The Psychopathic Now!

Jeff Nuttall’s Bomb Culture and the International Underground

Flat Time House

24th November - 15th December 2018

The Moment, the psychopathic Now in which man was imprisoned when
the future became improbable, was the launching point from which the
creative missiles were hurled into chance winds where they were played
along like gliders — Jeff Nuttall

Originally published in 1968, Jeff Nuttall’s Bomb Culture fused personal memoir with cultural critique in an attempt to diagnose a nuclear age imbued with both dread and possibility. Part manifesto, part roadmap to the burgeoning International Underground of the 1960s, the book made great conceptual use of the immediacy of the ‘Now’ — both in terms of Nuttall’s own existential crises: personal, political and creative, but also in its consideration of the period’s artistic and revolutionary intentions which could be characterised by their impatience. The Sixties declared an emphasis on the quality of urgency — Do it NOW! Be here NOW! Peace NOW! Live NOW! Prioritising the hip, existential grasping for the joyful moment, seizing the time, in the anticipated cultural Coup du Monde announced by the novelist Alexander Trocchi who said: ‘the invisible insurrection is happening in many places simultaneously… NOW.’

The Psychopathic Now! takes the 50th anniversary re-publication of Bomb Culture as an opportunity to survey Nuttall’s own artistic restlessness, considering his political and aesthetic evolution from the perceived failure of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, through his experiments in small press publishing and experimental prose, to his role as diagnostician of countercultural energies.

Curated by Jamie Sutcliffe, Douglas Field, and Jay Jeff Jones.
With thanks to Gareth Bell-Jones at Flat Time House.
All documentation by Jean-Philippe Woodland