The Nineties: When Surface was Depth

TWO The Barbarism of the Self-reflecting Sign

The surface of the water in the plastic cup had been perfectly still just a second ago. Now, though, was it your imagination or tired eyes, or had the faintest ripple, a tiny freak outbreak of miniature choppiness, disturbed its earlier calm? In this light – iron-grey storm clouds pressing down, dusk falling fast – it was difficult to tell.

No – look! There it is again! That sudden shimmer on the surface of the water, as if someone were gently tapping the cup from underneath. A distinct jolt, like a kind of sonic boom reaction to some …

With claw prints the size of parking spaces, the Tyrannosaurus Rex slammed his way through the tense, electrical air of the lowering tropical storm. Hard in his sights was that gleaming symbol of contemporary urban person’s assertion of the backwoods-roaming, paragliding, authenticity-boosting, camp fire, free spirit, white-water lifestyle: an off-road 4×4 land cruiser – of the sort that could be seen almost any day of the week, being loaded with ciabatta croutons, bagged salad and Chilean Merlot outside any number of edge-city retail park, twenty-four-hour, thirty-two-checkout, Mothership supermarkets.

Back in the early 1990s, dinosaurs loved the Mothership. The blockbusting success of the raised-awareness action movie Jurassic Park had let loose its computer-generated cast of prehistoric monsters to endorse any number of pre-teen products with their rearing, charging, hissy-fit forms, as well as the film’s eye-catching dinosaur skeleton logo. Which was about as popular as popular culture can get. Cereals and lunch boxes, birthday cakes and pasta shapes – along the shining aisles of the Mothership the dinosaurs ruled again.

And, somehow, dinosaurs were right for the early 1990s. A creature whose brain was its smallest part was unlikely to be wounded by irony. Also, the movie considered the needs of its audience from every angle, thus pre-empting a confusion of intentionality: here, for instance, was a guy being plucked out of a portaloo and having his legs ripped off; on the other hand, here were lots of he-might-be-right-you-know Chaos Theory pronouncements, delivered with seductive fox-like elegance by leather-jacketed sexy scientist Jeff Goldblum. And then there was the eco-message, summed up in breathtaking long-shots of peaceful, pro-organic, Natural Shoe Store, liberal bourgeois vegetarian dinosaurs, grazing en famille on prairies of willowy waving prehistoric pampas grasses.

By the by, the film had introduced the hitherto underused term ‘cloning’ into the broader cultural discourse, which turned out to be absolutely on-the-button to define a general trend. As the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park had been cloned from preserved DNA to provide sensational infotainment – reactivating a history in suspension, so to speak – so many of the cultural products of the 1990s, from TV programmes to graphic design, would turn out to be cloned from, as it were, cultural DNA. Here was classic post-modernism in action – authorless signs transmitted through filters of meaning, brought to life in the labs of logo and cultural production.

Cultural cloning … now there was a thought. If you could just identify the most efficient little gobbets of an image or an idea – well, you could simply think of it as sampling, taking out the best bits and doing them like mad. Fads such as these were as old as the hills, of course (Hollywood cloning its stars, England its Beat groups) but the sheer extent of media in the 1990s – when the ‘mass’ in ‘mass media’ appeared to amplify a thousandfold on endlessly replicating channels, added to a burgeoning cultural conservatism – would make for an especially arid monoculture, based largely on promotability and marketing. The trick, for cultural practitioners, was to identify which of the principal species they were cloned from, and not try anything surprising. Culture could be led by market research, and very often was.

(Also, in the Nineties, the culture of superlatives demanded the most popular bits – the fondant centres, the strawberry cream, garlic butter – were simply lifted out of their context, so they became little more than a gooey mass. A diet of fondant centre …)

An example would be the extraordinary success of Helen Fielding’s romantic comedy, Bridget Jones’s Diary: the success of her idea was multi-cloned across fiction, film, advertising and print media, established as an entire demographic model and then used to sell the idea of Bridget Jonesness back to people who’d bought it in the first place. At the wallet end of marketing the proof of the cloning would be found in a multi-million-pound cosmetics promotion which offered ‘a Bridget Jones-style Diary’.

