“The K Foundation, as Drummond and Cauty called themselves when they stopped being The KLF, burnt their money in August 1994.
The period of the early-to-mid 1990s is frequently overlooked in our cultural histories, yet it was far more potent and strange than it is usually given credit for.
In order to understand why it is significant that Cauty and Drummond’s bonfire took place in this period, it is necessary to recognise what was so odd about those years.
Our mental landscape was very different a century or so earlier. Victoria England had been, on the surface at least, a bastion of certainty.
The Victorians had three immoveable beacons by which they could orientate themselves and their society: the pillars of Church, Empire and Crown. This, of course, was not to last.
Charles Darwin had developed a scientific model that was ingenious and ground-breaking, but which had implications. Perhaps wisely, he kept it hidden away in a drawer for twenty years. But in 1859 he published.
Mainstream scientists and philosophers in the nineteenth century believed that they understood how things were organised, and where the human race belonged, in the natural order of things. But Darwin’s work, in combination with breakthroughs made in the field of geology regarding the age of the planet, caused one of the unshakable pillars of Victorian certainty to crack. The teachings of the Church about the origins of life on this planet had been shown to be wrong.
This was a severe failing for an organisation which exists to proclaim an infallible understanding of Truth. The great Churches of the world didn’t react to the new understanding well. In 1870, eleven years after the publication of On the Origin of Species, the Vatican formalised the doctrine of papal infallibility.
This dogma asserted that the action of the Holy Spirit can remove even the possibility of error from the Pope. The Pope was right, in other words, because he was the Pope, who was right.
This was clearly a form of circular logic, another of Robert Anton Wilson’s self-referential reality tunnels, and once that had been recognised the Darwinists found themselves outside the Church’s logic. They could no longer submerge themselves inside the Church and unquestioningly accept what it had to say.
Calls for the need to have ‘faith’ could no longer be met with reverent acceptance. Indeed, they were increasingly met with knowing smirks. Nietzsche was one who was brave enough to articulate publicly this change in the world.
‘God is dead,’ he wrote in 1882, ‘and we have killed him’. This change in understanding may have been unsettling, but it was just a warm-up for the goodies that the twentieth century had in store. New ideas came thick and fast from the likes of Einstein, Planck, Freud, Picasso and Joyce.
Every breakthrough seemed to be pulling in the same direction, that of undermining certainty. Things were no longer anywhere near as simple as they had been. Our most fundamental bedrocks – time, space, matter, the rational mind – were discovered to be nothing like as dependable as they appeared.
We were steaming ahead into uncharted territory. The First World War erupted, and shattered any notion that there was glory in Empire. As the value of Church and Crown eroded in contemporary thought, the public’s need for an unarguable authority gave momentum to politicians, who quickly offered up The State as a candidate.
They differed in the details, or course –the fascists thought the population should serve the state while the communists thought that the state was the servant of the people –but the methods used to enforce the centralisation of power were essentially the same.
These ideas played themselves out to their horrendous conclusions during the Second World War. The notion that The State should be The Central Authority in our lives has never seemed credible since.
As the decades rolled on the search for an unarguable touchstone to replace Church, Crown or Empire in our lives took on ever more urgency.
For populations still traumatised by the conflict of the 1940s, enforcing social conformity in the 1950s made a lot of sense, yet this was stifling for the generation coming of age after the war.
In the 1960s they sought liberation, but the philosophies that made so much sense on a personal level did not scale up well to the level of society.
In the 1970s the attention shifted to the self, but the hedonistic self-indulgence grew to such unbearable levels that punk was needed to tear it down.
In the 1980s they believed that money and the pursuit of material possessions was the answer. Wealth was pursued, but it did not have the power to satisfy us properly, and that, too, was soon discarded as a candidate for our unassailable personal omphalos. So what next?
By the time we reached 1990 all options had been tried and found wanting. We could return to The Church, The State, politics, material greed, personal liberation or hedonism if we wished, but we could no longer see them without being aware of their faults. They were damaged goods, still significant but no longer permanent and secure.
But what other options did we have? Did we have any?
It appeared not. We were out of ideas. And so there was heard a global, existential gasp of generational fear. There was nothing to believe in.
This awful period was brief, and we can date it quite precisely.
It arrived in mainstream culture in 1991, fully formed and simultaneously emanating from many different art forms.
Douglas Coupland’s debut novel Generation X was published in March that year, and the generation it described suddenly found themselves with a name.
Another label arrived in July, when Richard Linklater’s no-budget indie movie Slacker reached cinemas.
