Looking through an old copy of Photography/Politics: One, published by the Photographers Workshop in September 1979, I noticed a couple of interesting South London small ads.
Sabarr Books was at 121 Railton Road SE24 'Specialising in books on Third World politics and literature'. I believe that Olive Morris (among other things a Brixton Black Panther) was involved with this. Later the same address was squatted for many years as the 121 Centre anarchist bookshop and social space.
The League of Socialist Artists was based at 18 Camberwell Church Street (now Tuckers solicitors), and were advertising a publication on 'Class War in the Arts! The League of Socialist Artists v. The "Art and Culture" Agencies of Monopoly Capital'.
The LSA seem to have been a dogmatic group promoting strict 'socialist realism' in art and associated with the small Marxist Leninist Organisation of Britain. According to this article by Sam Richards:
'In addition to his activities in the MLOB, Mike Baker and other members of the group, notably his co-worker and wife, Maureen Scott, were active from August 1971 in the League of Socialist Artists (LSA). John Walker argues that: "Despite their left-wing rhetoric, in certain respects the LSA artists were conservatives: they believed in representation not abstraction, employed traditional techniques such as painting and drawing, accepted art galleries as places to display work and the necessity for artists to make a living by selling their products as commodities"(Left Shift: Radical Art in 1970s Britain). Based at 18 Church Street, Camberwell,The Communard Gallery, until 1975 provided the exhibition space where they exhibited their own work, delivered lectures, published the poetry of the Turkish Communist Nazim Hikmet, The Wall ,with illustrations by Scott, sold posters of Marx, Lenin and Stalin and generally promoted the cause of socialist realism'.
As was usually the way with such organisations there were bitter splits and denunciations. Baker was expelled as leader of the MLOB in 1974 - and in another local connection I note that the address given for the organisation at the time was 17b Brindley Street SE14.
 |
| (found this image online, seemingly from a gallery catalogue) |
0 comments:
Post a Comment