The Life and Times of Anthony Samuelson

http://www.samuelson.co.uk/gallery2/main.php?g2_itemId=90

INDEX TO THIS PAGE

1. The story of the Happening on London Bridge as related to Antiques and Art Independent magazine and an Introduction to this page.

2. BBC report of the happening published on its web site later the same day here
(with two further broadcast links within the article)

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1. Article in Antiques and Art Independent Magazine

The following article was published in a slightly shortened form in the magazine Antiques and Art Independent a few weeks after the event. After a passage of almost nine years this present web site provides an opportunity to honour those brave ‘Bridgers who participated. They may not have won the Turner Prize but they earned the enduring gratitude of the organiser Anthony Samuelson.

A great deal of the content of the web site (londonbridge29may.com) set up to facilitate and record the event has been preserved and will be put up on this web site as time permits. Included will be a large number of photographs. It is hoped to make available copies of the 12 minute video (plus 6 minutes of experimental walking footage) in time for the tenth aniversary next year. If you were involved in the happening please use the London Bridge blog to share your reminiscences.

It should be noted that the article that follows concludes with two paragraphs forecasting further happenings in Venice and New York which, in fact, were never realised. For several years, however, happenings were arranged for concert-goers attending the Last Night of the Proms at the Royal Albert Hall. Each year a different design of ears would be distributed. The standard stock shot of patriotic Britons wearing evening dress and very large Union Jack ears singing Land of Hope and Glory from a Royal Albert Hall box still frequently appears in newspapers and magazines. The ears are directly descended from the Accustomisers and Art-iz-Us ears seen on London Bridge for a brief moment in time.

Do not allow the last paragraph of the artilcle to confuse you. The dedicated web site, londonbridge29may.com, the first of its kind, a few weeks later took itself off to a retirement home for dot coms, somewhere in cyberspace.

The artistic happening on London Bridge

Earlier this year, on the last Friday in May, extraordinary scenes were being witnessed on London Bridge. It was the morning rush-hour when 40,000 commuters cross the bridge on their daily trek from London Bridge railway station on the south side of the River Thames to their offices in the City of London.

This was a rush-hour unlike any other before or since because on this occasion some 2000 of those setting foot on the bridge elected to participate in an artistic happening by wearing prominent cardboard ears bearing the message: “Art-iz-Us”. 386 of them went even further by allowing their names to be put forward for the 1998 Turner Prize - nominations for which were due to close 48 hours later.

In a few days time the 1998 exhibition of the works of the four artists shortlisted for the prize will open at the Tate Gallery. The 386 nominees and their fellow veterans of the London Bridge artistic happening will be no where in view.

Anthony Samuelson, who organised the happening and has others planned, says that it was never very likely that the Tate Gallery would want to sit an extra 386 artists down to the Awards Dinner “…but the emotional impact of the event on everyone was so overwhelming that, in the end and against all the odds, it wasn’t only me who began to think that it might just happen.”

Anthony Samuelson now tells the story behind the story.

The campaign to create an artistic happening on London Bridge got underway on a rainy, blowy day early in March when a girl huddled under an umbrella appeared midway along wide pavement which runs along the eastern side of the bridge clutching a handful of leaflets announcing that there was to be an artistic happening on the Bridge. She just about survived but her umbrella, which blew inside out, did not.

She was present on the bridge on a number of days following but there were few takers for the leaflet. The most ever handed out in a single day was fourteen. The “Bridgers”, as we came to call these commuters who regularly cross the bridge, walk briskly at a constant four miles an hour. Eyes fixed straight ahead, never pausing in their stride, never smiling and never speaking. These are serious people (”serious” as the French would use the word) and they form an iconic image which has been much favoured by illustrators, photographers and newsreels down the ages seeking to portray a moving tide of humanity on its way to work in the offices and banks and exchanges which together comprise the financial hub of the nation.

Finding a means of communication was obviously going to be the key to whatever success might attend our efforts. On the plus side, the same people are in the same place at the same time every weekday. They talk among themselves in their work place and on the trains. If one were able to get through to just some of them it would be like throwing a stone into a pool. Against this it was evident that even those whose curiosity was aroused and would indicate that they were minded to take a leaflet would not slow down for a moment to enable the transfer to be made. Either the leaflet was within the space bounded by their outstretched finger and thumb or the moment was lost. Such is the peer behaviour among the Bridgers.

