The Nineties: When Surface was Depth

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 the Daily Mirror – because he did not want his eight-year-old son, Lee, to hear ‘the kind of muck’ that Steve Jones of the Sex Pistols had just been coerced into speaking, live in the ‘Today’ studio, by presenter Bill Grundy. The following day, the exchange between Jones and Grundy was reported with some outrage by most of the British newspapers, providing punk rock with one of its more iconic labels: a banner headline in the Daily Mirror which exclaimed ‘The Filth and the Fury’.

Viewed now, the spoken dialogue between Jones and Grundy sounds curiously quaint, but the episode as a whole is still engaging. The actual swearing – ‘the muck’ that prompted Mr Holmes to put his boot through the tube – seems almost as weighed down by self-consciousness as Bill Grundy’s attempts to rise above his cheeky guests with a touch of schoolmasterly sarcasm. ‘What a clever boy!’ he purrs, with thinly veiled rage, as Jones responds to his challenge to ‘say something outrageous’ by calling him first a ‘dirty fucker’ and then a ‘fucking rotter’.

Leaving aside the early-evening transmission time – which was the overriding factor that got ‘Today’ into trouble and Grundy suspended – what remains compelling is the all too apparent manner in which the presenter loses control of his guests, and, as a consequence, reveals the speed with which television itself can lose its assumed authority. Throughout the shambolic interview, during which it becomes clear that the Sex Pistols are not going to submit to the role of ‘studio guests’, there is a gradual accumulation of tension – part embarrassment and part threat – that derives less from the inevitability of a conflict, than from the sense that we are witnessing an authentic breakdown in the power of television to contain its subject. As Grundy attempts to return to the autocue – his only lifeline to safety – we see a moment of extreme vulnerability in a medium that relies (or used to rely) on the illusion of control.

There is a common social impulse to witness spectacle, and, equally importantly, a desire to experience that frisson of excitement, shock or fear that accompanies the moment when the predictable passage of daily events is suddenly converted into drama by the occurrence of extreme behaviour. From a scuffle in the street to a major disaster, these moments of transition disrupt our sense of security and our perception of the world. To be present in the vicinity of such a disruption is to experience the adrenaline rush of confusion and fear we instinctively generate to protect ourselves. And to witness those same occasions in their mediated form is to experience all of their drama, but with none of the personal danger. We absorb the atmosphere of spectacle as a kind of narrative – a fact that has been well illustrated, in photographic terms, by Weegee’s stark images of life and death ‘as it happened’ on the streets of New York.

Through modern media we can pick out the soft centres, as it were, of heightened emotions and volatile situations. We can all become members of an invisible audience, the legitimacy of whose presence is morally and ethnically ambiguous. But whether we authorize our consumption of mediated events in the name of public interest and reportage, or whether we argue the fine line between voyeurism and documentary, we require, above all, that the occasions of disruption that comprise our sense of spectacle are authentic – ‘authenticity’ is the hallmark of truth, and hence the gauge of social value.

Today, authenticity as spectacle has become the Holy Grail of contemporary culture, the unifying style by which the zeitgeist is seen to be made articulate. From the gritty pop realism and boiled-beef brutalism of geezer fiction and Britflicks, to the interactive scenarios of third-person video games such as ‘Metal Gear Solid’ or ‘Silent Hill’ – in which media techniques of truthfulness are used to heighten action, control and suspense – there is now the sense that authenticity itself can be sculpted to suggest veracity as an image, in which truth remains ambiguous. This is not a marginalized creative form: the reshaping of current affairs programming to convey immediacy has been matched by the rise of broadsheet columnists recounting their personal lives as contemporary fables, embracing the breadth of the human condition.

But nowhere has this trend been more pervasive, and the issue of veracity more contested, than within the wake of ‘popular factual programming’: a genre which links the ‘authenticity’ of docu-soap and docu-drama to the studio-based spectacle of conflict of ‘The Jerry Springer Show’ or ‘Vanessa’. As a cultural phenomenon, popular factual programme-making – and its impact on television, advertising and commentary – can be seen as the defining spirit of the 1990s: how do we mediate ourselves and who defines the mediation?

