Jill Rants and Raves: the compulsion of art and politics

I'm having trouble writing my blogs - mostly I'm writing about something particular and my internal alarm tells me not to post it. So I've been writing away - and reading the stuff to friends who tell me (because friends do) 'hey, you're right' - but not posting it for the world to see. But that so goes against my particular grain. I'm not one to keep a diary and put it underneath my pyjamas in the third drawer down, taking it out at night and writing in a tiny script the agonies and glories of the day. And that's been true for everything I've ever 'produced'. Photographs in an album seem to shout to be let out, writing in notebooks stored in a series of efficiently labeled boxes but never shown to another feels like voices trapped in an underground tunnel. It's why the writing on the wall has always appealed to me - in your face, bold, crude and public. It's why 'outsider art', giving a 'fuck you' to the doors of the art world citadels, has always drawn me close. It's why the act and the art of openness is like manna to me. Someone said to me recently ' It's as if you see your work as community property'.

When I wrote 'Any Woman Can' in 1974 it was because my anguish was busting through the seams of my skin. And my first act on finishing it was to give it to women who I felt could take it to the world outside of me. When I photographed the Fiat Ad with the graffiti in 1979 and published it as a postcard it was because the world needed to see the anger and the humour, not just those who walked past the refaced billboard from Farringdon Road tube station to their offices. When I had the opportunity to publish a collection of my graffiti photos in 1982 I jumped at it and when I was told that it had become the most shoplifted book from a number of bookstores that season, I couldn't help myself - I smiled. (And before you get all upset about the plight of independent bookshops, I don't think I was the cause of their downfall). In 1986 I published a second book of graffiti imagery. In between I had fallen madly in love with a women's rock band, the Mistakes, and almost - almost - managed to parlay their sweet and sour, post punk, pre grunge political love songs into a major success. We were told we could be the next Martha and The Muffins (remember 'Echo Beach'?).

In 1986 I threw away my one real opportunity to have a different kind of career. I was offered an amazing job working for an London arts funding agency - overseeing their photography grants. I sat in the interview and said completely honestly ' I need some security, I need a change, I love the idea of helping new photographers, new community groups achieve their goals'. The day they offered me the job, I got a call from a friend, actress Miriam Margolyes (who coincidentally had been the first to play the lead in 'Any Woman Can'), who pleaded with me to come to the States for six weeks to stage manage her touring theatre show about Gertrude Stein. I called the arts agency, and asked whether they could wait for me. They said they really couldn't. I took the short term fix. I left for New York the next week. I arrived to San Francisco for the first time in my life two weeks later. Had a passionate affair with a woman in Berkeley. Went back to London. Persuaded a publisher to give me an advance for a book to be photographed in California. And came to the good old US of A. That's me. Can't really see into next week.

In 1996, after years of photographing women making out in public places, the book of lesbian erotic photography I co-edited with Susie Bright, 'Nothing But The Girl' was published - ironically by a British publisher.

And I'm not sure where the last 10 years or so have gone. Well, I... yes I am sure. I discovered what happens to homeless people (and their beloved animal companions) when a city begins to deconstruct an encampment, I found out just what level of cruelty can exist in our municipal animal shelters - both towards the animals and the people who love them - and especially when they are run by law enforcement agencies, I got a quick civics lesson in city government when I led a successful bond measure for a new animal shelter, and discovered that curious sub culture of people loosely called 'animal rescue'. I discovered the Albany Landfill. Or did it find me? It's been a wild ride. And as ever, a wildly public one.

Now, my head is itching again, but it's itching from the inside, I feel I want to tear my head off. I am in my mid 50's and I'm scared senseless of being alone, of never earning quite enough, of never producing anything of social import ever again, I'm desperate to get back to photographing the community that nurtured me when I first arrived here, I'm trying to write a second play - 34 years after the first, I'm anxious to get my book about the Albany Landfill done and oohed and aahed over, I'm trying to see past next week.

And there's the odd thing - for someone who really does have a hard time seeing into even the closest future, I've come to accept that sometimes it can take months even years for the seed of artistic vision to show even the slightest green shoot above the busy dank soil. If only it were not such a compulsion.