John B Ledger

Pressing the 1997 button

All memory is worked upon backwards – they are private sculptures that are never completed.

Today when I think back to spring/summer 1997 the ambient backdrop is the b-sides from Radiohead’s OK Computer, which I didn’t actually hear until the 2000s. I heard bits of OK Computer and The Prodigy’s The Fat of the Land at the same time on a holiday journey, and they gave me what I’d come to understand as ‘future shock’; a vision of a place we hadn’t quite arrived into yet.

Because very little music, as great as it may well be, has felt ‘futuristic’ ever since, this moment has a gravitational pull that drags later encounters backwards into its orbit.

My personal accounts are difficult to separate from the fact that a pervasive structure of feeling in British culture seems to be one haunted by the ghost of 1997.

As Labour come back into power this week, all focus is on 1997, eclipsing all other Labour election victories. Despite the Labour party being the biggest party in Western Europe when Corbyn was leader, despite most people not really believing that this current Labour Party can deliver the structural changes much-need by most of the country, a kind of narrative remains fixed around this idea that if we can just get back to how things felt in 1997 things can be ok again.

I think it was the writer David Graeber who said that ideology works not by believing in the dominant narrative about life, but by believing that everybody else believes in it. We know the world is very different to 1997, we know what happens when private sector funding of public services was done before (for example), we know so much isn’t working and isn’t going to work, but yet we cling to threads of the governing discourse because if everybody else does then surely they are right?

Trying my hardest to chip away at the retroactive alterations made to my memories of 1997, I still recall a euphoric atmosphere that permeated all aspects of life. Even as a 13 year old I still obsessively looked for connections, and when my local football team gained promotion to the Premier League for the first time, and then a rock star ‘man of the people’ became prime minister, the future momentarily looked nailed on to the better than the past.

Did I know much about the damage that Thatcherism had done to towns like my own as a 13 year old? There’s definitely much that I’ve sown onto these recollections afterwards, but you couldn’t help but be aware that a lot of bad stuff had happened around here and things could be a whole lot better. But unlike how it feels as a 40 year old after 14 years of feeling like I’ve been punched in the stomach, 1997 was almost a momentarily transcendental release from the weight of past through the Messianic rock star, Blair.

Again, this is likely because I had no reason to feel out of breath as a 13 year old. But it’s also a sign of how different reality now is.

The Corbyn era was also about 1997 but not in the same way.

Although Corbyn, the man himself, may be more associated with a post-1945 social democratic politics, the ‘momentum’ that pushed the movement along was also born in 1997.

Yet, unlike the mainstay of the progressive wing of the establishment, in parliamentary politics, business and media, it wasn’t trying to set the clock back to 1997. Whether it was ever made aware or not, a movement dominated by people in their formative years in 1997, people for whom Blair’s “education, education, education” speech momentarily meant something, we were undertaking something that Tom Whyman in his book Infinitely Full of Hope, called Applied Hauntology.

Hauntology, lazily or simply (on my part) characterised as the present moment being haunted by the past through ‘lost futures’ that never materialised, is here progressively activated.

If you were fortunate enough to assume that you were guaranteed a life of expanded horizons, university, new experiences, and a better quality of life than your parents and grandparents, the 1990s embedded an expectation of life in you that, by the late 2000s returned as a form of unworked-through grief.

Far from merely being a Western Consumer attitude of the late 20th century, it permeated old industrial areas, which, although traumatized by post-industrialisation, believed help was on its way, and it was all underpinned by the cultural exuberance born from what Francis Fukuyama called ‘the end of history’, a moment after the end of the Cold War, and East/West divides, when just for a moment it looked like we could collectively ‘do this’, and make a more peaceful world.

As wafer thin as the grand narratives of the 90s may have been, they gave young people a vision of a better life, and a better world to come in the Millennium. Jeremy Corbyn’s surprise election to be the leader of the Labour Party seemed to open a door, that seemed to connect directly from Millennials optimistic expectations and a future that looked workable, bypassing the encroaching sense of dread of reality in the 2010s.

It was a moment when a generation applied hauntology to almost reactivate the lost futures that culminated around the year 1997.

In 2024 this momentum has been squashed, exhausted, and what we have again is an obsession with trying set the button back to 1997.

