The Nineties: When Surface was Depth

‘Try writing what you have written in the past tense in the present tense and you will see what I mean. What we have to do is to give back to the past we are writing about its own present tense. We give back to the past its own possibilities, its own ambiguities, its own incapacity to see the consequences of its action. It is only then that we represent what actually happened.’

Professor Greg Dening

http://www.nla.gov.au/events/history/papers/Greg_Dening.html

Contents

Cover

Title Page

ONE: Culture-vulturing City Slickers

TWO: The Barbarism of the Self-reflecting Sign

THREE: Exquisite: The Gentrification of the Avant-garde

FOUR: Retro: Running Out of Past

FIVE: Post-industrial/Auric Food

Index

Acknowledgments

Also by the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

ONE Culture-vulturing City Slickers

It was back in the winter of 1988 – a dark, wet, spiteful afternoon, with the thin rain blown in sudden gusts. Looking down from the penthouse of some mansion flats in Warrington Crescent – it was a real penthouse: there was a roof terrace, and a spiral staircase and everything – you could just make out, in the failing light, the dripping shrubs and sandy little paths of the big private garden that ran behind the length of the entire block.

This elegant oblong of trees and lawn – a Central Park in miniature, transplanted to west London – looked desolate now, with drifts of sodden leaves rising up like sullen brown waves towards the damp-blackened timbers of a trellis. In summer, the same lawn had been scorched white, and peopled throughout the long afternoons by squads of charging, tumbling toddlers, running riot in the dusty sunshine. But now it was early December, and, against the gathering dusk, the tree-tops looked like crooked black fingers, clawing at the lowering sky.

The window panes held darkness. Probably, somewhere down there, forgotten and forlorn, there would be a child’s abandoned tricycle, or a brightly coloured ball, begrimed by weeks in a flower-bed. Something or other, at any rate, to send you one of those sudden jabs of melancholy that quickly casts a shadow across your hopes; some trite but troubling symbol of lost innocence, reminding you, in abstract, of youth and opportunities thrown away (a whole summertime, it seems, of opportunities squandered) – wasted in a mess of jobs and plans and relationships, which had seemed, at the time, to put the kick in life’s chutney.

Beyond the twilit barrier reef of the facing houses, you were aware of the rush-hour traffic, inching ill-tempered towards Marylebone and Marble Arch – the dreary scraping of the windscreen wipers, the black cabs shuddering in an endless jam. Here we were at the tail end of the 1980s, children of the late Fifties and early Sixties, beginning to feel the odd twinge of the thickening process of early middle age, but still young enough to want to carry the fight to the enemy; to emulate the Balzacian hero, staring down on the city of Paris, to declaim, ‘And now you and I come to grips!’

But what, exactly, right now, was there down in the city to come to grips with? The heroism of the war-cry had been replaced by a kind of Mock Heroism, which had declared itself (out of nowhere, too – a sudden hesitancy in the voice, skidding a few tones from manly authority to punctured confidence) only at the moment of announcing the challenge.

Or were the vocal cords simply learning the cadences of irony? Everything had gone all slippery, like spilt mercury; and when the tweezers of criticism tried to pick up a trend or a product or an event it seemed to split up into cunning little sub-sections of itself, scattering hither and thither with a wanton disregard for any singularity of purpose – any one meaning. And this was because everything, it seemed – all the bits and pieces of contemporary culture, from architecture to mineral water – had become semiotic Phenomena; the seismic impact of which, rippling across the surface of the culture, could be placed under the niftily scientific label of Epiphenomena. In the lab of semiotics (you could imagine that it looked like the Clinique counter in a big department store) everything was significant, busily signifying something – it was all signage.

By the end of the 1980s, small things seemed to articulate big things (fascism, fast food and Madonna, for instance, could be studied and assessed within the same academic language – at times within the same sentence); while big things (the burgeoning processes of globalization, for example) were almost too big to see, like those patterns in the desert you can make out only at 37,000 feet.

The penthouse had a main living room that was maybe the size of one and a half tennis courts. The walls were painted a matt shade of pale dove grey, as was the surround of the fireplace, which didn’t imitate Georgian classicism (the style of choice for the Eighties make-over of Edwardiana) so much as pun on it, and then cross out the pun – like making a painting that looked like a painting and then painting over the painting, frame and all, with one colour that was the same shade as the wall.