On terms such as these the idea of originality per se had become subordinate to the cloning process, and the baby dinosaurs crept out of their broken shells to rule the Earth again.

Cloned Media

Prior to the latest cloning boom in ‘zoo media’ (Chris Evans et al. to ‘The Girlie Show’) and ‘reality TV’, the process has perhaps reached its apotheosis with the phenomenal, pan-media, super-cloned success of Irvine Welsh’s novel Trainspotting. What began as a neo-realistic account of life and living death among Edinburgh drug addicts – couched in the vernacular tradition of James Kelman’s Booker Prize-winning novel, How Late It was, How Late – has become, by way of the movie, the soundtrack CD, the t-shirt and the advertising campaign, a form of media shorthand to signify Youth in general.

The greatest irony, perhaps, of this conversion of a novel into a free-floating logo for youthfulness was the appropriation of the orange and white graphics, made famous by the film of Trainspotting, to advertise the winter sale in French Connection’s chain of high street boutiques. There is a somewhat spooky connection between the desire to buy a ribbed brown cardigan and the need to identify, as a consumer, with the desperation of a heroin addict. And the proof of the cloning process would be inadvertently sealed by Sarah Champion, in her introduction to Disco Biscuits: New Fictions for the Chemical Generation, where she wrote, ‘we now have Trainspotting, the attitude’.

The cloning process, by converting issues and substance into the short-term safe harbour of provenly marketable ‘attitude’, has created a tendency within contemporary media – and even the broader span of contemporary culture – to fear any innovation that does not correspond to whatever attitude happens to be riding high. And at this point, cultural phenomena become merely vessels – the medium is the message, after all. Too true, Marshall!

Similarly, our decade-long love affair with mass retro-culture within the poppier packaging of just about everything (the cloning of suspended styles) would prompt the suggestion (with more than just a pulse of real panic in there) that at this rate we would ‘run out past’ by 2005 – that culture was faced with a chronic ‘retro shortage’. (A further Jeff Noonism would be the idea of ‘Post-Future’, a point at which the Future – as a thing, concept, temporal or descriptive – no longer existed. Thus there would also be ‘post-future kids’, for whom the idea of fashionability, modernity or keeping-up-to-speed would be utterly – and, you imagined, blissfully – meaningless.)

The endless cycles of pop cultural revivalism – the imagery of modern culture as a database and dressing-up box – describe the extent of retro-culture. You could also throw in the importance to Interior Design in the 1990s of Mid-century Modern styling (the Fifties coming up in price), which was morphed with the brushed-metal and bleached-oak effect of shop-fitting chic to create the basic Loft Look. Out of this came a kind of ‘Pod and Spike’ approach to Lifestyle – Pod being the cocooning impulse to feed on infantilism, and Spike being the exquisite good taste of the tamed avant-garde.

At its most expensive, styling went the whole way to Minimalism: this required lots and lots of open floor space to turn your loft into a gallery (Pod) – one science-fiction exotic cut stem of some spiky flora (Spike), a couple of Whitefriars vases perhaps, and the rest was whiteness. Hence the irony of the urban very rich seeking to define their Lifestyle by vast areas of emptiness – they and their possessions becoming exhibits, an aubergine or a Diptyque perfumed candle (Pod) taking on the aura of sculpture. More often than not, any actual art in a minimalist barn would be screaming how fucked-up it and everything around it was (Spike), or, at the very least, pronouncing an exquisite conundrum of neurotic self-concept.

Tim Noble and Sue Webster

Visceral yet lumpen, lurid yet delicate, the art of Tim Noble and Sue Webster is filled with contradictions. Encountering their work for the first time, a viewer will be struck by its mixture of vivacity and savagery. Mixed messages of love and death, ambition and nihilism, are carried on a style that alternates between cartoon delinquency and a kind of modern baroque.

Sue Webster was born in Leicester, in 1967, and Tim Noble in Gloucester, in 1966. The couple first met at Nottingham Polytechnic, in 1986, where they were both studying Fine Art. Their personal relationship, from this initial meeting, has become a major informant of their creative partnership as artists. The couple do not claim to be two people working as one artist; rather, the direction of their work is dictated and considered by the conflation of their separate ideas, enthusiasms and acquired skills. As Tim Noble remarks, ‘We are consistently inconsistent; that’s one of our greatest strengths.’

