The Naked Rambler and raw Clare

'I thought - fxxx! That is what I am!' says Stephen Gough, aka the Naked Rambler.

We each have to deal with our discovery of what we are. Steve's method is to go around undressed: 'I wanted to express that purity of what I am in the most obvious way.' So far his obviousness, or obliviousness, has cost him and the taxpayer nine years in prison.

When Enid Blyton played tennis in the nude, no one complained to the police. Context is all. Steve has just been released from HMP Winchester wearing nothing but a watch and hiking boots. His minders have got him to a safe house where he is giving an interview for The Sunday Times.


'They say I'm a solipsist,' he says, stumbling over the word. 'Narcissistic.' He is animated after his latest spell in solitary. The criminal justice system is not at its most nimble when having to deal with people like Steve. Can't we just yawn and ignore them?

He has a dedicated team of friends even if the patience of a few is fraying. Some naturists are concerned that his doggedness is alienating what they rather touchingly call 'the textile world'.






Here's a naked man behind bars (below): Sound II, Antony Gormley's lead statue from a cast of his body, in the crypt of Winchester Cathedral. The figure is contemplating water, not himself.

Steve's prison-pale body is functional, hardy, bone and sinew, gently softening with time; he laments his giant frogspawn-y varicose veins. I wonder how his nose got broken.

My head aches: I banged it on a car door, pre-dawn groggy, at the start of a Keystone Kops aquaplaning trip up and down the M3 to find Steve. (We track him down in Sainsbury's car park, in the back seat of a car with blacked-out windows.)

He rambles on nakedly in a borrowed room, well furnished with good books and family photos. The house speaks of security and comfort, a tender love of grandchildren. Steve has been absent from the lives of his children and he anticipates re-arrest before long.

He reminds me of the Carry On actor Jim Dale; also of the vulnerable warrior in Descanso de Marte (Mars resting, 1640) by Velázquez. Steve used to be in the Marines, where he was a cold-weather expert, of course.

An old soldier was the model for the body of Voltaire nu, by Jean-Baptiste Pigalle (1776). Both figures are saved by drapery, which Steve refuses.









Talking of which, a seasoned copy editor slows down when certain words appear. Or should appear. 'Public' is one. And sure enough, a sloppy editor has allowed Steve to refer to being charged 'under section 5 of the Pubic Order Act' in a chapter he wrote for a book called Naked Hiking.

Garment approaching from the right in Botticelli's 'Birth of Venus'...

...and in this exquisitely composed Daily Mirror photo

Above all, Steve makes me think of the nature (not naturist) poet John Clare, who was a stranger to his family but not to incarceration.

I like what's called 'raw Clare' - his poems without the fig leaf of tidied-up punctuation, spelling and vocabulary imposed by editors. But because of his chaotic writing methods, raw Clare is hard to determine. This version is from the raw-ish, heroically controversial Oxford edition, which is not above bearing down to impose garments, silently, but let's not go into that now:

'I AM'

I am - yet what I am, none cares or knows;
My friends forsake me like a memory lost: -
I am the self-consumer of my woes; -
They rise and vanish in oblivion's host,
Like shadows in love's frenzied stifled throes: -
And yet I am, and live - like vapours tost

Into the nothingness of scorn and noise, -
Into the living sea of waking dreams,
Where there is neither sense of life or joys,
But the vast shipwreck of my lifes esteems;
Even the dearest, that I love the best
Are strange - nay, rather stranger than the rest.

I long for scenes, where man hath never trod
A place where woman never smiled or wept
There to abide with my Creator, God;
And sleep as I in childhood, sweetly slept,
Untroubling, and untroubled where I lie,
The grass below - above the vaulted sky.

After Steve's interview with the writer Alev Scott we leave the house, making sure the neighbours won't see anything to cause offence. I apologise profusely to the owner.

'That's all right,' he says, kindly. 'You should see who we've got coming tomorrow.'

British sense of humour/proportion

And if you want the serious gen on all the above, start by googling Steve's barrister, Matthew Scott.

Conference and one-legged dance, Portugal

Stabbing open a plastic-sealed Camembert with eyebrow tweezers in a hotel room, I'm here for a conference at the University of Porto on the theme of strangeness and the stranger in the context of theatre/architecture/law.