Back in the mid-1970s, television barely understood that programmes could be made by simply filming volatile ‘real life’ domestic and civic situations, and rely entirely on flashpoints of confrontation to hold the attention of the viewers. Televised conflict, beyond the sphere of current affairs, was a rarity, and the occasions on which the medium had been challenged by circumstances beyond its control – as it had with the Sex Pistols – were regarded as memorable. When the dramatist and critic Kenneth Tynan became the first man to say ‘fuck’ on television, during a debate over censorship on Ned Sherrin’s ‘BBC3’, on 13 November 1965, he remarked that he would probably be remembered only for that incident. And the (now forgotten) fact that he had used the word within a dry academic discussion about an audience’s relationship with language was an irony that failed to save him from being branded, immediately, as ‘the man who said “fuck” on television’. What sealed his reputation was the objectivity of the medium: we actually saw him say it – our sense of stability had been challenged, and an evolutionary stage in the potency of television had been defined.

In 1974, a further defining moment in the evolution of TV took place when the BBC made a successful excursion into filming a factual series – regarded at the time as a radical experiment – about the daily life of a British family. In so doing, they discovered not only the power of the hand-held camera and the fly-on-the-wall point of view to convey tension and intimacy, but also the allure of authenticity. Paul Watson’s series ‘The Family’ was greeted by some critics with incredulity and distaste – how could a film about daily domestic routine, with no specific subject or story, possibly hold anyone’s attention? But the public proved the pundits wrong, and tuned in by the million to watch the volatility of a low-income, working family. Thus a template was established – already sketched out by the soft sociology of ‘kitchen-sink’ cinema – that authenticity was synonymous with dysfunctionalism.

The route to authenticity – or, more cynically, the allure of mass-voyeurism – lay in the simple televisual device of apparently removing the fourth wall of a person’s room and thus laying bare his or her privacy. By this means, a compelling sense of risk – absent in scripted soaps – was written into the TV format, answering our need for authenticity and spectacle.

Previously, such subject matter – ordinary British life – had been the highly politicized terrain of ground-breaking documentary directors like Humphrey Jennings, whose films, such as Listen to Britain (1942), would prompt the young left-wing film director Lindsay Anderson to pass an assessment of British cinema in 1957 which predicted the vogue for today’s popular factual television but assumed, wrongly, that social conscience and the rights of the individual would take priority over mere sensationalism and ritual humiliation: ‘I want to make people – ordinary people, not just top people – feel their dignity and their importance. The cinema is an industry, but it is something else as well: it is a means of making connections. Now this makes it peculiarly relevant to the problem of community – the need for a sense of belonging together. I want a Britain in which the cinema can be respected and understood by everybody, as an essential part of the creative life of the community.

What Anderson regarded as the ordinary person’s right to importance and significance as a subject for documentary – ‘the creative treatment of actuality’, as he cited from documentarist John Grierson – has now become what the Sex Pistols once described as ‘a cheap holiday in other people’s misery’. In the Nineties, following on from the success of such docu-soap series as ‘Hotel’, ‘Airport’, ‘Pleasure Beach’ and ‘The Cruise’, TV companies fell over themselves to combine the phenomenal appeal of ‘real’ characters (Jane McDonald from ‘The Cruise’ has now presented ‘The National Lottery Live’, published her autobiography and played at the London Palladium) with the moments of conflict that typify the format of daytime-TV studio debates (or ‘studio rage’ as it has been called). Fact, not only stranger than fiction, was perceived to be stronger, even if one ITC report opined that popular factual programming was pandering to ‘the worst of human behaviour’.

As docu-soap and conflict television both scored impressive ratings, the fusion of the two forms has come to revolutionize the programming schedules: one Friday evening’s viewing on ITV in April 1999 ran as follows: ‘Parking Wars’, ‘Motorway Life’, ‘Family Feud’ and ‘Neighbours from Hell’. Even the BBC’s Business Unit got sexy with a docu-soap drama about company merge, ‘Blood on the Carpet’. On cable, Sky TV has given us the hugely successful ‘Ibiza Uncovered’ and myriad half-hour shows – ‘Tango Tango’, ‘Police, Action, Camera’ and ‘America’s Dumbest Criminals’ – which edits chunks of CCTV and surveillance video into a kind of ‘You’ve been Framed’ (or ‘You’ve been Arrested’) by the emergency services.

