The Nineties: When Surface was Depth - Michael Bracewell

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enable different discussions to go on outside of the commodified business exchange. The Tate have been collecting my pamphlets and leaflets since the 1980s, so you can criticize these institutions, but their archivists and librarians are really on the ball. Basically, if you get an A3 sheet of paper, and fill it with whatever polemic you want, then those ideas are going to get around and get a response.’

      A further collective devoted to such practice is Inventory, formed in 1995 as a group committed to exploring the possibilities of anthropological research as text-based art. Through their Inventory journal – with the slogan, ‘Losing, Finding and Collecting’ – and a succession of activities based on street interventions, Inventory could be seen to represent a determinedly outsider stance, while seeking new, cheap ways to disseminate their thinking.

      ‘We all abandoned individual practice at the start of the 1990s,’ says an Inventory spokesperson, ‘primarily because we found the whole new British art scene, which had originated around Hirst’s “Freeze” exhibition, to be utterly alienating. We saw ourselves as more connected to surrealism, Dada, Walter Benjamin or Bataille, and we wanted to talk about ideas through a journal which could be slightly academic, mad, and shocking.

      ‘But that wasn’t enough; we wanted to explore the various economies of social life through social situations, and so our work is political inasmuch as it’s occurring at a time when even the word “socialism” appears to be taboo. We regard nihilism in a pro-active, Nietzschean sense, as something to be worked through, and empowered by. By investigating the nature of field work, we turn the anthropological gaze back on ourselves. This could be translated into politics – through the surrealist notion of a permanent state of revolution.

      ‘I don’t think that anyone in the London contemporary art scene trusts us enough to represent us; they like us to be a bit of a cult. But we’ve survived for five years without them, and so we can easily do another five. We’re quite happy representing ourselves.’

      One of Inventory’s better-known ‘interventions’ was a fly-posting project in Hanway Street, in London’s West End, called ‘Smash This Puny Existence’. Braving foul weather, local hostility and the approaches of bored prostitutes, the group fly-posted this dark cut-through between Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road with a series of newsprint posters proclaiming such announcements as ‘The Puerilification of Culture’ and surrealist texts on the experience of walking through a city. The group also discovered that a loophole in public by-laws made it possible for a person to stand on Oxford Street holding a large placard (of the sort usually seen advertising closing-down sales) which blared ‘Smash This Puny Existence’.

      This project was also disseminated by Matthew Higgs (the curator of this year’s British Art Show) through the long-established art books publishers, Book Works, as part of their Open House series of guest-curated projects. Book Works was founded in the mid-1980s as ‘an attempt to reposition the book in the context of visual arts’, and in recent years their role as enablers of documentative, interventionist and pamphleteering artworks has become increasingly significant. Above all, many of their publications create affordable artworks, which can have whatever collectable status the buyer decides.

      ‘Over the years, this has produced an eclectic range of works,’ says one of Book Works’ founders and directors, Jane Rolo, ‘from early collaborations with activist groups like the Guerilla Girls, or Adrian Piper’s book Colored People – a visual commentary on preconceived ideas about race. More recently, Czech artist Pavel Buchler’s project involved projecting a red light from Chetham’s Library in Manchester – where Marx and Engels studied – on to the Saint George’s flag of Manchester cathedral. With the Open House project, we’ve been able to work with talented young curators like Matthew Higgs and Stefan Kalmar, and to commission books by artists like Janice Kerbel and Nils Norman: to invest in ideas, rather than the cult of artist as celebrity’

      Stefan Kalmar has introduced his commissions for the Book Works Open House project – under the umbrella title ‘access/excess’ – with a quotation from the Communist Manifesto: ‘All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real condition of life and his relations with his kind.’

      As though to illustrate this supposed disruption of systems and orders, Kalmar has commissioned four artists to create what are in essence handbooks for social or anti-social activity. Janice Kerbel’s ‘15 Lombard Street’ gives precise instructions on how to rob the branch of Coutts & Co. bank at that address, for example, while Nils Norman’s ‘The Contemporary Picturesque’ considers protest culture tactics in relation to ‘the development of a repressive form of urban architecture and design – such as surface studs, trash cages and anti-poster surfaces’.

      Ultimately, events such as the recent ‘Reclaim the Streets’ demonstrations in London can be seen as a potentially volatile summation of the burgeoning relationship between marginalized artistic activity and direct political action. For Stewart Home, however, as a veteran of many interventionist, hoaxing and direct action campaigns, the political significance of anarchic demonstrations should not become too intimate with art. ‘The danger is that you begin to brand such street actions as “art”, and thereby dampen their political directives. It’s always easy for them to try and control us by treating us as a cult.’

      Freezing cold in Cavendish Square, shadows in the doorways of John Lewis – the clear night sky, promising frost, above the ornate red brick of Marylebone’s rooftops … In a nasty little pub, a knot of cumbersome figures accumulate: unironic anorak wearers, plump young men with pudding-basin fringes and bottle-end glasses, dandyfied smoothies reeking of scent, Dadaist-looking spiv types with loudly checked tweed lop-sided motoring caps such as Mr Toad might have worn, a few greying punks wearing old men’s suits … These people may look like potatoes, but they’re the forces of Opposition; like Wyndham Lewis’s Enemy, clan-gathering round the back of Oxford Street, W1.

      Shortly before half-past eleven the whole rag-bag assortment creeps and shuffles, grey and hunched against the frost-whitened streets, where sounds are growing softer, along the shadow of the buildings, to a back mews, and a big black garage door, behind the uppermost panes of which a feeble yellow light is dimly gleaming. The little crowd – fifteen or so, maybe twenty – huddle forward in the silence, as the big black door opens just a few inches and a hand so white and frail as to seem luminescent slides out to greet them with a single beckoning finger. Heads lowered, they all shuffle in …

      The vast auditorium, smelling of brass polish and dust, is barely lit. But you can just make out a couple of … grand pianos … on the stage. To a murmur of exceedingly well-mannered applause, two casually dressed young men seem pretty much to sprint from the darkness of the wings, hurl themselves down on the pair of adjusted piano stools, fling their hands to the keyboard and … play a Morton Feldman minimalist piano duet for the best part of the forty minutes. Welcome to the ‘Wigmore Alternative’, the Anti-Rave! – where the music doesn’t pound in beats per minute, it echoes in beats per hour …

      The enigmatic composer Lawrence Crane (England’s unacknowledged Satie, a joker in the pack) and founder of the Wigmore Alternative – part pastoralist, part humorist, part über-archivist, part punk rocker – would demonstrate, in the twilight of the 1980s, the importance of Organization … The artistic application of the aesthetics of librarianship or proofreading. Cranesque order and neatness was a rout to the sublime.

       Pet Shop Boys

      For a pop duo who had their first Number One hit – ‘West End Girls’ – back in 1985, Chris Lowe and Neil Tennant, better known as Pet Shop Boys, have a knack of remaining constantly modern. Like the artists Gilbert & George, they have developed a creative partnership that seems to operate beyond the boundaries of fashionability, and yet remains permanently in fashion. From such memorable occasions as Chris Lowe wearing an Issey Miyake inflatable suit when they performed on ‘Saturday Night at the London Palladium’ – and refused to wave at the end of the show with the rest of the acts and Jimmy Tarbuck – to their later collaborations with artist film-makers such as Derek Jarman and Sam Taylor-Wood, they have always managed to mirror the zeitgeist

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