The American comedian Bill Hicks’ career started taking off in the UK, and the generation found their philosopher.
Then, in September, their anthem arrived. Nirvana released the single ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’, and the story of alternative music was changed forever.
Slackers were not well dressed, because there was no reason to dress smartly. Their uniform was old jeans, Converse trainers and warm, practical lumberjack shirts. They were not career-minded, for there was no reason to pursue the corporate dream.
They were seen largely as apathetic, but it was an apathy born of a logical assessment of the options rather than just innate laziness.
They were often well-educated and creative, and were usually portrayed as being talkative and self-obsessed.
If they had a mission, of sorts, it was to work out how to move forward from where they were.
With the Berlin Wall down and Thatcher and Reagan out of office, there was a clear sense that the old order had finished.
Modern historians also draw a line at this point. The historian Eric Hobsbawm coined the phrase ‘the short twentieth century’ to cover the period 1914 to 1991, from the start of the First World War to the end of the Cold War.
This is a useful time frame for a historian because it works as a complete narrative.
Francis Fukuyama’s hugely influential 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man also recognised that a change of great historical significance had occurred.
Fukuyama argued that an era of great political upheaval had ended and that Western liberal democracy was the final stage of human government.
He was essentially unable to imagine what could possibly happen next.
For that was the question that needed to be answered: ‘What next?’.
Looking to the past didn’t help; it didn’t have any answers and it was all out of ideas.
The past shrugged as if to say, ‘Good luck. You’re on your own.’
At first, Generation X was linked to a sense of relief and a feeling that they had recognised the blind spots of the past and were now facing up to things with a refreshing honesty.
But as 1991 rolled into 1992 and 1993, this honesty became less invigorating and increasingly unbearable.
It started to become apparent that they were not going to find a focus for their narrative, or a way to repair the damage to their mental landscape.
The sense of mounting horror came closer and closer to the surface.
The nihilism reached its peak in 1994, the period of Kurt Cobain’s suicide, the burning of the million pounds and the year Bill Hicks died.
This was the point when the constant creation of new musical genres that had characterised the twentieth century came to an end. That era was over.
By this point there was a desperate need for a way out.
Any way out.
The changes that signified the arrival of the next era began towards the end of 1994.
In Britain, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown had taken control of the Labour Party and had launched New Labour.
John Major wrote in his memoirs that his victory in the 1992 general election ‘killed socialism in Britain’.
Margaret Thatcher was of a similar opinion, as was, it seems, Tony Blair, whose first act upon gaining the leadership of the Labour Party was to remove the socialist ‘Clause IV’ from the party’s constitution.
After Blair, politics would no longer be led by ideology, but by opinion polls.
This was the ‘Third Way’, a political discourse dominated by spin, where it was not what you did that was important, but how that played out in the press.
In Europe, the Maastricht Treaty paved the way for the modern European Union and, ultimately, the euro.
In the United States, George W. Bush entered political life in 1994 as Governor of Texas. Netscape released the first version of their Navigator software that year, the first popular web browser, and Microsoft followed with a high-profile launch of their Windows 95 operating system the following year.
The modern digital era began.
The world of Google, Wikipedia and Facebook was coming into being.
The old order was being ripped up.
The new era was being born, and it was the Age of Networks.
As the blogger Neuroskeptic notes, during the period from 1945 to 1990 new cults, religions and sects were springing up all over the place.
This period gave us the likes of Scientology, the Hare Krishnas, Transcendental Meditation, the Moonies, Jesus Freaks, the Manson Family, Heaven’s Gate, Jonestown, the Kabbalah Centre, the Nation of Islam, the New Age, Neopaganism and Wicca.
Why, he asks, did that outpouring of new religious groups dry up so abruptly and decisively, with hardly any popularly known groups forming after the Waco siege of 1993?
The question points to a deep change in our culture, and once again marks the early years of the 1990s as the end of an era.
It was not just new musical genres, it seems, that stopped appearing at that point in time. We can date the end of that era, what Hobsbawm called the ‘Age of Extremes’ to the end of the Cold War in 1991, and we can date the start of the information era to the first popular web browser in 1994.
What, then, should we make of those years in between?
They are boundary years, comparable to what anthropologists call a liminal state. They were a period when the old rules were gone, but before the new order was formed. They were a period, in other words, when normal certainties did not apply, when anything was possible and the strange was commonplace.
As John C. Calhoun, the seventh Vice-President of the United States once wrote, ‘The interval between the decay of the old and the formation and the establishment of the new, constitutes a period of transition which must always necessarily be one of uncertainty, confusion, error, and wild and fierce fanaticism.’
