Mark Sladen

MARK SLADEN

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Precarious Lives

In 2025 I produced a research report, entitled Precarious Lives, which explores financial hardship among older LGBTQ+ Londoners. There's a myth out there that older queer people are all affluent – 'double income no kids' – but the reality is very different. The truth is that older LGBTQ+ people will have faced many barriers in their lives, and that these factor into their financial health in later life.

The report reveals a thicket of issues – centring on long-term discrimination and trauma – and how these contribute to increased rates of isolation and disability, which in turn have a major impact on life opportunity. And it shows how the financial impact of discrimination and exclusion are especially pernicious for certain groups of older queer people: if you're trans or nonbinary, for example; or if you're LGBTQ+ and a person of colour.

It was my honour to manage this research and to write the report. The project started at Opening Doors, and when the latter closed it went to Tonic Housing, with the ongoing support of Trust for London. It was a crazy ride, in which I was working part-time at cash-strapped charities and non-profits, the sole person dedicated to the project, and yet helped by many brilliant people and much goodwill. Along the way we were gifted with amazing testimony from people with lived experience of the issues – stories which are eye-opening, heart-breaking and anger-inducing.

As some of you will know, I re-mixed my career a few years ago, having worked for many years solely in the arts. This project was a re-education, teaching me about people and community and resilience and some of the big fault lines in our society.

To read the report see here.

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Derek Jarman Protest!, Manchester Art Gallery, 2021

I went to see the Derek Jarman exhibition, Protest, in Manchester last week, and found it very moving, since Jarman is undoubtedly the single most important role model who I have ever found in British public life. This presentation today – which is personal and polemical rather than evidenced – will look at the idea of Jarman as a role model, as a father figure, as a daddy, as a conduit for a queer tradition, even as a disease vector, ultimately looking at him as a figure of inter-generational transmission in a queer context.

In 1986, at the age of 44, Jarman discovered that he was HIV+, and embarked on the last phase of his career. Late Jarman includes his later films and writings, but also two strands that are distinct to this period: his garden, at Prospect Cottage; and his AIDS activism. This phase of Jarman’s career was impressed upon me in 1990 when he gave an interview for The Listener, which was a magazine that the BBC used to produce to accompany its output.

The interview was ostensibly promoting The Garden, Jarman’s film of that year. But in it he also talked about his garden in Dungeness, as well as about his HIV diagnosis, the failings of the government’s approach to combatting the epidemic and the role of homophobia in the health crisis. This wasn’t the first time that Jarman had ‘come out’ publically as HIV positive, but it was the one that had the biggest impact on me. I was 24 in 1990 and, in my first job after leaving university, was the layout assistant of The Listener. As a young gay man I was terrified at the prospect of catching AIDS, and full of confusion – and some shame – about being gay. It is hard to overstate the importance to me personally of the example of Jarman: an older gay man who was open about his sexuality, open about his HIV diagnosis, critical of the pervasive homophobic culture and all the while insisting on his own cultural relevance.

However, when I went to see Protest I must confess I found it curiously unsatisfying, in part because the strand of Jarman that the exhibition focuses its most attention on – the paintings – is the aspect of his work that has the leastinterest for me. Meanwhile, the aspects of his artistic output that have the most interest to me, his writings and his garden and his activism, are harder to represent in exhibition form. His filmmaking, it should be said, is better represented in the show, especially his Super8 work, but even his films feel, to me, more like relics – artefacts that are interesting mainly because they give us a glimpse of a larger phenomenon. 

What the exhibition reveals to me is that it is not Jarman as a producer of artefacts that interests me, but Jarman as this larger cultural phenomenon. Some of this might be captured by talking about him as a public intellectual, which indeed he was: he drew on a wide range of cultural and historical references, especially English ones, to create an alternative worldview, and defended it in public. Some of this might be captured by talking about Jarman as leading an exemplary life, which indeed he did: his insistence on continuous personal experimentation and creativity, and his militant openness about his queerness and his disease, are both inspiring, and this notion of an exemplary life is implied, in a camp and queeny way, by his canonisation as Saint Derek of Dungeness by the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence in 1991.