And to be honest, I’m not crushed. It’s a relief to get the Conservatives out. And, maybe because the Tories have exhausted me so much, I’m not as quick to condemn this new government as many are. Every little improvement makes big changes in life. As if some of this creeps back into everyday life, perhaps the ability to feel the idealism inside oneself will come back too.

Art from the last 14 years.

I’ve done a lot of these virtual retrospectives on here. But why not another?

Whatever the future looks like, even if it’s a continuation of the same but worse, the last 14 years have certainly been something that deserves attention as it potentially comes to a close.

Roughly from 2010 to 2024, I’ve stuck specifically to the drawings just to have some kind of cohesion.

**‘Global Ghetto, 2024’ marks the centenary of the defeat of fascism**‘

First protest vote as tragedy, the second as farce.

‘Sleepy John’ has had his eyes off the ball.

I’m not as sharp as I was in the 2010s (although, who is?)

Wounded and winded by the personal and political over the last 5 years, improvements to my general quality of life as I entered middle age became the only real priority.

The mental gymnastics involved in trying to understand why people in my milieu think and vote as they do, in the hope to make some sort of progressive bridge, contributed to the aforementioned injury.

I instigated participatory art projects with my friends in an artist-led collective, to try to do my best to circumvent the trigger labels, and to ask how people really felt about life. It was a DIY project that received little attention, but I saw it as contributing towards a memetic grey matter of information that was slowly transforming the world over social media – and, as violent as the dialogue was on the senses, it was undertaking the impossible-yet-necessary from the bottom up.

How old that all feels…

Yet, I’ve awoken this week to find out that Farage’s Reform party are getting close to overtaking the Labour Party in the voting intentions for Barnsley North, the constituency where I live.

The title quote, playing on the famous quote attributed to Marx’s interpretation of history, feels the most adequate to the current situation.

I will hold my hand up and say that I had sympathy for some of the motivations for voting Leave in the 2016 EU referendum.

It was ugly, it was racist, but it was also justifiably angry at a political orthodoxy that presented everything as being fine, when it clearly wasn’t for many people, for many reasons.

That this dissent was easily activated through racism, through scapegoating immigrants, was just as much the fault of culturally liberal politicians and institutions who endorsed inclusivity and tolerance whilst subscribing to the economically right-wing agenda (neoliberalism) that is at the root of so many of our problems.

Brexit was and has been a tragedy.

Reform is its return as farce.

Around the time of the 2016 results, I genuinely thought that the racism and xenophobia could be deactivated if a politics that genuinely served people, and moved away from an economic system that was tearing up the social fabric around us. This never happened: the main progressive alternative was demonised and the general population gaslit into believing it ‘unelectable.

The farce of Reform is the farce of not learning from our recent past. Both the electorate, who cannot see that Farage is nothing but a wrecker in the service of disaster capitalism, and the political and media establishment who did everything they could to prevent an alternative that may, may, have just tended to needs that are once again being exploited.

The General Election looms and I feel worryingly depoliticised

(Image of Ossett town centre, June 2017).

There’s clearly so much at stake. During the last 14 years we have experienced a horror show, and despite the potential epochal collapse of the Conservative Party, the path before us is far from reassuring.

But I just cannot find something that pushed me forwards for so long: my political pulse.

Where did it go?

Half way through these 14 years, exactly 7 years ago, we almost had a government that pledged to bring about the kind of 21st century we once expected in those childishly optimistic moments of the late 20th century.

A collective energy had built around the unexpected Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn and even when the Tories under Teresa May managed to cling to power after the 2017 GE, there was a sense that the near future was on our side.

I have never been as directly politically engaged as my conscience suggests I should. An adult life devoted to thinking about the state of the world, making art about the state of the world has been matched by an inability to know how to be, both with others and with myself.

From my observations the average political activist doesn’t make themselves, but is made – often by where they end up in their early adult life, what community they become an adult in, university or otherwise.

Likewise the politically disengaged are made and do not make themselves, by the same factors, or, more so, by the lack of them.

I found myself in the middle, literally. Between larger towns and cities where I would more frequently come into contact with politically active bubbles. And the more politically disengaged culture of the people I grew up around and still lived around.

