Laziness, Greed and other Utopian Virtues
on the work of Beagles and Ramsay

Dave Beech

There's a lake of gin
We can both jump in
And the handouts grow on bushes
In the new-mown hay
We can sleep all day
And the bars all have free lunches
The Big Rock Candy Mountain
American Folk Song
Attributed to Harry McLintock

Abundance, sexual freedom and idleness, according to Steve Edwards, are the three central themes that structure Utopian thought. Edwards concludes that "utopia is concerned with the pleasures of the body, particularly feasting and revelry" in the wondrous images of "rivers of wine and whisky, lakes of stew, fruit falling from the trees, piles of strawberry pie and wagon loads of cream" . Utopia is the highest demand of our lowest needs.
Beagles and Ramsay are classic utopians of this bawdy variety. In their work the social, cultural and religious constraints on the senses are suspended in an imaginary replete with revelry. Song and dance, greed and indolence, belly laughs and bodily pleasures – these are the delights that infuse their world of blood, guts, horror and, above all, bellies. Of their Unrealised Dreams notebooks from 2003, two proposals for Monuments tell the story of their unholy utopianism. A dancing Ian Curtis, arms windmilling and head swaying, would be a monument to unglamorous intensity and the raw seduction of the beat, while an oversized tooth, titled "Oh Rotten Molar – A Monument to All the Teeth That Got Away", monumentalises how our love of sweet food overrules knowledge of its harm to our bodies.

Utopia, like ethics, is not the triumph over the body, as Terry Eagleton reminds us: "It is the mortal, fragile, suffering, ecstatic, needy, dependent, desirous, compassionate body which furnishes the basis of all moral thought." Utopia, no less than ethics, requires reciprocal human flourishing to be erected on the foundation of bodily frailty and fleshly needs. Nevertheless, utopia is an image-repertoire that pulls in the opposite direction of the bourgeois pleasure seeker, insisting instead on the need to think of pleasure in terms of how to make life more pleasant for everyone. "There is tenderness only in the coarsest demand", Adorno says, namely "that no-one shall go hungry any more". Not that utopia restricts its horizons to the rational projects of its time, like town planning does. Utopia doesn’t tighten its belt for the greater good. This is why scarcity, hunger, sickness, relentless toil, sexual repression, drudgery, neglect, poverty and misery are not merely alleviated in utopian thinking, they are completely abolished to make way for a paradise of feasts and freedom.

In the utopia of the American folk song The Big Rock Candy Mountain, therefore, food is ubiquitous, costs nothing and needs no preparation. At the same time, this sweet-toothed paradise is free from the authoritarian violence of the state (the police and prisons are ineffective and weak) and immune to the urgencies of industry (laziness, rest, sleep, relaxation and leisure are as routine on The Mountain as labour is in the modern world of work). The Big Rock Candy Mountain is a utopian province of bodily pleasures "where a bum can stay/ For many a day/ And he won't need any money". Thomas More’s Utopia does more than catalogue such fancies, but it nonetheless insists, as a minima of happiness, on the indulgence of bodily pleasures: "There is no reason for giving a denial to any person, since there is such plenty of everything among them" . The citizens of Utopia, according to More, are easy-going and leisure-loving. No wonder, they have everything their hearts’ desire.Utopia is not made out of good taste and good sense; it is built on needs, desires and dreams. If utopia is a demand made by the body, it is not the body imagined by medicine, fitness and nutrition; it is the body of laziness, greed and lust. Beagles and Ramsay know that the utopian body couldn’t be more different from the perfect, beautiful body of classical thought because it is above all the subject of tastes, not the object of scrutiny. This is why Beagles and Ramsay’s works are unashamedly immersed in the grimy world of burgers, black puddings, glitter balls and sex doll self-portraits. If such trash appears to hold little promise, that is why a true utopianism needs to be built around them, for, as Fredric Jameson has argued, "utopia is somehow negative… it is most authentic when we cannot imagine it" (my emphasis). The best example of the ‘otherness’ of utopian thinking is, perhaps, Paul Lafargue’s pamphlet "The Right to be Lazy" from 1883, in which he calls up laziness as "the balm of human anguish". Utopia is not a picture of what we (prejudiced by our present non-utopian circumstances) regard as our highest and best achievements. On the contrary, utopia turns everything upside down.