Painting Hancock: Restoration comedy

In his 1960 film 'The Rebel', Tony Hancock played a talentless, pretentious artist. So why would anyone painstakingly recreate his fictional works of art? Kevin Jackson tries to explain

Paris, late one warm evening some 40 summers ago, and the hippest, most avant- garde party anywhere in this hip, avant-garde city is in full swing. The host, an epicene type with asymmetrical facial hair, busks atonal fugues on a mighty pipe organ before donning scuba equipment and retiring to the bottom of a giant fish-tank to sleep; a yogi stands on his head to achieve a state of enlightenment, but also falls asleep; a squad of juvenile existentialists, dressed identically in black, laments the conform-ity of modern life; a lanky poet recites Dada verses; and in one corner a noisy English painter holds forth on his aesthetic beliefs. He's not interested in mere visual representation, he says: when he paints a chair, he has to become the chair. A supercilious youth responds to his tirade: "I don't think I have ever heard such a... " [slight, almost subliminal pause: he is clearly about to say "such a load of old cobblers!"] "... such a penetrating analysis of modern art."

As all fans of The Lad will by now have recognised, this party for poseurs is one of the key scenes from The Rebel (1960), Tony Hancock's second film vehicle, and the first to bring to the big screen something of the pompous, touchy, fantastical idiocy of the immortal comic character he co-created with his brilliant writers Ray Galton and Alan Simpson: "Anthony Aloysius St John Hancock", of 23 Railway Cuttings, East Cheam. Barring some farcical complications, The Rebel's plot is fairly simple. Hancock, driven almost to insanity by his tedious office job, chucks it all in and goes off to Paris to set up as an artist. Spectacularly void of any talent save self-belief, Hancock none the less manages to become both a hero to the weirdo crowd and – thanks to a case of mistaken identity – a vast commercial success.

When the film was made, Hancock was himself no stranger to success. One of the best-loved and most highly paid of British comedians, his BBC radio and television shows commanded huge audiences and made him a pet funny- man of the intelligentsia (well, JB Priestley), especially after his notoriously self-torturing appearance on the inquisitorial interview programme Face to Face. He even had his own comic strip. Chronically discontented, however, Hancock was hungry for international fame, and carefully developed The Rebel as the magic carpet that might finally spirit him away to Hollywood.

It didn't work. True, The Rebel was a major hit at the domestic box office, but in the United States (retitled Call Me Genius) it meant nothing, despite Hancock's ruthless excision from Galton & Simpson's dialogue of anything that might baffle folks in Peoria. The British critics were fairly underwhelmed, too, noting how impoverished the Hancock persona was without his usual supporting cast: spivvy Sid James, oafish Bill Kerr, twittering Hattie Jacques, snide surrealist Kenneth Williams. Sadly, The Rebel (which boasts at least half a dozen wildly funny moments) passed into an oblivion mitigated only by the slow acquisition of that dubious virtue, cult status. Or so it seemed until lately.

Flash forward 42 years to this week. A curious group of British writers, artists and unclassifiables, recently banded together as the London Institute of 'Pataphysics (LIP) has made its first major public intervention with a highly idiosyncratic event: a display of all the major easel paintings of Anthony Hancock, as seen in The Rebel, as well as his giant sculpture Aphrodite at the Water Hole and his one known "action" painting, Aphrodite at the Water Hole, on the Horizontal. The great vernissage was held at the Foundry, Hoxton, on Saturday evening, where a Hancock catalogue raisonné with many scholarly essays was available.

So what is 'Pataphysics? Oh dear. Well, reference books usually repeat a couple of the simpler definitions: 'pataphysics, they explain, is the science of imaginary solutions. Or: 'pataphysics is the science of exceptions. Or: the science of the particular (other modes of science being interested in rules, general theorems, universally applicable formulations). Or: 'pataphysics is the pursuit of the inutilious (a word 'pataphysicians generally prefer to the more loaded and prejudicial "useless".) More prosaically, one can say that 'pataphysics was, is, a sensibility, or a mode of thought, or an assortment of hints, provocations and suggestions cast out by the extraordinarily fertile mind of the French writer Alfred Jarry (1873-1907), best known this side of the channel as the author of Pere Ubu and the other Ubu plays.

The science of 'Pataphysics lay dormant in the years between Jarry's early death and the foundation in 1948 of the Collège de 'Pataphysique to preserve and develop Jarry's legacy. Its membership soon became as illustrious as it was mongrel, including the artists Max Ernst and Marcel Duchamp, the polymath Raymond Queneau, the playwright Eugene Ionesco, the songwriter-poets Boris Vian and Jacques Prevert... and many, many others, far less well known. The college went into a period of voluntary inactivity or "occultation" in 1975, and it was at around the time of the great de-occultation in 2000 that the LIP came to be.

Founded largely on the initiative of the cabaret entrepreneuse Regine de la Hay and the writer, publisher and artist Alastair Brotchie, the LIP can boast a similarly motley membership, from its esteemed president, Stanley Chapman – writer, translator, magnificent beard-wearer – to its latest honorary recruits, Messrs Galton and Simpson. (This article's author should here confess to being a fully paid-up LIP fellow, too.) The institute has set itself a number of inutilious fields for research and development, including enquiries into hirsuitism, ectoplasm, strange units of measurement, innocent machines and time travel. The Hancock project was proposed and executed by a sub-committee of the LIP known as the Depart-ment of Reconstructive Archaeology.

DORA is dedicated to the re-creation of works of art that have somehow been destroyed, or have gone missing, or, simply, never existed. ('Pataphysicians have a somewhat insouciant attitude to the distinction between the real and the imaginary.) Hence the suitability of the Hancock project: a body of paintings that could be seen plain, or glimpsed in fragments on the screen, yet which no longer existed. Without any disrespect, this is not really an exercise in Hancock fandom, but an attempt to render a fictional body of work actual. Thus, it is axiomatic to DORA's work that "Anthony Hancock" was a real artist, and The Rebel a straightforward documentary.

The reconstructive work was undertaken with immense care and precision: the LIP's mathematicians worked out the exact dimensions of each canvas; our colourists determined and mixed the exact shades of paint; and the entire collection is to be put on sale as a unit, including full documentation of its re-making, for exactly £50,000 – the sum paid in The Rebel by a Greek shipping magnate for the total Hancock oeuvre. (Good evening, Mr Saatchi...) Potential investors should be assured that all profits from such a sale would be put to strictly inutilious ends. And those who wish to attend the show purely for the joy of the thing may equally rest assured that they will never have seen such a... such a penetrating analysis of contemporary art.

The Hancock Project: The Foundry, 84-86 Great Eastern St, London EC2 (020-7739 6900), Tues to Fri 3-11pm, Sat & Sun 2.30- 10.30pm, to 20 Sept