I will never not vote.

I know there are others in what is broadly defined as the Left who see voting as meaningless: the anarchists, the Russell Brands. There are those who are disenfranchised by mainstream politics to the extent that participating in elections seems pointless; there are those who think more significant gains are made locally, on the ground rather than in the ballot box. I’m sympathetic to an extent, but I can’t subscribe to this refusal as I can so many others. It’s a sentimentalism of sorts — too many people fought for my vote, too recently, being as I am not only a woman but a poor one. It’s less than a hundred years since the Representation of the People Act. It was the centenary of Emily Davison’s death only last year.

Perhaps you’ve seen the plaque Tony Benn put up for her back in 1999. ‘In loving memory of Emily Wilding Davison’; erected where she locked herself in Parliament, illegally, so that she might record her address on census night as ‘The House of Commons’. Benn’s tribute calls her, with the simple, arresting candidness that characterised his career, ‘brave’. Her night in the Commons and her death at the derby are recounted in the inscription. ‘By such means’, his tribute concludes, ‘was democracy won for the people of Britain’. Underneath, a short explanation — ‘Notice placed here by Tony Benn MP’ — and then a quotation: ‘”I must tell you, Mr. Speaker, that I am going to put a plaque in the House. I shall have it made myself and screwed on the door of the broom cupboard in the Crypt”‘.

It shows Benn’s understanding of politics that the plaque is in the Crypt. Note the tributes he could have arranged (or tried to): this is no bronze statue of Davison outside Parliament, or stone bust in a chamber. The real architecture of politics is not to be found there; it doesn’t rely on the benches and lines, on the hooks for swords or Black Rod marching to knock on the door. True politics reveals those things as empty — it hides in your building, in the broom cupboard, forcing you to count it by being somewhere it shouldn’t. When Benn commemorated Davison he chose for his tribute not the room where power was, but the one from where it was challenged. ‘If one walks around this place’, he later said in the Commons, ‘one sees statues of people, not one of whom believed in democracy, votes for women or anything else. We have to be sure that we are a workshop and not a museum’.

A night in the Crypt, to write truthfully a line on a form: by such means was democracy won. Ritual and subversion colliding. Benn put the plaque up by hand.

There is an oft-quoted line of Frederick Douglass’ which reminds us that ‘power concedes nothing without a demand’. Benn’s most quotable words speak to the same truth: five questions which are addressed not to the worker but to the boss.

What power have you got?

Where did you get it from?

In whose interests do you exercise it?

To whom are you accountable?

How can we get rid of you?

Only democracy gives us that right. That is why no-one with power likes democracy and that is why every generation must struggle to win it and keep it; including you and me, here and now.

With all of his legitimacy and political inheritance, Benn still understood that power does not give unless it is forced. No-one relinquishes their chance to wield it voluntarily. Except, perhaps, for a politician famously known as the only man who became more left-wing while in office. Who today, on the day of his death, was remembered by Radio 4 as being present not at high-profile dinners and clean photo ops — although he could tear up the floor of the Commons, or Glastonbury — but at environmental rallies, miners’ meetings. When he did not stand in the 2001 general elections, Benn explained that he was ‘leaving parliament in order to spend more time in politics’.

Remember him. If you ever have trouble understanding the true geography of power — if you ever have difficulty articulating the precise weight behind the word ‘integrity’ — the life of Tony Benn will be a good place to start.

Stephanie Boland is an editor at Don’t Do It and a British citizen.

Recently, artist and media savant Trevor Paglen spent some nights hovering over the headquarters of a few American intelligence agencies in order to make  photographs of these agencies  which have remained largely invisible to the public. Their budgets are classified, many of their activities have only come to light after Edward Snowden’s infamous document leaks, and their physical existence is largely characterized by a single outdated photograph of the NSA headquarters. But what are aeriel shots of monolithic buildings surrounded by empty parking lots meant to show us? Perhaps the only thing they can: the American public’s exclusion from these institutions which are operating both literally and figuratively, as is becoming increasingly evident, in their own back yards.

Paglen’s project stands in marked contrast to the work of fellow Art Institute of Chicago graduate Simon Menner . The Berlin based artist’s recent ‘Images from the Secret Stasi Archives’ is a view of the surveillance state from within, assembled from reproductions of photographic material from the Stasi archives. For 40 years the Staatssicherheit , or ‘Stasi’, turned Eastern Germany into a panopticon. It was larger by population than either the CIA or the KGB and amassed vast paranoiac records of its own civilians, both their public and private lives. But Menner’s selections focus on the surveillors and the culture of surveillance rather than the surveilled, including images from seminars and training manuals in disguise, combat, and observation.