The lighting, too, was subdued. It came from a neat constellation of dimmer bulbs set into the ceiling, and conveyed – what? A submarine light that made distances difficult to gauge; it made the vast room appear cosy and cold, simultaneously. If you were feeling the jab of melancholy it could seem like the twilight of indecision.

And then, there they were, the two of them: a pair – a brace – of Culture-vulturing City Slickers.

With his back to the big sash window, seated in a grey vinyl cube of a chair, sipping his tea without looking up from the cup, and frowning – a trick he had learned during his brief stint as a chartered surveyor, working in Carlos Place opposite the Connaught Hotel – a critic and curator of high seriousness, Andrew Renton (one of the first – if not the first – art-spotters to identify the gathering nestlings of Young British Art), had just made the statement that ‘culture is wound on an ever-tightening coil’.

He was speaking with reference to the peroxide crew-cutted female vocalist Yazz, who – solely on the strength of her summer Number One, ‘The Only Way is Up’ – had just earned herself an hour-long documentary entitled ‘The Year of Yazz’. And his point was that culture – mass-market popular culture, in particular, as the latest delectable truffle of the age – was being assessed and assimilated into the various strands of media with increasing speed. The brainy end of the fashionable media, especially, were being swift to set their hounds on the trail of the Gilded Truffle: that signifier, punctum, bull’s-eye that changed weekly – sometimes even hourly – but that seemed to sum up the age in one bite …

‘Would You Like to Swing on a Star?’ or A Short History of Cultural Commodification in the 1990s

Picture, if you will, the slack-jawed derision with which Little Richard or Elvis Presley might have greeted an announcement, in 1959, that comedy or cooking was ‘the new rock and roll’. ‘No suh! Ah don’ like it!’ With pianos to straddle and trousers to split, neither of these great architects of the Pop Age would have deigned so much as to give the idea a second thought. That any rival phenomenon could pinch the mantle of rock and roll, or parade around in its borrowed crown, would simply have been unthinkable. Rock and roll defined the modern age, and nothing else would do.

This happy state of affairs managed to last, in Britain, until the start of the current decade. Then, in 1990, when the country was still watery-eyed and winded from being punched below the intellect by the Recession of the late Eighties, the great surge of public fervour for England’s chances in the World Cup of Italia 90 gave birth to the latest catchphrase in analytical shorthand: football, we decreed, was ‘the new rock and roll’.

And the media were swift to authorize this radical shift in value judgements. Unlikely celebrity pundits such as Salman Rushdie and Michael Ignatieff were wheeled out from behind their hitherto bookish identities, to dabble in populism and turn the tears of a pre-lapsarian Gazza into a kind of weeping effigy for the burgeoning church of Laddism Nouveau. That soccer should be ‘the new rock and roll’ was a triumph for the zeitgeist surfers, providing as it did a sinewy little label that could be easily adapted to a whole succession of ensuing phenomena that appeared to define the state of the nation.

Barely had rock and roll itself had time to acknowledge this sneaky jab to its noble jaw, when the success of Luciano Pavarotti, whose rendition of ‘Nessum Dorma’ as the ‘’ere We Go’ of Italia 90 had brought Puccini to the High Street, inspired the heretical suggestion that opera, in fact, was the new rock and roll. And, as the latest speculation on what brand of cultural activity might best reflect the national temper, kept buoyant in the ether of popular enthusiasm by various combinations of tenors through the early 1990s, opera might well have been the new rock and roll had it not been usurped by the reinvention of stand-up comedy.

Comedy became the new rock and roll when Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer took the trappings of psychedelic dandyism and applied them to what seemed like an imagining of Morecambe and Wise on helium. Suddenly, released from the humour of political correctitude that had kept many young comics on the raised awareness cabaret circuit, British comedy exchanged jokes about Margaret Thatcher for cartoon surrealism and an infantilist nostalgia for the popular culture of the early 1970s. All too soon, by way of Vic and Bob, Harry Enfield, Sean Hughes and Frank Skinner, comedy’s claim to being the new rock and roll seemed assured when Newman and Baddiel, of ‘The Mary Whitehouse Experience’, played sell-out shows at Wembley Arena – thus conquering the ultimate venue of rock and roll itself. This triumph of comedy over pop and football – as the new rock and roll – would be compounded by the fact that many young comedians would discover secondary careers as celebrity panellists on TV quiz shows about pop and football.

