In 1995, on a cycling holiday amid the snow-capped peaks of the Italo-Slovene border, a British conceptual artist went missing. Already famous for his boxing ceremonies – described by one critic as ‘like Japanese tea ceremonies, but with boxing instead of tea’ – Harry Kipper had hoped to make his name in Europe with a new project: to cycle a route that, when completed, would trace out the word ‘ART’ on a map of the continent. Hearing of his disappearance, Italian state TV dispatched a film crew to London. Friends and acquaintances took cameramen on tours of Lincoln’s Inn Fields – beloved by Harry because of its clear architectural debt to the Great Pyramid of Giza – and to Harry’s flat on the Isle of Dogs, which had unfortunately been bulldozed by the time they arrived.
Only when the kidnapping was publicly owned up to by former Watford FC and AC Milan striker Luther Blissett – best known for the hat-trick he scored for England in their 1982 defeat of Luxembourg – did the press begin to doubt the story. In the weeks that followed, it emerged that the whole thing was a hoax: there was no Harry Kipper, and Luther Blissett was busy playing out the twilight of his career on loan at Wimborne Town.
The ‘kidnapping’ had been simulated, in fact, in the name of art. And the perpetrators? A madcap cell of ‘art terrorists,’ whose bizarre stunts, hoaxes, and political performances would soon give rise to the most compelling movement to emerge from the British art scene during the drab interregnum between Thatcher and Blair. The London Psychogeographical Association had been born.
In certain obscure circles, the London Psychogeographical Association is legendary. It is the kind of thing you tend to have heard of if you read a lot of Alan Moore’s comics, or Will Self’s novels, or Iain Sinclair’s literary perambulations, or if you have ever described a Sunday-afternoon walk as a ‘dérive’. To a particular type of counterculturally inclined fiftysomething, the LPA is one of the great lapsed European vanguards, London’s answer to Dada and the Surrealists.
Indeed, before long the Luther Blissett hoax had set a precedent, inspiring a subgenre of Anglo-Italian pranks, from the announcement that Britain would submit a live chimpanzee to the 1995 Venice Biennale, to the 2007 declaration that pro-Ratzinger Catholic cyberterrorists had infiltrated the Bloomsbury mainframe and leaked the upcoming Harry Potter manuscript online, causing the Bloomsbury stock price to drop by 5%.
Yet when I meet one of the LPA’s founders, Stewart Home, in the Barbican, he is quick to stress that for the most part, the LPA was a half-serious, bumbling, and resolutely local affair. The name ‘London Psychogeographical Association’ wasn’t even particularly original: Home and his friend Richard Essex had taken it from dissolute older artist and founding member of the Situationist International, Ralph Rumney, with whom Home spent a few days drifting drunkenly through Paris in the 1980s under the pretext of an interview for an arts magazine.
Unusually for artist-theorists, Rumney seems to have had almost no ego: though the LPA had originally just been a rather grandiose moniker he adopted for himself while consorting with Situationists in Switzerland, he was happy to have it invoked by others provided they were doing something suitably weird and disruptive. Henceforth, a core principle of the LPA was its rejection of auteurism: the Luther Blissett project, Home tells me, was just an attempt to attract so much publicity that people would use the name spontaneously, without tracing its originators, inspired by an old Berlin Dada performance where the public was sold the right to use the name ‘Jesus Christ’ for a small fee.
Most of the LPA’s early activity was rather modest. Home and Essex spent much of their time producing a pamphlet, modelled on the old copies of the Situationist Times of which Home had found in a cache in an old bomb shelter off Oxford Street. ‘Say no to the Gregorian calendar,’ reads the first article I find online; ‘Sir Christopher Wren […] was the founder of freemasonry’, reads the second. The third article I don’t quite understand, but seems to be implying that the key to the ancient mysteries of the Priory of Sion is to be found in a painting currently on show at the Royal Academy.
