Bruce Lacey at the Camden Arts Centre

PART TWO

The second room in the chronological survey of Lacey’s life and work at the Camden Arts Centre began with cabinets displaying cuttings, programmes and mementoes from The Alberts period. These included posters and flyers for various Evenings of British Rubbish, which attained semi-legendary status for their dalliance with destructive chaos and self-dissolution in the name of art and slightly unnerving entertainment. In the absence of any filmed evidence (a lack which, whilst frustrating for those who weren’t there, tends only to enhance the legend as enlarged upon by those who were) photos from Alberts performance give some of idea of the debris strewn battle-zone to which they cheerfully reduced the stage. Lenny Bruce for one was deeply impressed by the impact they made upon the Establishment Club, the nightclub Peter Cook had set up in Soho in 1961 as a venue for satirical comedy, to which Lacey’s semi-namesake had been brought over from America to perform. There was a telegram on display from Bruce, sent from Honolulu in September 1962, giving words of encouragement for The Alberts’ debut show in New York, an appearance which he had arranged for them. Costumes were hung on the wall above the display cases, direct descendants of those childhood fancy dress outfits. There was foppish cavalier finery from the Three Musketeers, in which the Alberts had played a supporting role, and a red Edwardian military jacket with golden buttons and braids, which could easily have been sported by any of a number of Sergeant Pepper era bands infected with the psychedelic whimsy of the age.

Picnic in Space - The British moon landing

A native American fringed buckskin tunic and trousers contrasted dramatically with the spacesuit which floated above, as if suspended in the zero gravity of space. They demonstrated the twin poles of antique and futuristic impulses which were an odd characteristic of the decade, and which pulled Lacey in different and, on the surface, contradictory directions. The spacesuit came from the British Landing on the Moon performances which he first devised and put on in 1969 after watching the Apollo 11 landing. It involved a low gravity, slowed-down going through the British motions, with the lunar daytrippers planting a Union Jack and a garden gnome to make them feel at home, laying out a picnic from a whicker hamper, pouring tea and eating sandwiches which were all shrink-wrapped in plastic, and having a kick-around with a football. It was both a gentle mockery of British traditions, and a deflation of the nationalistic triumphalism which was one of the less noble aspects of the American moon landings through rendering the whole thing into nothing more than a homely outing. The enthusiasm for a ‘space-age’ aesthetic of synthetic and mass-manufactured food and materials which accompanied the progress towards the moon landings is also held up for ridicule, both in its juxtaposition with the enduring symbols of suburban normality, and in the absurdly futile attempts to eat a simple sarnie or enjoy a cuppa through sealed plastic.

Facing the Albert memorials were some of Lacey’s Electric Actors, anti-luvvie automata which were a foretaste of robots to come. One had a square wooden frame for a head, topped with a Napoleon hat, its neck a revolving brass mechanism which could spin to present one of two Janus-like faces: one offering the blank stare of time, an antique clock-face with wire spectacle rim eyes; the other a colourful Indian mask with extravagant moustaches and gaudy turban. The head rests on a battered loudspeaker cabinet torso, with shop dummy arms attached to broad shoulders made from bellows, presumably allowing for wheezing concertinaed gesticulations. The torso balances on decrepit, rickety stool legs. Another has a foolishly grinning, pink-cheeked Woosterish head with a woman’s cloche hat stuck onto the exposed innards of iron machineries. Whatever lies below the waist area is tightly contained within a pink corset, with a small bunch of flowers jauntily planted between the laces.

The educational meat grinder - School Days (detail)

In the main part of the room, we came upon Lacey’s robots and assemblages from the sixties, the work for which he is probably best known (certainly what I had known him for and had largely come along to see). I’m Not Chicken/The Drug Addict (1968) could be seen on a comment on the pharmaceutical appetites which fuelled the fevered experimentation of the period. It’s a medical operation model (predating Hirst by many a year) with guts exposed, tubes connecting its innards to a dispensing machine with the words purple hearts indicating the amphetamine sweeties with which it is stocked. The transparent tubes carry the pills directly into the Addict’s body as if they were corpuscles in an extension of his circulatory system. School Days is a grim assemblage which expressed Lacey’s loathing for what he saw as the processing and normalisation of young minds within many British schools. The burnt and blackened head of a shop dummy, joke shop glasses with enlarged eyes pasted onto the lenses suggesting the unblinking omniscience of an observer in a panopticon prison, presides with charred malevolence atop an old wooden cabinet. Inside are arrayed rows of steel meat grinders, with the disembodied heads of dolls perched on the rims of their bowls, ready to be pushed through and processed when the handles are turned. In a cubby space at the bottom, fingers, noses and ears are neatly sorted into compartmentalised and labelled jars. It’s a horrific piece, partaking of the darker and more violent currents of surrealism, which suggests an instinctively oppositional stance towards the fundamental tenets of society and the authorities which dictate and enforce them. The worn, dirt-encrusted and chipped condition of it all adds to the effect, giving the impression of a system grown rigid and fossilised with age.

