Search results
Best known for her work with punk provocateurs Crass, Gee Vaucher (b. 1945) is widely acknowledged for the idiosyncratic and powerful images that have played a decisive role in shaping alternative culture over the last fifty years. This is the first book to critically assess an extensive range of her work, situating it in a lineage from early twentieth-century avant-garde art movements through the counterculture and punk and on to contemporary street art. It provides a fascinating insight into social and cultural history from a vital but hitherto marginalised perspective. While Vaucher rejects all ‘isms’, her work offers a unique perspective within the history of feminist art. The book explores how her experience has shaped this perspective, with particular focus on the anarchistic, open house collective at Dial House.
New Labour was elected, and the Sensation exhibition, at the Royal Academy, showcased a collection of contemporary art, predominantly works by Young British Artists (YBAs) owned by the advertising giant, businessman and art collector Charles Saatchi. Sensation represented the culmination of the inexorable rise of the YBAs to a pre-eminent position in the art world over the preceding decade. Vaucher's comment regarding the offence taken to Icons is interesting in the context of the controversy provoked by some of the artworks in the
aesthetic, but manifested in a host of mediums, from installations to oil paintings to street art. It has also taken on a more complex and subtle means of communication, although it continues to provide an idiosyncratic reflection of the times. In this it provides a stark contrast to the approach of the Young British Artists in the late 1990s, while both inspiring and contributing to the more politicised art movements of the twenty-first century. While this book is the first monograph about this singular artist, over the last decade her work has
commercial success has been seen as central to the careers of a number of Young British Artists or YBAs, as critiqued by Julian Stallabrass (1999) in High Art Lite, most notoriously in the Sensation exhibition at the Royal Academy in 1997, consisting of works from the Saatchi Collection by artists including Damien Hirst, the Chapman brothers and Tracey Emin. The work by The Little Artists on the cover of this book translates Jake and Dinos Chapman’s Great Deeds Against the Dead (1994) into Lego, amplifying the focus on scale, play and seriousness apparent in the original
practitioners and institutions. The reaffirmation by Britpop and the Young British Artists of London’s long-lost credentials as a capital of culture in the aftermath of eighteen years of Conservative rule lends itself to comparison with the unleashing of creative energies in the Spanish capital some fifteen years previously. The discrediting of the Movida combined with Madrid’s unimaginative approach to urban redevelopment, as well as a sentimental post-Orwell attachment, ensured that the Catalan capital was the chief and generally sole Spanish reference point. It is no
of the group known as Young British Artists that came to national notoriety in the 1990s, Hirst also belonged to a conceptual pop group Fat Les with comedian Keith Allen and Blur’s bass guitarist Alex James. Director Chris Cunningham made startling promos for Aphex Twin, Come to Daddy (1997) and Windowlicker (1999). Both used CGI technology to highly dramatic, and in the case of the second promo comic, effect. Along with other pop video directors Michel Gondry and Spike Jonze, Cunningham is now seen as a ‘respectable’ filmmaker, having released a DVD that brings
the widely influential Sensation show of the transgressive art of young British artists in London, New York and Berlin. In 2001 Charles Alexander Moffat, a formative figure of the Neo-Gothic movement, issued ‘The Neo-Gothic Art Manifesto’ (‘We are social rebels, misfits, a society within a society’) and followed this with a revised version two years later (Moffat, 2001/2003 ). Martin Myrone
media promotion of cultural products is essentially corrupting – a question taken up in several Bourdieusian studies, for example into the centrality of media profile to the status and influence of the Young British Artists of the 1990s (Cook, 2000). What are the implications for public broadcasters, especially those such as the BBC which are simultaneously involved in mass production and the consecration of high culture? And if elite cultural production depends on insulation from principles of publicity and popularity, how do we reconcile the role of the public
over as Head of Independent Commissioning at Channel 4 in 1995, advocating ‘innovation and change’ but significantly dropping the word ‘experimental’ that had featured in the channel’s charter. Effectively, he rejected the social and aesthetic activism of the first independent commissioners in favour of the new populism, and continued to do so more widely when he was made Head of Arts and Entertainment.26 A new generation of media-savvy ‘young British artists’, who used video as just another item in the tool-kit (as John Baldessari and others had predicted twenty
entrepreneurial or risk-taking behaviour (see Leadbeater and Oakley, 1999) – from the mix of self-promotion and private sponsorship that produced the Young British Artists in the 1990s, to the virtual economic bubbles of an expanding Internet economy – it is worth noting how much cultural activity remains located in the public and non-profit sectors (see Boorsma et al., 1998; Salamon et al., 1998). This only compounds the difficulty of mapping the cultural economy – and of quantifying, for the purposes of national accounting, its overall contribution to national wealth. It is