God Save Jamie Reid
There's more to the work of Jamie Reid than first
meets the eye, as Ian Lowey discovered when he met the man largely
credited with creating the punk aesthetic.
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When Jamie Reid took a Cecil Beaton silver jubilee portrait
of the queen and superimposed a safety pin through her bottom
lip, he created one of the most iconic pop cultural images
of the late-20th Century; a simple visual statement that
in terms of its universal familiarity, stands alongside Andy
Warhol's soup can and the Beatles Sergeant Pepper album cover.
Having graduated from Croydon Art School (alongside Malcolm
McClaren), Reid first made his mark politically and artistically
with the Suburban Press. This was a local Croydon-based magazine,
co-founded by Reid in 1970, as a kind of shit-stirring mix
of local politics, cut-and-paste graphics, absurd humour, agit-prop/
Situationist aphorisms and a lot of subtly subversive mischief-making;
all conceived as a spirited antidote to the prevailing earnestness
and beard-scratching inertia of more orthodox left-wing politics.
The Suburban Press ran for five years, during which time Reid
was able to hone his soon-to-be hugely influential combination
of cut-up graphics and cryptic sloganeering, which would eventually
be brought to wider public awareness, via his collaboration
with Malcolm McClaren, and Johnny Rotten and the boys. |
With Reid's anti-design forming the perfect visual foil to the
Sex Pistols incendiary anti-rock and roll, the resultant package
became one of the most brilliantly effective examples of guerilla
marketing ever seen: one which served to critique and undermine
passive consumerist society whilst at the same time raking in 'cash
from chaos'. And within punk itself, Jamie's oblique, enigmatic
sloganeering made the more earnest proselytising of contemporaries
such as The Clash, look woefully pedestrian. Yet if shock and outrage
is said to represent the first stage in the assimilation of subversive
ideas, then perhaps it was inevitable that, far from destroying
rock and roll, the Sex Pistols have become 'classic rock', whilst
punk graphics have been appropriated to sell anything from vodka
to high street fashion. But there is an enduring legacy in as much
as Reid's easily-copied, rough-hewn visuals helped carry the DIY
punk ethos over into other areas of endeavour, such as zines, self-produced
comics, independent film-making and fine art. Some cultural critics
have even pointed towards punk's influence on the Young British
Artists of the early-Nineties: something which is most immediately
exemplified by Gavin Turk's 'Pop'; a lifesize fibreglass cast of
the artist assuming the identity of Sid Vicious as he appears in
the 'My Way' sequence of 'The Great Rock & Roll Swindle'. Not
that Jamie has much time for the YBAs,
'It's funny, I never really think of them as a Nineties phenomenon,
but more as being part of the legacy of Margaret Thatcher; it's
all gestures and very elitist. As a movement it reminds me of nouvelle
cuisine; you get very little for your money.'
So, who in his view
are the true inheritors of the punk legacy?
'There's loads of examples, but ultimately it's the DIY
ethos which counts. Also, it's very easy to view things solely
within the context of western culture and fashion; but a
specific example of someone I've worked with who has been
directly influenced by punk, is the Finnish film director
Aki Karusmaki. But instead of getting a mohican and a guitar,
he and his brother took over cinemas and out of that formed
a production company and made films. Also, in North Africa
punk was a big inspiration on Rai music. Ultimately, punk
is more to do with ideas and less about just the fashion
and being in a four-piece rock band.'
And why does Jamie think the whole punk thing become mythologised
to the extent that you can now imagine 40-year-old men being
asked by their wide-eyed siblings, 'daddy, what did you do
during punk?'
'I think a lot of it is like looking back on war stories,'
he laughs. 'Punk was like an exorcism which cleared up a lot |
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of the shit that was left over from the Sixties. A lot the
energy and creativity of the late-Sixties had become very corporate
by the mid-Seventies. But then, that happened too with punk. Initially,
punk was about spontaneity and it also carried with it a really
vicious sense of humour, but sadly that has become lost with the
process of mythologisation.'
Extracted from a longer illustrated article which appeared in
issue 4 of Nude (Sept/ Oct 2004).
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