1. I’m reading Ted Morgan’s William Burroughs biography Literary Outlaw just now and finding it very interesting. In many ways Burroughs was a terrible person — a bum, a killer, a political reactionary, a trustafarian endlessly calling on his parents to bail him out of trouble — but Morgan shows how he was actually on a mission — via drugs, anthropology, sex, scandal and the half-lit sleaze of liminal “interzones” — to get back in touch with an enchanted cosmology, imposing a brightly-coloured pre-Enlightenment state of mind on the mercilessly stark grid of modernity. To revive soul at all costs, in other words, even if the human soul turns out to be stupid, lazy and evil. 2. Burroughs was certainly interested in Wilhelm Reich’s ideas about orgasm — he built an orgone accumulator in his Tangier garden — but doesn’t seem to have read Max Weber, although it’s Weber’s ideas about disenchantment that make me think of Burroughs’ project as essentially — despite all hardboiled appearances — a Romantic one. Weber was drawing on the Romantic Schiller when he described how the destruction of the “enchanted garden” of pre-modern society had both positive and negative aspects: when we modernised, bureaucratised and secularised European society (and note that these things are precisely what many Brexiteers voted against), we exchanged a kind of childish enchantment — and perhaps a deep understanding of our own irrational natures — for things like security, predictability and control. 3. The reason art continues to be so resonant and so important is that it has a way of connecting us back to the enchanted, the primitive, the instinctive, the uncontrolled. For me, the best art doesn’t take sides in the struggle between control and uncontrol, discipline and sensuality, but simply dramatises the conflict, the tension, in a compelling way. 4. When I look at these letterpress monoprints by veteran Dutch graphic designer Karel Martens, I find them compelling precisely because they dramatise with brilliant simplicity the tension between pleasure and control. Martens uses old index cards and other official records as his basic background for gorgeously sensual colour experiments. They make me think of the Auden poem The Fall of Rome: “Caesar’s double-bed is warm / As an unimportant clerk / Writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK / On a pink official form.” 5. Martens’ work — the essential Dutchness of it — makes me think of another Max Weber book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. It is above all Protestants (like the Dutch) who have methodically disenchanted the world. Explaining his use of one particular card, Martens told the New York Times: “It’s a specification card for income and expenditure. It makes me think of my father, who entered his costs into a similar ledger book every day.” 6. But if it’s Protestants who got us into the disenchantment of modernity, it’s also Protestants who can get us out of it. Burroughs of course was the scion of a family known for producing adding machines — he emerged from that card index world, but used his insider’s understanding of the processes of excessive, deadening control to evade them, and re-enchant his own personal model of the world. 7. Martens’ card index monotypes remind me of the work of other artists I love for their colour — Ellsworth Kelly, Frank Stella, David Batchelor. But while their work certainly plays on the same tensions between structure and sensuality (particularly Batchelor’s series of bright colours superimposed on the severe pages of October magazine), I think Martens’ use of — and love of — printed materials, his emergence from the more artisanal and compromised world of graphic design, makes his work particularly resonant. 8. The dilemma of the graphic designer in capitalism — tasked with giving an appealing face to things that may be anything but — is in fact the dilemma of the human being in capitalism. How do we negotiate that tense standoff between control and pleasure? How do we work and also play? To what extent should we inject deep human values into a system that seems less and less humane? We have to get these things right when we design our lives. 9. The reason I’m not a Brexiteer is that I believe in the paradox that, just as it may be Protestants who can be counted on to save us from the Protestant worldview, so it may be the EU bureaucracy which is the only way to meliorate the dead hand and wooden tongue of bureaucracy itself. This is something another Dutchman, Rem Koolhaas, stressed when I interviewed him for Frieze magazine back in 2012: that it’s not anarchists or businessmen who were responsible for the visions of the Metabolist architects in Japan, but imaginative civil servants. Civil servants with flair! 10. Karel Martens’ monoprints summon, for me, an almost impossible but incredibly beautiful world, a place where civil servants have flair, where control and sensuality co-exist in the same visual plane, where the circle is squared and the square circled, where one can — in the words of the delusional Brexiteers — have one’s cake and eat it too. In that sense it’s a thoroughly European vision: one which understands that Europe may have disenchanted us (as all those Russian novelists in the 19th century warned it would), but it’s also and only Europe which has the pure visionary power — the yage, as Burroughs would call it — to transcend itself, to offset its own limitations, to give freedom the structure it needs. To improve Europe — to help it improve itself — you need to be inside it.
