ZOMBIE HISTORIES: IMPOSSIBLE AFFINITIES AND UNDEAD INSPIRATIONS (by ANNEBELLA POLLEN)

I am delighted to announce that this week’s #GANTOB2024 pamphlet is by Annebella Pollen. Without further ado I will hand over to her.

If you were in Liverpool on 23^rd August 2017, you may remember an event, at the Black E, organised and compered by the artist Tom James, which took the form of a public hearing. Designed to take place 23 years after the K Foundation burned a million quid, it invited witnesses to take the stand to provide their interpretations of the money burning. It then asked an eclectic bunch of five outsiders – including economist Anne Pettifor, artist Jeremy Deller, and myself – to propose their own theories of why the “fuckers burned the lot”.

I came up with a theory that the K Foundation were part of a ‘deep tradition of historical weirdness’ and won the public vote. I linked the act to another group of justified ancients who liked to roam the land: the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift, a mysterious hooded brotherhood of English mystics, artists and social reformers who, around one hundred years ago, offered a radical set of propositions for reforming all that they saw was wrong with the country.

A winning proposition

With tongue firmly in my cheek, I argued that KLF and Kibbo Kift shared an uncanny number of philosophies and practices despite their different times. In their hoods and capes and cryptic symbolism, they certainly shared a wardrobe. Additionally, Kibbo Kift developed a powerful and self-referential myth that mixed politics, culture and magick (always with a K).

And, like KLF, they were always there with that K, waving flags and throwing shapes, in Kurious Kostume and in the buff. The K was mystical insignia and organisational logo, an attitude of worship and a sign of allegiance. It was culturally and spiritually loaded with meaning, yet what it meant was never quite clear. Sound familiar?

Kibbo Kift combined occult ritual, avant-garde aesthetics and agit-prop politics in their attempts to design a new world. They looked bizarre but spectacle was a central aspect of their method. They described themselves as ‘vanguards of the New Renaissance … in a world tottering on the brink of a New Dark Ages.’ K cultures echo across time.

A core part of what KK wanted to do was to ‘blow the gaff’ on conventional thinking about money. The global economic system of the 1920s was a core enemy. Its trickery and deception were seen as dark arts. Kibbo Kift’s founder stated, ‘Bank money is nothing more than… “Promises to Pay”. There is no MAGIC in these bits of paper.’ He went further: finance was ‘a Death-Cult. The Whole Financial System represents a Ritual Dance of Death.’

The method by which they registered their protest against economic order was highly symbolic, informed by the theatrical sacrifice rituals they used to mark the changing of the seasons. They marched three times anticlockwise around the Bank of England and burned an effigy of the governor of the Bank on the institution’s steps.

Like the present-day Ks, KK forebears were fascinated by ancient cultures and what they called ‘primitive tribes’ (rural small scale societies). These seemed to offer visual styles and spiritual systems that were superior to those in Western culture. These might save it in its final dying breaths. It is among the economic systems of non-European and non-Christian communities that we might find answers to the K Foundation’s money burning. The potlatch gift-giving practices of the indigenous people of the Pacific Northwest, for example, are based on a principle of excess rather than scarcity. The destruction of wealth in potlatch is a means of achieving sovereign status. Smashing, sinking and burning luxurious objects, in order to show wealth’s sacred uselessness, demonstrates the power of the destroyer.

Kibbo Kift, however, did not destroy a million quid. They barely had a hundred quid to spare. But with their global inspirations, their pagan-influenced anti-finance fire rituals, and their dramatic stunts, they blazed a trail for KLF to follow. Their ritual endeavours were performative magic, designed to bring ideas into being. They aimed to replace one form of immaterial imaginary (the financial system) with another (a leisure society or, in K2’s terms, ‘a Utopian costume drama’). The correspondences with KLF suggest an unbroken tradition.

K2 put it in 2017:

Down through the epochs and out across the continents, generation upon generation of the Justified Ancients of Mu Mu have told variants of the same story – an end of days story, a final chapter story. 

Kibbo Kift proclaimed in 1927:

The Kindred changes; its forms change, illogically, inconsistently, as it may seem, with the non-logical forces of Life and Death. What it was yesterday it is not to-day; and what it is to-day it cannot be tomorrow.

These K-based shapeshifters draw on sometimes bewildering shamanic, retrofuturist and apocalyptic symbolism and ritual. They each seek answers deep in the past and future, outside everyday life, and beyond the rational. Through this lens, the burning of a million pounds by the K Foundation can be explained as a ceremonial annihilation of excess and a spectacular magick act, designed to disrupt the prevailing order, to expose the fiction of conventional economic value, and build alternative social status.

