Savage Messiah
“One of the most striking fanzines of recent years is Laura Oldfield Ford’s Savage Messiah, focussing on the politics, psychology and pop- cultural past of a different London postcode. Ford’s prose is scabrous and melancholic, incorporating theoretical shards from Guy Debord and Marc Augé, and mapping the transformations to the capital that the property boom and neoliberalist economics have wrought. Each zine is a drift, a wander through landscape that echoes certain strands of contemporary psychogeography. Ford—or a version of her, at least—is an occasional character, offering up narcotic memories of a forgotten metropolis. The images, hand-drawn, photographed and messily laid out, suggest both outtakes from a Sophie Calle project and the dust jacket of an early 1980s anarcho-punk compilation record: that is, both poetry and protest.”—Sukhdev Sandhu, New Statesman
Savage Messiah collects the entire set of Laura Oldfield Ford’s fanzine to date. Part graphic novel, part artwork, the book is both an angry polemic against the marginalization of the city’s working class and an exploration of the cracks that open up in urban space.
Paperback, 464 pages
ISBN: 9781844677474
October 2011
$29.95 / £19.99 / $37.50CAN
Reviews
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The consumer-friendly face of neoliberal Britain gets an anarchic makeover in Laura Oldfield Ford's politically biting work. … No false promises of a brighter, better, more sanitised tomorrow here. Instead, she focuses on areas haunted by an urban dispossessed, which regeneration seeks to concrete over: city wastelands where fortress-like old tower-blocks rise, with their Escher-like walkways and bleak "recreational" open spaces.
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Oldfield Ford displays authentic gifts as a recorder and mapper of terrain. She is a necessary kind of writer, smart enough to bring document and poetry together in a scissors-and-paste, post-authorial form.
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This black-and-white, cut ‘n’ paste-style zine by the artist Laura Oldfield Ford, in which she traces her psychogeographical drifts around London’s grimey underbelly, has achieved cult status in art circles since its first issue in 2005. Be warned: this is a city you won’t find in any guidebook.
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There is poetry ... there is anger ... there are calls to arms ... and thankfully, there is humour.
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Savage Messiah’s fractured narratives, clipped sloganeering and topographical poetics have been, for the last decade or so, a kind of solace for anyone who loathed the coked-up arrogance, the intellectual and political vacuity and compulsory amnesia of the boom. It was a constant reminder that bad times were just around the corner.
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No exercise in style nostalgia, this is her recovery of punk’s provocation and politicization.
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Looking at Oldfield Ford's work, one sees the last three decades of urban flux laid out as singular snapshots—from the infinite, utopic possibilities of abandoned land that rave culture picked up, to the increasing civic and corporate control of space.
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What made Savage Messiah so interesting was ... its dialectical montage, its lost futures erupting into and over-running the seamless, optimistic spectacle of redevelopment and speculation—because it imagined other futures than the one being sold so extortionately to Londoners. It held out the promise of another modernism, of things no longer going on as they are.
Blog
Verso's guide to political walking
Inspired by Patrick Keiller's The Robinson Institute, currently on show at the Tate Britain, we present Verso's guide to political walking. We also draw influence from Will Self's Guardian article in which he pronounces that "walking is political" and suggests that the "contemporary flâneur" can be one "who seeks equality of access, freedom of movement and the dissolution of corporate and state control."
1. Wanderlust - Rebecca Solnit
The first general history of walking, Rebecca Solnit's book finds a profound relationship between walking and thinking, walking and culture, and argues for the necessity of preserving the time and space in which to walk in an ever more automobile-dependent and accelerated world.
2. Savage Messiah - Laura Oldfield Ford
Savage Messiah collects Laura Oldfield Ford's black and white, cut 'n' paste, punk fanzines that document her drift through London's margins. Illustrated with haunting line drawings of forgotten people and places, Oldfield Ford records the beauty and anger at the city's edges.
"A book for desperate times": Rick Poyner reviews Savage Messiah
In his stunning, controversial recent article for the New York Times, author China Mieville describes the London Docklands, the definitive Thatcherite regenerated playground of the rich as "a thuggish and hideous middle-finger-flipped glass-and-steel at the poor of the East End, every night a Moloch's urinal dripping sallow light on the Isle of Dogs". London is a city being overbuilt for the advantage of someone, but that someone doesn't appear to be the people who make London breathe. As Mieville writes, "Everyone knows there's a catastrophe unfolding, that few can afford to live in their own city."
'A prophetic apocalyptic sublime' – Savage Messiah reviewed in Times Literary Supplement
Reading Savage Messiah, Roz Kaveney finds moments of “inchoate skinhead anarchism,” sitting alongside moments of mixed-media art that, “approach the condition of poetry.”
Kaveney admires Savage Messiah for its ability to, “see in the scruffy and semi-derelict a sort of beauty, a prophetic apocalyptic sublime,” but worries that Laura Oldfield Ford’s London is,
a city of white working-class resistance; it is an able-bodied, exclusively heterosexual world in which the only ideology is a sort of inchoate skinhead anarchism devoid of theory.
Kaveney, writing in the Times Literary Supplement, describes the content of Savage Messiah as a series of, “collages, fragments of text, dingy-looking photographs, sketches of buildings, deliberately stylized portraits. She interprets Oldfield Ford’s low-tech approach as, “in part a deliberate rejection of the sort of psychogeography she associates with Iain Sinclair and Stewart Home, and sees as a deliberate packaging of the bizarre for middle-class consumers.” She highlights the ways in which the apparently derelict and run-down areas of London that are depicted in Savage Messiah become symbols of struggle against urban and political hegemony, writing that
[Oldfield Ford] sees temporarily occupied drinking dens, factories where alienated workers sabotage the machines that fill cheap chocolates with nasty fondant, high streets full of kebab and pound shops, as sites of resistance to the squeaky clean consumerism of contemporary Britain.
Upcoming Events
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July 13, 2012
British Library
Journeys through Urban Britain
With Owen Hatherley, Owen Jones and Laura Oldfield Ford