BIBLIOFILE

Founded by Tony Godwin in 1946, Better Books became not only the alternative bookshop in Charing X Road (and later on round the corner in New Compton Street too), stocking 'little press' material, hard-to-find foreign imports etc, but also a venue for countercultural poetry readings and events, providing a transatlantic match-up with City Lights book store in San Francisco. As well as the Metzger installation (see below) it hosted events such as Alexander Trocchi's 'sTigma Environmental Exhibition', and in May 1965 was the platform for a reading by Allen Ginsburg. The poet Lee Harwood has outlined what made Better Books so special: 'It was Jeff Nuttall taking over the basement and creating an installation, a miniature world that you entered by pushing your way through a tunnel set with phone directories. After that was a narrow passage lined, either side, floor to ceiling, with TV sets. Walls of blurred sound and distorted images. Then a seemingly peaceful grotto with a fountain, fake flowers and grass, and a dish with a piece of rotting meat.' By the 1970s the outlet was owned by John Calder, with another luminary of the underground writing scene, Bob Cobbing, as manager.

Photo of front door in 1972:
www.rchrd.com/photo/archives/images/pb3-28-8.jpg

This tradition of experimental, occasionally naf art continues nowadays in the two 24-hr open Charing X Road vitrines of Central St Martin's Art School. Sandwiched between Foyles and The Montague Pyke pub, and sitting on the unstable border zone of Soho and Bloomsbury, CSM's windows often serve up a different type of mis-en-scene for tipsy audiences on a jolly night out in 'theatreland': fuzzy videos, sub Koons pop sculpture, recursive conceptual jottings, you name it. Usually up for just a few days, the constant turnover signals institutional demand, despite these worthy efforts frankly often being little more than minumental window-dressing.

Ami Clarke's piece 'Diagram as Event' caught the eye. Installed in the south window, it showed research findings from time spent in the John Latham archive at Flat Time House, Peckham, consisting of five selected photocopies of Latham diagrams stuck to the inner window glass, and backed by a large poster reproduction of his Full Stop (1961), a work that suggests Roland Barthes' notion of the 'punctum', or even Saturn, referred to by Ian Allison as 'the planet of detours and delays', although Clarke herself favours 'an eclipse, an event that would certainly stop you in your tracks.'

She has emerged with a cache of theoretically laden material that instantiates her love of diagrams, among them: a score, a map as readymade, and a drawing as prototype. Dilating somewhat on Latham himself, (a figure who was notoriously sacked from CSM in 1966 for chewing and pulping a copy of Clement Greenberg's cultic text Art & Culture, [at least if we are to believe his spin]) Clarke underlines that it is his 'ideas through diagrammatic form that is of interest here' and how 'referencing the archiving of this material where it was found, starts a new category perhaps titled 'the diagram' to collate this set of material'; another reminder if it were needed of the influence of 60s art, and its extensive cultural footprint.

En passant a woman blathers on her mobile "He's going to get an enormous television screen..." The remark dopplers away. Sic vita in Charing X Road, with its constant throughput of voyeurs, hustlers and Eurotourists steering and swapping between the smutty and the arty, dodging roadworks too, occasioned by the never ending replacement of London's Victorian water mains.

www.amiclarke.com
www.flattimeho.org.uk