But I have decided that the best way, for me, to capture the importance of Jarman as a cultural phenomenon is to talk about him as a queer daddy. By queer daddy I mean, at one level, a figure that passes on – in a form of intergenerational transmission – an idea of a continuous queer culture. In Protest this is seen most clearly in the section of the exhibition that addresses Jarman’s activism. The latter includes an excerpt of a film that records the artist giving a tour of an installation that he staged in 1989 at the Third Eye Centre in Glasgow.

The project features a set of large paintings made upon mattresses, with each of these ‘beds’ dedicated to a queer cultural exemplar, including such figures as Plato, Shakespeare and Passolini. The beds are set with rumpled and twisted sheets, emphasising the sexual nature of these heroes; with books, photographs and other artefacts that attest to their ideas and influence; but also with tars and feathers, attesting to a kind of martyrdom. These are all Jarman’s gay ‘saints’ – he is building a tradition and an ethics for himself, drawing on their work and example. (As he says in the film, “I’ve always thought of Shakespeare as an ally”.) At the centre of the installation is another bed, this one occupied by two real figures – the people playing these roles included Jarman’s young boyfriend Keith Collins – and the exhibition presents a gay lineage that comes down to these present-day lovers, whose own bed is set about by barbed wire and tabloid front pages loaded with homophobic hysteria.

This project is an example of Jarman in the daddy role in a cultural sense – as both the maker and the transmitter of a tradition – and it is significant that the project was made in response to Section 28, the law passed in 1988 that outlawed [quote] “promoting the teaching of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship.” [end quote] Not only is the exhibition a flagrant piece of pedagogy – perhaps not a great piece of art, but a great lesson– but it takes as its model of operation this very notion of the pretended family, or what, in queer discourse, is called chosen family.

The idea of Jarman as a conduit for a queer tradition is addressed by the filmmaker John Maybury in an essay written for the catalogue of Protest. As Maybury says, connecting to Jarman was "in part how I found my connections to my branch of the queer family tree. This tree has its roots in the generations of queer men and women down the centuries who passed on care, knowledge and love to those who followed, helping the young to navigate the cyclical problems that beset us all. Denied our full human rights, we sought to construct a secret history, known only to those who could read the signs. This thread manifests in various forms, including the bitingly funny covert language of polari. In books and films, in paintings and in poetry, this secret society has a shared special knowledge. The older poof befriends and mentors the younger boy; the older dyke cares for and nurtures the young girl in crisis." [1]

Maybury uses Jarman and himself as an example of this handing down of care, knowledge and love. He relates how, as a 19-year-old art student and punk, Jarman gave him the responsibility – on the basis of a single conversation – to create the punk sets and costumes for Jubilee. From this point onwards the older filmmaker acted as mentor to the younger one, in a kind of daddy / son relationship (though it is notable that Maybury points out that this relationship dynamic is not exclusive to men). Nor is the sexual aspect of this relationship entirely ignored since, as Temple relates, the pair fell into bed one night when the younger man was off his head on Mandrax.

The combination of a mentor / mentee relationship with a sexual partnership is a long-established model in queer history, but one that has become, in recent decades, both more rare and more difficult to talk about. This is ultimately because of the AIDS crisis that culminated in the West in the early 1990s, and which created a very significant generation gap. On one level, younger men didn’t want to fuck older men, because of the fear of getting infected – which came in part from the way in which the sexual culture of these older men was being demonised in the popular press. In addition, many younger gay men chose to focus their political energies, if they had any, on the quest for equality, rather than defending the radical queer culture that their immediate forebears had created in the post-Stonewall, pre-AIDS era. Furthermore, what could – in one interpretation – be called the ‘pederastic’ tradition within queer culture was exactly the kind of thing that these young assimilationist gay men wanted to dissociate themselves from. Finally, there were fewer opportunities for this daddy / son relationship because, quite simply, a lot of the daddies were dead or dying, creating the ultimate generation gap.