Being innate storytellers, we neglect this brief, confusing period and prefer instead the clearer narratives that surround it.
If you Google each year in the last quarter of the twentieth century, you’ll find that each successive one has an increasing number of mentions online, as you would expect given the growth of the internet during this period.
The only exception to this upward trend is the period between 1991 and 1994, when the number of mentions declines.
The age of John Major and George Bush Sr, it seems, does not attract our attention.
Our cultural narrative skips from the Stock, Aitken and Waterman late eighties to the Britpop and The Spice Girls mid-nineties quite happily.
Even the Adrian Mole diaries skip these years.
This boundary period is a cultural blind spot; we choose not to look at it.
But there is much that can be learnt from such a time, and great art can be found there.
In The KLF’s field of music, for example, this brief period brought albums such as Loveless by My Bloody Valentine, Primal Scream’s Screamadelica, SUPERMAN :, Automatic For The People by REM, Peggy Suicide by Julian Cope, U2’ s Achtung Baby and Oasis’ Definitely Maybe – all records that are considered the career best, or thereabouts, for those musicians.
Considering the long careers of many of those bands, the fact that their highest achievements all fall within that narrow period does suggest that there was something in the water at that time, so to speak.
In the moments that followed the withdrawal of one wave of history you could see, if you chose to look, a brief glimpse of the undercurrents at work in the late twentieth century.
It did not last long, for the next grand wave arrived and drowned out these subtle workings with energy and noise. And that next wave was noisy. The escape route from the nihilism of the early 1990s was, in the end, mindless optimism.
Things could only get better.
Adopting this belief entailed not worrying about the details. And it was fun!
This, then, became the 1990s that we choose to remember, a time of Cool Britannia, the Millennium Dome and the dotcom bubble. Ego-fuelling cocaine became the drug of choice, BritPop and The Spice Girls were on hand to entertain us, and the modern digital world created itself anew.
Times were exciting again.
We could not help but be swept along with that tide, and we found that it supported us to the extent that we no longer felt the need to worry about our foundations.
How does the death of that era compare to its birth?
Hobsbawm pinpointed the beginning of that era, the ‘short twentieth century’ of 1914–91, as the beginning of the First World War. This was when the age of empires collapsed upon itself and the political realities of the twentieth century began.
It coincides roughly with what the American author and lecturer Susan Cain calls a shift from a culture of character to a culture of personality.
This era’s birth couldn’t have been more different from its death in the 1990s when, having exhausted itself, it quietly laid down and died.
The period of the First World War was a brutal, violent explosion, when the collapse of the Victorian system engulfed the whole world in sheer bloody horror. Everything –from our social structures to our relationship with technology and the nature of the human condition –was shredded before the unstoppable firestorm. Nothing survived.
A time of mud, gas and unimagined mechanised slaughter, it is no exaggeration to call this exactly what it was: the darkest point in human history. True, the death toll was higher in the Second World War, but that war had been psychologically understandable in the context of the time.
No one was in any way prepared for the actuality of The Great War, and there is no horror greater than the arrival of the unthinkable. This was the period that spawned the Cabaret Voltaire.
As we have seen, the six members of this group share with Cauty and Drummond a sense of being haunted by what they did and an inability to explain or come to terms with their actions. This makes a strange sort of sense when we view this period as the liminal gap between eras.
There was no narrative context at that point to explain their actions, because the old story had ended and the new one had not begun.
If Cauty and Drummond had burnt their money earlier in the twentieth century, it would have been seen as a Surrealist act, or perhaps a Situationist one. If they had done it ten years later it would have been understood in terms of the global anti-capitalist movement.
Doing it in the period between eras made in incomprehensible, for there was no surrounding context that could make sense of what they had done.
Nothing is really explainable in liminal periods, as anyone who has attempted to understand the First World War using the Victorian world view will have discovered.
How can you explain an act, except as part of an ongoing narrative?
The movement that the Cabaret Voltaire created is known as ‘Dada’ –a meaningless, idiotic word which showed their contempt for art itself. Art, as they saw it, was the product of the society that gave birth to it. It was the finest aspect of that society, its highest expression, and by the nature of its transcendent qualities it could glorify and even justify that society. What, though, if that society was rotten to the core? What if you lived in a world so misguided, flawed and terrible that it could create the unthinkable slaughter of the Somme?
Any art it produced would have to be treated with contempt.
Any beautiful expression that could in some way redeem the society that formed it would be unacceptable.
