Your Authorised Reflection

The Blank Page - Darian Leader

Everyone is familiar with the image of the writer or artist confronted with blank page or canvas. We see it on TV, at the movies, in comics or in magazines. When we read a description of the particularity of the experience, we might identify with it or we might not. Sometimes the emphasis is on a preconception and sometimes on a void: there’s a difference between having a clear image of exactly what one wants to create and being stuck at the moment of materialising it and just knowing one wants to create but not having any idea of what. Both of these suppose the encounter with the blank page, but isn’t this blankness itself something that involves a complex process of creation? Is a page with nothing on it a blank page from the start?

Blankness, like silence, needs to be created. You might enjoy the silence of your garden every morning until one day you notice that it isn’t silent in the same way anymore: the birds have suddenly stopped twittering. The silence you feel now has a weight to it, created by the absence of birdsong. In other words, it’s the noise that creates the silence,

that frames it. To take another example, you might be pleased to spend the day at a spa where mobiles are banned and there’s only a vague background hum of New Age music. But what would happen if when you checked in, the receptionist just stared at you and said nothing? The absence of noise at the spa wouldn’t be silence, but the receptionist’s non-response would be. Isn’t the blankness of the blank page quite similar?

It only becomes blank at the moment we feel the weight of an expectation to fill it, to put something there. It’s the expectation that creates the blankness. This means that the same blank sheet of paper will only become a blank sheet of paper at a certain moment in one’s life. Perhaps it will then stay blank forever, perhaps not. But the moment that it becomes blank will be specific and unique to each of us. For some, the accent is perhaps less on expectation than on necessity. Paul Klee would find it impossible not to draw, covering any available surface from menus to newspaper borders with configurations of lines. Klee explained that he felt looked at from all sides: even on

his trips to the country, he said, “it was not I who looked at the forest, since the trees were looking at me”. This feeling of being submerged, of being invaded, was why he had to make marks. They protected him from an intrusive and enigmatic presence. With such high stakes, the page, for Klee, could not stay blank.

We often make marks at moments when we feel overwhelmed. This goes beyond the idea that we make narratives to protect ourselves from trauma. It is less about making meaning than about making an inscription, less about making stories than about making marks. Something can be fixed or arrested by making a mark, as we see, for example, in the feeling of relief sometimes experienced by self-harmers after they have made a cut in their body surface. This could be seen as a form of discharge, but a better term might be barrier or limit. Isn’t the crucial moment in the act of inscription, after all, the moment when one ends a line or mark or brushstroke? This is less an art of representing than an art of stopping.

Sometimes, it can be the very blankness of a page

that needs stopping. The page itself becomes a conduit for an anxiety that has its source somewhere else. The blankness calls us like a siren: say something, write something, do something. This solicitation requires us to represent ourselves, yet representing always involves a loss. We can never represent ourselves perfectly, only inadequately and incompletely, and this margin of loss can both bind us to the blank page and inhibit us to go further. Whatever we do will not be enough, so we remain at the edge of what seems like an abyss. Writers sometimes speak here of how they feel taunted by the blank page. And yet without this blankness, how can a creation emerge?

Gavin Turk’s blue plaque provided an elegant solution to this apparent impasse. Instead of displaying works that would necessarily fail to represent their maker, he simply indexed the fact that works had been made. That way, no one could judge whether the works had done their job or not. Naturally, this solution was a transitory one, as the association of the plaque with renown opened up a thread that the artist followed with some tenacity: his later works explored iconic images and what it

would mean to inhabit them.

The parsimony of the RCA installation of course raised the question of the missing works. Where were they? How could the artist conjure himself out of representing himself? What was there to interpret? This coalescence of blankness and creation brings into focus nicely the main psychoanalytic approaches to making. Analysts tend to fall into two camps here. Those who believe that we create from our phantasies, unconscious scenarios that mould and shape what we produce, and those who emphasise less such unconscious templates than their absence. For them, it is precisely the points at which our phantasies fail us from which the work of creation springs. Where we are unable to explain to ourselves key questions such as birth, death and sexuality, we create works in the place of the missing solutions. This would explain why classical psychoanalytic readings of literary and artistic works seem so reductive: they put the emphasis on phantasy and meaning rather than the experience of a hole.

Again, the stakes can be quite high at this point. Confronted with a hole, we can make something out of it or we can jump into it. And can’t the blank

page be both the substance and the metaphor of these options?

