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.
For ‘Apocalypse’, Noble and Webster have expanded their aesthetic to encompass an epic notion of the sublime – re-routed through the now established signature of their own vivid style. ‘The Undesirables’ (itself reminiscent of the title of a pulp exploitation novella from the late Fifties) takes the form of a mountain of garbage-filled bin-liners with a scattering of litter on its peak. The projected shadow of this crowning litter shows Noble and Webster – no longer in profile but now with their backs to viewer, and to scale – as observers on the summit.
Inspired, in part, by their drive to this summer’s Glastonbury music festival, and their wait upon a hillside, as the sun was setting, to watch David Bowie’s superb performance, the couple also cite the cover of Gary Numan’s Warriors LP as an influence on this work. ‘We’ve ascended above the trash,’ says Sue Webster, of ‘The Undesirables’ – thus completing (in the tradition of nihilism) a classic circuit of Western romanticism.
The white neanderthal couple in Webster and Noble’s ‘New Barbarians’ – coarse, territorially hostile, but embodying an attitude and expression at once suspicious, narrow-minded and assertive (a kind of ultra-conservatism, in the sense of protecting self-interest) – could also take their place in the Jurassic Park of post-modernism. They seem like a couple from some point in the future when the world is about to end – a post-historic, as opposed to pre-historic pair.
In such a fantasy, the world would not be coming to an end in a dramatic, Terminator-style apocalypse of infra-red night scopes, killing machines and rebels in the ruins; rather it would simply – dully, even – have ground to a dirty, multiple food-allergic, worn-out, hyper-polluted inevitable halt because of humankind’s insatiable greed. The New Barbarians could be strolling through the last days of the biggest shopping centre on Earth, still complaining, still greedy, still defensive of their self-interest above all. As an artwork, however, ‘The New Barbarians’ is owned by a wealthy private collector, for whom its message, wit and undeniably disturbing presence must perform the task once undertaken by classical allegorical painting to seventeenth-century aristocrats.
By the middle of the Nineties, the slipstream of the zeitgeist was pretty much dominated by a steady cross-cultural cloning of the two principal Attitudes: Irony and Authenticity, conflating mid-decade to breed the cult of Confession and the mediation of the formerly private and personal as mass public spectacle – another attraction in the Jurassic Park of post-modernism (with the writings of Theodor Adorno standing in for the Jeff Goldblum character’s warnings about fiddling around with evolution).
[Subsequently, a web-site would be launched at www.theory.org.uk which ‘packaged’ leading cultural figures as though they were children’s poseable action figures and bubble-gum trading cards (infantilism strikes again!) The theory.org.uk Trading Card for Theodor Adorno summarized his biography, strengths and weaknesses as follows: ‘German Thinker, 1903–69. Member of the Frankfurt School. Argued that popular media is the product of a “culture industry” which keeps the population passive, preserving dominance of capitalism at the expense of true happiness. Mass media is standardized, and the pleasures it offers are illusory – the result of “false needs” which the culture industry creates. Argument is elitist, but that doesn’t mean it’s wrong necessarily.
‘Strengths: Saw culture to be as important as economics.
‘Weaknesses: Shows no understanding of popular tastes.
‘Special Skills: Extreme anti-capitalist argument.’]
Like the cloned dinosaurs, cloned media were reasonably single-minded about their message, and now the public were the new stars – so long as they were offering sex, violence, sentimentality or converting their back bedroom into a nursery. As the writer Michael Collins put the case, rephrasing Warhol’s maxim on fame, ‘In the future everybody will be ordinary for fifteen minutes.’
The Moment of Truth
On the evening of 1 December 1976, at around 6.25 p.m., a lorry driver by the names of James Holmes kicked in the screen of his ‘£380 colour television’ – as he later told