To meet this situation a succession of leaflets was produced, the later leaflets foreshadowed in earlier leaflets. First came Leaflet Red, then Leaflet Orange and then Leaflet Green - distinguishable from each other by coloured borders. Each leaflet would remain on distribution for several days and each would be publicised on a series of posters fixed to wooden poles which were in turn secured by rubber bungies to the railings separating the pavement from the traffic thundering along the carriageway. “Thundering” is the right expression. On windy days the buses created a vortex which snapped the poles supporting the posters in half.

Leaflet Red announced the date of the happening, Friday 29 May with every member of the public walking across the bridge invited to take part. A “semi-dress rehearsal” would be held two days earlier and the happening would be entered for the 1998 Turner Prize. “There is a complication concerning the Turner Prize nomination” said the leaflet “…but that the happening will be nominated is not in doubt.”

The “complication” referred to somewhat obliquely was that I myself, being of a certain age, was not eligible for nomination. In the case of the Turner Prize the certain age is upon you the moment you blow out the candles on your fiftieth birthday cake. In my case, nineteen years ago.

The Turner Prize is presided over by an august body known as the “Patrons of New Art” the chairman of which, it just so happens, is a partner in a leading City firm of Solicitors, Simmons & Simmmons, of whom I have been a client for well over a decade. This seemed to be a lucky break inasmuch as I could write to him telling of my plans to mount an artistic happening on London Bridge by “earing it up” without him thinking that any reply would one day feature in a book by Henry Root. I asked for the age-fifty cut-off to be done away with. He replied saying that it was too late to do anything about it for the 1998 award but that his committee would review it later. Of this review there is, as yet, no sign.

I had been wondering how much to say to the Bridgers, and when. I decided to stop shilly-shallying around and in the next leaflet, Leaflet Orange, I went for broke. What with our regular presence on the bridge and the repeated use on the posters of the phrase “artistic happening” we were by now handing out hundreds of copies of the leaflet a day. the phrase “artistic happening” pushes a lot of buttons and a reference to the Turner Prize even more. It was still almost never that anyone paused in their stride to take a leaflet but they began to aim themselves twenty paces out and we got better at effecting the transfer. As in relay racing, practice makes all the difference.

On a fine day the Bridgers would read the leaflet as they continued their passage across the bridge. The look of incredulity on their faces, sometimes accompanied by outright laughter, as Leaflet Orange spelled out what was expected of them will live with me till my dying day.

“The projecting ears are such a prominent feature that the headwear is customarily referred to as “ears.” (Said Leaflet Orange.) “It is thus inevitable that the artistic happening planned for 29 May will become known as the “earing-up” of London Bridge. It is appreciated that such terms are unhelpful both as regards winning the support of members of the public invited to participate and in its immediate appeal to the Great and Good of the world of modern art in whose gift the Turner Prize is. It is considered better to meet the problem head-on at an early stage than to engage in a futile attempt to smother it with high-falutin art-speak.”

Leaflet Orange went on to explain that the semi-dress rehearsal would take the form of the distribution of a simple headband with no ears, designed to be worn in the domestic environment. Called “accustomisers” these headbands were designed to get the Bridgers used to the idea of having something on their head and in the hope that they would receive the advice and encouragement of family and friends concerning their participation on 29 May.

The reverse side of Leaflet Orange was entirely taken up by an account of the Turner Prize in the form of Questions the Bridgers might ask and Answers. Who can nominate an artist for the Turner Prize? Any member of the public. Can anyone nominate anyone regardless of whether they have any artistic talent? You could nominate your dustmen for the artistic way they spill rubbish all down you garden path when they empty your bins. How do you jump the age barrier? By me nominating everyone walking across London Bridge on the morning of 29 May (who are under age 50, that is). Who will prepare the exhibition of work and who get to keep the £20,000 prize money? I will. You do. But you will have to share it with the other nominees walking across the bridge.

Leaflet Orange also announced a development which was to turn out to be of the utmost significance. A dedicated web site for the happening had been established. From that moment the array of posters along the railings included a final poster saying “Daily Bulletins on www.londonbridge29may.com” which not only prompted Bridgers to call up the site on their office computers but served to remind everyone that the date was the 29th of May.

In the weeks that followed the web site attracted a lot of activity and some favourable publicity in the internet media. The site included a response form which visitors to the site could use to send in their views and questions on the happening anonymously if they wished. This facility generated a deal of incoming messages, every one of which (favourable or unfavourable to the endeavour) was posted up into a correspondence file along with my reply for everyone else to read and comment upon if they wished. In artistic terms this element of interactivity represents a new frontier and it captured the imagination of many Bridgers. It was probably the single most important factor in the decision of so many of them to step out of their skins when the day arrived.