Celebrity - Paul Flynn

In the immediate wake of 9/11, Daily Mirror editor Piers Morgan hastily declared an end to The Celebrity Culture. His polemical wager centred on the dawn of a new age of serious thinking. It cut directly against the grain of tabloid thinking and effectively signed his own newspaper death-knell, as The Mirror’s sales fell directly into freefall.

Ignore The Celebrity Culture at your peril. Celebrate it with caution. Attempt to defy it and you will hastily become enveloped by its Faustian embrace. Seven years after declaring its end, with an irony arch enough to drive a double-decker bus under, Piers Morgan is a central figure in Britain’s Celebrity Culture. He makes his living mostly as a judge on The Celebrity Culture’s favourite medium, reality TV shows, and interviewing celebrities for a glossy magazine. Soon he will consolidate his own niche in The Celebrity Culture, replete with the requisite spray tan and teeth whitening signifiers, by hosting a chat show in which one self-made Celebrity of the age will talk to others. His brassy soundbite, so potent in the eye of international tragedy, meant nothing after all.

At the risk of glibness, just as the words were dropping

out of the Editor’s mouth, 9/11 was confirming temporary celebrity status on previously unfound icons. The good. The Mayor of New York, the Head of The Fire Department, individuals showing previously unseen displays of bravery and heroism. And the darkest celebrity of them all: ‘the baddie’. Bin Laden’s celebrity was such that a distant relative of his became a momentary newspaper obsession herself in the UK two years later, simply on the strength of sharing his surname.

The Celebrity Culture endeavours to keep a moral temperature between good and bad, but as it twists through the national psyche – encompassing such unlikely candidates as ‘The Canoe Wife’ who hid her husbands identity from her children, the lapdancer who the comedian informed her grandfather he had fucked live on national radio, the nurse who dated the TV presenter on a rape trial, a multiplicity of footballer’s spouses and a pantheon of young folk for whom fame constitutes a dream in itself – it bestows its arbitrary 15 minutes with slapdash abandon.

The Celebrity Culture was not about to go down in the aftermath of the fall of the Twin Towers. It had already acquired too much personal

significance for a nation that had bought into the idea of the self as brand. It had begun developing its own serious agenda, becoming at once synonymous with the idea of personal identity and community empathy. (Go on. Start an argument in the pub. Say the words ‘Victoria Beckham.’ Everybody cares, one way or another).

The Celebrity Culture satisfies a deeper need for a narrative we can all share, a story in which reward for the good and judgement for the bad becomes modern folklore. These stories of the most public beacons of our age frame the moral temperament of the nation. They are stories of redemption and absolution. They satisfy age-old hopes that justice will be done and that the good guy will get the girl and eventually save the world.

In this way, there is an argument for the case that The Celebrity Culture is the most honest arbiter of the time we live in. The psyche has become a modern instrument to be mastered. Playing it and shaping it is its own talent. Those living in the bookmarks between reality and celebrity have become living works of art. We

can point at them and adjudicate ourselves against them.

One of the most fun aspects of a Celebrity Culture that embraces not just the extraordinary but the ordinary in extraordinary circumstances is that we can measure how we might behave in a similar predicament. The Celebrity Culture as it stands is embodied in a South London dental hygienist that became one of the most recognisable names in the country after three months of public vilification in the Big Brother house, a subsequent turnaround, a further public shaming and redemption through illness. She is the first woman that has lived her entire adult life and may well die in the full public glare. Even her name feels weirdly symbolic or ironic, depending on the public’s mood towards her at any given moment, as if to prove that ‘Reality’ and ‘Celebrity’ have conspired to become the Dickensian fable of our times. Start a fully blown pub fight. Say the words ‘Jade Goody’. Everyone cares, for better and for worse.

A graph point somewhere between ‘Celebrity’ and ‘Reality’, not yet named, has become the esoteric watchword of our era. The Celebrity Culture itself has replaced The

Fairy Tale as the modern day fabulisation of moral and social codes. Heat, OK!, Hello and the daily coverage of The Celebrity Culture’s superstars in the tabloids and beyond act as its very own Hans Christian Anderson.

