Onion Jack
ZM
John wants to fuck the St Georgeâs flag. The St Georgeâs flag doesnât have a hole. The St Georgeâs flag doesnât have a material form, actually. Like, it isnât a real object that exists in our world of people and objects. It is actually an image. John wants to fuck it all the same. He wants to feel its harsh lines and sharp angles against his skin. Delicate caress. He wants to press up against it and moan, sweat, breathe heavy and release into it.
John is a complex man. He understands that the St Georgeâs flag isnât actually an image, it is a semiotic object. It is a sign. Well, maybe it is more accurately described as a symbol. John clears his throat, points his finger at a powerpoint slide. This is the sign: the signified and the signifier. The signified is the concept the sign represents, the signifier is the form it takes. The sign is an oval with a line cutting it in half horizontally. The signified is in the top half, the signifier the bottom. John taps the slide with his pointing finger. John smiles.
The flag isnât a flag, it isnât a textile it isnât a print it isnât a shape it isnât an object. St Georgeâs cross is a Union Jack is a Butcherâs Apron is an image of the queen â but SHEâS DEAD / but it doesnât matter / but she was never alive / but she was only ever an image / but she was a signifier / but it was always about what she signified / but that hasnât changed â EXACTLY.
It is all a very fluid and blurry thing. We can paint red Xs on our faces when the footballâs on. We can share it with Genoa and Sardinia and Barcelona and the nation state of Georgia. We can nod smugly when Guardian columnists say âSt George was Palestinian!!!!â, like facts could ever make a dent on public reckoning. We can spray paint a red X on the white blob of a mini-roundabout and Zarina will see one in South West London and shit herself â it doesnât even matter, this text is an obscure expression of anxiety, very catastrophic thinking, except Zarinaâs right to shit herself. One day when (NOT IF, WHEN) Nigel Farage is Prime Minister, when (NOT IF, WHEN) Tommy Robinson comes marching back through Waterloo, one day it wonât seem so much like catastrophising. But it is just a red X. It isnât even about John, because John doesnât exist. (Yes he does).
In 1712, John Arbuthnot (an Enlightenment era gentleman-polymath, Scottish man in London) published a series of political pamphlets. In an effort to swing public opinion behind the Tory government and their attempt to end the war of Spanish succession (by withdrawing England from its international alliances), Arbuthnot dramatised the political situation as an allegorical interpersonal conflict/farce. France and its King (Louis XVI, Louis Bourbon) was personified as Louis Baboon, and England was personified as John Bull. John Bull was a stout middle aged country squire. He wore a Union Jack waistcoat and a top hat. He was jolly, he was matter-of-fact, he was stubborn. He was Middle England. He was entirely made up, like literally fabricated from projections, put together from all these handed down assumptions about what Englandâs national character might be. John Bull stuck around as the symbolic personification for England. Newspaper cartoonists had a field day with him, he appears on wartime posters, is embodied in teapots and Toby jugs.
In Summer 1748, William Hogarth was on holiday in Paris. On his way back to London, he found himself in Calais, waiting for a boat. He passed the time by sketching the portâs gate and drawbridge â Calais had been an English enclave up until 1558, many of the buildings had English architectural features, it was all very curious and interesting. Until French soldiers spotted him, thought he was a spy (v suspicious, making note of their civil infrastructure/fortifications) and arrested him. To avoid the 18th century version of banged up abroad, and to demonstrate that he was not a spy, literally just an innocent artist, he showed the French authorities his sketches and offered to draw them anything they requested. They requested a scene of an enormous piece of roast beef landing on the shore, and heading to the Lion dâArgent (an English inn in Calais) followed by a trail of hungry friars.
Apparently roast beef was seen as an iconically British thing, like fish and chips or bangers and mash. The French nickname for English people was les rosbifs, or the Roast Beefs. The guards outside the Tower of London are called Beefeaters â so iconic, their image is printed on the bins at Gatwick Airport. Hogarth was actually a founding member of The Sublime Society of Beefsteaks, a Roast Beef club thatâd meet for Beefsteaks and Port at 2pm. Members wore waistcoats with brass buttons embossed with the societyâs motto (BEEF AND LIBERTY), the president wore a Beefeaterâs bearskin hat. Roast Beef â a symbol, a sign, a semiotic object. Signifier: ROAST BEEF. Signified: IIIIIIINGERLAND.
