Under Construction Journal Issue 6.1 UNDER CONSTRUCTION JOURNAL 6.1 | Page 115

dealer Bent Lewis will later remark about Bobby – ‘so candidly about their work, like a commoner would
explain their snaps from Faliraki 99’, revealing a coterminousness of living arrangements, the quotidian
and artistic vitality blurred in a heterotopic space of speech like Marcuse’s ideal art; when Bobby
temporarily withdraws into his post-London haze phase, Georgie misses their chats about art 100 .
Development
Yet there are tensions within this collective. A return to Class and material politics of the commons is
imbricated with form, of the story and in the story. Although TSLS’ text flows between person to person
in a single paragraph like an acid datum, it is still narratologically structured around Bobby: through him
the text makes an early distinction between ‘looseness’ and ‘pure chaos’ 101 detecting a historical and
ongoing tension within acid-art. So too, we may bring to mind, acid politics, with the danger of dispersal
and Fisher’s own admonition to ground it in material analysis, albeit in oscillation with the ’to be’
Blochean future. The Nietzschean Dionysian and Apollonian, clearly, resonates here but also a cluster of
concepts including the Nietzschean concept of the mask-fiction, the ineluctable dimension of rhetoricity
and ressentiment.
Johnny is engaged in robbery from his own kind 102 within the eco-system 103 , the anxiety of a
schizoid-self torn between empathy and the ‘mask’ he must wear- for scoring cash as well as residual
toxic masculinity and class-interpolation . Art and sex are already conjoined acidically in subjects who
‘Ellen oozes more sex than a sloppy de Kooning’ 104 - Bobby’s fidelity to the art as well as to his
relationship bolsters rather than upsetting this conjunction when thought in terms of ‘health’ and
reciprocity. Conversely, Jonny’s life is a quasi-impotent cycle, given that he does not engage in same
play and is in an unsatisfying sexual relationship framed on pornography; supposed release from the
(Marcusean) repression of ego culminates not in health or creative energies – or the imbrication of the
100
It’s never been like Bobby not to chat to her – one thing she loved, in the past about the surrealists or space
rock or the [paranoia critical method ever since he got famous he hasn’t spoken about any or it at all (2010, 234)
101
He believes in spontaneity, madness, pure psychic automatism, childish colours and soppy brushstrokes but this
one’s just a mess. There were these in the 1940s COBRA who believed in painting with that total abandon like a
little child but of course you do run the risk of making a massive boo boo (2010, 8)
102
Johnnie and Ellen in bedroom having completely awful sex 15 [ when delivery intrudes]. Johnnie just yanks the
12” off him, closes the door shut and leaves the Express boy with a good old fashioned ‘Fuck off’ (2010, 16)
103
Having a hundred pills ticked […] playing hide and seek makes for an unsettled young man…eventually paid
them off a week later after kneecapping a youngster who owed £70 ticky (2010, 7)
104
Ellen oozes more sex than a sloppy de Kooning and at times Bobby wishes he was single again and free to feel
the completely different caresses and crevices of a completely different girl (2010, 67)
106