This political disengagement was formed in two stages. The first was that a lot of people were traumatised by the post industrialisation of the 1980s, especially round here, because of the Miners Strike. Secondly, the design for life had shifted massively. New build housing estates encouraged us to focus more on the nuclear family than the community, and retail parks encouraged the same.

Around this time, my political mind was formed from personal distress, a deep questioning born from an inability to cope in my own skin. It was born in isolation rather than collectively.

It certainly strengthened my thinking and artistic direction, but it didn’t necessarily do anything to strengthen any sense of being part of something; I found the heated disagreements that would erupt with people I’d grown up with, or the disdainful reactions to my residual provincial town lifestyle habits in more urban bubbles eventually too stressful without a support network to ease it.

To deal with this, I found myself perpetually trying to square circles and circumvent divisions. This was aided at the time by an almost Millenarian conviction that a more just and equal world was coming, which would brush all minor differences away.

I, like many, have yet to properly recover the person I was before the 2019 general election and the conditions during the pandemic eviscerated any conviction that a better future was imminent . I could never have imagined the 2020s would have felt quite like this.

I, again, also like many, have felt more isolated and cut off since the aforementioned events. Whether it is a lack of ability to go where I once went, mentally and physically, or just a kind of brain damage caused by losing faith, I no longer find it easy to feel my political pulse.

With this in mind, the election next week feels pretty much like laying in bed, knowing you have somewhere important to be, but not being able to motivate oneself.

And I want to be. Christ, whatever happens, to likely see the back of 14 years of Tory rule, horrible nasty rule, should fill my heart. I want it to. But at the moment I don’t feel anywhere near the amount that I want to and know I should do.

Good news and bummer news.

I’ve finally got a studio space. It’s in Wakefield, the next town down the road. It’s a little more than I was wishing to spend, but after a series of difficult years that have forged a kind of internal inquisition into my devotion to my work, I now feel like I’ve got a concrete commitment to make this work out.

However…

Sadly, I was unsuccessful with an Arts Council bid that I put my heart and soul into.

I even paid for mentoring for support. I was as honest as I could be about how much I need help right now without playing the metaphorical violin.

Arts Council funding would have boosted my self-worth, which, over the last few years, has been crumbling and affecting my behaviour in deeply regrettable ways.

But I feel confident that I’ve passed a turning point. The studio space has for the first time in a long time let me feel self worth in that which i have devoted my life to.

Wish me luck.

Daily writing prompt

Write about your first crush.

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I can’t recall early childhood crushes, but I distinctly remember one from the spring of 1996 when I was 12 years old.

It was the kind of Spring that lived up to its name. I was in the first year of secondary school, and after a first term of hurtful bullying I undertook a lot of (unfortunate) editing of my appearance and personality. Whether this action altered the situation or not, life in the second half of the year became far lighter and brighter.

I felt the flutter of early pubescent vibrancy that was outshining the fear that stalks those new to secondary school, and it was as if I was blossoming just like the cherry trees in the courtyard.

I became fond of a brunette girl in my class. She wasn’t the most glamorous girl, and had a bit of ‘street cred’ coming from a tougher estate, which equally intimidated me and drew me in.

I had no idea what do with these feelings other than romanticise the situation over school chip dinners and the second side of a tape recording of ‘What’s the Story (Morning Glory)’.

I’ve always been naive and sensitive in equal measure, and always erroneously gambled on a New Now where the ridicule and soft-bullying I so hate as part of life gave way to softer kinder relations. But as I walked around a nearby village, looking in every Bookies and pub to find a newly-made friend’s unemployed dad, I realised I’d made a massive mistake by telling 3 friends who my secret crush was.

As you can imagine, it ceased to be a secret. After the disclosure, the 3 friends got me to the floor on a built up street, and sat on me until I disclosed more further. By this point I felt routinely humiliated.

They promised me that they would tell everyone once we got back to school.

And as great as my memories of this summer holiday are, I also recall beig haunted by the fear what was coming.

What came was quite humiliating, as they stuck to their word, and before I managed to get to the block where our form room was on the Monday morning, they’d already told everyone.