Hogarthâs drawings seemed to prove he wasnât a spy, and the French released him. As soon as he got back to London he began work on a painting: at the Port Gate of Calais, a hunk of beef is destined for the Lion Dâargent. It is being carried by a chef in white, a hungry friar and a group of men (soldiers and civilians) gather round to exalt the beef. To the right, two soldiers carry an unappetising bucket of grey watery French soup. A sad soldier in tartan is slumped against the wall, staring down in horror/disappointment at a raw French onion. The painting is called O, THE ROAST BEEF OF OLD ENGLAND. It is seen as one of Hogarthâs most patriotic works â yes, Hogarth, one of the most iconically British artists. This is the image that represents the pinnacle of his national-image-making. It is like: BRITISH BEEF! National symbol! French food is so BAD, it makes Scottish soldiers sad! Watery soup, les oniones, everyone is jealous of our roast beef!!! It becomes a national symbol.
John is very real. John wants to deport the migrants, stop the boats, YOU can fuck off back to where you came from, if you donât like it you know where the door is. John wants to march through Westminster with Tommy Robinson. John wants good old fashioned British values. John says thereâs no such thing as the far right, heâs not far right, heâs just a concerned individual, he wants to save the kids, he says this isnât about racism itâs about being patriotic, he says itâs winter fuel and the benefits cap and Kier Starmer IS a wanker, everything just seems to be falling apart and this countryâs going to the dogs and maybe Enoch Powell was right after all and these days theyâll throw you in jail just for saying youâre English. England isnât about multiculturalism, England is about English culture, people coming over here have to assimilate into English culture. John says, if you canât put up your own countryâs flag in said own country, something isnât right. A flag is a countryâs most neutral and indisputable symbol. John is interested in the way symbols work, how a symbol can become a national symbol, how national symbols can fall apart. The nation state is as fabricated as John is, so you have this weird empty link chain: John Bull (projection), personification of England (arbitrary land mass), as a nation state (socially constructed political unit that seeks to centralise power), English flag (signifier, the form and not the content) and the English people (ha ha ha ha WHO ARE THEY?) â you see? None of that was ever real!
John looks back at the powerpoint slide: signifier / signified. He sits down at a table with two chairs. The enormous piece of roast beef sits across from him. The roast beef has got something to say. The roast beef thinks thereâs something a bit postmodern about the way meaning is made only to be blasted apart. Once upon a time John Bull was the figurative symbol of England, personification itself, national character in singular human form. Then Roast Beef, not singular human but at least still a lump of meat. Not personification but meatification, the national culture as national meat â one step towards the abstract. It is interesting and noteworthy that John Bull and the Roast Beef of Old England came about as hearty national symbols in the first half of the 18th Century, when Great Britain was brand new (the Acts of Union in 1707 formally unified Scotland, England and Wales), and expanding its empire so the sun would never set across it, fighting back other European colonial powers for control over the Transatlantic slave trade and Bengal and the Industrial Revolution was due to be kicking off, colonialism and capitalism bouncing along hand in hand. But as time goes on, through modernity and progress and change, the symbol is eroded until it is just a shape, a cross, a red X. The purest form of the image, line, mark making. We no longer trust our institutions, our experts, our authorities â we donât even trust our royal family. The nation cannot be personified because a person is not a reliable or trustworthy form. They are also not an empty form, ready and willing to take on the burden of meaning â they are too full of their own character stuff. So shapes become symbols, these empty forms can carry what we (you, John Bull, me, roast beef, Tommy Robinson, Nigel Farage, the far right and concerned individuals) project onto them. Which is fine, natural, it was always going to happen. But it means that St Georgeâs roundabouts arenât just line shape and mark-making, the flag then canât be a countryâs most neutral and indisputable symbol, you canât really put up your own flag in your own country, and we have just built a symbol that must be blasted apart.
