Gee Vaucher: Beyond punk, feminism and the avant-garde

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Punk was a visual as well as audio artform with the aesthetic and associated art being a large part of its revolutionary impact and rebellious appeal. A lot has been said about the fashion; the posters and flyers; the Jamie-Reid designs; the Vivienne Westwood clothes etc. But a key part of this visual history is the work of an artist who defined punk’s protest art in the 1970s and 80s- Gee Vaucher. You could say that about Picasso," says Vaucher diplomatically. "He spent the second half of his life as a millionaire many times over. Could he still make art when he had money? I think he did, yes. But then he had that integrity to start with – and he did everything [himself]. He didn't have other people doing his art. I have problem with that – Hirst has a team of people doing his art." Binns's book is meticulously researched and well written, covering an area of punk history that deserves a full spotlight all of its own. Equal parts informing, accessible and compelling, this is the story of a woman whose talent and beliefs have made a huge contribution to conveying punk's revolutionary message.' One of the most affecting works here is just an eggbox, tiny emblems of a terrible marriage in each compartment, from a doll’s arm to a toy police helmet. Another, by Marlene Smith, recalls the moment that Dorothy “Cherry” Groce moved from her Brixton kitchen in south London at 7am to answer the door, where she was shot by police. A lifesize sculpture in plaster, chipboard and J cloths, it stands beneath the legend “She is not bulletproof.” Untitled Rug and Figures, 1974-1985 by Rita McGurn. Photograph: Courtesy of the McGurn family; photograph by Keith Hunter Introspective is Gee Vaucher’s first major institutional show in the UK, and spans the artist’s career of more than forty years. It charts Vaucher’s journey from local activity to international ambition, from domestic concerns to world politics, and from healing the planet to healing the mind. Including collage, photography, photomontage, painting, sculpture, film, performance, typography, sound and installation, the imagery she creates ranges from the absurd and often comical to the harrowing. Her message spans the political and the personal, the environmental and the humanitarian.

Although Vaucher herself is understandably against labeling her work, it's hard not to call a lot of it "protest art," and hard not to see how it might be relevant—or at least a solid reference to move forward from—in today's sketchy geo-political climate. Vaucher met her long-lasting creative partner Penny Rimbaud in the early 1960s when both were attending the South-East Essex Technical College and School of Art. [1] In 1967, inspired by the film Inn of the Sixth Happiness, [2] they set up the anarchist/ pacifist open house Dial House in Essex, UK, which has now become firmly established as a 'centre for radical creativity'. The exhibitionalso features an installation entitled The Sound of Stones in the Glasshouse. Created in collaboration with artist and typographer Christian Brett, the installation critiques the US’s involvement in warandreferences pivotal times in recent history, including the election of Donald Trump to the US Presidency. Dictator, 2008, acrylic on canvas, 640x535mm Inside poster for Crass single, Bloody Revolutions, 1980, gouache, 430 x 290 mm Marx’s refusal to equate labour inside and outside the home might stand as a theme. You see it in the desperate daily lives at a London toy factory recorded in an installation by Mary Kelly, Margaret Harrison and Kay Hunt, with women rising at five to make breakfast for their husbands and children, before cleaning the house then going to work, only to return to childcare and dinner. You see it in Maureen Scott’s strong painting Mother and Child at Breaking Point, where the infant howls while the woman, rigid, exhausted, tries to keep going.

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Her grandfather – but not her parents – was artistic but it's easy to get the impression that she was self-taught from an early age. "Every child draws, don't they?" says Vaucher about her first forays into art as the youngest of her family with three older brothers. "My most lasting memory is having made a lot of Christmas cards. I must have been six or seven. I remember sitting at the table working away. And my brother did a wobbler and tore them all up. Such cruelty – it never left me. It was the first demonstration of something that was really cruel, especially as he was child himself. Vaucher’s politics is explored using her own words to add context and personal nuance. From her views on gender and sexuality, to her pacifism and anti-military stance, as Vaucher herself states: “I am an extremely moral person to the point of being ridiculous. But my morals are my own”. This aspect of Vaucher is essential to being able to fully appreciate the motivation and message of her art and perhaps why she worked so well with a band like Crass. Vaucher shows me her studio, one wall dominated by the powerfully vulnerable face of one of her “children”, and with a riot of paper cuttings strewn across the floor, waiting to leap into witty juxtaposition in her latest project: a conjunction of the work of German artist Max Ernst’s 1934 graphic novel A Week Of Kindness and Scottish psychiatrist RD Laing’s 1970 book Knots. “It’s so intense, so anal and fascinating,” she says.

