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Collaborations: Routine Art Co
This is the actual 1987 cover. A book that documents collaborative art activity in the Eighties on London. A unique record.
100 pages, Paperback
First published February 3, 1987
About the author
Stefan Szczelkun
24 books44 followersLast three books:
'Can Working Class Culture be Knowledge' 2024 ISBN 9781870736558
'Dementia Painting' April 2023.
'Exploding Cinema 1991 - 1999: culture and democracy' was published in 2021 - a short version of my PhD dissertation at RCA.
'SiLENCE! the great silencing of British working class culture' plus related photoboooks on UK Plotlands and other stuff. See Openlibrary link for full list of books.
Most of my books are available as ebooks or PDFs. If you contact me I will send you a review copy.
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 in a van. 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 was finding my own categories and structuring knowledge for myself rather than following existing classifications.
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 by the thousand.
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 architect. 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 with other working class artists and started running radical and inclusive exhibitions in three railway arches. It was a breath of fresh air compared with the stuffy art world.
The next thing was I realised was that I was still Polish. 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 a Polish artist in Lincolnshire, through the mail art network, (Leszek Dabrowski) and realising I could do with being part of a Polish artists group. Then I met Kasia Januszko living in my squatted street in Kennington and with her help the project took practical shape. The group, cal
'Can Working Class Culture be Knowledge' 2024 ISBN 9781870736558
'Dementia Painting' April 2023.
'Exploding Cinema 1991 - 1999: culture and democracy' was published in 2021 - a short version of my PhD dissertation at RCA.
'SiLENCE! the great silencing of British working class culture' plus related photoboooks on UK Plotlands and other stuff. See Openlibrary link for full list of books.
Most of my books are available as ebooks or PDFs. If you contact me I will send you a review copy.
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 in a van. 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 was finding my own categories and structuring knowledge for myself rather than following existing classifications.
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 by the thousand.
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 architect. 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 with other working class artists and started running radical and inclusive exhibitions in three railway arches. It was a breath of fresh air compared with the stuffy art world.
The next thing was I realised was that I was still Polish. 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 a Polish artist in Lincolnshire, through the mail art network, (Leszek Dabrowski) and realising I could do with being part of a Polish artists group. Then I met Kasia Januszko living in my squatted street in Kennington and with her help the project took practical shape. The group, cal
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