But no sooner had the new generation of young British comics settled down to a collective reign over the national mood, than out of the comparative obscurity of Goldsmiths College and warehouse exhibitions in London’s East End came the pronouncement that contemporary art, festooned with ironic chutzpah by the youthful practitioners of neo-conceptualism, had in fact taken over from comedy as the new rock and roll. There was even the suggestion, as young British artists became famous for making sex- and death-obsessed conceptual jokes with ironic punchlines, that art had become the new rock and roll by being the new comedy.

But if BritArt was a cultural co-product of BritPop, as suggested by Arena magazine, then the international success of Oasis would remind the nation that rock and roll, actually, was the new rock and roll and always had been. And that would have been the end of it – except for the fact that ‘BritCulture’ had inspired the media to reinvent Swinging London, and with it a restaurant and gastronomy boom that made cooking, in fact, the new rock and roll. (Other than a faint flurry of excitement around the contractual arrangements of Zoe Ball and Andy Peters, which had threatened to suggest that being a children’s television presenter was the new rock and roll, the issue had never been clearer.)

By the autumn of 1996, with new expensive restaurants opening all over London, each one a tribute to the luxurious styling revealed on the pages of Elle Decoration magazine, and with braised artichoke hearts on wilted rocket being concocted nightly on British television, anyone who could poach an egg in a minimalist interior was on the cutting edge of culture.

So what might be the next rock and roll, in 1999? Answer: Designer Witchcraft. It was only a short step from the luxurious mediation of herbs, olive oil and shaved truffle, which typified the cult of the neo-Foodie, to the cleverly styled photographs of natural ingredients and state-of-the-art spells that appeared in the velvet-covered publishing sensation of winter ’97, Hocus Pocus: Titania’s Book of Spells.

In a stroke of sheer brilliance, in terms of marketing, at least, Hocus Pocus took the visual language of Elle Decoration and ‘Alastair Little’s Italian Kitchen’ and applied it to a practical guide to white magic for the New Women of the urban cognoscenti. With spells for wealth, health and a happy love life, this was New Age sorcery for the Bibendum generation, as though Titania herself were sprung from the womb of the Conran Shop, tutored in the Aveda school of minimalist aromatherapy and sent on her mystic way to heal the hearts and guide the heads of high achievers bored with Prozac and the Marie Claire problem page.

With a rival publication, How to Turn Your Ex-boyfriend into a Toad, selling equally well, the cult sensation was building up to a juicily media-friendly phenomenon. And this latest challenge to the increasingly materialistic and somewhat chauvinistic procession of phenomena that had comprised the new rock and roll – each one describing a further return to the demonized and elitist values of the 1980s, only dressing down now in the name of populism – brought about the triumph of female spell-weaving which conjured up the Spice Girls. Bred in the magic test-tubes of advanced marketing, the Spice Girls are a comma in the history of cultural commodification: they bridge the gap between virtual reality and legalized cloning. Both of which might yet be the new rock and roll.

The brief December twilight gave way to the hostile blackness of a winter’s night. Even the sodium orange of the streetlights seemed to be sucked into the darkness, leaving just a gleam of a tangerine mist, hanging in the trees. Inside the apartment, barely audible, came the sound of some difficult modern music – sudden, pedal-dampened piano chords, a jagged crescendo … On the low black coffee table, which was varnished and polished to such a sheen that it looked as though it was lacquered, was the box of the CD – some pieces by Pierre Boulez.

‘… plunk.’

This was anxious music – culture-vulturing city slicker music. It sounded as if someone were trying very carefully to extract a snooker ball that had become stuck beneath the strings in a grand piano. But how to describe a culture-vulturing city slicker? Well, it was all based on a drawing. This is what you got.

