D is for Demonology
A rare solo exhibition by Sexton Ming
By Helen Murphy and Nick Pelling
I think it was the recent Royal Jubilee that prompted the question, where has the old punk spirit gone? For those of us who remember it, the jubilee of 1977 still echoes with the demented banshee-siren of Johnny Rotten in our generational head. But now, as we seem to live in a world of carefully sequenced demoralising crises, where can we get that angry injection of the contrary? I suggest you try upstairs at ‘1200 Postcards’ in Queens Road.
Sexton Ming
CREDIT: Jeff Pitcher
ODD SHAPED PEOPLE
This fabulous micro-pub brings us an exhibition, entitled D is for Demonology, by the somewhat subversive and uncategorisable Sexton Ming. We sat down with him downstairs in the ‘Postcards’ to try to make a little sense out of his oeuvre. Although, ‘oeuvre’ is probably a word he detests. In fact, he kicked off his little chat with your illustrious art correspondents by saying that “arty types make my skin crawl.” We smiled the smile of people reduced to human cliches. A dislike of the art world has always been a thread in Sexton’s thinking. Famously, he was part of the Stuckist movement, along with Billy Childish, his future partner Ella Guru, Charles Thomson and others. They rejected not just all conceptual art but the whole idea of art as a profound and weighty intellectual activity. They wanted just to paint pictures for fun – drawing stuff, and particularly odd-shaped people, for the crack. Ironically perhaps, their brand of iconoclasm was quickly absorbed by the art world – with a major exhibition at the Walker Gallery in Liverpool in 20O4, and, of course, pompous art theory began to grow around them. This did not go down well. As the cultural critic Edward Lucie Smith said, they had “a terror of seeming pretentious.” Perhaps that is why the various members of the Stuckist group, including Sexton, have apparently severed connections with it, and each other, almost repeatedly. If that makes sense.
Dysney’s First World
Actually, Sexton began his creative life as a teenage poet. He helped to create the punk poet collective, the Medway Poets, in 1979. Working in collaboration with Childish, they produced numerous little collections, with titles like The Old Onion of the Mountain. And from that, they also branched out into making music that sought to fuse together punk with elements of the psycho-hippyism of people like Frank Zappa, whilst all the while holding to a belief in the honesty of lo-fi awfulness. (Interestingly, Sexton cites a key artist from the psycho-hippy era, Cal Schenkel – the album cover illustrator of such luminaries as The Mothers of Invention – as an important artistic influence, along with more deep pedigree strangelings, such as Edvard Munch.) On top of that, Sexton is a musician and has quite a discography to his name, with yesterday’s kitchen-sink titles such as ‘The Beer Mat Chronicles.’
NOT GETTING THE JOKE
The exhibition itself consists mainly of works that mix up old newspaper-based collage, almost crude cartoonery, jolting captions and naughty word balloons. The scatological, subversive and surreal slip slide around in small frames. I suppose it’s true that people don’t really go to art exhibitions for laughs – I can’t quite resist the temptation here to quote Peter Cook’s famous line about the Leonardo da Vinci cartoon, that he “couldn’t see the bloody joke” – but Sexton is evidently quite serious about silliness. The titles alone are fantastic. My favourite was ‘Dysney’s First World,’ (sic) which accompanies a muddled picture of some sort of low-budget naff-erotic biblical tableaux.
But, at the risk of being very unStuckist, dude, there is a seriousness lurking in his work. It is of course the obvious seriousness in all attempts to debunk and fragment the realities served up to us by mainstream media. But with Sexton there is also a personal tussle going on. It may be a bit trite to say this, but we had the sense that creating things, whether it be music, poetry or art, is his way of dealing with other internal issues. Despite the shouty-funny nature of his work, Sexton is rather a reclusive individual who occasionally finds people and situations trying. Without going into detail, Sexton did admit that the death of his brother hit him hard when he was young. And subsequently, mental health issues have, from time to time made Sexton’s life difficult. His partner, Ella Guru, says that in part the exhibition is about, and born of, his experience of “living with” what is crudely labelled ‘schizophrenia’ – a condition which actually seems to be infinitely varied from person to person.
TOMMY TRIBUTE
But on the evening we met him, he seemed for much of the time to be having fun. He put on dark glasses to become as he said “cool,” adopting his role as DJ for the evening, he then did a splendid arm-flailing tribute to Tommy Cooper, acting as if the glasses had plunged him into total darkness. As a DJ he is also somewhat out there –rarely have I heard Save all your kisses for me as a deep exploration of psychic sound space. And that is the main impression we were left with above all – a show, and a man, devoted to over turning received sense, in favour of injecting little pieces of hilarity into our dull reality.
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