When I started to explore London as a young gay man in the early 1990s I fell into this generation gap – and this assimilationist trap – avoiding the company of older gay men, such as you could still find, and certainly not sleeping with them. I met Jarman once, at his flat in Phoenix House on the Charing Cross Road. I was there because, for a brief period, I designed a fanzine called Square Peg, a queer arts publication of which Keith Collins was one of the editors. I remember Jarman bustling through in a grumpy manner, clearly irritated that his tiny flat was being used for our meeting. I was far too shy and tongue-tied to speak to my hero, and Jarman’s mentorship of me was only through his films, books and other public statements.

Perhaps Jarman took his irritation with the invasion of his flat and – hopping on the Northern Line, or perhaps the number 24 bus – went to the cruising grounds of Hampstead Heath, of which he was extremely fond. I remember being shocked to read, in Modern Nature (1991), that Jarman continued to have sex on the Heath after his HIV diagnosis, but I’m not shocked anymore. It seems very human. The radical sexual culture of the post-Stonewall, pre-AIDS era – including the celebration of such transgressive acts as cruising in public parks – was something that Jarman never wished to give up. This aspect of the book caused some upset on its publication, and as Jarman would say in his next book, from 1992: "Cruising Hampstead Heath has frightened them, suddenly Derek’s a bad boy again. I always went to the Heath from the moment my friend Michael told me about it in the sixties. It’s completely Queer, rooted in sex – a completely Queer space. Few people fuck there any longer, but there is choice. All you can do is give everyone information. They have to make their own decisions. For instance, if you decide to fuck me without a condom and I consent, where does responsibility lie?" [2]

Perhaps Jarman chose to have unsafe sex, and perhaps he infected young gay men with the HIV virus, and perhaps that was another manifestation of inter-generational transmission, but his emphasis on consent within this equation is strikingly modern. As the title of the book in which this appears has it: At Your Own Risk.

As I was leaving the exhibition in Manchester I looked down and saw a sign on the floor of the gallery, telling people to stay two metres apart. I think that Jarman would have been furious at this endnote to his retrospective. Moreover, this anxious manifestation of the current pandemic makes me think of all the anxiety and fear and stigmatisation that was created by AIDS. And within this constellation of damage, one small but significant part is the damage that the epidemic caused to relations within the queer community, including the damage that it did to the operation of inter-generational transmission.

Notes

Image above: Derek Jarman, Queer (1992), oil on canvas. Image below: Keith Collins and Derek Jarman at a screening of Blue at the Venice Biennale, June 1993 (photograph: Howard Sooley).

[1] John Maybury, “The Warlock of the West End”, in Derek Jarman Protest!, ed. Seán Kissane and Karim Rehmani-White (Dublin: Irish Museum of Modern Art, 2020), p. 149.

[2] Derek Jarman, At Your Own Risk (London: Hutchinson, 1992), p. 111.

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Genesis P-Orridge: Mum & Dad (1971)

Genesis Breyer P-Orridge (1950-2020) was an English musician and artist whose interests included sexuality, the occult, personal transformation and the principle of the ‘cut-up’. As Genesis P-Orridge they were a founding figure in groups and bands such as COUM Transmissions, Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV and Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth. In later life they gained a new celebrity through their partnership, with Lady Jaye, in The Pandrogeny Project, in which the pair underwent body modification to resemble one another.

In the early 1970s Genesis was using mail art as one of their central strategies, including items in which they collaged images from pornographic magazines with picture postcards of the Queen. (Erotic pieces were an important subset of mail art – as can be seen in the ‘Image Bank Request List’ section of FILE, the magazine that was for a time the most important hub for mail art.) In 1975 Genesis was charged by the General Post Office with sending indecent mail, though these charges were eventually dropped.

The two works illustrated here are non-pornographic but demonstrate the thread of queerness that ran through much of what Genesis did. Both use passport photographs of the artist’s (estranged) parents, captioned ‘Mum’ and ‘Dad’. In Mum & Dad (1971) the pairings, and the captions, are scrambled, effectively queering the parental and marital roles. Two years later Genesis would recycle the work in a piece of mail art, Mum/Dad (1973). This takes the form of a postcard – or, as the work has it, ‘pastcord’. In the context of the family drama this term could suggest an umbilical cord, or the traumas that tie us to the past.

Image above: Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Mum & Dad, 1971, mixed media. Images below: Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Mum/Dad, 1973, postcard with photographic collage.