The medium was both necessity and message. So many of these artists could not get their work shown anywhere, or were forced to work from home. They used slides, which could be posted round Britain and projected on any scale. They wove, embroidered and knitted. Rita McGurn’s trio of women, lovely and lifesize, hanging out on a crocheted rug, are themselves a work of crochet using whatever scraps of wool she could come by. The publication of Punk: An Aesthetic accompanied an exhibition that recently ran at London's Hayward gallery. The book also features Linder Sterling, Jamie Reid, Raymond Pettibon and John Holmstrom among others, with essays by Jon Savage and William Gibson. Despite being included in many exhibitions featuring other artists and having her own dedicated exhibitions across the States in New York, San Francisco and LA, she's never had one in the UK. But it's not an issue for her. Vaucher may be independently-minded with regards to the art industry to the point of being frustrating, but she is modest to the point of being maddening. I was fortunate to work with a group of friends who always trusted and left me to come up with what I felt was right. No one interfered with the process and everyone saw the piece when it was finally finished. I could not have worked any other way. He made a golf course in the garden. He got all mum's eggcups and sunk them down into the ground and then he made these putting things. He was brilliant. He'd never throw anything away. He was a very inspiring man. My mum was as well. She'd always unravel jumpers and re-knit them so there were no holes."

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Well, I love a lot of graffiti, it rightly gives people a space to voice and view their opinions, realisations etc. Of course, not all of it will be to one’s liking, especially those that cross the line into hate and discrimination. But you have to let it all go into the mix and let the people work it out, either by covering it up or adding a comment. Ex-Crass members Penny Rimbaud and Gee Vaucher continue to put out their creative works (for example, material by Last Amendment, and Vaucher's book Animal Rites) through Exitstencil, often in collaboration with other publishers such as the jazz label Babel Label and AK Press. [2] Corpus Christi [ edit ]

Accompanying the release is an extended accompanying Spotify playlist featuring the album artists and the new generations of musicians they have inspired. Featuring contributions by Alice Correia, Zuzanna Flaskova, Rachel Garfield, Juliet Jacques, Dorothy Price, Lucy Reynolds, Ash Reid, Amy Tobin and Linsey Young.Children, the innocence of youth and the fleeting changes of their looks is a recurring theme in Vaucher's artwork. In 2007, her Children series of portraits was based on deliberately androgynous kids who have seen too much too soon, "whether it's domestic violence or rape," she explains. More recently, Vaucher produced Angel for this year's Raindance film festival, an 'exercise in visual perception', the 40-minute film features a barely-moving portrait-like image of a young girl, caught for a moment in time before maturity catches up. The bittersweet nature of these works seem at odds with Vaucher's own childhood which she describes as happy and enormously positive – her parents were supportive of her talent for art. For someone with so much warmth and love (she spends the interview anxiously fretting about close friend Penny Rimbaud's illness) and as such a caring, almost maternal type, it's a surprise to learn Vaucher has never had kids of her own. "No, I have no children of my own, and even if I did they wouldn't be mine," she later tells me. "I don't regret not having children." The reissue of Crass Art And Other Pre Post-Modernist Monsters by Gee Vaucher is out now, published by Exit Stencil Press; Punk: An Aesthetic, edited by by Johan Kugelberg is out now, published by Rizzoli She is radical in every sense of the word. In this episode, Gee invites us to Dial House, on the edge of Epping Forest in Essex – a tumbling old cottagewith a difference: it’s run by Gee and her collaboratorPenny Rimbaud as an anarchic “centre for radical creativity” where anyone can turn up at any time for a cup of tea and a chat. Sothat’s just what we did, to hear Gee talk about her working relationship with Penny, why punk was a disappointment and the 'perverseness' of her art.