Leaflet Orange marked something of a turning point in relations with the Bridgers in that we began to get an occasional nod or a “good morning” or even a smile and after a few days of Leaflet Orange they began to ask for Leaflet Green. All conversations were held with at least one of the participants moving at four miles-an-hour so it would be wrong to suppose that any extensive dialogue was taking place, but it was a hopeful sign nevertheless.

Leaflet Green, when it came, carried the text of the Turner Prize nomination card, actual distribution of which would take place a few days later. With £20,000 of prize money at stake it had to be worded carefully - particularly as I wanted to ensure that the copyright in the works of art themselves, which is say the ears and so on, remained with me. I dislike asking anyone to sign something, whatever it is, that they have never seen before.

Leaflet Green also had fun with the Tate Gallery’s famous bricks. Until I genned-up on them for the leaflet I had not realised that they were not the genuine original bricks. What happened was that the sculptor Carl Andre, not finding a buyer for his 120 bricks arranged in a neat pattern in 1966, returned them to the supplier for a refund. Six years later the Tate, having seen a photograph of the bricks, arrives in New York cheque in hand. Whereupon the sculptor re-constitutes the work with more or less similar bricks under the name “Equivalent VIII”.

Leaflet Green pointed out that there were two important lessons to be drawn from “the Bricks” so far as the London Bridge event was concerned. The first being that nothing beats a sexy name. Would the Tate have paid £2000 odd and shipped the bricks across the Atlantic if the work had been entitled “DIY”? The name “Art-iz-Us” by which the coming artistic happening would be tagged was still shrouded in mystery so far as the Bridgers (and everyone else for that matter) were concerned - but it would turn out, I felt, to be seen as a sexy name. Nothing, I would hasten to add, not even “Equivalent VIII”, comes within a cruise missile distance of “The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, Even.”

The second fundamental principle which “the Bricks” underline is, quite simply, that when you are talking conceptual art it does not matter who makes it - it is what is done with it that counts. The ears might be my creation but it was what the Bridgers were going to do with them which would make the happening. Since a happening is whatever happens, even if no one at all would be willing to wear them it would still be a happening.

The Tate Gallery maintains, by the by, that the open market value of the bricks is now upwards of £150,000. If this is so, their’s is the last laugh.

The weather in the days leading up to Friday 29 May was on the whole dreadful. Eastwardly there is nothing between London Bridge and the Urals and when the wind and rain whips in from that direction the Bridgers lean over diagonally and scuttle across with their heads buried in their chests as quickly as they can. Wednesday was Accustomiser Day and was doubly important because attached to the headbands was the form for completion by those wishing their name to go forward as a Turner Prize nominee. It was a miserable rainy day and we only gave out 20% of the number of accustomisers (the print run was 5000) which we had brought with us. To make matters worse, I had recklessly decided to have different accustomisers for men and women, a pyjama stripe styling for the former, little rose buds on a pink ground for the latter. This would make handing them out on a fine day difficult. On that Wednesday it was a near impossibility.

Thursday 28 May was Brochure Day, the brochure taking the form of a broad sheet upon which the entire correspondence file from the web site had been downloaded for the benefit of Bridgers not on the internet.

The brochure also contained a number of pictures of London Bridge in its several manifestations down the centuries harvested from various libraries and photo archives. Also included was a photograph of the predecessor London Bridge in the course of reconstruction at Lake Havasu, It seems fairly clear that when it was purchased in the late ’60s the Havasu City fathers thought they were getting Tower Bridge. To their credit they put a brave face on things and laboriously re-assembled their numbered stones across a tract of dry land (later scooped out and filled with water) to produce as ugly and nondescript a bridge as there is anywhere in Christendom. But it was, and is, a genuine London Bridge and this alone was enough to put the resort city in the middle of the Arizona Desert well and truly on the map. Lake Havasu’s bridge was built (first time around) in 1830 to replace the beautiful structure which at one time had famously supported a self contained urban landscape and the par-boiled and tarred heads of traitors and which survived many centuries. In comparison the Lake Havasu bridge was not even middle aged by the time it was transported across the Atlantic, but it was already too old to be entered for the Turner Prize.

Anyone thinking of doing a similar artistic happening (and I would hope that there will be such people) should consider what a hostage to the weather we were. Friday 29 May was the very last moment (in Monday to Friday terms) for qualifying for nomination for the 1998 Turner Prize but even if it were otherwise there is no way in which you can announce such a happening on the basis that it will take place on a particular day subject to the weather being clement. It falls into the category of the Boat Race, the Trooping of the Colour and other outdoor events. You choose a day in the late Spring before the summer holidays get underway and cross your fingers.

