Stefan Szczelkun

The life of a serial artist bookmaker

Whilst having my year out from my architecture course in 1969 I came across The Scratch Orchestra and although not a musician I joined with glee and experienced the power of collective improvisation. This did result in a publication, but much later. By 1971 I was back at college in Portsmouth attempting to finish my course whilst living the high life of a provincial hippy. Architecture did not seem to be located in human needs… So I decided to take John Cages’ advice and ‘start from scratch’. Before architecture came shelter so I started collecting stuff on basic forms of shelter making. That turned into collecting scrapbooks of material on our basic life supports - shelter, food and energy. It was a revelation to me because I felt that I was reclaiming knowledge from its European Humanist edifice.

I had the good luck to take my collection into Unicorn Bookshop in Brighton at an opportune time. The poet proprietor of Unicorn, Bill Butler, could see the potential for a British version of The Whole Earth Catalogue. The first completely hand-drawn ‘Survival Scrapbook 1 Shelter’ came out early in 1972. ‘Survival Scrapbook 2 Food’ came out later that year and ‘Energy’ in 1974. They sold well and the rights were sold to Schocken in NY. I was sent on a 37 radio and TV talk show tour of America and they sold thousands of them.

The next thing I got into was a concept of ’Total Ability’ where the idea of ‘going back to first principles’, which my school physics teacher used to bang on about, was applied to human functioning. It started when I came across a page-long description of standing in a classic book on Yoga. What if I collected things like that on all our human abilities… creating a sort of self-knowledge through doing. Anyway that project was bought by a big publisher called Wildwood House. But then they went bust and as the Seventies progressed the bottom fell out of the hippie alternative market as things got less visionary. So ‘Sense -Think - Act’ got put on the shelf until Gordon Joly turned up and offered to publish it as a Wiki on his own backyard server. From there it was finally made into a self-published paperback book.

But to return back to the Eighties… By then I felt a need to explore who I was. And I still hankered after the peer collectivity I’d experienced in the Scratch Orchestra. First of all I decided that I should follow my inner mojo and be an artist rather than a half-hearted professional. Help for my confused state of being came in the form of a class conscious form of co-counselling. Through this I came to realise I was still as working class as my family in spite of my pretensions to be an author and artist! I joined a newly formed Brixton Artists Collective which got hold of some railway arches and started running radical and inclusive exhibitions. It was a breath of fresh air compared with the stuffy art world.

The next thing was I realised was that I was a Polish artist. In spite of losing the language and being second generation I was still an immigrant with attitude. Two practical actions came out of this almost simultaneously.

The first was meeting some Polish artists in Lincolnshire, through the mail art network, and realising I could do with being part of a Polish artists group. Then I met Kasia Januszko living in my street in Kennington and with her help the project took practical shape. The group, called ‘Bigos: artists of Polish origin’ ran from 1986 to 1997 with touring shows in the UK and Poland. Some of the catalogues are listed below and can now be downloaded as PDFs or ebooks.

The second point of action was meeting with Graham Harwood and forming a collective publishing imprint called ‘Working Press books by and about working class artists’. At the time artists were all seen as middle-class and there was meant to be no such thing as working-class culture. Almost by definition the working class were considered to be ‘without refinements such as Culture’. Anyway, to cut a long story short, I wrote three books with Working Press between 1986 and 1993. First was a scrapbook of documentation of my collaborative art practice - ‘Collaborations’. Next came ‘Class Myth and Culture’, which was short auto-ethnography style essays intermixed with my artwork. Finally I wrote ‘Conspiracy of Good Taste’ which was my thesis about how working-class culture had been shafted and almost obliterated by certain upper middle-class operators over the last century. These three books and a few pamphlets are listed below. The books were all offset printed paperbacks and sold enough to cover costs in average editions of 1000.

At the same time, with the idea that all artists were workers, I had a go at organising book artists. Well, I got paid by the Arts Council to research the what artists were making books and what the issues were. This turned out spectacularly successful as it led to Tanya Pexioto putting together an Artist-book Yearbook in the following years - something that continues to this day with the efforts of Sarah Bodman in Bristol, and a yearly artists book fair.

Then I tried to enter the new digital world and started making documentary videos and publishing them on DVD. I joined another artists collective, The Exploding Cinema. I had realised that all the collectives I had been part of were not in the art history books. So I decided to use the doctoral research format to try to change that with regard to Exploding Cinema. My thesis was published as a website but not as a book! At the same time the DVDs didn’t sell well at all and at that time online video was still a bit weedy.

Then the materiality of books began to call me back. With help of Mute magazine I published a project I’d been doing online which followed up the chapter on the repression of working class music in the Conspiracy of Good Taste. This new project determined to distill the potency of the political aspects of music that became diluted and weakened in the mass media. This was a book of 23 playlists by 23 selectors called 'Agit Disco'. All the playlists and had been issued as home-made CDRs. Very recently the rights were bought by a publisher in Japan who brought out an expanded edition in Japanese in 2018.

After the Agit Disco book I wanted to revisit my fantastic experience of collective improvisation in the days of The Scratch Orchestra. I gradually got a group of younger performers together and, along with old Scratch members, we started working on a John Cage opus called ’Song Books’ before going back to explore a Scratch Orchestra collection of short verbal scores called ‘Nature Study Notes’. After several years, four public performances and an appearance at Documenta 14 in Athens, I published the documentation of the group’s work process in a print-on-demand book entitled - ‘Improvisation Rites’.

Finally, wanting to get back to my own art practice I published two hardback editions of my own recent photography projects. I was fortunate in getting these distributed by Central Books.

‘Chalet Fields of the Gower’ is a project coming out of the chapter on housing in the Conspiracy of Good Taste. Seventy colour photographs are accompanied by an interview with a local Swansea architect.

‘Composition’ documents my own food waste in a dramatic series of 17 photographs that pick up on the metaphor of decomposition and mix it with references to a history of European still life paintings.

Currently also working with video.