The Nineties: When Surface was Depth. Michael Bracewell

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