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Felix Gonzalez-Torres, "Untitled" (1991)

In 1991 the Cuban American artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1957-1996) conceived of a work that consisted of a photograph of an empty bed, presented without caption or explanation. This work would go on the next year to be displayed on twenty-four billboards across New York City, in a project staged by the Museum of Modern Art. “Untitled”, 1991, shows an image of a bed shared by the artist and his partner Ross Laycock, and depicts a scene that was tragically past, since Laycock had died of AIDS at the start of the year.

In 1991 there was still no effective programme of medication to combat AIDS, and by the end of the year a total of 156,000 Americans had died in the epidemic.[1] 1991 saw Gonzalez-Torres develop an astounding sequence of artworks on the theme of loss – including this billboard, probably his most celebrated piece – works that are among the most striking artistic statements to come out of the AIDS crisis in America.

Even if the viewer does not know the history of the photograph it is self-evidently a very private image, and one that appears alien in a public setting. Indeed, contemporary commentators pointed out how the work questions the boundary between the public and private. This was in the wake of the 1986 Supreme Court ruling in the Bowers v Hardwick case, which upheld an anti-sodomy law in the state of Georgia. In this case the defendant had been arrested in his own bedroom while having sex with another man, and the ruling was taken by homosexuals and others as an attack on their right to privacy.

However, what I think commentators may have missed is that this representation of the bed as contested space has a precedent in the queer activism of the era. The image below shows a ‘freedom bed’ that was deployed by the Chicago chapter of ACT UP – the AIDS Coalition to Unlock Power – as part of street protests, including this one in 1989.[2] I think it’s important to highlight the links between Gonzalez-Torres and a wider culture of queer protest.

Notes

Image above: Felix Gonzalez-Torres, “Untitled”, 1991; installation view at 11th Avenue and 38th Street, Manhattan, as part of Print/Out, The Museum of Modern Art, 2012; photograph by David Allison. Image below: ‘Freedom bed’ performance action staged by ACT UP / Chicago in Chicago, 1989; photograph by Steve Dalber.

[1] See “Thirty Years of HIV/AIDS: Snapshots of an Epidemic”, American Foundation for AIDS Research, accessed 17 July 2019, https://www.amfar.org/thirty-years-of-hiv/aids-snapshots-of-an-epidemic/.

[2] See Mary Patten, “The Thrill Is Gone: An ACT UP Post-Mortem (Confessions of a Former AIDS Activist)”, in The Passionate Camera: Photography and Bodies of Desire, ed. Deborah Bright (London: Routledge, 1998), 391. See also Deborah B. Gould, Moving Politics: Emotion and ACT UP’s Fight Against AIDS (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 197-198.

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Anon: Untitled photograph (unknown date)

This is a detail of a photograph by, or in the style of, Wilhelm von Gloeden. The son of an affluent German family, Gloeden settled in Taormina in Sicily, where he ran a photography studio in the 1890s and 1900s, making images for the tourist trade. But the photographs for which he is best known today were more clandestine in nature, and feature young men in homoerotic scenarios. This particular photograph features two youths, one partially clothed and the other entirely nude, and employs the kind of classical costumes and props that Gloeden favoured. However, this version of the classical world is one that is specific to late nineteenth century homosexual subculture – it is the classical world as homoerotic utopia.

It is the history of this artefact – within a tight-knit circle in Britain – that is as interesting as its origins. The photograph was once owned by Duncan Grant, the Bloomsbury Group painter. Grant said that it had been given to him by Robbie Ross, the dedicated friend of Oscar Wilde, and that Ross had it from Wilde himself. Wilde is, of course, a towering figure in queer history, who after his homophobic prosecution and imprisonment went on to live his final years in exile. It is during this period, in 1897, that Wilde is known to have visited Taormina, where it is possible that he could have acquired the photograph.

However, the story does not end there. In the early 1970s Simon Watney, the queer art historian, made friends with the elderly Grant, then still living at Charleston, the country seat of the Bloomsbury Group. Grant gave the photograph to Watney, who two decades later passed it on once again. Thus in 1994 it came into the possession of the queer impresario Neil Bartlett and his partner, as a house-warming gift when they set up home together. This fable of the photograph’s chain of owners is fascinating, as it speaks to how queer culture has traditionally been transmitted – between generations, over time, underground, and through friendship.