John Bull nods as Roast Beef speaks, but he doesnât quite understand why the blasting apart bit is inevitable. Roast Beef sighs. He stands up and leads the way. From Baker Street, down Chiltern Street, opposite the burnt out Firehouse, a gallery called Incubator Projects and Maya Gurung-Russell Campbellâs show, I WANT TO BE READY. The artist has deconstructed the Union Jack and St Georgeâs flag, ripped them into strips and knotted them together with bits of old military tent, jute and ropes. They are tied up into these bulbous suspended shapes, gnarled and weathered and dripping. John Bull imagines the repetitive act, double knot double knot double knot, building the sculpture out bigger, it expands. Roast Beef imagines the act before the knotting, the invisible and implied act, where the artist at some point must have torn the flags into ribbons.
Roast Beef is interested in the act of destruction. Because destruction isnât necessarily an act that seeks to flatten or obliterate or even actually totally destroy. Some destructions seek to transform, make everything liquid and malleable, sometimes it seeks to remake. Roast Beef thinks about Walter Benjaminâs Critique of Violence, and the idea that there are two types of violence: mythical violence and divine violence. Mythical violence as the violence of change, that transforms, destroys one thing to substitute it with a new other thing. Divine violence is the destruction beyond the possibility of a return to order. Roast Beef thinks about Kazimir Malevich and his Black Square, that sucking void of a painting, that portal, that open window. Because Malevich painted it in Russia, in 1915, in the soup of imminent revolution. Revolution being the radical destruction of an existing society, the radical destruction of a societyâs existing culture, no sentimentality or nostalgia for the past, death to nostalgia, death to the bourgeoisie, death to the imperial nation state. Black Square was meant to be a doorway, was meant to be violent, through the portal, destructive impulses could flood in and wash the old art away. Was it mythological violence or divine violence? In 1919 Malevich wrote an essay called âOn the Museumâ. Post-revolution, he calls for the revolution to extend itself to culture. âEnough of crawling about the corridors of time pastâ, Malevich calls for a mode of artistic production that looks only towards the future, that burns down the past to make way for new life. In burning the past, the past doesnât disappear, but collapses. âIn burning a corpse we obtain one gram of powderâ, the powder is the old thing, reconstituted in a new form. The essence of the old thing is still there, still communicative and energetically alive â but the old form is dead. But maybe (as powder) itâs more fit to be remade into something new.
John Bull looks at the double knotted ruined flag. Roast Beefâs whole Malevich & destruction schtick doesnât quite fit â the impulse is the same but thereâs something about the form that doesnât feel destroyed enough to count as reconstitution or transformation. The old form still remains. Anyway, Malevichâs Black Square was an image that existed after that destruction of the old. Not a remaking into the new, but an image of the destruction, that sat in the destruction. Thatâs the portal, thatâs the doorway, Black Square sits on the liminal edge between old and new, acts as the conduit between them. It is an image that cannot be destroyed, or it is an image that has already been completely destroyed without possibility of a return to order. Maybe the image exists in a karmic wheel of making and destruction, maybe the image never dies, only goes through this cycle over and over, maybe images are actually subject to constant change â Black Square is the essence that moves through the wheel. The flags are mythically transformed, remade into a new form.
Roast Beef nods his meaty lump of a head. But exactly. The image is the symbol is the wheel. The nation doesnât exist, its symbol goes through the karmic wheel of change, being made and unmade only to be remade over and over again. You, John Bull. Me, Roast Beef. Red X on your face when the footballâs on. Red X on a roundabout to make Zarina shit herself. Red Xs in the sky when (NOT IF, WHEN) Nigel Farage is Prime Minister, when (NOT IF, WHEN) Tommy Robinson comes marching back through Waterloo. Made, unmade, remade again. Flag, nation, symbol. We put these things together like they are the same thing, but Roast Beef taps a pointed finger toward the slide: SIGN = SIGNIFIED / SIGNIFIER. This countryâs going to the dogs, and weâre talking about the signifier. What is the change doing, where is the signified? Kazimir Malevichâs schtick wants to exit the cycle, destroy the sign or create an image of its destruction. Is that even possible? Do we even want that? John Bull looks back up at the double knotted ruined flags. He isnât so sure anymore. Once upon a time he wanted to fuck this flag, as some oblique metaphor about desire for proximity to its power. More and more, it seems less like a hole, more like a sucking void, portal, open window to the destruction of existing society, and John Bull doesnât know what is on the other side.