Lacey and his wife Jill Bruce tried to provide an alternative to this vision of the indoctrinating moulding of a common worldview. In the 70s they toured schools in Camden with their Incredible Whatsit Machine, a flexible play sculpture which encouraged children to develop their own creative and imaginative relationship with their surroundings and the wider world beyond. Associated activities were introduced by Lacey and Bruce, including the making of an edible man, a giant jelly mould with transparently visible fruit innards, which the children disembowelled and devoured with cannibalistic fervour. It was a project similar (in a more mobile form) to the establishment of playgrounds for the local children out of the developer’s rubble-strewn dead zones surrounding the Theatre Royal in Stratford by Joan Littlewood and Gerry Raffles in the early 70s , and their creation of new patterns of collaboratively worked out play. Lacey and Bruce also created a magical space within a giant inflatable, which could be transported and blown up (and deflated) with relative ease. Inside were lights, music coming from surrounding speakers and a stage which anyone could get up and make a raucous, amplified racket from. Its promissory billing encapsulated an invitation to step out of the everyday world for a while: ‘Journey through a Black Hole to Another Planet’. Children would dress in colourful costumes before crossing the threshold, adding a sense of ritual, and encouraging them to leave their customary selves behind them. It sounds like a development of the Space Place built up by Maurice Agis and Peter Jones in 1964, another cocooning environment designed to stimulate the senses and encourage creativity, which has evolved into the Colourscape modular mazes which are inflated on Clapham Common and elsewhere on a regular basis and play host to all kinds of innovative music, as well as activities for school and pre-schoolchildren.

Creaky swinger - Boy Oh Boy Am I Living

Another work, The Bedsprings TWANG in OUR House, is a rather sinister assemblage, a rusty bed frame stood on its end with male and female dummy figures attached to its coiled mesh in a form of household crucifixion. The woman has targets for breasts, and a boxing glove, clock case and dismembered doll are embedded nearby, all of which gives off a disturbing atmosphere of claustrophobic tension and incipient domestic violence. It has some of the sour odour of despair also to be found in the spyhole installations of Ed Kienholz. In fact, Kienholz provides a good point of comparison with Lacey’s assemblages and automata in general, his work tending to lack the touches of humour and absurdity that leaven the dispiriting air of angry despair. Other pieces on display here were more amusing, if no less caustic. If Lacey were to be likened to any one of the Goons with whom he worked, it would definitely be Spike Milligan, whose humour was often underlaid with a fierce and occasionally misanthropic sense of moral anger and disgust, laughter tinged with a hint of desperation at the absurdity of the human condition. Superman from 1963, is a freakshow metallic man of the future, caged within scaffold boxes, with its skull contained in a weighing jar, false eyes probing about on the end of extended stalks, and wooden hands held rigidly outward in an imploring gesture. Boy Oh Boy Am I Living, from 1964, is again contained within a boxlike frame (shades of Francis Bacon), his big flushed head a round orange ball with false teeth, nose and eyes attached. To its solid tea urn torso is strapped a couple of artificial legs, bent at the knee, one of which swings back and forth, cutting a creaking, clockwork caper.

Man as automaton - Everybody's Nobody

Such repetitive movements, reducing the human to the mindlessly mechanical, are also acted out by Lacey in John Sewell’s 1960 film Everybody’s Nobody, in which he plays M.A.N., the servile Mobile Abstract Nonentity, a passive and programmable cybernetic entity which embodies the fears of dehumanisation within a technocratic and market-driven society. The Politician, from 1964, is notable for its wide, circular megaphone mouth, rimmed with pearly rows of even, gleaming teeth. If the politician is designed for loud oration, the miserly Old Money Bags (1964), now a part of the Leeds Museum and Art Galleries’ collection, is activated by shouting rude commands into its speaker grille. Its internal coin circulation system is transparently contained within a tailor’s dummy with cut-away abdomen. As Barry Miles explains in his history of the post-war counterculture in the capital, London Calling, ‘Lacey used to bellow “get to work, you bastard” and the cogwheels would spring into action, moving two-shilling pieces through the “heart” like white blood corpuscles’.