In the first place, this winter’s dusk, it felt like the end of something. Like the Russian play where the collapse of an entire social order is announced by the snapping of a violin string. Perhaps the Eighties were exhausted, too, the pneumatic self-confidence of the decade’s rhetoric slowly beginning to deflate. (And these are observations about a certain, single aspect of an era – that aspect being the effervescent mist that shivered and tingled just above the fizzy bits of the zeitgeist.)

The latter half of the 1980s had seen the beginnings of destabilizing cultural status and blurring aesthetic boundaries. Terms such as ‘accelerated’, ‘fragmented’ and ‘dystopic’ were in currency, conveying the sense of a new, volatile, high-speed culture – the future was beginning with the ruination of history. From the Alessi kettle to your average maroon and turquoise balustraded business park office building, the Three Ps of post-modernism were making their presence felt: punning, plagiarism and parody. What larks Pip, old chap, what larks.

As if to mark the moment, the ‘semiotext(e)’ booklets by or on the principal cast and chorus of post-modern thinking (and that little bracketed ‘e’ said it all, somehow) from Baudrillard, through Foucault to Virilio, had neat, uniform, black covers – were aesthetically exquisite handbooks of the avant-garde – and somehow seemed emblematic of the sheer fashionability, at that time, of critical theory. They had frankly funky titles such as Pure War or Foucault Live, and generally sexed up the dusty world of critical theory in much the same way that business publishing would get down and groovy a decade later – in fact, the two facelifts would be linked.

Here, also, was the idea of the city itself becoming a critical theoretical text: a sort of moodily lit, sci-fi urban landscape, articulating the semantics of cultural meltdown. And the language (jargon, jive talk, call it what you will) of this latest criticism was very romantic, in a New Romantic sort of way, as it seemed to conflate the rhetoric of science with the imagery of dandyism, positing the critic as a kind of chic urban guerrilla über-technician, carrying out missions of anthropological field work.

This seemed also to echo – be a consequence of, in terms of image – that era of the late 1970s which the singer with the Human League, Philip Oakey, would describe in 2001 as ‘the alienated synthesist period’ – the chisel-faced romantic, playing musique modern(e) in a grey room. Urban infrastructure and information theory to the critical theorists (they were landscape poets, by temperament) of the middle to late 1980s, was what the Lake District had been to Victorian Romantics, the mountains of Nepal to a traveller on the Magic Bus, or the peaks of Bavaria to Pantheist seekers of the Sublime.

(The 1980s would also see the menus of fashionable restaurants employ a kind of lyric poetry, further Sublime, in the descriptions of dishes: ‘shards of baby halibut wrapped in a fluffy cardigan of raspberry coulis, dancing on a mist of chives …’ In the Nineties, he-man chefs like Marco Pierre White (think Kirk Douglas as Van Gogh in Lust for Life, shouting at crows and kicking over easels) and the rugged snappiness of cucina rustica would be a neat indicator of the general push towards Authenticity – the triumph of ingredients over adjectives. But the list-based poetry of food description would endure, largely on the packaging of supermarket premium-range thermodestabilized theme snacks.)

As the Nineties arrived, the sites for this critical theoretical romanticism would expand outwards, across the decade, from the city (from the capital, in fact) to engage first with ideas of suburbia, then provincial urban hinterland, and ultimately the nowhere-zones of service-area Britain – the edges of motorways and mirror-glassed retail parks. By the start of the twenty-first century (as the novelist Jeff Noon would assert about the regeneration of Manchester) entire cities would seem like one big shop: a mono-environment of white-laminated MDF shelving, brushed-metal light fittings and natural-effect bleached oak floors – the whole thing defined by the total consumer experience. Subsequently, the school of romantic critical theory would become fixated on a whole new landscape, of brands and logos and commerce: the poetical Sublime of business culture, corporations and the Internet.

But that was all ten years around the corner. What about the culture-vulturing city slickers, where did they come in? From a schism, in fact. The contortions of critical theory towards the end of the Eighties – as ideas, as fashion, as informants of advertising, arts education and retail culture – could be said to have divided a generational sensibility.