Image above: detail of photograph, author, date and dimensions unknown.

Bibliography

Neil Bartlett, “Oscar’s Photograph?”, in Queer Objects, ed. Chris Brickell and Judith Collard (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2019), 182-185.

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Christy Rupp: Rat Patrol (1979)

In 1979 Christy Rupp wheat-pasted four thousand posters around New York in a work entitled Rat Patrol. The posters depicted a life-size rat, appropriated from a public sanitation advert, and many were pasted around garbage cans and rubbish sites.

As Rupp has said, “Soon after moving to the city, I became a fascinated observer of rat behaviour, watching for patterns in feeding, social interaction, and population movement. The garbage strike of 1979 went on for three weeks, creating habitat opportunity with every accumulating pile of garbage. I started pasting these up as a way to mark areas that were infested, so people could avoid walking through dangerous areas in which rats were defending their territories.”

However, Rupp placed her posters not only around these burgeoning rat habitats, but also in places of commercial and political power such as around banks and on the steps of the City Hall. Here the work suggested socio-economic problems as much as ecological ones. Rat Patrol captures the atmosphere of New York in in the late 1970s and early 80s, an era in which the city was near to collapse, but in which downtown artists generated an anarchic, do-it-yourself culture in sites that included the streets themselves.

Bibliography Miller, Marc H. “Christy Rupp: Rats and Other Early Works, 1979 – 1983.” gallery98bowery.com. Rupp, Christy. “Rat posters and sculptures.” christyrupp.com. Wye, Deborah. Committed to Print. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1988.

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Gran Fury: Wall Street Money (1988)

Gran Fury was an activist art collective that was part of the AIDS protest movement in America in the 1980s and early 1990s. Gran Fury emerged out of the New York wing of ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition to Unlock Power, and took their name from the type of car used by New York City police in undercover operations. As Douglas Crimp records, Gran Fury “became, for a time, ACT UP’s unofficial propaganda ministry and guerrilla graphic designers.”

Wall Street Money, 1988, consists of replica bank notes, with Xeroxed $10, $50 and $100 bills on one side and slogans on the reverse. The fliers were scattered at ACT UP’s first anniversary demonstration, in Wall Street in March 1988, and were aimed at financial brokers. The slogans reflect the anger of AIDS activists at the pharmaceutical corporations that held monopolies on medications for the disease, thereby preventing the release of cheaper, generic version of drugs.

Bibliography Colucci, Emily. "Is Art Enough? Gran Fury in Perspective." hyperallergic.com. Crimp, Douglas. AIDS Demographics. Seattle: Bay Press, 1990.

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New Old

Design Museum, London / January-February 2017

In the context of a rapidly ageing population, this exhibition looked at how design can help people lead fuller, healthier and more rewarding lives into old age, asking the question: how can designers meet the challenge of an ageing society? New Old was organised into six sections – Ageing, Identity, Home, Community, Working and Mobility – with each part featuring a special commission by a leading designer or design team, creating new solutions for demographic change.

Yves Béhar / Fuseproject created a lightweight fabric garment incorporating motors, sensors and artificial intelligence, providing support for the wearer’s torso, hips and legs. Special Projects created an installation where members of the public could engage in conversation with a real – older – person. Konstantin Grcic, meanwhile, designed a mesh structure offering a secluded outdoor space for working and thinking, intended to symbolise a departure from the stereotypes of ageing.

Curator: Jeremy Myerson. Commissioned designers: Yves Béhar / fuseproject, Future Facility, Konstantin Grcic, IDEO, Priestman Goode, Special Projects.

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Beazley Designs of the Year

Design Museum, London / November 2016 - February 2017

Beazley Designs of the Year is an annual exhibition celebrating the world’s best designs. This was the ninth installment of the exhibition, and the first to be staged after the Design Museum’s move to its new home in Kensington. Comprised of over 70 nominations proposed by an international panel, the exhibition presented designs from around the world in the previous 12 months across six categories: Architecture, Digital, Fashion, Graphics, Product and Transport.