The Womaniser

In the centre of the room reclined The Womaniser (1966), a kinetic sculpture now owned by the Tate. A disturbingly perverse autoerotic figure, its torso takes the form a large bolster (a punch bag?) of orange plastic, which lies back on the peeling remains of a dentist’s chair. Tin false legs protrude from the bottom, with a small, syringe-plunger penis peeping perkily up between. Its transparent plastic head cast relaxes on the chair rest, the pink and beige material with which it is stuffed giving it a flayed look, with exposed eyeballs staring ahead with abstracted fixity also reflected in the small smile on its mouth (provided by a fold in the material). On the torso is laid another transparent plastic cast, this one of a triple set of breasts. Pink rubber gloves at the end of plastic tubes are poised over each one, and the occasional blast of condensed air causes them to inflate for a self-pleasuring fondle. It’s a mutant figure, no longer human but not yet wholly alien (although its eight limbs lend it a slightly arachnoid aspect), a monstrous evolution of the polymorphous desires which rose to the surface during the sixties, extrapolating from the present in the manner of HG Wells in The Time Machine, with his far future division of humanity into Morlocks and Eloi. The anatomy of the womaniser certainly suggests that it has reached a stage where it is no longer likely to rise from its couch for any prolonged period of time. Perhaps, given its title, it could also be seen as a Bosch-like purgatorial transmutation for a serial adulterer. Whilst the sculpture has an amusingly pervy comical element, it also points to a lingering element of traditional morality in Lacey’s character, a remnant of his upbringing in an ordinary (in the sense of being neither extravagantly bohemian or well-off) pre-war English household. And there, of course, in the corner was dear old R.O.S.A., almost a part of the Lacey family herself; static and lifeless but still exuding an aura of star power.

The grain of 8mm time - Castlerigg

The final room took us through Lacey and Jill Bruce’s retreat from the future in the 1970s and 80s, and their absorption in an intuitively developed sense of ritual rooted in an exploration of the granite bones of Britain. They travelled around the country visiting megalithic sites, as documented in their atmospheric super 8 films Castlerigg and Wales Stone Circles which, as the booklet notes for the bfi dvd attest, bear a certain relation to, whilst being quite different in approach from, Derek Jarman’s Journey to Avebury super 8 film. Having connected with the children of Camden in the early 70s, having gained funding from the council to take their play environments to various locales within the borough, they made their own family the subject of scrutiny in both theatrical and cinematic contexts. The Laceys at Home was a 1972 piece of performance art installed in (or rather outside) the Serpentine Gallery in Kensington Gardens, in which the family went about the ordinary business of daily life in a three sided living room, as if they were human specimens in a zoo. The everyday and seemingly unremarkable was transformed into drama through the act of being observed. Lacey and his family (Jill, Kevin, Tiffany, Saffron and Fred) also turned the camera on themselves for the 1973 film The Lacey Rituals, each taking their turn behind the lens. Again, ordinary activities (taking a bath, eating a meal, shaving, putting on make-up, riding a bicycle etc.) were foregrounded, making us look at them anew from a Martian viewpoint. This focussing on the minutiae of domestic and familial life could be seen as Lacey’s assertion of the need for a settling into a more responsible way of life after the chaotic experimentation and social upheaval of the 60s. The desire for a simple life, which seemed to go alongside a more general ‘back to the garden’ migration from urban centres in search of a rural idyll, reflected the countercultural tenor of the times. The films and performance also expanded the radius of his self-fascination and use of elements of his life in his art (or use of his life as art). Such self-documentation, and the exposure of ‘ordinary’ life to an observing public, cannot help but invite comparisons with later trends in reality TV programming. Lacey’s films include a deliberate acknowledgement of their own artificiality, however, with unedited directions, clapperboard takes, countdowns to cuts and shots of the soundman dispelling any illusion of authenticity.