One of the most recognisable Fairytale narratives is that of ‘rags-to-riches’. But the pot of gold at the end of the modern rainbow is not only about money, however much the deification of cold and charismatic businessmen Alan Sugar, Roman Abromavich and Simon Cowell might suggest otherwise. In a fractured social state, validity is reached through remuneration <and> recognition. A side order of both remains The Celebrity Culture’s holy grail. The glamour model Katie Price, or Jordan in her Fairy Tale Princess guise, has become the most significant beacon of the acquisitive modern urge for both. The reason young girls look up to her more than other icons of her generation is a complicated combination of business acumen, show-and-tell shamelessness, an implicit understanding of the demands of her epoch and simply fulfilling the affably sexual, game-lass role in culture that calls to mind anyone from Diana Dors to Samantha Fox – those Fairytale princesses of yore, both beacons of an older, more

innocent incarnation of The Celebrity Culture.

Within Jordan’s and Goody’s stories and with all the Princesses that try their hand at living this year’s model of the Fairytale, a democratisation of Celebrity has taken place. In an age where the self has become the centre and mass communication fulfils the grand Warholian prophesy to the letter, Fame has become something that is no longer about People Like Them. It is about People Like Us. Public recognition has become about personal recognition. The cycle completes itself. Fame for everyone and everyone for fame. If there is an element of narcissism in not wanting Celebrities to be elevated and choosing to take them Just Like Us, then it is counterbalanced by the needling reality that it presents hope for everyone. And who doesn’t really want that?

The Celebrity Culture has now delivered its own hard-edged appeal. A collective game of good vs evil has emerged within it. So Fairytale! Sorry to hark back, but no-one quite fulfils these age-old tales with more tenacity and slyly intuitive public exuberance than Mrs Beckham. Her transformation from pock-marked, flat-haired, unremarkable Spice Girl to aerodynamic fashion plate has been a stealthy

Ugly Duckling anecdote for our times. And there was her handsome Prince, waiting patiently and compliantly, to conduct her down the aisle in a chariot of gold, paid for in an unprecedented deal by The Celebrity Culture’s favourite magazine. Before long her happily-ever-after is interrupted by Rebecca Loos, who instantly slips into the role of the dragon that needs to be slain by the withering, icy disapproval of the public. In The Celebrity Age silence has become the most potent weapon of choice against interrogation. It has invested the blonde model, the graffiti artist and the author of her generation with their own modern superpower. So Mrs Beckham follows the lead of Moss, Banksy and Rowling and keeps schtum on her husbands infidelity, styling out the impasse with a gravity that is both distinctly old fashioned and uniquely modern. Letting us be the judge. Clever girl.
In an age of transparency, where every aspect of the art of living has its price, to be auctioned off in an insane Sotheby’s of the psyche, silence is the only tool left to keep a myth in tact and protect a fantasy of living the perfect life. At the

other end there is the serial confessor. Tracey Emin has removed any sense of enigma or mystery about her life by revealing it down to every last artful detail. In The Celebrity Culture, the public has chosen the role of priest in the confessional. We still await Amy, Britney and Kerry to say their rosaries.

To lend Mrs Beckham’s Fairytale ending a strange intertextual twist, Loos’ final public dressing down after public rejection was delivered by another formerly betrayed wife (Sharon Osbourne) who had entered the public faculty and The Celebrity Culture by way of a reality TV show (The Osbournes), on a reality TV talent contest (Celebrity X Factor) in which ‘real’ celebrities imitated the motives of the ‘hopeful’ celebrities of Saturday night light entertainment. Did the whole hall of mirrors come crashing down after this? Of course not. It simply ripped up another chapter of The Modern Book of Fairytales and started over the process of replication, this time with another footballer, Ashley Cole, and another rags-to-riches reality Princess, Cheryl Cole, feeding the public need to cast villains and victims and deify the righteous.

Is modern day Celebrity any worse than

Fairytales of old in presenting unrealistic ideals? Or is it just a more complicated variant of the same? No matter how much a Celebrity chooses to control their own myth, no matter how much they shroud it in mystery or unknave themselves completely for public consumption, the judgement is left to the moral hordes. Who stays and who goes? We decide.

The Celebrity Culture is just a filter, a storytelling exercise, a picture book to turn the pages of and come to conclusions about the deep seated sense of right and wrong, good and bad, that has always been passed down from generation to generation in one form or another. Same as it ever was.

So rest assured.
Night, night and God bless.
Good, in the end, will always triumph over evil.