The nominees included the recently completed Tate Modern Switch House by Herzog & de Meuron, as well as the much-celebrated Prada Foundation in Milan by Rem Koolhaus / OMA, both included in the Architecture category. The SH:24 online STI testing kit, as well as a video game entitled This War of Mine, were both nominated in Digital; whilst a drinkable book made it onto the Product shortlist. However, the prize was taken by a flat-pack refugee shelter designed by IKEA Foundation.

Curator: Gemma Curtin. Image above: album cover design by Jonathan Barnbrook, for David Bowie’s Blackstar. Image below: installation photograph.

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Fear and Love

Design Museum, London / November 2016 - April 2017

Fear and Love was the first exhibition to be staged in the main gallery of the Design Museum after the latter’s move to Kensington. The exhibition presented installations by eleven designers and architects, newly commissioned works that explored a spectrum of contemporary issues including networked sexuality, sentient robots and slow fashion. The exhibition showed how design is deeply connected not just to commerce and culture but to urgent underlying issues – issues that inspire fear and love.

The Spanish architect Andrés Jaque presented an audio-visual installation, one reflecting how our pursuit of sex and love through social media is changing the way we view the city, our bodies and our identity. The American multidisciplinary designer Madeline Gannon used custom software to transform a 1200kg industrial robot into a living, breathing mechanical creature named Mimus. Meanwhile Chinese designer Ma Ke presented her ongoing project Wuyong (‘Useless’), clothes that have a strong connection to the land and to the traditions of rural China. These and other installations in this multidisciplinary and global exhibition aimed to capture the mood of the present.

Exhibitors: Arquitectura Expandida, Hussein Chalayan, Madeline Gannon, Kenya Hara, Andrés Jaque, Ma Ke, Christien Meindertsma, Metahaven, OMA / AMO, Neri Oxman, Rural Urban Framework. Curator: Justin McGuirk. Exhibition design: Sam Jacob Studio and OK-RM. Image above: exhibition graphic by Thomas Traum. Image below: installation photograph.

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Designer Maker User

Design Museum, London / opened November 2016

Designer Maker User is the Design Museum’s permanent collection display, made especially for the museum’s Kensington premises. It features almost 1000 items of twentieth and twenty-first century design, viewed from the perspective of the designer, manufacturer and user. The exhibition covers a broad range of design disciplines: from architecture and engineering; to the digital world, fashion and graphics.

The Designer segment of the exhibition explores the ways in which the thought-process of the designer informs projects at every scale, with exhibits that include Kinneir and Calvert’s British road signage system. The Maker section traces the evolution of manufacturing, from Thonet bentwood cafe chairs and Model T Ford cars to robotic arms and 3D printing. The display on the User explores the interaction between people and the brands that have come to define the modern world, including Braun, Olivetti, Sony and Apple.

Curator: Alex Newson. Exhibition design: Studio Myerscough. Image above: a display of items suggested by the public for inclusion in the exhibition.

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Sure Johannesson: Revolution Means Revolutionary Consciousness (1968)

The counterculture posters of the Swedish artist Sture Johannesson were included in A History of Irritated Material, an exhibition held at Raven Row, London, in 2010. The critic Lars Bang Larsen was the lead curator of this exhibition, and also wrote an essay on Johannesson to accompany the project. An excerpt of the latter essay is included here, while the full text can be found on the Raven Row website. Johannesson’s best known work, illustrated above, is Revolution Means Revolutionary Consciousness (1968), which was commissioned for an exhibition – entitled Underground – at Lunds Konsthall in Sweden.

“Sture Johannesson (born 1935, Sweden) is a self-taught artist who started out as a member of the Scandinavian wing of the Situationist International. During the latter half of the 1960s, he produced a series of colourful, highly detailed and coded posters that expressed countercultural lifestyle and protest. The posters were printed in large editions and sold through mail order or at concerts, fairs and be-ins (the price was set according to how far Johannesson had to travel). The posters were never meant for public space but for the bedroom; their exploration and decoding in the laboratory of one’s home were what mattered.