The Theatre of family life - The Laceys at Home

Another performance from this era, Stella Star and Her Amazing Galactic Adventures, put on by the Galactic Theatre (there’s a poster for it in the gallery) in 1974, had an accompanying film, included on the bfi dvd. This provides a bridging link between the futurism of the 60s and the search for a rural arcadia in the latter half of the 70s and the 80s. Its science fiction fable of the elemental Manichean struggle between the intergalactic adventuress Stella Star, the feminine force of light and life (Jill Bruce) and an embodied black hole, a voracious, predatory void of negative ‘dark matter’ and spirit (played by a black-robed Lacey) is played out (with more home-made dressing up) against the backdrop of an ancient British woodland. The space operatics are brought down to leaf-mouldy earth. Lacey and Bruce’s involvement with the free festival movement in the 80s saw them creating Pagan rituals, which avoided new age insipidity through the intense personal investment which they brought to them, an intensity which could give them the same slightly unnerving, unhinged quality which the Alberts’ performances possessed. They were rites which admitted the destructive aspect of the elements, and the presence of death within the Arcadian summer festival garden. The ritual room contains relics from these festival happenings. A central pentagram formed from wooden sticks was laid out on the floor, the sort of thing which would have acted as the focus for one of Lacey’s fire rituals. On the wall, more costumes were hung. Lacey has evidently always had a strong sense of the importance of costume, which goes hand in hand with the self-dramatising and –revealing aspects of his art. Changes in life are marked by changes in costume, old skins shed and new ones created. The costumes here are brightly coloured, tie-died capes, pegged out like flags which pledge allegiance to the late-flowering hippiedom of the 80s travellers. Occasionally, Lacey would cast aside costume altogether, stripping naked to perform rituals daubed in paint and mud, as in the heartfelt Awakening of the Earth Goddess, 8mm footage of which can be seen on the bfi dvd.



A film playing on a TV mounted at the corner of the room had Lacey and Bruce and other participants chanting the Om Nama Shivaya mantra, incorporating it into actions deriving from their own intuitive notions of the sacred, in the manner of new age syntheses – Indian mysticism blended with the romance of the Celtic twilight and the genius loci, or spirit of place, of the ancient English landscape. There’s something of the spirit of neo-romantic artists like Paul Nash and Cecil Collins to these imaginative dramas; an attempt to evoke, in an unsentimentalised, way, the power of the natural world and of a particular geographic locale, and to place humanity within rather than outside of it, an intrinsic and inseparable part of its cyclical processes. The super 8 films themselves possess a grain and have accrued a surface detainling of cracks and speckles which serves to enhance the feeling of antiquity in the landscapes they survey and the rituals they record. Such influences can also be found in the paintings hung in the room, which marked a return to the form he’d studied and practised at art college. These depart from tradition through being created on sackcloth stretched out within metal frames like rough hides, giving them more of an American Indian look and feel. The large circular mandalas Lacey has painted on their dusty backdrop represent a vision of life and matter on a micro and macroscopic scale. Some resemble cells or spores magnified under a microscope, some the colourfully banded surfaces of gas giant planets, and some planar representations of the galactic core. They seem to be reaching out to some grandly intuited sense of the unity of all creation, a quest which puts him in the visionary tradition of Blake and his descendants, and well beyond the radar of modern art trends. Cecil Collins’ Cells of Night, The Joy of the Worlds and The Great Happiness and others, with their similar interposition of cellular and astronomical forms, are further points of connection with the neo-romantics of the inter-war years, as are the symbolic lunar and solar landscapes of Paul Nash’s later Wittenham Clumps paintings from the forties. This connection with a mystical tradition of interior landscapes and symbolic natural forms suggests an attempt to regain a pre-war sense of completeness, perhaps even something of the lost idyll of childhood.

Replica sun machine - solar recorder

Physical records of Lacey’s observance of solar and seasonal cycles were present in the form of arced strips of paper with burnt lines extending in varying lengths along its curved surface. These recording strips were attached to a frame around a spherical glass filled with water, which acted as a refractive, light-focusing lens, tracking the sun’s progress across the sky and recording it, and the passage of clouds across its surface, on the paper. The device looked something like a scrying ball, used to write the unique solar script of each chosen day (the dates written down on the paper at the end). Lacey’s recording of the details of his own life seemed to have been absorbed into the creation of a more universal record, the observance of a wider pattern into which he would eventually disappear. In the meantime, he has landed in the county of Norfolk, in the rump of the British Isles, where he curates the vast archive of his own life and work in an old farmhouse, emerging for the occasional retrospective and working with community arts projects in the area. One such local appearance, at the Norwich Arts Centre in 2011, was commemorated in the most recent poster in the corridor gallery; a performance entitled Bruce Lacey: A Silly Bugger Artist’s Life at the Taxpayer’s Expense, some of which is captured on Jeremy Deller and Nick Abrahams’ documentary The Bruce Lacey Experience. The acknowledgement of the country’s cash-strapped state and its low opinion of the importance and active hostility to the public support of art and artists implicit in such a billing shows that Lacey’s sense of humour, at once anti-establishment and anxiously self-questioning, is still fully functional. Long may the silly bugger continue.