April and May were successively proclaimed by the weather experts as being the wettest and coldest April and May since records began. By the time Friday 29 May dawned we had crossed our fingers for so long and so hard that they were welded together by bruises. In the event it was a fine, warm, sunny day. More than a dozen art correspondents and newspapers and radio and television reporters were already on the bridge by 8 am and most of them were still there by 9.15 when the happening officially ended. I had organised my own television team of four final year cinematographer students from the Ravensbourn College equipped with rented Sony video cameras and from that has emerged a professionally edited 12 minute rough cut documentary which can form either the nucleus of television programme or an indication of what is available from the underlying digital footage for a production company which wishes to do its own thing with them.

The response from the Bridgers themselves was beyond anyone’s best expectation. More people, many more, did not wear the ears than did, but those who did found it a rewarding experience. The actual design of the ears had been kept a closely guarded secret until the first person stepped on to the bridge and the sheer appropriateness to the occasion of “Art-iz-Us” probably came as a welcome surprise. For days afterwards the web site sang with incoming emails telling of the sheer exhilaration of having been on London Bridge on that day.

As ever, I had printed many more ears than had been given out but those left over were dealt with in accordance with a pre-announced procedure. 100 pairs of ears were signed and numbered and retained for the Archive. The remaining undistributed ears were publicly “de-natured” (what they do to barley on which subsidy has been paid which is consigned to animal feed) by spraying them with red paint. The effect of this is that the only un-marked ears that will ever exist were those which were either walked or carried across London Bridge on the day. There is a space on the back of the ears for the Bridger in question to fill in the details. Whether or not these ears will ever have any value is uncertain, to say the least, but one thing which can never be doubted is their provenance.

I sent six copies of the video, each with an accompanying brochure, to the Tate Gallery - enough for every member of the Jury to take one home and have a look at in the peace and quietness of their domestic surroundings.

Exercising my mind was the thought that, assuming the jury saw sufficient merit in the London Bridge event to consider it for inclusion on the short list they might nevertheless be deterred by the absence of anything in the nature of a gallery exhibit. So included on the videos was a simulation of a video wall with scenes of the happening as it took place and a simulation of something more unusual, unique probably, which I called a visual walkway. This was material shot with three cameras one above the other of people walking across the bridge into shot. With one camera aimed at the feet, a second at the waist and a third at the head and shoulders the effect is highly surreal. The idea is that this footage would be displayed terracotta army style on modules of video monitors arranged one above the other three high and visitors to the exhibition would walk between them.

With the background of the steady, rhythmic, four miles-an-hour, footfall the effect is of walking across the bridge in the opposite direction. And then some.

The Bridgers themselves were largely unaware of this additional effort but many of them, perhaps out of ignorance, came to believe that the happening was so remarkable an event in the context of London Bridge (which was something they did know about) that it has some kind of a chance of making it to the short list. I allowed myself to be buoyed by their enthusiasm, which was arriving by email on a daily basis, and the thought that the London Bridge event had involved ordinary people in the Turner Prize in a way which had never happened before and this factor alone would make it a worthwhile candidate. Whatever else can be said about the Tate it is not frightened of controversy and I floated the idea that the Jury could, if it wished, extend the shortlist to five and in this way defuse the complaints of conventional artists who might otherwise assert that they had been done out of a place on the short list by a stunt. I hoped, too, that the Gallery authorities would be swayed by the thought that Art-iz-Us ears would sell in their shop like hot cakes.

Although the London Bridge event did not make it to the short list I have no reservations about the work of those artists who did. I have a tiny concern about the use of elephant dung by Chris Ofili - a feature made much of in the Tate Gallery’s own press release and one which can hardly be said to be at the cutting edge of art. The trail was blazed back in the sixties and seventies by George Maciunas who founded the Fluxus movement. Maciunus, ever willing to shock, put on a show in Berlin in 1975 which included a work entitled Excreta Fluxorum made from animal droppings, principally elephant dung, obtained from a zoo. The droppings were contained in what was called a “shit-box” at the end of a labyrinthine tactile funhouse. To turn the door handle to get out it was necessary to put one’s hand in the shit-box. In Art, as elsewhere, what goes around comes around.

The 386 nominations and the copies of Leaflets red, orange and green copied to the Chairman of the Patrons and Nicholas Serota have been locked away in the Tate Gallery archive and will not be available to art historians until thirty years from now.