[…] To Johannesson, his work was ‘underground art’. Today we would call it a version of psychedelic art. While the term ‘psychedelic’ soon ended up as a consumer preference, however, the more extrovert and conflict-oriented style developed by Johannesson prevented easy appropriation. In short, his work is more like agitprop and more aligned with Dada montage and constructivism than with art nouveau. Unlike the swirling lettering in the typical acid rock poster for example, one can actually read the text in Johannesson’s work, and the forms are hard-edged. Johannesson not only produced striking, sensual imagery but also a structural artistic critique. He conceived of his poster-making as an unpretentious, democratic art form that – by dint of being mass-produced – sought to actively undermine established markets for art and hence to usher in an ‘art crisis’, as one poster is titled. Unlike most other psychedelic graphics, Johannesson’s posters were not advertisements for concerts or festivals, but autonomous works or made for art exhibitions.”

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Wolfgang Tillmans: ‘Brexit’ posters (2016)

The artist Wolfgang Tillmans produced a provocative series of posters in support of the ‘Remain’ side in the so-called ‘Brexit’ referendum. This referendum, on 23 June 2016, asked the British people whether their country should stay in the European Union or leave it (Brexit = British exit). In a letter released alongside the posters, in April 2016, Tillmans said that, “The official ‘Remain’ campaign feels lame and is lacking in passion”, and the posters were an evident attempt on his part to address some of the deeper principles at stake in the referendum – and to do so in a way that engaged a young and alternative audience.

Some of the texts of the posters make reference to benefits of membership of the European Union, including the latter’s enshrining of environmental principles, workers’ rights and the freedom of EU citizens to move and live across the member states. Other posters flag up the enemies of this liberal consensus, from extremist politicians such as Marine Le Pen to the press baron Rupert Murdoch. As Tillmans said, in a detailed statement issued in May 2016, “the forces driving towards the UK leaving the EU are disregarding a most crucial point – the values the EU stands for are fragile in this world of extremism.” 

There are 25 posters in the group, generated by Tillmans in collaboration with colleagues from his studios and other operations in London and Berlin. The works feel deliberately various, in a way that reflects the collaborative nature of the project, although some strategies are repeated – including the use of different weights of Helvetica for the text, and the use of aerial photographs by Tillmans as backgrounds. The posters were made easy to print and distribute – the artwork files were available on the artist’s website – and many editions were seen in bars and galleries in London in the weeks leading up to the referendum.

There are several fascinating aspects of this project. For one thing, the posters marked a shift from the implied politics of Tillmans’ photographs – which have long explored ideas of alternative community – to a more explicit form of political engagement, and one in which his sympathy with, for instance, youth and music culture, could be deployed to very pragmatic ends. It is also fascinating to see the artist’s aerial images – whose gorgeous gradients demonstrate the dissolution of barriers between, for instance, sky and sea – used to promote the European dream: the ideal of peace, liberty and cooperation within a continent without borders.

Images: a selection of the posters (the first version, produced in advance of voter registration day); an image of one of the posters on referendum day in Chichester.

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Matthew Higgs: Imprint 93 (1993-98)

Whitechapel Gallery, London, is presenting an archive display dedicated to Imprint 93, Matthew Higgs’ collaborative mail art project from the 1990s. The display is being shown from 19 March to 25 September 2016, and the following text is from the Whitechapel’s press release.

“Matthew Higgs, artist, writer and current Director of White Columns in New York, produced and distributed more than fifty works through his publishing project Imprint 93 between 1993 and 1998. An administrator at an advertising agency by day and influential curator by night, Higgs invited artists to create works of art that could fit inside an envelope to be distributed, unsolicited, by mail to an informal group of friends, artists, and curators. Financed by himself and printed on an office photocopier, Imprint 93 served as an ongoing curatorial project which did not require a space, circumvented traditional art world structures, and offered a unique platform and network for artists to distribute their work.

The artists involved in Imprint 93 were often at the beginnings of their careers, working on the periphery of the then emerging 'YBA' movement, but would later be celebrated as some of the most important contemporary artists. The artists whose works will be exhibited include Fiona Banner, Billy Childish, Martin Creed, Jeremy Deller, Peter Doig, Ceal Floyer, Stewart Home, Alan Kane, Hilary Lloyd, Paul Noble, Chris Ofili, Elizabeth Peyton, Bob and Roberta Smith, Jessica Voorsanger and Stephen Willats, among others.