It had to go, all of it.
The sensual Art Nouveau style that had so defined the preceding decades collapsed almost overnight. Dada was anti-art. It was negation, a creation that saw itself as destruction.
Its very nature makes it seem impossible to define or pin down, but its echoes can be heard throughout the twentieth century in movements such as Situationism, Discordianism and punk.
The word itself oscillates between being a verb and a noun, between having meaning and no meaning, between being an established movement of many years’ standing to being a spent force the moment the Cabaret Voltaire closed.
It cloaks itself in gnomic pronouncements that make it appear more of a disembodied conscious presence than an art style.
‘Before there was Dada, Dada was there . . .’ the painter and sculpture Hans Arp, one of the founders of Dada, has said.
This is usually about as clear as it gets.
The more you look at the Dadaists’ attempts to define Dada, the more you are reminded of Daoists attempts to define the concept of the Dao.
The Dao is the central concept in ancient Chinese thought, usually translated as the ‘way’ or the ‘path’.
It also oscillates between being a verb and a noun, between having meaning and having no meaning. The Dao De Jing, the Daoist central text, begins by declaring that the Dao that can be named is not the Dao.
As first lines go, this can throw the reader a little. What it means by this is that the Dao is everything and, because a name or definition is a small part of everything, that name therefore cannot be the thing itself. The all cannot be accurately defined, as any definition is limiting. Dao is, by definition, beyond definition, beyond ‘is’ and ‘is not’.
When Arp said ‘Before there was Dada, Dada was there’, he echoed The Dao De Jing which states that the Dao is all heaven and earth, and that the Dao existed before heaven and earth. In light of these comparisons, the Dadaists’ attempts to describe Dada appear as if they are describing something fundamentally similar to the Dao.
This may initially appear counter-intuitive, of course, because the Dao is associated with peaceful acceptance whereas Dada is violent negation. But Dada emerged during the First World War. The Dao, at that point, would also have been violent negation. One point that many commentators make about Dada is that, while its intention is to destroy or negate, it is still the product of the very thing that it is fighting against. It is a creation of the society that it rejects, and can only exist alongside that society. In the words of Greil Marcus, ‘Dada was a protest against its time; it was also the bird on the rhinoceros, peeping and chirping, but along for the ride.’
Marcus also discusses the philosopher Henri Lefebvre, ‘. . . an old man, whose life’s work had been the investigation of “modernity,” he said so queerly that what was truly modern about modernity, what was actually new, what was really interesting, was not its works –technology, abundance, the welfare state, mass communication, and so on –but the peculiar character of the opposition modernity created against itself: an opposition he still called “Dada.”’
A Daoist would be amused by Lefebvre’s observation, for a thing to carry its own opposition is anything but modern. This is one of their most fundamental principles and it is depicted in the best-known Daoist symbol, the Yin-Yang. This icon shows a circle, half white and half black and seemingly rotating as if the black and white elements were continually replacing each other. This constant flow between opposites is, in Daoist thought, the fundamental nature of the world. In the centre of the black there is a white dot, and in the centre of the white there is a black dot. This symbolises that each state carries the seed of its opposite –that the Yin always contains the birth of the Yang that replaces it, and vice versa, just as Robert Anton Wilson’s Illuminati carried the seed of the Discordians and the music industry gave birth to The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu. Mathematicians also recognised this truth, once they gained a grasp of the nature of chaos. Whenever they looked inside chaos, they found order, and wherever they looked closely at order they found it to be riddled with chaos. Dada can be thought of as a form of Dark Dao, a path that was as sick and feverish as the era that formed it. Dao is an ungraspable concept that contains both the very nature of the world and also the way the world will unfurl. In this context it is no wonder that Dadaists could not define what they had done, as Dao both contains and is more than any single definition. In this liminal period, in this time between eras as the old ways destroyed themselves and before the new order emerged, there was only this fundamental nature of the world remaining, an unnameable Dao that could only be implied by the meaningless noise ‘dada’. The subsequent shift of eras during the early 1990s was a mirror opposite, a small, quiet death that has almost disappeared from history. It was here that The K Foundation, with their meaningless name, performed the act that they could never explain or get over. How different, then, was the fundamental nature of their act of destruction? How close to the underlying nature of the world were they working? The undercurrents that were so briefly visible in the gap between two eras were still exposed. And because the money was burnt in this liminal space between two waves of history, the meaning of the act was not absorbed or dissipated by either of them. The timing, in other words, was perfect. The subconscious was fully exposed when the deed was done.