I talk about quick and dirty drawing as an outsider.

I end with bodies in suspension, floating but constrained, drawings/bodies unable to escape from being drawings/bodies. Max Risselada of Delft University of Technology also shows bodies in suspension: winged concrete structures by Lelé Filgueiras.

One evening we head for a performance which includes one-legged dancer Mickaella Dantas. The degree of compensation going on over the rest of her body/brain gives her the edge over the other dancers.

I draw her from memory which fades in seconds.

In one image my brain flips - it is her right leg incomplete, not her left.

I make mistakes about where her vertical axis must be. If my drawings were buildings, some would fall over.

The dancer I feel sorry for is the one with both knees bandaged under her tights: that's pain now, pain later.

Back in the hotel, eating sardines out of the tin, I read my place-mat, the London Review of Books.

American writer Ben Lerner: "...What if we dislike or despise or hate poems because they are – every single one of them – failures? The poet and critic Allen Grossman tells a story (there are many versions of the story) that goes like this: you’re moved to write a poem because of some transcendent impulse to get beyond the human, the historical, the finite. But as soon as you move from that impulse to the actual poem, the song of the infinite is compromised by the finitude of its terms. So the poem is always a record of failure. There’s an ‘undecidable conflict’ between the poet’s desire to make an alternative world and, as Grossman puts it, ‘resistance to alternative making inherent in the materials of which any world must be composed’. "

The same applies to drawing.

On the plane home I meet an emeritus professor, Robert Adams, who's been co-chairing a conference at the same university.

'What was yours about?' I ask.
'Glue.'
'What's the big thing in glue?'
'Surfaces.'

He points out that artists have been let down terribly by glue/size/varnish over the centuries.

It was the Third International Conference on Structural Adhesive Bonding. The former head of glue at Ford Motor Company was there. I feel a pang for the two days of metaphor they have been enjoying.

Seminar on illicit images

I can draw this seminar without incurring a criminal record. Unlike in a court - the Supreme Court excepted - where it's illegal to draw (section 41, Criminal Justice Act 1925). The court sketches you see in the newspapers have to be done from memory. Meanwhile, people tweet goodness-knows-what defamation and contempt from the public seats.

Professor Linda Mulcahy, Department of Law, London School of Economics reads Economies of illicit images: understanding the ban on photography in English courts. 

She shows courtroom photos snatched from odd angles. Dr Crippen and Ethel Le Neve in the dock. Poisoner Frederick Seddon being sentenced to death in 1912. Early courtroom paparazzi had top hats on their laps with a hole in and a camera inside. They coughed to cover the sound of the shutter. This reminds me of the time I had to skewer someone's bollocks for taking illicit photos in life class.

Professor Leslie J. Moran, School of Law, Birkbeck, University of London, reads Televising the judicial ‘money shot’: making and managing screen images of judges delivering their judgments. Baroness Hale's spectacle case is caught on video, colourful and folklorique among clean curves of pale wood in the Supreme Court.

From Australia we have Dr Peter Doyle, curator of the exhibitions Suburban Noir, City of Shadows and Crimes of Passion, drawn from the Forensic Photography Archive at Sydney's Justice and Police Museum; associate professor of media at Macquarie University. His paper, Ways of looking, limits of seeing: displaying the forensic photograph is all Hitchcock, sinister banality. Bloodstains on a café floor.

Professor Katherine Biber, University of Technology Sydney, Australia, Visiting Scholar at Birkbeck School of Law, Visiting Fellow, Institute of Advanced Legal Studies reads Redacted readymades: art from bureaucratic secrets. Creative crossings-out, the art of absence. Lacunae. Black holes, punched in images deemed unfit to be shown, become part of the composition.

The chairman is Dr Thomas Giddens, St Mary’s University, Twickenham. The event is organised by the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies in collaboration with Birkbeck. The redacted images in my current exhibition in Oslo are under the counter in the gallery.