Bruce Lacey at the Camden Arts Centre

PART ONE

Bruce Lacey is one of those characters who has seemingly moved in the peripheral vision of British popular and counterculture for several ages. His name many not be widely known, but once noticed, you find yourself recognising him in the background of or exerting his influence upon all manner of significant movements, from the 50s up until the present day. I first became aware of him in his professorial role (his self-awarded title of ‘professor’ Bruce Lacey fitting the mad scientist role which he adopted) in the 1967 George Melly scripted film about the not so fab 60s, Smashing Time. An electrical mishap unleashes his self-built robots on a helpless art gathering at a Roundhouse style venue, and he looks on with manic, gesticulatory glee from behind a lectern. He looks for all the world like Rotwang, the robot-builder in Metropolis, throwing silent movie shapes. This scene is probably still the best way to see his remote controlled robots in action. They’re hilariously inventive and at the same time a little bit threatening, as mechanical facsimiles of the human form generally are. I had also heard of him through Fairport Convention’s song Mr Lacey, which also sang a song of praise to his robots and his ‘loving machine’. The latter presumably referred to his orgasmatron-style sensory stimulator which he manufactured for the Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition at the ICA in 1968. This was an encapsulating pod in which the willing entrant was exposed to ‘non-specific erotic images’ whilst being massaged and caressed by an automated system of rollers and soft pads. It was a device to set against Kafka’s mechanical punishment machine from his story In The Penal Colony, one devoted instead to the fulfilment of the pleasure principle. There was an element of criticism or moral questioning behind the surface fun, however, as there was with many of his madcap actions and inventions – a constant assertion of the authentically human over the mechanical or simulated.

Knowing his place - Lacey prepares to gnaw George's lawn in Help

Had I but realised it, I also knew Lacey from his brief appearance in The Beatles film Help as the resident yokel gardener in the fab four’s surreal pad, trimming their artificial lawn with the aid of two pairs of nibbling false teeth. The Beatles’ patronage puts him in the lineage of other British oddball artists such as Ivor Cutler (who sometimes appeared on the same bill as Lacey in the 60s) and the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, both of whom featured in The Magical Mystery Tour. Lacey’s connection to the Goons no doubt endeared him to John Lennon, but it was probably his previous association with Dick Lester (he’d appeared in his Goonish short The Running Jumping and Standing Still Film, for which he also designed the props) which led to his presence in Help.

Lacey has received renewed attention recently on account of The Lacey Rituals, a new 2-dvd collection from the bfi of his film work, both as director, performer and prop builder, and an attendant exhibition at the Camden Arts Centre, which looked back on the entirety of his profligate and restlessly mercurial creative life. I went and saw it on its last weekend in mid-September. The first of the gallery spaces you entered on the first floor was a spacious, light-filled corridor on whose walls a good number of framed posters and flyers were hung. These formed an effective and visually absorbing survey of Lacey’s work and appearances over the six decades, as well as offering an incidental insight into the changing styles in graphic poster design from the 50s to the present day. The range and mutability of Lacey’s activities soon became apparent through this introductory display. He was part of a Goonish vaudevillian troupe in the 50s and 60s called The Alberts. It was a name entirely apposite for their aesthetic of scavenging and using with irreverent and at the same time affectionate and sincere humour the junkshop flotsam of Victorian and Edwardian England. Their colourfully antique style anticipated the tatterdemalion motley of swinging 60s and summer of love fashions. The confusion and rapid changes between space-age futurism and a nostalgic resurrection of Edwardian and Victorian formal finery is also reflected in Lacey’s work – his robots and rockets set off against top-hatted, one-man band buffoonery.

