Interview With Stefan Szczelkun

Author of "Conspiracy of Good Taste"

I met Stefan Szczelkun in the Kennington Park Cafe. Stefan had told me told me that it served the cheapest roast beef Sunday dinner in South London. But as soon as we were seated behind our steaming mugs of tea the real reason was conspiratorially revealed:
"The park is the site of the last great monster rally of the Chartists who were a kind of sub-culture around 150 years ago. Chartists were the first urban sub-culture to really challenge the establishment. The cafe marks the spot were the speeches were made from and would be a place of pilgrimage except that very few people know about it and the council refuses to even put up a plaque."

Stefan turned away from his tea with an expression of disgust. "Just over there by the Oval tube is a fountain which is on the site of one of the main public execution sites. A place literally soaked in the blood of Londoners history and yet unrecognised in the official tourist guide books."

He gives me a knowing look. I take the chance to get more to the point. "What has all this got to do with the self publishing group wORking Press ?" "The North American Indians have this idea that you are affected by seven generations of your ancestors. I feel that's about right - you just have to look at the Bosnian conflict to see how old unresolved enmities can last through several generations with a deadly power.

The culture we are imbedded in now is effected by seven or more generations back. What wORrking Press is doing is blowing the classist cobwebs off culture. Giving a shared platform to viewpoints and values that have not had much space in print in the last seven generations. Obviously the cloth cap worker is just one image of working people that has become an anachronistic badge and stereotype. The present reality is of a great diversity of working people, many of whom have been to college, or travelled the world and now work in office environments often on computers. Really I think it's just the same for most producers of 'zines, they are just finding a voice that can be in their own style and dialect as it were. It's just that most zines and stuff are not aware of the history that they are part of. Not surprising really as its not easily available in a palatable format.

It's a bit like computer formats the information has to be in the right codes for your machine and your software to be able to read it. I'm not promoting a mechanistic model of consciousness here by the way but its the same with what I'd call working class history, it's only available in dry academic tomes and 'papers' and only that in the last 20 or 30 years! It needs some disc conversion." Right on cue the dinners arrived. "Seven generations ago people were hung not a hundred yards from here for stealing a sheep..." With that there was a respite from the gale of rhetoric in which our attentions were taken with the magnificent Yorkshire puddings.

"Why do you do all this self publishing what motivates you?" "In the early eighties I was producing photocopy publications based on the performance art actions I was doing and taking part in the International Mail Art Network. That sort of all worked together but was fragmented for any particular audience. I was working on all the things that I felt most strongly about in my life and this tended to cluster around my own sense of identity. This lead to meeting and working with artists with similar backgrounds which meant working class and second generation immigrant. I'd become acutely aware of the powerful influences of both of these areas of my past in doing intuitive artworks.

Things I'd sort of blurt out and then analyse later and get insights from. I worked collaboratively and in this way we achieved quite large scale projects. Mind you this idealises it a bit... not many artists around at that time would publicly admit to a working class identity! Anyway this extended interaction sparked of a lot of thoughts and emotions.

There was still the problem of communicating overall intentions. Working Press developed out of this need and the chance meeting with Graham Harwood. We decided to produce cheap books rather than zines because it was felt we could be more subversive that way. Books can find their way into bookshops and public libraries and have a longer shelf life than pamphlets or mags. They can also be accessed through electronic indexing which means we can barge our way into history a bit. Hopefully soon we'll be able to offer direct access to wORking Press books on Fast Breeder.

Anyway the first book was in 1987. It was Grahams 'John'. Since then we've done about 20 titles and there's about 100 people in the broad network. Quite a few of these are people who tried to do a book  but who didn't quite make it. A book costs about £1000 minimum even if you do all the typesetting yourself. I just worked in a boring but well paid  office job for five months to print my book 'Class Myths and Culture'. It then takes about three years to sell 800 or so books and recoup enough money to go for another. But a warning to anyone who might be considering it you have to continue to do a lot of unpaid promotion unless you strike it lucky with that rare commercial title that 'sells itself'." (The WP list is in a neighbouring file so just take a look!)

"Rightly Ho well what's next on the cards for you?" "I need to put aside some time to promote my book Conspiracy of Good Taste. Then I'm thinking of re-writing it and doing a paperback edition. After that I want to organise a big conference for artists and mind workers with working class backgrounds or what have you. No qualifications required by the way. So if anyone reading this is interested...get in touch.

I'm also busy at weekends building my own shared ownership house with a bunch of people behind Kennington Tube. It's exhausting getting up at 7.30 am every Saturday and Sunday! When that's finished I'll probably go electronic.

Interview by Karen Eliot 21-12-93.

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