Trump is learning what happens when you’re slapdash in politics

If there was a question in the Big Issue quiz as to where it expanded to after its launch in London in 1991, you’d be hard pushed to find the answer. Was it Glasgow or Manchester, Cardiff or Birmingham? Its first notable expansion was overseas to Hamburg, a bit like The Beatles you might think. There, Hinz&Kunzt, meaning odds and ends in German, was based on our model.

But even before that, a very unnotable little office in the front room of a flat came into being, perhaps a month after our September launch in the crypt of St Martin-in-the-Fields in London’s Trafalgar Square. No, it wasn’t in one of the great metropolises: it was in Milton Keynes.

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A very insistent Big Issue vendor had got himself a loving girlfriend who had a flat in Milton Keynes and I went up there, overcome by the enthusiasm of the young woman and the vendor, and Milton Keynes was put on the Big Issue map.

Alas, health issues intervened and its presence in our Big Issue consciousness flagged and the expansion to this new made-up 1960s New Town ended. The land of the concrete cows, for which it was principally known, disappeared from our map – the concrete cows presumably there to avoid alienation in a city spread out like an urban pancake or pizza; everything seemingly the same, everywhere.

I stayed there last week, intent on renewing my acquaintance with this New Town and seeing if I could fathom its heart, if that was possible. But also in order to visit the MK Gallery near the theatre in this sprawling city. 

I was intent on renewing an acquaintance with art from my teenage years in the works of a now increasingly known artist called Euan Uglow, which are exhibited until late May in the capacious space of this fine gallery. Back aged 18, fresh out of a young offenders’ institute where they had encouraged my passion for painting, I got a place at Chelsea School of Art.

Read more:

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Chelsea Art School was going through a strange transformation where Pop Art was popping up everywhere. Where the rigour of knowing how to draw was being overwhelmed by splashes and splodges of paint. Where in some ways you could see the outbreak of childhood with images that abandoned technique. In fact, increasingly you didn’t have to apprentice yourself like an apprentice baker or carpenter did, where rigorous precision was necessary in order to learn a craft. You didn’t have to know how to draw. Leading 30 years later to Britart, where childhood exuberance took over. Art became unskilled if you compared it to the hardworking apprentices of earlier times when drawing was drummed into you.

Euan Uglow was a friend of one of my tutors, Craigie Aitchison, who like Uglow, has in death grown in importance. In some ways Uglow’s incredibly precise work seemed to be in revolt against the seemingly infantilising effects of art being liberated. Liberated at a time when sex and clothes, music and attitudes towards authority were being transformed. The foundation stones, you might say, being laid for our modern streets of whiffs of pot smoke and children massing to raid supermarkets, the 1960s being a time of abandoning the old and bringing in the loose and free. Discipline being old hat; whether that was a mini skirt knocked up in a trice, or a work of art.

Everything about Euan Uglow pointed to that ‘old hat’ precision, all measured and carefully proportioned. His nudes were built painstakingly, taking months, where the chalking-up of the model’s position was essential. So after a tea break the model was back in precisely the same position, for precision was everything.

I learned to draw in the way that Euan Uglow drew, but grew more rushed and slovenly. Drawing though was still hanging on in the 1960s. It was not completely abandoned and in fact, with the then-Prince Charles’s creation of the Royal Drawing School in 2000, a revival ran counter to the seemingly slapdash.

Uglow continued his precise, careful and measured nudes and still lifes until the end. A refreshing alternative to what was seen as free expression over rule makers.

Certainly, there is a sense in Uglow’s art that it is less free. His carefulness can be seen as monotony. It is as if he is trying to stand against all the imprecision of modern life. Its untidiness. Its anarchy. As if there are no rules today; the only rule being that there are none. That doesn’t mean art is fossilised, as if that were Uglow’s intention. It’s liberation of a different kind. As if art can free itself by following rules.

I, alas, slop and slap and have no rules when I paint. If I draw a model I don’t chalk them up, so they return precisely to where they were before the tea break. But I do like looking at the careful and the measured. It’s a refreshing break from the slapdash, and Uglow offers that to us in buckets.

The slapdash, though, can spill out into life. The slapdash that brought us into Tony Blair’s and George W Bush’s Iraq war which unsettled much of the Middle East. The slapdash meaning that if you don’t heed Shakespeare’s warning about “the dogs of war”, you can land in a bigger war; something that the president of slapdash, Trump, is learning. It’s all right in some ways to be slapdash on a canvas but in life, it’s a different matter. The unthought-out life can at times be exciting. But in the hands of our masters and mistresses of the political life it can be disastrous.

In such hands the slapdash becomes the short term, the emergency after emergency after emergency; because the slapdash doesn’t produce prevention. Shortermism hides within the body of the slapdash the mind of modern political life. Responding to criticism in a slapdash way means you end up where we are now – up a creek, without a paddle.

I enjoyed my time in Milton Keynes. Enjoyed the gallery and Euan Uglow. And would recommend a visit. Though this is definitely a pizza or pancake city, for everything is definitely everywhere.

John Bird is the founder and editor-in-chief of the Big Issue. Read more of his words from our archive.

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