Pre-punk graphics - The Alberts' lost album

Centred around Lacey and the Gray brothers, Tony and Douglas, the Alberts’ enthusiastic demolition of early jazz and novelty tunes, gleaned from the cracked and dust-filled grooves of rediscovered 78s, paved the way for The Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band. Roger Ruskin Spear’s kinetic robots and automata, and the many theatrical props incorporated into the Bonzo’s stage performances, may also have drawn on Lacey and The Albert’s example. The Alberts, whilst remembered with great affection by those who witnessed their unpredictable, chaotic but energetic and committed shows, endure as an obscure footnote to 60s London pop culture. This is largely due to the lack of any substantive documentation of their performances. In the new documentary on Lacey, The Lacey Experience by artist Jeremy Deller (who also co-curated the Camden Arts Centre exhibition) and film-maker Nick Abrahams, included on the bfi discs, he reveals that The Alberts recorded an LP for EMI, produced by George Martin. EMI objected to the cover, a union jack with torn out lettering from adverts ornamenting the red crosses of St Patrick and St George. As Lacey elucidates out in the documentary, he regarded the flag as representative of the lingering arrogance of British imperial attitudes, and the messages mischievously attached point to its negative associations and paint it as a redundant symbol. The ‘ultimate toilet paper’ byline suggests a possible alternative usage. The rough, collaged graphics and provocative use of the flag resemble Jamie Reid’s God Save The Queen cover for The Sex Pistols, and punk graphics in general, to a striking degree. Lacey refused to compromise over the cover, and the album remained in the vaults (although Lacey states that he has a copy in his possession too). George Melly, in his 1970 book on Swinging 60s London, Revolt Into Style, offers his own perspective on why the Alberts were destined to obscurity. ‘As to why they have survived in the shadows while those they engendered swam out into the light’, he stated, ‘I believe the reason is that they are totally serious. Surrounded by extinct musical instruments and ancient machinery, dressed in daily life as if they were Victorian lifeboat skippers or First World War German pilots, they preserve a grave courtesy which holds mockery at bay, but at the same time worries people’. Melly also makes a prescient connection with the punk generation to come when he describes Lacey as being ‘barely in control of his hatred for whatever seems to him to be unloving or morally dead…with his rolling eyes and filthy Edwardian evening clothes…he gives off an aura of real if ludicrous menace’. This sense of underlying violence, of a savagely satirical and slightly despairing outlook on the dehumanising aspects of the technologised post-war landscape, counterbalances the charmingly whimsical and childlike aspect of his creations.

Flight of fools - doomed Hampstead launch

A hint of the barely contained anarchy of their performances can be found in the short film The Flying Alberts, included on the bfi disc. This documents and attempt, clearly doomed from the outset, to launch a rocket from the slopes of Hampstead Heath, piloted by a gasmasked Lacey with the brothers Gray in tweedy tow. The whole endeavour ends in sopping ignominy in one of the nearby ponds, and can be seen as a tribute of sorts to the hopeless dreamers whose inept early attempts at flight are captured in bathetic turn of the century film footage. A celebration of British failure. The marching band whose ragged fanfares give them a wavering send off includes future Bonzos Neil Innes and Rodney Slater, revealing an even more direct link between Alberts and Bonzos. Perhaps The Humanoid Boogie, Innes’ infectious automaton pop number for the Bonzos, was influenced by Lacey’s robots too. The film also displays Lacey’s skill at making imaginative props out of whatever he could lay his hands on, props which were often treated in a less than gentle manner (shades of Gustav Metzger’s auto-destructive art, violently impinging on popular culture via Pete Townsend at about the same time). Lacey had made or found props for Spike Milligan and Michael Bentine’s post-Goon TV shows, and props from his personal hoard (kites, spyglasses, Victorian cameras, amusing hats etc) can also be seen in Dick Lester’s short The Running, Jumping and Standing Still Film. This was made in 1960 with a half-Goon cast of Spike Milligan and Peter Sellers, Leo McKern acting as a more than serviceable Secombe stand-in. Lacey himself himself appears briefly as a music lover, laying his chosen LP down onto a treestump ‘turntable’, producing an old gramophone arm and stylus connected to a trumpet speaker, and running around the stump in a giddy circle, pressing the needle into the groove and the speaker against his ear.

Lacey's DIY gramaphone method - The Running Jumping and Standing Still Film

Lacey’s antic role within the Alberts’ set-up is hinted at in the poster for the 1950 Carnival of Jazz held, appropriately enough, at the Albert Hall, and headlined by Chris Barber with the late Ottoline Morrell. The design is a simple two-colour textual delineation of the bill of artists, with an announcement at the bottom that it will be ‘compered by The Alberts and interrupted by Professor Bruce Lacey’. The Alberts staged a number of shows which pre-empted criticism by announcing themselves as ‘An Evening of British Rubbish’. It’s a billing which manages simultaneously to fly the flag and make a mockery of it. As they used to proudly declare when the whole thing shambled to its conclusion, the smoke of exploding dummies drifting from the stage, ‘I know it’s rubbish, but by jingo, it’s British rubbish’. The rubbish could also be the Victorian detritus, wartime surplus equipment and health service cast-offs which Lacey cobbled together into comically grotesque anthropomorphic automata (junk people) or Heath Robinsonesque props destined for noisome destruction.

