Harald Smart

Attempts at Closeness comprises two essays and two shorter autofictive texts. The project as a whole is concerned with the themes of queer utopias and queer temporalities and represents my attempt to ground these complex ideas through close analysis of two artworks: Hail the New Puritan (1986), a film starring the dancer Michael Clark, and Arthur Rimbaud in New York (1979) a photo series by the artist David Wojnarowicz. My interest in these texts is rooted in their playful, profound agitation of the limits of space and time, and what I feel are the meaningful contributions they offer to the ongoing discourse around queer temporalities and queer utopias. My interest is also personal, and I have drawn occasional parallels in the text between the content of each work and my own experience as a gay man and a queer individual.

Attempts at Closeness comprises two essays and two shorter autofictive texts. The project as a whole is concerned with the themes of queer utopias and queer temporalities and represents my attempt to ground these complex ideas through close analysis of two artworks: Hail the New Puritan (1986), a film starring the dancer Michael Clark, and Arthur Rimbaud in New York (1979) a photo series by the artist David Wojnarowicz. My interest in these texts is rooted in their playful, profound agitation of the limits of space and time, and what I feel are the meaningful contributions they offer to the ongoing discourse around queer temporalities and queer utopias. My interest is also personal, and I have drawn occasional parallels in the text between the content of each work and my own experience as a gay man and a queer individual.

In response to the brief for our third writing workshop, Writing London, I travelled to the site of a bar in St James’s that had been owned by my great-great aunt, Olwen Vaughan. Olwen opened the Petit Club Français as a haven for French exiles during the Second World War and remained its proprietor until her death in the 1970s. The resulting text combines an account of my search for the bar’s former address on a brisk October evening with responses to some miraculous footage found on YouTube of Olwen holding court there in 1942. Underpinning the piece is an appreciation of the role such night-spaces can play in fostering kinship and community for marginal groups, and of the work carried out by those, like Olwen, who fight to keep them open.

In 2020 the MA Writing cohort brought the RCA’s student magazine, ARC, out of dormancy, relaunching it online with The Dirty Issue. As project manager I oversaw the six month process, delegating tasks between the editorial teams and signing off on creative decisions. The above text was written and recorded for Montez Radio last September as part of a special two-part ARC take-over. It details the project’s lifespan from conception to delivery, and unpacks our multifaceted approach to the chosen theme: dirty.