Fear and failing in Chatham

My bad: somehow I made it all the way to Chatham in Kent without realising that the exhibition of drawings by gonzo illustrator Ralph Steadman I’d come to see was shut. The day away from my desk in the office, the two hour train journey, the ticket expense (£18.40 anytime day return) would all be a waste. The time I spent re-reading The Great Shark Hunt by Steadman’s long-time collaborator Hunter S. Thompson would have been better spent reading a washing machine manual. The bucket hat on my head, the 35mm SLR analogue camera I carried, and the old, broken pair of chucks I wore in a poor pastiche of a 1970s embedded journalist were now dead weight to slow me down in a dead-end town.

The call back to the office was tense. In one ear, the wind whipping across the flat expanse of the dock’s empty car park. In the other, my editor’s voice, a mixture of disappointment and clear-headed problem solving. I tried to drown out the wind and rebuke with a stream of what could have caused this screw-up: the maps… the museum’s website… the notice, “The Historic Dockyard Chatham will be closed on Mondays and Tuesdays in November 2024, ahead of closing for winter from Monday 18 November 2024,” wasn’t there yesterday (I later learned that my ad blocker was hiding the essential info popup). My editor broke through again, “try to find the art scene of the town, don’t make it a wasted journey,” she suggested, with the tone of telling a puppy not to shit in your shoes again.

No chance of that. I’d arrived an hour earlier and already walked in and around the town centre, twice. Chatham is like everywhere and nowhere in Britain. A small, grey-brown town an hour or so out of London. A ring of low-lying, 1960s suburbs punctuated by squat tower blocks, ten minutes walk to the high street: H. Samuel jewellers, Lloyds TSB, NatWest, Lyca Mobile, nameless vape shops, named empty shops, Sports Direct, Poundland, Pound World, barbers, salons, Shoezone. The three largest buildings in the town centre housed the Jobcentre, the recruitment office and Primark. You could be in Swindon, Stockport, Swansea. Chatham is only distinguished by its location on the southeast coast, in the mud flats of the Medway estuary, far from the oyster shacks of Whitstable and the AirBnbs of Margate. I don’t think there is a thriving art scene here. At least, not the kind that might usually make it to the esteemed pages of Plaster.

“Sure, I’ll go check it out!”

I did what any sane person does in a town like this and holed up in the first pub I found.

I took a quick survey of the area on the off-chance that I had actually missed some palace of culture. A scroll through my phone revealed nothing more than a few Sunday painters, some performing arts venues and a local ‘arts cafe’. Great, I could spend 15 minutes – tops – looking at paintings of dogs and boats or perhaps sculptures by someone who recently found their artistic calling “in Asia”.

The second pint sloshed down.

This whole situation was ridiculous. This was a trip that had only been planned the day before, sketched on a napkin when somewhere around the second hour of the editorial meeting my editor’s boss had woken me up from the fugue state I’d entered, clapping his hands and demanding “a real story, a journey,” about one of his favourite artists.

60 years on, gonzo still grips the minds of artists and writers. The basic idea is that, instead of the stiff and stultifying formality of facts and reportage, you go to a place and write down what you see, feel, and perhaps dream. It’s just one of many ways of seeing the world, but there are those who believe it offers a clarity of vision usually only achieved by a two weeks of cold turkey. Editors, writers, readers… who doesn’t love a journey that starts on the edge of the desert and leads you into the unknown?

Pioneers have the privilege of naming and mapping the land. In 1970, Steadman and Thompson, with one article on the Kentucky Derby and a handful of caricature illustrations, set the standard that every artist and writer in their wake would aim for and miss. Those who do make the mistake of focusing on the madness of the middle distance. They miss the bigger picture and they neglect the details. The derangement of the work is only there to grab your attention, its exquisite arrangement keeps you there. Acting mad is hard work.