ROSA on the rampage - Smashing Time

Lacey’s professorial qualifications were self-bestowed, and indicated his penchant for rubbish dump invention and mad scientist affections (a disconcertingly intense and abstracted gaze, manic glints of sudden inspiration, disarrayed clothing and electrostatically charged hair). This culminated in the multi-purpose robots he created in the early to mid-60s, powered by old aircraft voltage motors and lent limbs and extremities by courtesy of the NHS. These made their appearances at various countercultural London hotspots in the swinging summer of love 60s – places like the Roundhouse at Chalk Farm and the Middle Earth club in Covent Garden. His star robot was probably R.O.S.A B.O.S.O.M. (that’s Radio Operated Simulated Actress, Battery Or Standard Operated Mains), who was best ‘man’ at his wedding to Jill Smith (Lacey’s regular collaborator under the name Jill Bruce). It’s fairly typical of Lacey’s refusal to make a distinction between life and art that he should turn his wedding into another performance. As he tells it, he simply couldn’t leave her at home, regarding her as an integral part of the family. ROSA can also be seen trundling about the Middle Earth dance floor in a short film on the dvd, Lacey discretely manipulating the antennaed control box from the shadows. She went on the rampage (along with a battalion of Lacey’s other robots) in the 1967 film Smashing Time, menacing our Rita (Tushingham) with big wet smackers from her extendable red sponge lips. Lacey observes the mayhem his mechanical offspring cause with hysterical, bug-eyed delight, playing the mad scientist to the hilt. Showing little signs of her age, ROSA also ended up winning the Alternative Miss World Contest in 1985, snatching a crown usually claimed by an outrageously inventive drag queen.

ROSA was initially created for the theatrical show The Three Musketeers at the Royal Court in 1965, where she, Lacey and The Alberts appeared alongside the likes of Valentine Dyall and Rachel Roberts. A mutated version of The Alberts, genetically re-engineered (in name if not dress and outlook) for the times (1967 by the looks of it), appeared at The Marquee with the pre-Kraftwerk robots in what the psychedelically bedazzling poster styles as ‘An Antique Freak-In with Pink Albert’s Collapsible Orchestra, Bruce Lacey and the Red Army Combo’. Having mocked the lingering tatters of British Imperial bluster, Lacey and the Alberts were happy to extend the privilege of being the target of their piss-taking to the linguistic affectations of the counterculture. With an evening of such unpredictable delights in prospect, tickets were a steal at 6/- for members and 8/- for guests.

Lacey’s artistic credentials were given substantial recognition through several appearances at the ICA from the late 60s onwards, including participation in the Cybernetic Serendipity symposium in 1968. Our backstreet, homegrown professor took his place amongst the heady company of Professor Herbert Brun, Professor Lionel Penrose and the avant-garde composer, mathematician and architect Iannis Xenakis. The ad for this august gathering was in the style of Polish surrealist film posters, with the central image definitely based around Lacey’s robots. A 1975 exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery suggests that he was now firmly established, earning a career retrospective looking back on ’40 years of assemblages, environments and robots’. That forty year span makes it clear that Lacey traces his creativity back to his childhood, and makes no clear distinction between mature and ‘juvenile’ work, valuing early efforts as much as the work of his adult years. He was born in 1927, in the South London borough of Lewisham, so counting back from 1975, the Whitechapel exhibition would include things he made when he was 8 years old.