To be fair, nothing happened, apart from the girl in question losing her shit with all the silly little 12 year old boys giggling and making rude things up. Equally she was far more grown up than I was. She was street wise, she was already dating lads, whilst I was still eating ice pops in the summer and pop tarts in the winter.

I don’t like modern dating apps. I don’t know how to communicate with photos of people. But a month ago I decided to have another go and the first person I saw was the girl (now woman) in question. Now with a life and with teenage children of her own, I found it hard to swipe left.

I swiped right. But then deleted the app 2 minutes later.

Stay away from Farage and his Vampire’s Vortex

I didn’t intend to stay away from Farage and his Vampire’s Vortex as it swirled through my home town today, I just had no idea it was happening.

I feel the rush of excitement to see my home town on the front pages, and the grip of Fomo as I’m sat in the distant exotic place of Wakefield, trying to sort an art studio, and hopefully a small step towards a new life path (I’m feeling a little more myself already, but I know it won’t be easy).

But I should be glad I missed out. The Vampire’s Vortex has one aim: to suck you in and feed off your energy.

I don’t particularly want to speak about what Reform UK stand for, and try to unpack why it means one thing to some people, and something terrifying to others: “stay away from the Farage Vampire-Vortex” is the best advice I can give myself.

Of course, this only works if everyone else stays away from the Vampire’s Vortex.

All successful enterprises in our information economy have to be part vampiric: they rely far more on what we give to them than in what we get in return. If we ignore them it has no energy and dies.

In a more self-sufficient society, of strong communities, we could even ignore the General Election entirely, because we’d find it easier to do our bidding on the streets.

But on the streets all we can do is yell and lob bits of broken plaster from a construction site, from the despair of abject disempowerment. Farage Vampire-Vortex loves this.

Farage and his Vampire”s vortex love this.

It also loves the hate towards one another we project on the comments section – especially the hate towards the “scruffy-looking” lad who threw the objects, who, judging by a 5 second clip, and being from Barnsley, is a “unemployed scumbag”.

It’s the absolute pinnacle of the ‘negative solidarity‘ that permeates such an exhausted and atomised society. And it’s the kind of bait which is hard to resist diving into the comments section for, and the kind that gets the Farage Vampire-Vortex fat on our blood and guts that I wish we could use for something better.

For when we are blind we must be led

Artwork made before the 2010 general election by David Shrigley

As the Far-right grows on the continent, the author and journalist Naomi Klein remains forever-rooted to a centre left position in a world where the Overton Window hasn’t merely shifted, but seemingly fallen into a ditch.

She has issued a warning to the UK Labour Party that if they do not implement something that addresses the most urgent needs of the country, such as a wealth tax to restribute at least some of the country’s wealth then this void will almost certainly be capitalised on by the Far Right.

The former prime minister Gordon Brown and even a former aide to Blair have stressed the same message.

Not for me to go all left-centrist, but genuine left-centrism, as in not simply more neoliberal technocrats, could save us from calamity.

Even those with contempt for small boats can still feel pain at the silent social murder of many on our town centre streets since austerity kicked in. You can appeal to people’s social spirit, or you can ignore it, and let the void be filled by the likes of the Farage Vampire-Vortex.

The artwork above is very David Shrigley, in that what looks at first like simple satire is very multilayered, and between these layers is love, perhaps even the desire to be led as if we were blind. Back in 2010 this poster almost got me voting for New Labour, even after all that had made me and many others my age so apathetic by the end of the Noughties.

Yet, as I chose to vote for a fringe left party, I can’t help wondering what the present would have looked like if Brown had remained in power.

And as we stand, after nearly half a century of Thatcherism, we are a blind society: we cannot see collectively

Because of this we still have to engage with what almost feels like the impossible mental gymnastics of voting in the hope of genuine change.

We aren’t going to do it ourselves, on the street, because we don’t know how to bring ourselves towards one another. The more atomised we become hereinafter, the more the far right will grow.

Somehow we need to be led together towards Social Sight.

Lashing out in the void

What if a heart is turned to stone before it’s had the chance to be broken?

Slow trauma.

Fast trauma.

What’s the difference in the end?

You pour over maps, with the longing to finally get on the right track. Maps are both an aspect of our alienation and a comfort from it.