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Donmar’s Coriolanus, Shakespeare’s most overtly political play, starts in the same way the National Theatre’s 2009 production of All’s Well that Ends Well started. A young boy comes on stage, playing with a sword. Where the National’s All’s Well made fun of the teenage Bertram, clueless about actual war, the Donmar’s boy – Coriolanus’ young son Martius – seems to understand exactly the necessity of war for him. The sword-wielding Martius is younger and more earnest than Bertram. This is the keynote of the production: very earnest, but a bit undeveloped.

The text is drenched in politics, but the director, Donmar’s Artistic Director Josie Rourke, has turned away from hackneyed depictions of Coriolanus in a fascist or Marxist frame. What you gain in insight into human nature you lose in specificity, which makes the production seem slightly unanchored. But that’s not the main problem. The main problem is casting of the main character.

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Today  William Burroughs would be 100 years old. We wracked our brains for fully three minutes to think up a way to pay fitting tribute and at the same time make good of all the time wasted in idle emailing. I’m sure you’ll agree that our solution was not only perfect, but the only one available to us.

The following is a product of the ‘cut-up method’ – made famous by Burroughs – applied to text selected at random from some of our editorial communications. The cut-up was not invented by Burroughs; it got Tristan Tzara kicked out of the surrealists and came to Burroughs by way of the poet Brion Gysin. But we think it’s fitting to borrow something already borrowed in tribute – as Burroughs himself put it, ‘Tristan Tzara said: “Poetry is for everyone.”’ All names have been removed to protect the innocent and guilty alike.

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Three men work in perpetual shifts, supervising the control of thirty-six potted plants that are arranged in a grid across the set. When the alarms sound, someone must water every row – except the last one. That’s orders.

A canny team of designers dance with the central conceit at the heart of Nick Gill’s surreal play, which draws a parallel between kept plants and war prisoners. With a sharpness that compliments the play’s starkly episodic format, Tom Wickens’s crisp lighting design and Max Pappenheim’s filthily industrial soundscape charge up a buzzing electrical jail. On top of the bare neon strips that mirror the rows of plants, uncomfortably bright spotlights shine an invasive edge onto the production. Ruth Hall’s set, comprised of functional beige tiles and white, easily-wiped plastic sheets supports this sinister vibe, sitting on the evocative border between greenhouse and torture room.
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Don’t Do It is launching a series of videos, putting readings of poetry and novel excerpts to image. We’ll be spanning a range of national literatures and languages. Resisting the moniker of ‘world lit’, we want to capture something of the sound and metre of poetry and fiction in its native language.

We launch with a series of Russian Literature. Elena Korshenko reads excerpts from Anton Chekhov and Leo Tolstoy, as well as poems by Vladimir Mayakovsky and Marina Tsvetaeva.

The first in the series is Mayakovsky’s  Kindness to Horses (1918). You can read Andrey Kneller’s English translation . Visuals are recorded and edited by Don’t Do It  editors.

I like to come to the news a bit late. Gives it a fresh lustre and frees things from the hysteria of news cycle cannibalism. My favorite story lately has been the affluenza defense which ensured Ethan Crouch’s infamy… Well, of course, when I say that it ensured his infamy I really mean that everyone’s already forgotten about him.

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On the banks of the Seine, two men look out from twin banners adorning the front of the Musee D’Orsay. One is classical in appearance; so classical as to be unremarkable. The other is Pierre et Gilles’ Mercury . His taut muscles are lit by an ethereal light, glittering around the one item he is wearing: a winged helmet, which, along with his snake-headed staff, marks him out as the god he is. His back is facing the river; peering at the ground, we see his face only in profile. Seemingly unconcerned with the viewer, he draws our attention. He glimmers. Continue reading →

The poster for the new production of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Richard II , in which David Tennant sits slumped on a throne with a portrait of the eponymous king behind him, is a distillation of what the audience can expect. In an interview Gregory Doran, the director of the play and newly appointed Artistic Director of the RSC, lauds Tennant’s ‘inability to be anything but contemporary’. ¹ As a result of that contemporaneity, the result is a refreshing take on the most lyrical of Shakespeare’s plays.

The previous RSC production from Michael Boyd’s histories cycle in 2008, in which Boyd’s wunderkind Jonathan Slinger played Richard, was nice and haughty but lacked a self-awareness. In the BBC’s adaptation The Hollow Crown, Ben Whishaw’s rendition of Richard was earnest, taking Richard’s cue from Michael Jackson, down to the cadences of his flutey voice and a pet monkey. In this production, Richard is more conscious of his own faults at the outset. Tennant’s Richard, even though he eulogises to English ground on his return from Ireland, knows his words are over the top. ‘Mock not’, quipped over the shoulder to his followers, is here a concession, a nudge to self-irony.

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