A Robot Lilliput reproduction

The first room of the Camden Arts Centre exhibition proper (if we regard the poster hall as a prelude) looks at his early work, life and influences, and is perhaps best summed up by the declaration, included in the introductory remarks, that you should endeavour ‘never to lose the child within you’. Various relics of Lacey’s childhood were on display, precious personal artefacts safely encased in museum glass. At the far end of the room, by a window which lent it backlit prominence, a wooden fort was placed on a table, with a note from Lacey telling us that it had been built by his dad. It was the perfect stage for a young boy’s imagination, and a demonstration for him of what could be created from the sawn-off discards of the lumber yard. Its placement at the rear centre of the room made it a natural starting point for a journey through Lacey’s life, a progenitive object which sowed the creative seed in little Bruce’s imagination. Also present were some of his childhood toys (part of Lacey’s art lies in a natural hoarder’s tendency to curate their own lives). There was Robot Lilliput, an early Japanese version of the wind-up tin robot toy, one of the first to be produced; and an Indian doll (of the Native American variety) which, as he told us on one of the neatly handwritten cards he placed beside each artefact, ‘I took to bed every night as a young boy and cuddled’. Here in nascent form, in these objects placed side by side, were two of the enduring, counterbalancing poles of his artistic obsessions – visions of mechanical men and the space-age future, and an instinctive embrace of a pre-industrial worldview as filtered through popular culture, and re-interpreted in personal terms. A 1953 sketch of ‘my ventriloquist dummy’s head Tommy’ suggested an early facility (or need) for adopting alternative personae, and also forged a link with fellow eccentric spirit, explorer of personal mythologies and stubborn follower of his own path Ken Campbell, who would carry out his own distinctively interrogatory ventures into the ventriloquial arts in his latter years.

Art as impulsive therapy - 1980s Earth Rituals

Costumes from childhood gave a foretaste of a life spent dressing up and playacting. Indian, harlequin and clown outfits hung from the wall next to a red post-box one-piece, an early indication of a sense of the surreal and the absurd. The centrality of wartime mythologies and the dreams of flying were represented by his Uncle Jim’s helmet and goggles from the First World War. Lacey himself went into the Navy in 1945, his one brief voyage largely spent in cramped conditions below decks, where he contracted tuberculosis. He was confined to a TB ward, where he was rendered immobile for a period, and witnessed the confinement and decline of others whose cases were far worse than his. Some of his later assemblages using health service odds and sods, crutches and body-covering plaster casts draw on his experience of this time. It was in the ward that he started seriously sketching and developing his interest in art, as several sketches of his immediate surroundings, and of ranked skeletons attested. He also set up an episcope projector, which could throw magnified pictures of his fellow patients’ photos onto the walls. Again, the roots of his future gadget building ingenuity and improvisatory instinct for going beyond the standard boundaries of ‘serious’ art and entertaining and surprising people through whatever means were available or came to mind were plain to see. Lacey, in the documentary on the bfi dvd, talks about having taken up art in the ward as a kind of therapy, and there’s something of that therapeutic impulse which has persisted throughout his life. Certainly, when he talks in the documentary about the ritual to the Earth Goddess he performed at a festival in 1982, which was a naked (literally) public act of ceremonial rebirth after the end of his long-term partnership with Jill Bruce, he is still palpably emotional about it. It was his way of coming to terms with a great disruption in his life, creating a performance piece almost as an incidental side-effect. The experience of war and of the drawn out death of the TB ward is reflected in his truly horrific assemblage Wartime Marriage from 1965, in which two bodies are tied onto a camp bed with lengths of string. Their skin is covered with sores and open wounds, and parts of limbs have been messily snapped off. The woman’s face has become fused with a gasmask, and the man’s arm is raised, as if in a futile gesticulation for help. They look like fossilised Pompeii-esque relics from the far future of a post nuclear catastrophe. In a wartime gas ‘cradle’, a baby’s face can be seen peering innocently out; another of Lacey’s disturbing uses of dolls. This is a work which amply demonstrates that Lacey, beneath (and sometimes coexistant with) his whimsical and madcap persona, could draw on and give powerful expression to deep-seated personal and political fears, anxieties and terrors.

On the near wall hung some of the paintings he produced after leaving the Hornsey College of Art to study at the Royal College of Art from 1951-54. They are surprisingly subdued, even drab in tone, and realistic in their depiction of everyday scenes and landscapes. Their rather depressing air of brownness is maybe a reflection of a general disaffection with the shattered, weary world of post-war austerity Britain. Or maybe the paint has just faded and lost its colour with time. Suspended above all of these representative markers of his childhood and youth was a sculpture which spanned most of the upper space beneath the ceiling. A large prick in a spectrum of primary colours was outlined in framework form by broken, bent and rejoined hula hoops, ceremonially bedecked with ribbons to add a ritualistic air. White tubes issued from its tip to swirl and spiral out across the room’s upper expanse. Baby girl dolls of varying size and shape were attached to these looping pathways at different intervals, new life launched off into the world. Just as Lacey’s story begins below, they are setting off to create new stories, and to build up their own personal mythologies along the way. It’s a cyclical symbol of generative forces, the straight male member issuing its brief cannonade before giving way to circular forms with their conjoined female travellers – the daughters of Albion flying away into a new world very different from the one laid out below them.