Watch Steadman at work: his sheet of paper begins with a splatter of ink, after that it’s carefully controlled by brushes and pens. I’m a fan of Steadman’s imagery, as I am of Georg Grosz, Otto Dix and Max Fleischer’s cartoonish energy. It’s the perfect catalyst to Thompson’s prose. Photographs wouldn’t do the text justice. It looks mad. It’s perfect. Like a Rorschach test, no ink blot out of place. Every mark has meaning.

I don’t think Chatham, or anywhere in Britain, lends itself to the kind of introspective journey into the Heart of Darkness demanded by gonzo. Britain is too small and too slow for road trips. There are no deserts to whip along and outrun sheriffs in. The day’s trip was a journey of, what… 25 miles. I could have driven here in 45 minutes. It took me nearly two hours thanks to delayed buses and broken down trains.

No. Steadman, and his collaborator Thompson, had the presence of mind to be born in the right place at the right time: America in the ‘60s and ‘70s was febrile. You could wake up to find acid, free love, Hells Angels, Vietnam vets, Chicano riots, bombs, revolution, the Black Panthers, Jimi Hendrix and/or Patty Hearst in your bed. There were enemies and freaks within and without. There were hundreds of Soviet nukes aimed directly at your house.

The problems of the present world are dispersed and unknowable and yet, at the same time equally existential: the rightward drift of society, declining sperm counts, micro plastics, climate instability. It was warm in Chatham. You couldn’t put that solely down to the bright blue, cloudless sky. No, it was too warm for November. The sign of our times is the low-level hum of discomfort and violence that has, for the most part, faded into the background over the past decade and a half. The world is worn out. We can’t even elect new idiots, we have to put the old ones back in charge.

In this environment you ignore the great flashing caution signs and focus on the little things: the civil enforcement officer sat in front of you on the bus watching religious sermons at full volume;  the kid in school uniform vaping and casting chicken bones and empty cans into the gutter; the thin, wavering electronic whine in your ageing ears of the mosquito alarm above the door of the newsagents. How this country kills and eats its kids.

Art’s the same. It aims for the mid and the mediocre. The intersection, the plural, the vagueness and the banality of the world. It’s often too afraid to say anything precise about where or what it is. Unless it’s portraits of beloved pooches or rotting row boats on the foreshore.

Had I been able to see Steadman’s show, I would have seen in-person the art he’s been making in the many decades since those first gonzo experiments. Going off the press release I read in the corner of the pub, that includes: His book illustrations for editions of Robert Louis Stephenson’s Treasure Island, Edward Lear’s Alice in Wonderland and George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Childhood classics, exercises in pure imagination. His Gonzovation Trilogy made along with conservationist Ceri Levy: Extinct Boids, Nextinction and Critical Critters. Drawings of dearly departed animal species, and those next on extinction’s long list: birds, fish, mammals, insects. And his 1988 series of 547 drawings, made in five months in emulation of and competition with Picasso’s own 347 Suite.

There’s a clear line through all of this work: nostalgia for a world that has disappeared. Steadman is a man of the past, still riffing on gonzo. But, by standing firm against the flow of culture and time he stands out. He represents an era and an attitude that was, dare I say, better for art. Forgive me for sounding so lib-coded but the worst possible thing to do at this moment is to become numb to the strangeness of things. In these times I think of Adam Curtis, the gonzo-like filmmaker whose own desert of discovery is the BBC archive, and his 2016 film Hypernormalisation (the more things change, the more things stay the same) and his 2021 series Can’t Get You Out of My Head (things can quite as easily change back). Steadman’s art holds onto the essential strangeness of the world and revels in it.

At around 5 pm the tide was out, the sun had long set and harbour lights lit up the mudflats of the estuary that divides the town and the light rain in the now cloud-filled skies. I made my way uphill back to the station and took the next train home.

On the way back, I read an article about a man in South Carolina, caught following a three week manhunt. The man, a felon, had stolen another man’s identity and committed a string of crimes before attempting to tie off the loose ends by befriending and murdering a second man and passing off that man’s body as his own, leaving the stolen ID with the dead body and placing a false 911 call saying he’d been attacked by a bear.

It’s good to know there are still some freaks out there.