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

Product Information

Finally, when the latest edition of The Crassical Collection is spread out before you, how does it compare with the work you are doing today? Your work is synonymous with what could broadly be called counterculture. Thanks to the wonders of the internet, counterculture is now as accessible and easy to engage in as the mainstream. Does that excite you? As far as collage goes, I first started having a go when I was living and working in New York and having to meet very tight deadlines. I was doing fine painting even then, which is what the jobs wanted, but it was impossible to deliver on time even if I worked all night. So, reconsidering my attitude to collage, which to me had always felt like cheating, I decided that the only way I was going to get the work done, was to ‘cheat’. My first effort was a combination of painting with bits of collage. It was a small piece for The New York Times due in the next morning. I’d grabbed some magazines off the street and had a great time experimenting and then, worried that it might not be accepted, and they used it with no questions asked!

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. In my opinion the poster that accompanies Christ The Album is one of your finest collages. It looks like you really enjoyed creating it, bringing together the various visual elements from previous albums and splaying them out on a single canvas. In a way it looks like a celebration of Crass’s collective political philosophy, but was that what you intended it to be? Women in Revolt! is supported by the Women in Revolt! Exhibition Supporters Circle, Tate International Council, Tate Patrons and Tate Members. Exhibition curated by Linsey Young with Zuzana Flaskova, Hannah Marsh and Inga Fraser. Moving image works co-curated with Lucy Reynolds. In 2016 I started a review of Gee Vaucher’s Introspectiveexhibition by saying: “…[as] a teenage punk in the early 1980s it would have seemed inconceivable that Gee Vaucher’s artwork might ever grace the walls of a gallery…”. In 2023, the same thought crosses my mind about what ‘teenage me’ would have made of Vaucher’s life and work being the subject of an academic text. The exhibition title comes from Eve Figes’s 1970 text Patriarchal Attitudes: The Case for Women in Revolt.

Sign up

Untitled Rug and Figures, 1974-1985 by Rita McGurn. Photograph: Courtesy of the McGurn family; photograph by Keith Hunter Some of your work in the past involved performance—have you made performance work since then? Would you make it again?

Gower Boy". Fourteenth Raindance Film Festival. Raindance. 1 October 2006. Archived from the original on 14 November 2006. {{ cite web}}: CS1 maint: bot: original URL status unknown ( link) Gee's indescribable artwork has been an inspiration for multiple generations of artists and art appreciators. Gee is proof that Art changes people's lives - and for the better!'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.' This book examines [Vaucher’s] unique position connecting avant-garde art movements, counterculture, punk, and even contemporary street art,” says the publisher. “While Vaucher rejects all ‘isms’, her work offers a unique take on the history of feminist art. The book explores how her life has shaped her output.” As well as rare and radical material from the artist’s archive, the exhibition focuses on a particular series of works and shows them in their most complete configuration to-date. Including her series of paintings Children (who have seen too much too soon). Complementing Vaucher’s work are a selection of original books and prints by Max Ernst from his series Une semaine de bonté. Both contextualisation the artist’s practice in the history of collage but crucially illustrating Ernst’s influence on Vaucher’s working method and its resulting form: the artist book. 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. Authored by Rebecca Binns, a writer and lecturer on art, design and cultural history, the book is published by Manchester University Press, and offers the first critical assessment of Vaucher’s work. According to the publisher, Vaucher is “one of the people who defined punk’s protest art in the 1970s and 1980s” and as such, “deserves to be much better known”.

Gee Vaucher: What's a career retrospective show? I don't have a career. A space was offered, and I accepted. I just pulled everything out of the drawers and cupboards. The exhibition includes the now-iconic artworks Vaucher created for Essex's finest commune-dwelling anarcho-pacifist punk band Crass, of which she was a member for the band's entire time together (1977 to 1984). Crass, famously, had a thing or two to say about authoritarianism and right-wing, warmongering, and isolationist heads of state, and with Vaucher at the helm of most non-musical undertakings, they found some ingenious ways to make their point. While their records are fantastic and powerful in their own right, their extracurricular antics could be considered a very mischievous kind of performance art.

Artworks by Gee Vaucher

Find sources: "Crass Records"– news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR ( September 2020) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message)

Accompanying the release is an extended accompanying Spotify playlist featuring the album artists and the new generations of musicians they have inspired.Yes – but then that's another form of art. Andy Warhol probably set the trend. The Factory [Warhol's studio] was a factory – turning out silkscreens. They all have a value but whether I would choose to go that way is another matter. It's another way of thinking, another way of driving something. Warhol was into high society and money – that's how he made it. If you're in it to make money, that's the best way to go about it. It seems integrity doesn't really matter any more. It does to me but I'm not interested in making hordes of money. It's not the object." 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. You’re right, the photo was actually taken on the same field as the original Feeding photo was taken so long ago. Yes, living in the countryside, gardening, walking, is where I think best. My home is an extension of everything I do. He made all our toys. He'd find bits of wood, bring them home and put two together but with a step, says Vaucher starting to smile at the recollection, "then we'd hobble around on them like stilts!" A chef then boiler cleaner by trade, Vaucher's father apparently invented an early version of what became to be known as streak racing for kids' toy cars: "Once he came home with all these long piece of ply," recalls Vaucher. "Really long. You could put them from one wall over to the next. He said, 'go and get all your toys!' And we'd race them along while mum would be sitting underneath it all knitting.