Over the course of their career, Tim Noble and Sue Webster have worked in many different artistic media: they make paintings, sculptures and assemblages of lights and neon. The couple have also turned their hands to fly-posting montaged pictures of themselves, and once held their own street tattoo parlour during the ‘Livestock Market’ art fair held in Rivington Street, east London, in 1997.

Above all, however, Tim Noble and Sue Webster have worked with the idea of themselves, as artists who are making works within the somewhat febrile climate of contemporary British culture. Their intentions are maybe explained by a work they made in 1998, called ‘Dirty White Trash (with gulls)’. In this piece, ‘six months’ worth of artists’ rubbish’ has been meticulously assembled and crafted – itself a contradictory act – in such a way that when light is projected upon the seemingly chaotic heap, it casts the shadow of the artists in perfect profile.

Caught with the accuracy of a silhouette, this shadow piece shows the couple relaxing back to back, the one sipping a glass of wine, the other enjoying a cigarette. Meanwhile, two stuffed seagulls are picking at a few discarded chips on the edge of the dumped rubbish. What could this tell the viewer about Tim Noble and Sue Webster as both a couple – they live together as well as work together, and they have an uncanny physical similarity, which makes them look like brother and sister – and as artists?

One answer might be that they regard themselves as determinedly careerist, within a line of work – the art world – that they regard as a complex game, and one in which cheats, short cuts or open ridicule of the prevailing mainstream can all be taken as valid moves. Following hard on the heels of this assessment of the pair, however, is the fact that their work can be divided into that which is extremely simple to make – little more than the cut-and-paste techniques of ersatz punk montage – and that which is painstakingly crafted. Taken all together, the different strands of their art entwine to make a coded polemical commentary on cycles of life and decay – the mortality of species and the deliquescence of cultural movements or individual careers. In this sense, Noble and Webster could be described, with accuracy, as ‘decadent’ artists.

On leaving Nottingham, the couple took up a residency, in 1989, in the sculpture studios at Dean Clough, in Halifax. It might be taken as eloquent of their artistic temperament – or of the recurring motifs within their later work, suggesting a desire to keep themselves at arm’s length from their peers – that Noble and Webster headed north just as the movement that would become mediated as Young British Art was beginning to gather momentum in London.

As Damien Hirst had curated his influential ‘Freeze’ show at the PLA building in London’s Docklands the previous year, so within two years the mere idea of ‘young British art’ would have become a usefully malleable phenomenon. Taken up by the media, as much as the patrons, galleries and collectors, this new direction in British art – as it merged with other pop cultural strands – would be taken to represent the temper of the zeitgeist.

In 1992, Tim Noble came to London to study on the sculpture MA course at the Royal College of Art. By this time, the whole phenomenon of Young British Art was following, point for point, the route between a fledgling metropolitan bohemia (those former urban badlands, colonized by artists) and ‘uptown patronage’ which the American cultural commentator, Tom Wolfe, had defined in his book The Painted Word nearly two decades earlier.

Cutting-edge contemporary art, ‘warm and wet from the Loft’ – as Wolfe describes it – can enjoy a relationship with its patrons that benefits both parties. The ensuing social and cultural milieu created by this relationship – and as seen, in Britain, to have been achieved through the mediated phenomenon of ‘yBa’ – becomes a new kind of orthodoxy, influential in taste-making, and provoking inevitable response.

The translation of young British art into a social phenomenon, with its own cast of characters and social types, and its particular topography around the Hoxton and Shoreditch districts of east London, seems central to an understanding of the earlier work of Tim Noble and Sue Webster. As the couple moved to Hoxton in 1996, holding their first solo exhibition, ‘British Rubbish’, at the Independent Art Space, they arrived on the ‘YBA’ scene as the partying of that movement was already approaching its second wind. For Noble and Webster, the appropriation of ‘YBA’’s own idea of itself – as an oven-ready phenomenon, as it were – became their point of intervention.