The KK is dead! Long live the K!

Postscript: Bricking It

Obviously, this theory was consummate nonsense in any literal sense; it was an impossible affinity. But it was voted as credible by a mostly drunken audience, and it was condensed down to a single sentence and greeted with a nonchalant ‘Whatever’ by Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty. On the way to the Black E, Tom James had confirmed what I suspected: Bill and Jimmy had never heard of Kibbo Kift until Tom showed them a copy of my book a few months before. When I nervously introduced myself to Jimmy on the final day of the Welcome to the Dark Ages event, however, he asked if I had seen the parade banners, totems and costumes of the Toxteth Day of the Dead, which of course I had (I was in it). He told me: I based them entirely on Kibbo Kift. So, we seemed to have come full circle.

At the time of putting my proposal together, I had no idea about the People’s Pyramid or the coming significance of the brick. Mumufication had not yet been revealed. Had I known, I might have put together a different historical narrative. The brick has a noble, if controversial place in the history of art, most famously with Carl Andre’s Equivalent series of fire bricks that caused outcry when exhibited in the 1960s and 1970s.

The brick, too, is a cornerstone in Kibbo Kift legend, at least in their later reinvention as The Green Shirts in the 1930s, where they cast off their woodland whittling and devoted themselves to urban agit prop in pursuit of radical economic reform. Between 1934 and 1938, green-shirted members threw green painted bricks through the windows of 10 and 11 Downing Street. These acts have been the subject of artistic re-enactment; in 2006, in a work called Confession of the Kibbo Kift, sculptor Steve Claydon remade a painted brick alongside a reinterpretation of one of the group’s political cartoons. In the same spirit, I painted a London Brick green in 2023. For now, it is nothing more than an attractive paperweight, but one day it may be needed. Until then, it remains an undead inspiration.

Annebella Pollen, Brighton

10 February 2024

#GANTOB2024 Pamphlet 6

An audiovisual version of the 2017 presentation is also available.

A personalised copy of this pamphlet has been sent to Annebella by Royal Mail.

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GANTOB responds:

A couple of weeks ago on this blog we had Urs (The Benefaktor’s wife), in her response to Stuart Huggett’s pamphlet The Gate is Open, exploring literary connections around hawthorns (the subject of her earlier pamphlet The Three Trees), stumbling upon the word “kibble”, recognising it as something that a contributor called The Inconsistent Influencer had used in the second GANTOB book, contacting TII via the Deputy General Manager of GANTOB (the projekt), and on receiving the answer, asking the question in her pamphlet Hawthorny: “Who on earth were the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift?”

To complicate things even further, last week’s pamphlet was – by complete coincidence – by one of the alter egos of TII: “A young man on Facebook” and his partner in crime, ChatGPT. That pamphlet explored geographic connections along the azimuth of 244′, plotted east to west. TII/AYMOF refers to this as The Line of Sh!te (which I argue is a term of endearment, and of course it has clear Bill Drummond connections). Last summer I placed a book with an earlier version of the young man on Facebook’s piece in Folkestone. If you draw a line of 244′ from Folkestone (give or take a few degrees(*)), where do you think you end up? Brighton, where Annebella is based. I contacted Annebella after I read Urs’ question, and she replied with her pamphlet later that same day. It’s a beautiful piece on a fascinating topic.

For a writing and arts project that is meant to unfold spontaneously every Saturday over the course of a year, that is a lot of unforeseen connections, stretching from Badenoch to Sussex, in just a few weeks. The Benefaktor has mentioned the quantum physics theory of entanglement and ley lines previously (with tongue in cheek probably). Who knows where else this will take us.

The phrase “Kindred of Kibbo Kift” sounds more outlandish than pretty much anything else you may have read about in the GANTOBverse. But it is very definitely something of the real world, and studied by Annebella, an authority in visual and material culture. I heard about them a few weeks ago on the excellent Search for the White Room Facebook page (you don’t need a Facebook account to visit). Extending our horizons, creativity, and hopefully making the world a better and fairer place are fine aspirations. It’s certainly what GANTOB (the person and projekt) are about.

You can still purchase Annebella’s book on the Kindred via Donlon Books. It’s a beautiful volume. And her new book on art and the British Council was published last month (bonus marks if you can find a connection with a Bill Drummond book via a shared interest in a famous artist). It too is a beautiful book (Annebella’s book that it; though Bill’s is pretty good too of course).

Until next week,

GANTOB

If you you have an idea for a pamphlet please get in touch: check out the 52 Pamphlets page.

(*) 253′

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