Whatever this mental health ‘thing’ (and it must be a disorder, judging by the way it shapeshifts every time I think I’ve sussed it out), I still feel caught by some late teenage snare, staring at that missed moment from where life branches out, from where the ambience and assets of our future are roughly predetermined, unless we hit some middle age crisis.

At this delicate moment I was in the throws of Anorexia.

I’m not bitter, and not asking for pity. It’s just been hard to move past a crucial part of my life that I believe that if I’d had it I’d had been a lot better equipped to deal the standard trials and tribulations that life throws at us. I missed an important life lesson, and it’s absence is filled by some inner Jeremy Kyle-esq figure whipping you with ‘hard truths’.

My home town is a traumatised town. The young adults who remain and don’t join the university flock, tend to be more vulnerable, damaged, traumatised. It’s something I’ve observed year after year.

Without sounding like a nobhead, I wish I’d had an experience of friendship building and recreational habit-forming with others who weren’t like myself trying to hide the emotional lesions from where pain perpetually oozed. I say this with nothing but empathy, but I needed to see horizons that didn’t reflect my interior landscape.

More and more desperate for connection, any diagnosis that I may or may not receive in later life may be no more than a conciliation prize for my own stability, and will do nothing for the consequences of my mistakes that have oozed quicker than pain can ooze.

I have been lashing out in the void. The void that exposes itself in every form but in the one that craves to scream “help me”.

Keeping a blog for 17 years

I started keeping my blog 17 years ago.

I had just finished my Bachelors degree in Art and Design at the local university centre in my home town, and all I knew is that I wanted to progress and get more exposure as an artist.

That summer was messy. My entire social world in my home town revolved around an indie bar which became a more toxic and paranoid environment as a larger reality loomed. The party was over – both for up and coming indie bands and socialites and for the larger economic order.

I was increasingly in a state of anxiety over my future, infused with a growing sense of distrust and paranoia, and I agreed to go to the Leeds Festival with a gang from this scene. After 2 days of insomnia, which led me into a hyper-paranoid state I had my only ever psychotic episode.

In a moment of narcissistic hell, everybody in the entire festival was calling my name. “John Ledger, John Ledger!”. I’d only had a small bit of public accolade and exposure from featuring the local paper after the degree show, but this had escalated into a sense that everybody had eyes on me. And, momentarily, I could hear things that weren’t real.

After that, I got a job at a local gallery. Which is in the fact the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Which is only a few miles from my home.

And the rockiness began to subside, and for the next two years, I had started to build myself up as an artist and writer. Increasingly using blogging to share what I was creating.

It was originally on Blogspot. I was encouraged by a more cock-sure artist at the high-flying Glasgow School of Art, who happened to be the brother of a woman I thought I had a chance of a relationship with at the time.

I transferred my blog to WordPress in 2012, at a time when the social media giant Facebook was perhaps at its most popular.

When I began blogging in 2007, Facebook was still a bit so-so. It had no more gravitas than Myspace. I’d never heard of Instagram or Twitter. Did they exist way back then?

As we all buckled up for the austerity ride, full of misleading statements that gave us a sense that we ‘were in it together’ and that there was even a ecological morality to the cut backs, none of us except life’s chancers could have been prepared for what came next.

I imagined austerity as a great leveller, but soon I began to see a society more divided and exclusive than ever. Social media initially seemed like a tool to ignite change, but quickly became a tool to enforce high maintenance social envy, or what we’d begin to call ‘fomo’, and to enforce and escalate divisions. What once seemed like a tool to seek a better future quickly became what my late art tutor would come to call ‘the last battle ground of Thatcherism’.

Over the coming years, my work improved, but got heavier and heavier, as my 30’s closed in, and I found myself increasingly isolated and in need of a better income, but lacking any sense of how to do this. The need for connection became greater, but so did shame and self-hate. Drinking became a more lonesome and regular evening pursuit, and addictive and destructive behaviours began to play out on social media.

I cannot find a better word to describe what the experience of what has happened over the last 15 years+ but ‘traumatic‘. I wonder what my life track would have been like, without this transition towards ‘instant everything’. And with a background ambience of every thinkable catastrophe, I cannot help but wonder what shape they’d had taken, minus the collective induced-effect of social media on all of us.