Exhibition at VI, VII in Oslo

He said, 'Mankind have a strong attachment to the habitations to which they have been accustomed. You see the inhabitants of Norway do not with one consent quit it, and go to  some part of America, where there is a mild climate, and where they may have the same produce from land, with the tenth part of the labour. No, Sir; their affection for their old dwellings, and the terrour of a general change, keep them at home. Thus, we see many of the finest spots in the world thinly inhabited, and many rugged spots well inhabited.' 

I'm travelling with Dr Johnson, tempered by the emollient Boswell.

Nowadays, Americans go to Norway. Esperanza Rosales forsook Brooklyn for Oslo where she set up an art gallery. It's called VI, VII and pronounced 'sixes and sevens' in a sort of reverse Featherstonehaugh.

Another import, Richard Bowers, is a Sinatra-style crooner from Taunton, now settled in Oslo where his Greek girlfriend runs a restaurant.

It's egalitarian here. 'They don't say "please",' Richard confides. 'They don't need to. Vær så snill. I learned it but I never use it.'




'Publick practice of any art, (he observed,) and staring in men's faces, is very indelicate in a female.'

But I've got permission to draw in the Supreme Court of Norway so off I go - see here.

Much enquiry having been made concerning a gentleman, who had quitted a company where Johnson was, and no information being obtained; at last Johnson observed, that "he did not care to speak ill of any man behind his back, but he believed the gentleman was an attorney."

Oh for God's sake.



The exhibition Back to Life shows my drawings of the progress of The Violet Crab, a cabaret-themed exhibition by Than Hussein Clark at the David Roberts Art Foundation in London which I've blogged about here (there's more than one post so please scroll down).

The Oslo gallery VI, VII is at Tordenskiolds gate 12; please check opening times online; closes 17 July.

The dancer in the pictures is Ayumi LaNoire.

More pictures if you scroll down.

My drawing of photographer Josh Redman - not his photos

Oslo shop window

A tourist in the Supreme Court of Norway/Norges Høyesterett

A discreet tip-tapping like a mouse behind the wainscot, then the justices file in. In London an usher would holler to disturb our reverie, but this is low-key, egalitarian Norway, the country ranked top in the Democracy Index compiled by the Economist Intelligence Unit. 

I'm here as a non-Norwegian-speaking tourist. There are just a few observers - mainly students, I think - composing a curtain of blonde. Five justices, the normal number here although some appeals are heard by more. Two advocates. A soothing narrative style.

No legal teams. Robes all round. No wigs. Sparse court staff. No back wall of judicial assistants. No microphones. No Apple logos.

There is no Latin, but plenty of English is being quoted in A mot Den offentlige påtalemyndighet. Sounds like - not sure - the Antarctic Treaty. The case examines a judgment regarding a crime against the Antarctic environment. The French appear to be involved.

In London we are mollycoddled with informative case hand-outs, including a seating plan for the bench, but I have nothing to go on here. 

Advocate alone

There are a few five-minute breaks built in to proceedings. At one point, the only person left in the courtroom is the advocate who has been on his feet, full of adrenaline, pacing, wanting to press on.

After the hearing he is photographed and interviewed in the courtroom by a journalist. This would not happen at home: that's what the pavement is for.

Advocate being photographed

The way out of the courtroom takes you through a smaller room with a wash-basin in it. I am struck by this intrusion of the personal. You could enact some Ibsenesque renunciation or off-stage suicide here.

I wander upstairs, past a kitchenette, to a civil case. It concerns a difference of opinion between the government and a psychologist about official payments and beyond that I am lost. 

I was in Oslo for my exhibition (blog post here) at the gallery called VI, VII and pronounced sixes and sevens (Tordenskiolds gate 12, entrance in Otto Sverdrups gate) until 28 June. Please check online for opening times.

Aerial hoop and silks: Astra Beck at Skylab Studio

Astra Beck  teaches aerial hoop and silks at Skylab Studio in Camden. Girls with implausible amounts of core strength are practising on hoops and loops of silk suspended from the ceiling in a sort of fairy-circus dream.

I spread the Financial Times over my little territory to protect the pristine mirrored studio from any ink spills.

Astra stands still as a tree-trunk thinking deeply before launching into a long routine.

Out in the street you start to see hoops everywhere.