The six copies of the video and other material supplied for the benefit of the Jury have probably been returned to me. I say “probably” because a large envelope with dimensions and weight corresponding to these items arrived by recorded delivery at my home but I have not opened it, seeing it as a work of art in its un-opened state. A useful by-product of this decision is that the videos are available for forensic testing should anyone ever think it worthwhile to establish whether any member of the Turner Prize jury actually looked at them.

There is a problem with the Turner Prize which is that it is sort of “owned” television-wise by Channel 4 by right of them putting up the £20,000 prize money and this puts it off limits to the other channels as a major topical documentary subject during the lead-up to the awards ceremony in December which is televised live by Channel 4. It seemed to me therefor unlikely that any of the other channels would do anything with my video and so I confined my efforts to trying to interest Channel 4’s commissioning editor in doing something with it. Successive letters brought no reply and eventually I sent her a fax saying that I felt like an old lady I once met whose cat had gone missing. She (my old Lady, that is) said that with cats you had to accept that eventually you might lose them but that one did like to see the going of them. The video was returned by the next morning’s post.

I shall continue to press on. Indeed I have already executed a follow-up artistic happening to the London Bridge event, but not to my way of thinking in the same class, by earing-up the BBC’s “Last Night of the Proms” at the Royal Albert Hall on 12 September. On this occasion “Gents Promenading Ears” - Alsatian in shape, very erect and of huge proportions - were distributed to the male members of the audience and Ladies Promenading Ears - spaniel shaped and dangling - to the ladies. Both designs bore a representation of the Union Jack. Compared to the effort needed to get a result on London Bridge it was like shooting fish in a barrel. The ensuing television exposure was, however, enormous - the world-wide audience, so they say, approaching the 100 million mark.

Television cameramen and their producers are skilled at avoiding things which they don’t like but it was clear from the transmission that they actually favoured the ears, no doubt seeing them as a useful addition to the artistic integrity of the occasion. The Independent ran a picture and reported that even music critics were wearing them and asked “What kind of malicious person thinks up these things?”. They also caught the eye of the music critic of the Sunday Times who described the Gents Promenading Ears as “goblin ears” saying “even the elderly lady in front of me wore them.”

The publicity following the London Bridge event was on the whole favourable but, as might be expected, slightly tongue in cheek. A sour note was struck by a Mail on Sunday columnist, however, in a piece which juxtaposed my contribution to the Turner Prize with works by the shortlisted artists which were “pornographic and profane” or “fetishistic sculptures” or “represented Christ as a bare-breasted woman”. This I would not have minded, but he went on to say that I was clearly suited for the best arts job in town —chief clown at the Royal Opera House. I wrote to the editor saying that it was clearly defamatory to suggest that I would be a bigger clown than those already running the Royal Opera House and requesting a right of reply. He answered saying it was not proposed to return to the subject of the Turner Prize for the time being.

Much he knew, because two weeks later there was a feature article in the same newspaper’s Night & Day tearing into the Turner Prize under a headline which concluded with the words “and the Joke is on us.” There was a nice picture of eared-up commuters crossing London Bridge and a large chunk of text along the lines that I was either protesting about the under-50 age limit or having a laugh.

Neither of these suggestions is true but I was pleased with the article for two reasons. Firstly because it planted the London Bridge event firmly into the Turner Prize lore, alongside such as Tony Kaye (of the homeless man installation fame); and, secondly, because it managed, unlike the pieces penned by many other art correspondents, not to describe me as an eccentric millionaire - a description which is probably factually inaccurate following the recent collapse of the stock market.

I dislike being stereotyped in this way because it puts down what was, in truth, an artistic happening of spectacular proportions in which I had the willing co-operation of many other people who could also see the point in it. If an adjective is needed I prefer “maverick” to “eccentric”. Better still: “visionary.”

The reason why “eccentric millionaire” keeps on cropping up, is because the software loaded into the word processors used in the newsrooms of quality newspapers has it as a keyboard short-cut. Command 4, I would guess. The same keys in the tabloid press throw up “randy vicar”.

Future plans are to arrange a happening in Venice to co-incide with the Bienalle next summer. This would involve earing-up the traghetto (gondola ferry) across the Grand Canal or possibly the motonave which brings the residents of the Lido (whose gloomy mien is legendary) to the Historic Centre every working day. I also have my sights set of the Staten Island Ferry which carries tens of thousands of commuters to Manhattan every morning. These locations have in common with London Bridge a magnificent backdrop with the same people in the same place each day so that it is possible to communicate with them, albeit with difficulty.

Readers may be interested to know that the London Bridge web site is still functioning although these days it is less frequently up-dated and the number of hits is but a shadow of what they were in its heyday. You will find it at www.londonbridge29may.com