Art versus stunt: art as stunt in John Lanchester's Capital

Thus starts Capital (2012), a novel by John Lanchester. Indeed, it is a novel about London life at the end of the first decade of the new millennium, with its wealth and its poverty, with its smug and snug and its hard-working immigrants, with its finance and its corruption -the subjects rather convincingly treated in the reviews both in Russia and in the British and American press [Bogdanova 2017; Saveliev 2017; Vodyanitskaya 2019; Miller 2012; Potts 2012; Tomalin 2012; Preston 2017; Schillinger 2012; Corte 2017]. Indeed, the many and various characters and events of the novel are connected by the same area – a street in Lambeth in South London. Yet the reviewers tend to ignore another sub-plot, also very important in holding a very populous and eventful story together – it is a kind of quite popular Contemporary Art. So the purpose of this paper is to explore and explicate this vastly neglected subject of Lanchester’s novel – the type of art it depicts and employs for building its detective sub-plot.

Waking up one morning following the activity of the man in a hooded sweatshirt the street residents find in their post photographs of their houses shot from unusual angles, with the message: We Want What You Have. The rich and spoilt Arabella, wife of a bank manager ,

thinks it must be from estate agents, the oldest resident of the street widowed Petunia Howe rather ignores it, some others find it unpleasant. When similar photos with the same message go on appearing every fortnight and then are accompanied by a DVD just showing the street up and down with all its nice houses and cars, the residents become enough worried to apply to the police, and the word harassment is used by many. The photos and the video can also be accessed on the site entitled We Want What You Have. Then all of it just stops.

Once upon a time the old Mrs Howe is visited by her grandson, a very successful twenty-eight-year-old artist (not at all terrible, let us disagree with the description given by The Telegraph reviewer [Miller 2012]). What kind of an artist, the reader already knows from some previous chapter s dealing with the successful Smitty and his art: This was how Smitty had made his name: through anonymous artworks in the form of provocations, graffiti, only-just-non-criminal vandalism, and stunts [Lanchester 2013: 80]. He is sent reviews of his most recent piece which was “exhibited” on an abandoned building site and the piece is described as follows:

It had been called Bucket of Shit and had involved putting ten abandoned toilets around the rubble – only instead of being filled with shit, the toilets had been full of cut flowers, crunched together and spray-painted to look like oversize turds. He and his crew took photographs and sent press releases out by mail. The council’s contractors had cleared the piece within forty-eight hours but the harvest was here in the clippings, most of it favourable. Urban renovation and the ease with which we passed by, unseeing, the urban underclass; that was, apparently, what this latest ‘guerrilla intervention’ had been about [Lanchester 2013: 81 - 82].

As can be seen from the latter quotation, Smitty’s art has social purposes, in this particular case – to attract people’s attention to what is wrong about under-developed building sites in poorer urban areas. To get ideas for his pieces he wants to know what goes on in people’s minds, that is why he may prefer travelling by Tube and watching commuters to driving his fast and expensive car. And he is always thinking about his art. Thus, he is looking out the window of his studio and sees a group of idle workers seeming to admire a big hole they had dug a week before, and the trigger inside his head clicks:

That was what gave Smitty the idea: make a work of art about holes. Or, make holes the work of art. Yes, that was better. Dig some holes and make the hole the artwork, or rather the confusion and chaos the hole caused – people’s reaction, not the thing itself. Yeah – bloody great hole, for no reason. Let the tossers argue about who fills it in. That’s part of the artwork too [Lanchester 2013: 80].

He is referred to as the performance and installation artist [Lanchester 2013: 79] and he thinks of the way he might explain his work to his grandmother: I am a conceptual artist who specialises in provocative temporary site-specific works... [Lanchester 2013: 86].

As Contemporary Art plays an important role in the novel it is worthwhile to explain it. It is, first and foremost, a system of aesthetic rules corresponding to the Artist’s contemporary pattern of statements about this world. This pattern is characterised by some specific comprehension of the artistic project and purport and artistic artefact as well as of the creative art which establishes new forms of communication with the audience. In the place of the criterion of artistic quality, all-important in the traditional Arts, Contemporary Art puts forward and highly values the ability of the Artist to conceptualise his or her original ideas and present them through a gesture. The latter absorbs the artistic meaning curtailed to a system of codes and substituting modes of expression used previously – those employing the artwork’s plastic form. So it is a gesture understood as the Artist’s act and as the possibility to “present” the Creative Self which ought to be decoded by the audience in the process of looking.

A gesture conceptualising the Artist’s ideas provides the basis for Smitty’s creative practices. How he gets the ideas for his performances, installations and graffiti breaking the urban space stereotypes should be obvious from the quotation above. His works make a series of provocative acts/actions aimed at criticising social order, they are artistic gestures encoding his attitude to the problems of life around him. The purpose of his acts is to form, by way of alerting his audience, a new experience of looking at their social surroundings and social relations. His work and its huge success are summed up in a newspaper closer to the end of the novel:

His artworks are controversial, his stunts infamous. His provocative graffiti have travelled the journey from Underground station walls to prestigious art galleries. He makes collectors’ pieces which sell for millions [Lanchester 2013: 558].

Well, while visiting his grandmother Smitty notices the DVD and the photographs with We Want What You Have on them and gives his professional appreciation: The kind of photo which would be crap if it were a normal photo but would be OK if it were consciously artistic [ Lanchester 2013: 88]. Art critics inform us that in the kind of Contemporary Art Smitty practices, artworks are not created, they are appointed as such. Anyway, Smitty gets enough interested in the DVD and the photos to take them to his studio.

At some point in the plot the reader guesses who the host of the We Want What You Have internet site was and made the photos of the houses and the video of the street. He is not an artist, so his acts and production were not consciously artistic. Yet he does, like Smitty, disapprove of many things he sees around him, so his actions may be seen as socially-oriented - hence the unpleasant feeling of the well-to-do residents of the street and, we suggest, hence the vague interest on the part of Smitty: he might somehow use the photos, he, a professional artist and a celebrity, might appoint them to be artworks.

Similarly to Smitty, the young man in a hooded sweatshirt shown at the very beginning of the novel does not intend to trespass the law, so once the police are appealed to and the word harassment is used, his activities cease. Much to his surprise a few months later he sees that his nearly forgotten site We Want What You Have is active again and the harassment of the street residents acquires a new and somewhat sinister touch – they find in their post parcels with dead birds. Once some ugly graffiti appear – not quite always fitting the particular residents of particular houses. Finally, an act of true vandalism happens – all the nice and expensive cars parked in front of the houses are scratched down their sides with a set of keys, apparently a serious damage, according to the British Law, causing a custodial sentence and jail. It is here that the true detective plot is introduced into the novel. And again it is connected with Contemporary Art and the Artists.

The nice and intelligent Detective Inspector Mill at some point comes to realize that there is not one, but two series of events arranged and performed by two different people. However, it is Smitty who, once he has learnt about the new series of attacks in his now deceased grandmother’s street, immediately identifies the criminal. The true Artist in Smitty, despite his youth, knows and understands the innate rhythms of the creative process which form the artistic statement. In the series of unpleasant and even criminal actions he has seen an attempt of self-expression through a gesture devoid of artistic meaning. This fact once again allows us to underline the important role of Art and the Artist in Capital – it is the Artist here who plays the role similar to that of analytically-minded investigators in the classical detective stories by Edgar Alan Poe or novels by Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie. It is the would-be Art which is the evidence.