The cruelest aspect of shame and self-hate is that it sets up the conditions to act in ways so that it becomes justified: if you spend most your day thinking your repulsive you’ll likely act in ways that begin to prove it. I think about this when I see certain criminal actions, and I think about my own future plight with cold-blooded dread.

Art, artist, me as an artist. This is something I have clung to for identity and self-worth increasingly more desperately over the last ten years. But it increasingly causes more pain than pleasure, I try to find self-worth keeping the oil burning, but then start succumbing to seriously negative thinking and then start drinking. All my biggest regrets in life began on evenings like this.

I’ve never been what is now called ‘normative’, I’ve never been good in competitive work environments – which is most work environments these days. Advice of all kinds ricochets inside my head, none of it makes sense anymore. I don’t really know what to do anymore, and cut and paste advice to this doesn’t make sense either.

So many ‘should haves’. Wish I’d learned how to stand up for myself at school. Wish I’d had the opportunity for an Autism assessment whilst young. Wish I’d had stayed longer at the Eating Disorder clinic. Wish I’d never got into the drinking culture. More than anything, wish I’d had recognised where all of this was heading at an earlier stage.

I’ve deleted social media. It really doesn’t matter anymore if I’m viewed as an artist or not. It all merely feels like a pantomime act for a past life now. But I can never delete this blog. Bloggers, the infamously ridiculed ‘balding middle aged losers still living with their mum’. Who cares what they think anymore? This blog will survive until WordPress dies.

List three books that have had an impact on you. Why?

Three books that have had an impact on me.

1. FEED – M.T Anderson.

For me, this partly satirical novel from our near-past (2002) painted one of the most prophetic visions of what would come to be.

FEED’s target audience was a teenage/young adult one, so maybe it will never receive the accolade of a more ‘grown up’ Science Fiction novel like 1984, but I believe it deserves it.

Revolving around the teenage protagonist Titus and his friends we are shown a vision of a world of constant connection to an information sphere in a consumerist society, and how this affects both the psyche and society at large.

This may sound a little bit ‘so what?’ in 2024, but it wasn’t in 2002. Our current relationship to technology didn’t seem inevitable back then.

In FEED, Titus has access to any information pouring into his head 24/7. You get the sense that everything from the most important things in history, in life, no longer has any more significance than a new brand of coke. We see a hollowing out of depth, both in society and the psyche, and as the novel eludes to a background ambience of climate breakdown and escalating geopolitical situations, it isn’t only the teenage protagonists who lack the capacity to care less, but also the parents of the teenagers who sometimes seem more infantile than the children. Sound familiar?

It is only when Titus experiences serious loss in his life that a thin vein of hope for the future of humanity is made visible.

(The image is of ‘Ill-equipped’, a work I made in 2011 which was partly inspired by reading FEED).

2. Capitalism Realism – Mark Fisher

“When I first heard Joy Division, aged 14, it was like that moment in In the Mouth of Madness when Sutter Cane forces John Trent to read the novel, the hyperfiction, in which he is already immersed…”

How Mark Fisher describes first hearing Joy Division is pretty close to how I felt when I read the first 3 chapters of ‘Capitalist Realism’ between a Cafe Nero in Sheffield, and a Wetherspoons in Barnsley, on a warm August afternoon back in 2010.

Fisher put words to things I was experiencing but still unable to express. Reading Capitalist Realism in 2010, I instantly understood my own experiences with depression, and other disorders. Reading Fisher’s interpretation of the suffering of famous musicians like Kurt Cobain helped me understand, maybe for the first time, that my own struggles with mental health weren’t merely down to something ‘wrong’ about me.

More than that the book would open a door to a world of critical theory, and in turn greatly influence the work I would go on to make.

1984 – George Orwell.

I don’t really need to go into this book too much, it doesn’t need an introduction. If anything the vision it paints often problematically provides a crudely simplified reading of our current world.

This said, when I properly read the book aged 20 in 2004 it was one of the first books I had ever read. I wasn’t a childhood reader, I came to reading later on, and perhaps already overly-prejudiced by life experience towards what reading I would do.

But this book allowed me to prove to myself that I could read a book, and not just read it to say I’d read it, but get properly engrossed in it.