Highlights from Imprint 93 include Chris Ofili’s Black (1997), a series of cuttings from his local newspaper showing crimes attributed to black suspects, Elizabeth Peyton’s Untitled (1995), made from a sequence of video-stills of Nirvana's Kurt Cobain performing in 1993, and Martin Creed’s Work no. 88 (1994) a crumpled ball of A4 paper that Higgs and Creed sent to the Tate Gallery but was returned to them, flattened inside an envelope, 'rejected' as an unsolicited donation.

Imprint 93 was closely linked to influential and emerging artist-centered initiatives such as London’s City Racing and Cabinet Gallery. Exhibiting the full collection of Imprint 93 editions for the first time the Whitechapel Gallery’s archive display offers a unique insight into a period significant to the development of the British art scene of the 1990s, and beyond.”

Image: Imprint 93, selected publications and editions, 1993-97.

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John Giorno: Dial-a-Poem (1969-71)

In the mid sixties the young American poet John Giorno was part of a circle of visual artists and dancers in New York who were experimenting with mass media technologies. “And I thought, if they can do it, why can’t I do it for poetry. Why not try to connect with an audience using all the entertainments of ordinary life: television, the telephone, record albums, etc? It was the poet’s job to invent new venues and make fresh contact with the audience.”

The result was Giorno Poetry Systems, a non-profit organisation founded by Giorno in 1965 and which went on to spawn various projects, the most celebrated of which is Dial-a-Poem, which ran from 1969 to 1971. On calling a phone service the user was connected with one of a number of different answering machines, on which were recordings of poetry – by figures that included William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Joe Brainard and Anne Waldman – as well as other material such as Black Panther speeches and Buddhist chants.

Dial-a-Poem was hosted first by The Architectural League of New York, and subsequently by other venues including MoMA (where it was included in the ‘Information’ show of 1970). The project proved to be a huge hit with the public, while its sexually explicit and politically radical content would often create a stir in the media. As Giorno remarked, “In the middle of the Dial-a-Poem experience was the giant self-consuming media machine choosing you as some of its food”.

Dial-a-Poem would also provide the material for a number of albums put out by the Giorno Poetry Systems record label. The latter issued albums from the mid 1960s until the late 1980s, building up a catalogue of forty titles, including performances by poets as well as by other figures such as Frank Zappa, Laurie Anderson and Philip Glass. A group of Dial-A-Poem albums, from the original project and after, are available for free on Ubuweb (see here).

Image above: telephone used in an installation of Dial-a-Poem created for La Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, in 2014. Below: John Giorno, 1969.

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Fiona Banner: Sleep (2009)

Fiona Banner has made a number of works in the category of the ‘book object’ – which Clive Phillpot defines as an art object that alludes to the form of a book. Banner has, for instance, registered ISBN numbers for publications, and then constituted these ‘books’ in unorthodox ways. 

One example of Banner’s work in this area is Sleep (2009), a stone tablet that bears its ISBN number in engraved form. Sleep (2009), by Fiona Banner, hand-engraved stone, edition of 1, published by the Vanity Press, London.

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David Horvitz: Sad, Depressed, People (2012)

David Horvitz is one of a number of younger artists exploring the legacy of the conceptual phonebook. His Sad, Depressed, People (2012), for instance, presents a set of stock photos, found on the internet and used without permission, showing people with their heads in their hands – a motif deliberately evoking the weeping subject in Bas Jan Ader’s multimedia work I'm too sad to tell you (1970-71).

Horvitz’s book comes with a glossary of terms that might relate to the pictures – including ‘advanced capitalism’, ‘Prozac’ and ‘copyright infringement’ – as well as a long list of unattached tags. Horvitz updates the tradition of the photographic typology for the Internet era, exploring how online images are authored, circulated and consumed, and how we deal – or fail to deal – with the speed of the contemporary image and its transformations.

Sad, Depressed, People, 2012, by David Horvitz, published by New Documents, Vancouver.