In terms of their style, Noble and Webster have been claimed by some critics to revive the aesthetics – and tactics – that were set in place by the first wave of British punk rock between 1976 and 1978. Too young to have participated in this movement as anything other than youthful observers, Noble and Webster can be seen to have taken a received idea of punk – the strategies, the baggage and the healthy bloody-mindedness – and applied it to their own generation’s attempts to re-route popular culture through the media of contemporary art.

Prior to ‘British Rubbish’, Noble and Webster had already made works that centred on the sloganeering, fly-posting and do-it-yourself ethos of punk pamphleteering. Tim Noble had usurped a billboard poster competition run by Time Out magazine in 1993, with his work ‘Big Ego’. The competition was open to people who had been resident in London for twenty-five years (which Noble had not) and to this extent Noble’s design – a crudely assembled poster, featuring his face and the statement, ‘Tim Noble Born London 1968’ – was revelling in its own falsehood. Noble, after all, was born in Gloucester in 1966.

Similarly, in 1994, Noble and Webster doctored an image of the legendary artists Gilbert & George, by simply sticking their own faces over those of the original. They called this work ‘The Simple Solution’, and it followed the same thinking – in terms of making a creative virtue of hijacking an existing graphical device – as Noble’s disruption of the Time Out poster competition.

If one of the distinguishing characteristics of the ‘Young British Artists’ – as a mediated, social type – was to own or affect an image of ‘dumbed down’ rebelliousness (the ‘Boho Dance’ in Tom Wolfe’s definition of the type), then Noble and Webster were amplifying this tactic to the point of caricature.

More than one critic has remarked how their street tattoo parlour, with its amateurish, felt-tip-pen ‘tattoos’, exposed the way in which a previously working-class, light industrial area of London had become colonized in the name of art from the power-base of a bourgeois economy and lifestyle. This was Wolfe’s ‘Boho Dance’ made visible. As David Barrett was to write of the event: ‘Young artists finally had the hardcore tattoo they’d always wanted, and they strutted up and down Charlotte Road like a bad actor doing the LA Bloods.’

By the middle of the 1990s, however, Noble and Webster were beginning to plan intensely crafted pieces. Inspired by a trip to Las Vegas – although they say that watching videos of films about Las Vegas inspired them more – the couple began to work with light pieces. Exuberant, vivacious and redolent of the perverse glamour of British travelling fun-fairs, these light pieces took the ‘trash aesthetic’ of rockabilly gothicism and turned it into free-floating emblems of desire and sensory overload.

The visual joyousness of these pieces – simplistic promises of glamour, carnival and success – were matched by two further developments in the work of Noble and Webster. In many ways, their do-it-yourself aesthetic had become the signature of their vision: that despite themselves, almost, they were honing a view of contemporary culture based on the imminent implosion of cultural materialism itself.

What was emerging in their work, through their monolithic model of themselves as a quasi-neanderthal couple – ‘The New Barbarians’ (1997) – and their gruesome projections of themselves off the contours of garbage, was a targeted celebration of aimless nihilism. This was not the pro-active nihilism preached by Nietzsche, as a phase of spiritual empowerment. Rather, in the imagery of decay, violent death and destruction, honed with wit and tempered with sentimentality, this was the imagery of romantic nihilism: tribal, insular and dancing on the imagined grave of a society that might one day choke to death on the sheer waste of its own consumer products. The triumph of terminally dumbed-down culture.

In one of their most recent works, ‘British Wildlife’ (2000), Noble and Webster have consolidated the themes and techniques of their ‘shadow’ pieces. As with their obsessive involvement in crafting the ‘trash’ of their ‘white trash’ pieces, the couple have assembled a quantity of inherited stuffed animals – themselves reminiscent of a forlorn, morbid notion of Britishness – which will cast a monumental shadow of their combined profiles.

Through working with the legacy of taxidermy, in which they can describe the nuances and cruelties of the natural world, Noble and Webster present the viewer with a compelling tableau of morbidity and ghoulishness. If ‘Dirty White Trash (with gulls)’ put forward the idea that Noble and Webster saw themselves as trash, trashing in turn a rubbished society, then ‘British Wildlife’, with its poetically archaic assemblage of stuffed animals, seems to amplify the themes of mortality. In all of this, however, they celebrate their relationship with one another, reversing the sentiments of the classical ‘Et in Arcadia Ego’, to suggest that in the midst of death there is life.