On the one hand, applied post-modernism in culture and commerce would come to seem like one of the voodoo arts carried out by the Demon Kings of yuppiedom – a grand denial of Content, grating and dicing the sanctity of Meaning into little more than a bucketful of marketable pixels, hand-sorted by media-sodden focus groups. A grand liberation, perhaps. On the other, there was the sense in which the cultural climate that had allowed post-modernism to flourish – a sudden explosion of media, technology and image making – was also, somehow, more than anything, well … like the end of something: a realization on that dreary December evening, those pedal-dampened, difficult chords, that snapped violin string …

These opposed opinions were well illustrated in the world of contemporary art.

Through the middle to late 1980s, the rise to prominence of young Scottish painters from Glasgow School of Art – most notably Steven Campbell and Adrian Wiszniewski – had delivered a muscular, enigmatic body of deeply literary painting that seemed to articulate – literally depict – the anxiety, doubt and confusion of a twilit, pre-post-modern generation. The aesthetic and philosophical agenda of these painters could seem like an update of that concerning the Neo-Romantic artists of the 1940s (John Minton et al.), which has been aptly labelled by the historian Dr David Mellor to include ‘nostalgia and anxiety, myth-making, organic fantasies’.

As such, these young Scottish artists were also the last gasp (for a while, at least) of a particular artistic sensibility, honed and empowered through atelier skills, responsive to the history of painting. In their different styles, both Campbell and Wiszniewski seemed to focus on the character, or type, that Peter York might once have described as ‘the neurotic boy outsider’: the romantic, aesthetic, self-questioning young man, existentially challenged and a teensy bit self-obsessed. Campbell’s stock character at the time was a kind of lost rambler – dressed somewhat in the clothes (grouse-moor tweeds at a glance) that ex-Skid turned model and TV presenter, Richard Jobson, had worn during his ‘Armory Show’ poet phase – and crossing a landscape of self-contradicting signposts and strange, semi-mystical features. Wiszniewski – in his paintings from the mid-Eighties, at any rate – depicted limp-fringed, sensual-mouthed, pretty-eyed young men wearing white shirts and tie, collar loosened, like Rupert Brookes or Rupert Everetts of the modern city. As with Campbell’s ramblers, these romantic, alienated young men appeared caught in a cat’s cradle of contradictory, entropic states. (Both painters looked remarkably like their chosen characters – archaically handsome in a Georgian kind of way.)

A powerfully atmospheric colour drawing by Wiszniewski from 1986, ‘Culture Vulturing City Slickers’ might be said to sum up this particular era: two of the painter’s urbane, entranced young men, immobile and strangely allegorical (one of them is clasping an affectionate alligator) against a dowdy, bronze-coloured twilight, which settles like sediment on Town Hall architecture and period streetlamps. But allegorical of what?

The young men are caught in the sunset of anxiety perhaps – as Damien Hirst’s massively influential ‘Freeze’ exhibition (one of the starting whistles for the 1990s) with its deft and super-self-assured rearranging of intentionality, was barely a couple of years away. For with ‘Freeze’ (not to mention its epiphenomenal seismic impact) the artist would seem to lose the right to fail. No more anxiety, no more lost young men. Wiszniewski’s City Slickers have an air, if not of doomed youth, then of youth in a kind of psychological transit camp of the emotions, stuck between Either and Or – rigidity or flux, spirituality or nihilism.

In the catalogue for Wiszniewski’s exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, held in the winter of 1987, the artist is described as a part of ‘the New Image Glasgow phenomenon’; it is also suggested ‘that a condition of ambiguity is more appropriate to the spirit in which’ Stephen Campbell’s pictures are painted. Here, then, was the phenomenon of a condition of ambiguity – the culture-vulturing city slicker position.

Represented by the Marlborough Gallery and Nicola Jacobs Gallery, respectively (Albemarle Street and Cork Street), Campbell and Wiszniewski both caught the Eighties art prices boom. It was one of the ironies of the period – during the Ascent of the Demon Kings of Yuppiedom – that paintings depicting states of anxiety, stasis or confusion should have made big money off the enterprise economy. But neurotic art tends to sell well during times of Boom Economy, cf. the cost of a Warhol during Reagan’s presidency.