Gee Vaucher - Beyond Punk, Feminism And The Avant-Garde - Rebecca Binns

GEE VAUCHER -

BEYOND PUNK, FEMINISM AND THE AVANT-GARDE -

REBECCA BINNS

Art and culture is thrust upon us though it's never of our making and always defined by others. Culture is a commodity and so too is art and we are sold it with a nod, a wink, and a proviso that this kind of culture and this kind of art is for us and that any other is either pretentious, above our station, or just plain weird. There is high art and there is low art and never the twain doth meet and if by some fluke it ever does then it's quickly recuperated, contained, accommodated  and packaged into something else to be bought and sold, ensuring the market always wins out.

Gee Vaucher was the visual artist for Crass and was responsible for all the record sleeves, the posters, the graphics for the International Anthem newspaper, the banners hung at gigs. Everything, essentially, apart from the actual Crass logo that was designed by a friend of Penny Rimbaud called Dave King.

Crass were a band who were never 'sold'. They were never hyped, they were never packaged, they were never advertised via adverts in the music press. Instead, they just suddenly appeared one day over in the corner making a lot of noise, with much swearing and talking about things that everyone knew and thought and felt but had never before expressed. 

Crass were the punk rock equivalent of the little boy pointing out that the king wasn't actually wearing any clothes. They were the punk rock equivalent of the mirror that Poly Styrene of X-Ray Spex in their song Identity asked if when we look into it do we smash it quick? 

Integral and essential to the music Crass created and the concerts at which they performed was Vaucher's graphics and imagery that combined photomontage, pop art and collage that was often not collage at all, but 'intricately painted, photorealistic depictions of a skewed reality masquerading as collage'.

Interestingly, up until 2005 political photomontage artist Peter Kennard when teaching at the Royal College of Art was presenting Vaucher's art to his students as fine examples of photomontage and it was only when Vaucher showed him the originals that he realised they were actually paintings.

Interestingly too, Vaucher's art and graphics for Crass had always been presented in black-and-white and this very quickly became part of the Crass image although the originals were often in colour, and it was only because it was too expensive to reproduce  everything in colour that it ended up as black-and-white. This means that but for a lack of money in their early days that Crass could have been a lot more colourful if not outright dayglo? And whilst on the subject, the same goes for their clothes. Apparently, Crass only dressed in black because it made for mixing their clothes in the washing machine that much easier. According to Penny Rimbaud, that is.

If Crass were a band who were never 'sold', the same too applied to Vaucher's art. It was just 'there', as part of the whole Crass package and no more important than the words or the thrashing, fuzzed-out guitar at the heart of the music. It didn't presume anything and it was neither subtle or in your face but simply taking its place as part of the whole. The whole when fully combined, however, creating a near unstoppable battering ram unlike anything that had gone before, full of anger in the extreme, intricacies, bludgeoning passion and love. Yes, love. Paradoxically, Vaucher's art was stuffed full of subtleties and so in your face that it had you near pinned against the wall.

Vaucher's art has been showcased in book form in the past, in her self-produced and self-published book Crass Art And Other Pre Post-Modernist Monsters. Rebecca Binns' book, however, entitled Gee Vaucher - Beyond Punk, Feminism And The Avant-Garde, is the first serious study of Vaucher's work that has ever been written, which for an artist of Gee Vaucher's status and reputation is pretty mad though not altogether surprising given the art world's accent nowadays upon media profile, collectability and monetary and investment value. All things, of course, that Vaucher has very little interest in. 

You may not have noticed but none of Vaucher's artwork is ever signed. Given the propensity for Crass members to take on pseudonyms, is Gee Vaucher even her real name? It turns out that her birth name is actually Carole, and it's the kind of detail that's interesting due to the fact that very few people would know this and inadvertently this says a lot about her. In comparison, most people who know anything about Banksy (who is a friend and long-time admirer of Vaucher) would know his real name even though there's this big mystery about who he is. When Banksy first started out, all he ever seemed to do was to paint up his name 'Banksy' all around Bristol. His name was his 'tag' and subsequently his name became his brand even after he began diversifying into stencils of rats and monkeys.

Vaucher has no such thing as a 'brand' nor even such a thing as a particular style. She is mostly known for her work with Crass, of course, and the stark black-and-white imagery of the band but this was but a period of her whole life as an artist and as mentioned, the limited palette was down to budgetary demands not artistic choice.

For most people, their first contact with Vaucher's art came with the cover of The Feeding Of The 5000 EP, the seminal first record by Crass, released on the Small Wonder label. It's an unusual piece and in hindsight a somewhat strange choice for a cover. There's a lot going on in it. It's very busy. There's no name of the band on the cover and no title - it's on the back cover instead. A much more obvious choice for the front cover would indeed have been the image used on the back, of the the flag bearer on the horizon of the churned mud landscape, and it's almost as if there has been some terrible mix-up at the pressing plant.

The Feeding Of The 5000 cover is a cover that's pretty confusing and makes you look twice, which in a way was what Crass were all about. Which means Vaucher's art was the perfect match for the whole Crass ethos. Or should that be the words and music of Crass was the perfect match for Gee Vaucher's ethos?

Rebecca Binns in her book drills down into Vaucher's art and discusses various pieces in detail, revealing meanings, subtext, context and subtle touches that make you look again and to even see them in a whole new light. That Bloody Revolutions record by Crass featuring the Pistols transposed into the Queen, the Pope, the statue of Justice, and Thatcher that you've looked at a thousand times before? You'll be looking at it again. 

So too Binns puts Vaucher's life into some form of context, touching upon her childhood, her time at art school in the Sixties, and her pre-Crass days in both America and the UK. There is a lot of joining of dots as well, such as her being fully aware of such things as so-called 'anarchist' ideas well before the formation of Crass due to various anarchist magazines in circulation among her associates. This being in contrast to Penny Rimbaud's assertion that pre-Crass he thought Bakunin was just a type of vodka.

There's mention of her time pre-Crass and pre-Dial House when she was living at another commune-type place in Essex called Stanford Rivers Hall with Eve Libertine, where she was a member of the seminal and much influential music collective Stanford Rivers Quartet. Pre-Crass as well, there's also her time with the avant-garde performance group EXIT, featuring among its many members Penny Rimbaud, Dave King and Steve Ignorant's elder brother.

Importantly, Binns covers the movements and the people that have all been influences upon Vaucher and her work as well as herself as a person, one of the most interesting being not an artist or a musician or a writer but radical psychiatrist R D Laing.

Rebecca Binns' book was eight years in the making and it shows. It's incredibly well researched and is probably the only book I've read involving the story of Crass that doesn't contain glaring mistakes or is full of revisionism. As much as it might ever be possible to do, the best book on Crass is still yet to be written but then Binns' book is not about Crass, it's about Gee Vaucher and in that sense it's the best book we're ever likely to get about her. In that sense, and due to Vaucher's genuinely deep impact upon a generation, Rebecca Binns' book is an important one.

John Serpico