Images of Society

Some years ago Gordon Lawrence asked me to write something for a volume he was editing called Exploring Organisational Boundaries. I was still an academic so the essay took off from my teaching of literature. I examined Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and some other Black texts, as if the characters in them were taking part in a group relations conference. For example, in Conrad there is a solitary Russian dressed in harlequin clothes who drifts in and out of the story as it travels up the Congo, to no apparent effect. We have all met - or been - this person, roving round an institutional event, unable to sustain a role inside any one group.

Since then, I have left universities in order to study to be a painter so in this essay I shall ask what evidence for understanding society might be offered by art? My example is the Saatchi Gallery at County Hall.

Charles Saatchi moved his collection of Young British Art to the ground floor of County Hall early in 2003. As an advertising tycoon Saatchi helped Thatcher to power. It was then her government that dismantled the Greater London Council and emptied County Hall for it to be sold off eventually to a Japanese hotel company. Saatchi is back in a part of it now; but other parts are occupied by an aquarium, an exhibition of Dali's surrealism, a Chinese restaurant and what seems to be a dodgems track. By Saatchi's entrance, 16 giant elastic-assisted trampolines have been set up, ‘£6 A GO’. Next door, the colossal shiny Wheel glares across the Thames at Big Ben's clockface and the Houses of Parliament.

The boundaries have been pulled down that separated state from funfair, public gallery from commerce. Subsequent privatisations - railways, buses etc - undid other major boundaries, then multiplied others, as when a windscreen is crazed. The recognisable patterns and relations of society - Whitehall/County Hall; the kingdom's trains/a city's buses - were obscured. This may be one reason why, when I stumbled into a conference of educat