The Secret Public

I was too young, fat, Mancunian, Jewish and heterosexual to have gone to the legendary nightclub Taboo, and I certainly wouldn’t have gotten past the bitchy doormen in the M&S slacks which counted for leisurewear in my schooldays, but the interesting thing for me is that I should have wanted to go – this, I thought, was what grown up life should be about – decadent, creative, bohemian, full of strange and wonderful people doing strange and wonderful things, a world of clubbing and clothes, piercings and tattoos, women with bobs and men with boobs. It felt like something important was happening, and 20 years on it still feels like something important did happen.

Last Days of the British Underground 1978 – 1988, an exhibition at the ICA, features all the usual and welcome suspects – including Michael Clark, Derek Jarman, Trojan, Charles Atlas, Gilbert And George, Mark E Smith and the Fall, Bodymap et al – a filigree spider's web of an artistic community where ideas, media, bodily fluids and artistic endeavours were freely swapped. And towering over and above all others remains the great mass of flesh that was Leigh Bowery.

What was going on was as much about lifestyle as art, lifestyle as performance, performance as art, and consequently the exhibition does not so much show much art (there being in truth little such art to show) but rather recordings of the art that was made – for example a film of Leigh Bowery’s performances at the d’Offay Gallery in 1988, in which Bowery does what he would have done anyway on a night out on the old town, namely wear outrageous clothes and pose and preen, gestures turned into art by sheer force of personality and will.

In another room sit rows of tvs (televisions not transvestites) showing films made at the time, the highlight being Charles Atlas’s film of Michael Clark and Company – “Because We Must” - see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lc2iY_SdAos&mode=related&search – a reminder of how exuberant and exciting Clark’s work was at this time, full of cheek and energy, sexy but strange, dark and sometimes menacing.

The exhibition programme suggests that this was the last group of artists to remain genuinely underground before the rise of the “consumer environment” and the “flattening of subcultural manifestations” but, albeit in an unintended way, these artists were the fathers of the modern condition – their concerns – fashion, lifestyle, style, individualism, narcism, live for the moment for tomorrow we die (which many did of course) – evolved into the concerns of the modern day consumer world – designer became brand became hundreds of people queuing round the block and fighting to get into Primark, men in skirts and make-up evolved into the billion pound men’s cosmetics industry, clubbing begat acid house begat mass uniformity of music and behaviour, decadence spread into the easy sex and drugs culture that exists in so much of Britain today (but sadly not Finchley). But one should not ignore the extraordinary conflagration of talent and originality that made this set of people so unique and this exhibition such an enjoyable trip down memory lane.

And it should not be forgotten that those who survived continue to make interesting work - Charles Atlas features regularly on this weblog, Michael Clark is in year 3 of his residency at the Barbican, and people are raving about the Fall’s current album.

Pictures of Taboo taken from http://www.geocities.com/bellkahn/menuleighbowery.html