Bring Back Robin Hood, 2008

artist’s book, published by Transmission Gallery, Glasgow

Bring Back Robin Hood is an artist’s book based on the installation Machine Shall be the Slave of Man but We Will Not Slave for the Machine. It tells the story of the Kindred of the Kibbo Kift, a fringe British youth movement active between 1920 and 1951. Originally part of the Boy Scouts, the Kibbo Kift split off in order to establish a more democratic organisation, in which relations between adults and children, men and women were to be equal. However, under the charismatic leadership of John Hargrave, camping was elevated to a ritualised spiritual activity and the movement became something of a cult. The Kibbo Kift were later radicalised in response to the economic crisis that followed the Wall Street crash of 1929, and transformed once more into a uniformed group promoting a monetary reform system called Social Credit.

Bring Back Robin Hood interrogates the ways in which history can be instrumentalised for the sake of nationalistic idealisations of the past, particularly in times of economic and social crisis. Written as a personal travel log in 2007 and 2008, as the latest financial crisis was unfolding, the text and accompanying illustrations detail my investigation of the (then) little-known historical movement. The story is underpinned by a feeling that events are repeating themselves.

Published by Transmission Gallery, Glasgow, on the occasion of ‘MOOT POINTS: Exercises in Self-organisation, Discourse and Collaboration’, 2008.

Awake! Awake!

The torch of truth is alight

In the hands of the men in green

Follow the green

Follow the torch of truth

And the truth is this:

That poverty in the midst of plenty is a

tragic absurdity that no free community

will tolerate indefinitely.