. It is not acceptable to have done a different job and become an artist later in life. Of course, galleries can usually be found to put on exhibitions by 'dabbling' musicians, but the art world sees these much the same way as the music world sees novelty singles. They're not what it's about, basically, and while they can be a bit of fun and can bring in useful foot traffic to a gallery, they are not worth risking context or reputation over.

  Lacking a gallery or art world acceptance, The K Foundation did what they could. They exhibited the work to the press in a field near Heston Service Station, while armoured cars painted orange drove around blasting out ABBA's 'Money, Money, Money.' But lacking a gallery called for a rethink, and that rethink led to the decision to simply take the million pounds and burn it.

  That was how this was always going to end, wasn't it? From the first KLF record Burn The Bastards onwards, it was always going to end with flames.

  There was some thought about staging this burning at a gallery but that was quickly dismissed. If it was done at a gallery, people would look at it as art. It may be bad art or good art, but it would definitely be art. And that felt wrong, somehow, even to an art foundation. That wasn't what this was about.

  Was it Art? That was the key question on the adverts to promote screenings of Watch The K Foundation Burn A Million Quid. The K Foundation was, after all, an art foundation. Cauty and Drummond may not have been actively working in the art world after the KLF, but they were certainly hectoring and bothering it from the sidelines. Even for those who felt that what they did didn't cut it as art, it still appeared that they were trying to make art.

  Of course, the question of 'was it art?' is complicated by the general lack of agreement about what 'art' actually is.

  It is interesting to remember what Charles Shaar Murray wrote, when he reviewed Drummond's book 45 for The Independent. "Drummond is many things, and one of those things is a magician. Many of his schemes [...] involve symbolically-weighted acts conducted away from the public gaze and documented only by Drummond himself and his participating comrades. Nevertheless, they are intended to have an effect on a worldful of people unaware that the act in question has taken place. That is magical thinking. Art is magic, and so is p
op. Bill Drummond is a cultural magician..."

  'Art is magic...' This is also a quote from Illuminatus!, as those are words used by a Discordian called Mavis in the first volume of the book. It is Alan Moore's view as well. He does not mean this as a vague generalisation or a touchy-feely feel-good slogan. He means it literally. Magic is not a science and it is not a religion, despite the efforts of people to define it as such. Magic is art - or the Art, if you prefer. Writing a book or painting a picture is like pulling a rabbit out of a hat - you are producing something out of nothing. A thing now exists in the world that was not there before.

  Viewed in this context, the history of magic suddenly starts to make a lot more sense. A grimoire was a grammar. A spell is to spell. In the beginning was the Word. The trappings of magic can be equally read as the trappings of creation. Song, dance, performance, recitals, music and pantomime can all be seen to have their roots in the magical practices of tribal shamen. Opera itself was the creation of alchemical thinking, an art form that included all other art forms within it.

  After all, what was magic for, exactly? It doesn't produce any useful scientific discoveries. For all its talk of great power, those who dedicate their lives to it have a notable tendency to end up alone and in dire poverty. On the other hand, there is an abundance of great art that has been produced by those with magical interests, be they Mozart, W.B. Yeats, William Blake, Dali, Elgar, Mondrian and so on.

  As everyone from magicians like Moore to the most rational scientist will tell you, magic is only in the mind. But this, of course, is also the realm of art - it's the role of art to explore and illuminate and express this very territory. In Moore's view, re-establishing and clarifying the association between art and magic would be beneficial in two main aspects. Firstly, it would give the practice of magic a purpose. And secondly, it would give the art world a shot in the arm and produce art of greater wonder and illumination than the half-arsed fumblings it has been content with of late.