Preparing For Emergencies with James Cauty

This is an interview with James Cauty, self-styled art-terrorist and former member of the KLF and the Orb, who is responding in his own inimitable way to alarmist government propaganda. We advise you to read it, then put it away and get on with your life...

You may remember James Cauty as being one half of the massively successful combo The KLF, alongside Bill Drummond. He was also   the founder member of The Orb. You may also recall that, following the dissolution of the KLF in 1992, Drummond and Cauty gave the art world a sharp poke in the eye with the formation of the K Foundation. This was an organisation which staged its first high-profile publicity stunt by setting-up the anti-Turner Prize and awarding the artist Rachael Whiteread £40,000 for 'House', which they judged the worst piece of British art of that year. Whiteread had just picked up a similar pay-out as the winner of the real Turner prize. And then, obviously with cash still to burn from the KLF's huge commercial success, they followed that up with the headline-grabbing public incineration of a million quid. But that was ten years ago, and so it was perhaps not surprising that James Cauty responded to my suggestion of a feature on his work   by stating unequivocally that, 'I don't want to talk about burning money or anything else like that. Let's talk about recent stuff.'

Fair enough. But without recourse to those usual first questions I'd normally ask about someone's recent past as a preamble to talking about the present, I felt the best course of action was to just turn on the tape recorder and see what happened...

We met up in a nondescript pub in Euston, on the depressing day that we learned that George Bush had been granted four more years. 'I did my best music in the Thatcher years. Maybe I'll do my best art in the Bush years,' was Cauty's pragmatic response to this news. And indeed, it seemed that he was eager to impress early on that his future lies very much in the realm of visual art rather than music. 'With the music I don't give a fuck any more and you have to give a fuck otherwise it doesn't sound any good. I still do some remixes and DJ-ing at parties for cash, but other than that it's not the driving force anymore. It's the art now.'

'I did my best music in the Thatcher years. Maybe I'll do my best art in the Bush years'

In recent years much of James Cauty's work, has manifested itself through the Blacksmoke; which he describes as 'an imaginary art collective', and has been based primarily around his response to what he describes as 'government propaganda about terrorist attacks'

But why all this focus on terrorism, real or imagined? Well, the events of September 11th seemed to have served as something of a catalyst for Cauty. 'I had loads of ideas after that happened. I wasn't really doing that much before for a while, and then suddenly after that it was like, "whooah I want to do stuff about 9/11." That's when the stamps started appearing. The very early stamps were just pictures of the twin towers on fire. Then I did the queen in a gas mask image -- but that got stopped.'

In issue 4 of Nude, we touched briefly upon Cauty's troubles with the Royal Mail. To recap, there has been a long running dispute between the two parties over an alleged infringement of copyright, in particular over his alleged misuse of the queen's image as it appears on Royal mail stamps. Basically, Cauty created a series of prints in which he added a gas mask to the Queen's image, prompting the Royal Mail to demand their immediate withdrawal from sale. Subsequent talks were held with the result that new, slightly altered editions of the Stamps of Mass Destruction series were issued over Christmas 2004. A confidentiality contract had to be signed before these meetings took place so its not possible to give details of what was said or agreed.

'Suffice to say much of it was quite bizarre,' says Cauty. 'And we even suggested that if the Royal Mail ever wanted to include a gas mask on their definitive stamp image they must first obtain a license from Blacksmoke. Now we've come to an arrangement where I can just carry on doing my job and they can just carry on doing theirs. And maybe they'll get off my case. They were always intended to be real stamps eventually, but I never made it that far. We didn't really think the whole stamp thing through.'

Although much of the Blacksmoke merchandise still features variations on the contentious stamp imagery, another key motif is his reworking of the distinctive symbol which appeared on the government's 'Preparing for Emergencies' leaflet.

'The original series of icons means danger, call 999, go inside, lock the door, tune in the radio and administer first aid. We turned them upside down to read; go to the chemist, turn the radio off, a bomb drops, go back outside again, Satan arrives on earth -- exclamation mark. We have no idea what all this means either, but we reckon it makes great wallpaper art prints.'

Extracted from a longer illustrated feature which appeared in issue 5 of Nude (Dec 2004/ Jan 2005)