Before I begin, I’d like to thank my latest Capitalist sponsors for the absolute restitution of my privileged access to Truth, hence my respectful reverence of Alex Pollard’s Bastardised stealth boomerang returned to ground after temporarily passing through ideological aerospace, the startlingly capable, enigmatically powerful plott-rocket that Pollard threw, or rather, that threw him, to the teeming megalopolis of Hampstead, that vast asphalt labyrinth of world-wide frivolity and cultural fraudulence, to which Pollard travelled through many a moribund agricultural hamlet from his point of departure, Preston Park, a rather prosaic subsidised ornamental park with a bafflingly amusing eemya, one of the most sought-after residential locations in Brighton, the very spot from where this stealth boomerang type device travelled back and forth at the most ungodly speeds to its fiery death, an area that astoundingly includes the 1980 Moscow Olympic 800-metre champion Steve Ovett – who was brought up in the carcinogenic air of Harrington Villas and attended Varndean Grammar School for Boys – among its residents. It’s no accident that the Pollard’s detailed psychoarchaeology of the mnemonic in long distance running should boomerang back to this spot. As a teenager, the seditious Pollard drank cider outside the iron school railings past which the future Olympic hero might have ran, had they not been prematurely torn down to make planes to kill Germans, a deeply bitter irony numbed only by the cider. It’s also no accident that the Pollard’s family have looked after Preston Park for centuries, ‘pollard’ meaning to cut back a tree to the trunk to promote the growth of a dense head of foliage. And dense this head of absolutely extraordinarily researched foliage is.
Back in 1980, Ovett, a punky social democrat sponsored by the Fair Trade movement, was young pretender to Tory New Romantic, Sebastian Coe, sponsored by Revlon, the infamous make-up manufacturers responsible for his Brideshead Revisited look at the time. As a small child, Pollard knew that Coe was destined for a glittering post-running career in Westminster and it’s probably clear where his sympathies lie. Combining the aesthetics of athletics with the athletics of aesthetics, Pollard now radically indexes these tales by sprinting from description to performance. These fissures clearly have something or other to do with Coe’s nationalistic ‘coherent training’ rationale, his belief in silky smooth speedy stride as the ultimate pre-requisite to success in addition to being indexed to Ovett’s love of Fair Trade. Seb thought he was self-sufficient but, as the structural paradoxes of Pollard’s paintings prove absolutely inconclusively, he wasn’t. Seb may have won the 1500-metre race, but only at the cost of equating fact with value and of remaining within a traditional definition and ideology of athletics by updating, developing, and differentiating the functions of his pernicious alibis.
In parallel disparity, life in Pollard’s ideologically drained Hampstead Achieved is a quiet collection of found gestures and scopic prostitutes. There are no iron railings, no athletes, no warplanes, no stores, no factories, no tramps or Garage MCs in this marginal space, his new hometown. Prognosis by crystalline morphology, the comfy living room has wallpaper and furniture, rather than being burnt to the ground or smeared in ‘dirty protest’, the street that is not visible through the window is neatly paved, rather than blown up or dug by dirty navvies, the garden is mowed rather than a horrid muddy bog, trees are carefully pollarded as opposed to being chopped up like spent matchsticks. Things have always been peaceful in here; it’s just the way life is. The correct prediction of all the relations one can measure, Pollard’s work insists on things being inclusively valid within the sphere of a pollarded experience that is at war with the war waged by normative rhizomeaddict networking.