As a format, popular factual programming can be seen as a reinvention of social realism, but one that replaces the heightened objectivity of the naturalistic style with a heavily coerced core of subjective values. Other than being cheap, the key to PFP’s success is its manipulation of public curiosity, placing viewers in the centre of a situation which is bound to test their tolerance and arouse their sense of vulnerability. In this way, the reality which such programmes mediate is being massaged by various formal devices to appear more real than real: the surface of the images is lacklustre and flattened, drawing attention to the immediate prompts of the situation – litter, clutter or any evidence of the subject being unprepared for being famous for being ordinary; long, unedited shots (sometimes running for minutes) that create a sense of portentous tension, while the new technology of small, digital cameras can convey a sense of immediacy or claustrophobia.

Thus the medium is so stretched that the slightest word or gesture becomes amplified. The traditional role of voice-over narration – to suggest authority, time line or commentary – has been either removed or replaced by a kind of disembodied Chorus, which hints at off-camera action, the consequences of which we are about to see. On programmes that deal with such volatile areas as, for instance, debt collection, environmental health and the RSPCA, there is the sense of being suddenly dragged back to safety at the ultimate moment of conflict – when someone throws a punch – or allowed to linger for as long as possible – when someone bursts into tears.

In most cases, the ‘authenticity’ of popular factual programming has been used to promote its treatment of the subject matter as being, to some degree, in the public interest. But in many ways such a claim for the genre is nothing more than the old device of positing pornography as sociology – ‘Look at these photographs, aren’t they disgusting?’ This also puts any critique of authenticity into the kind of moral headlock common in debates over contemporary art: to condemn contested material as sensationalist or prurient is construed as merely reactionary or elitist. What remains, beyond an unwinnable contest of value judgements, is the seismic shifts of audience share and ratings that will dictate the direction of the programme-making.

From the point of view of the programme-makers, the genre is an inexhaustible as the collective index of social situations and professions. But such a position is endemic within the genre of social realism. Robert Baldick, describing the cultural circumstances in which J. K. Huysmans came to write against Against Nature (1884) refers to the disillusionment of social realist writers in France in the latter half of the nineteenth century: ‘the novel of adultery had been worked to death by writers great and small; and as for the social documentary, they saw little point in plodding through every trade and profession, one by one, from rat-catcher to stockbroker …’

Television’s answer to such a cyclical problem has been both to up the sensationalism in its wares and spread the techniques of PFP – the span of social realism – into other strands of the medium: celebrities such as Geri Halliwell and Martine McCutcheon are presented in a carefully edited form of stylized ‘docudrama’ – thus satisfying the public’s need to be shown behind the scenes of fame and offered a sniff of intimacy with the stars. Similarly the fact that traditional situation comedies were based on the very professions and areas of human interest that now comprise docu-drama – corner shops, department stores, hospitals, police stations, holiday camps – has prompted, for instance, Carlton to commission a situation comedy – ‘Pay and Display’ – which replicates the look of a docu-soap.

And herein lies the notion that veracity has become synonymous with confusion and dysfunctionalism – through our depictions of ourselves as vulnerable, damaged, volatile, matched by our fetishizing of realism. And this, perhaps, is an accurate reflection of contemporary society, revealing a truth about the way in which we live through our very attempts to come to terms with authenticity.

Or was it just that the networks were looking for ways of keeping vast, profitable ratings by teasing their audience with the suggestion that they might get to see people being beaten up, losing control or fucking? Or maybe it was all just a bit of fun. One argument about Reality TV was that it taught people how to empathize with one another; that as the age was ruled by territorial hostility and depersonalizing information technology systems, watching people interact with one another on TV (‘Look at those dinosaurs ripping one another apart!!!’) could somehow be edifying.

Championed by its creators as either a) an important breakthrough in television as a social medium, or b) honest-to-goodness, forward-with-the People soap ’n’ tabloid populism (which could also, in certain circles, mean a High Camp, how-deliciously-vulgar, semi-ironic exercise in slumming it in populism), the drift of such cloning in television would seem by the end of the decade to have reached critical mass. The walls of Jurassic Park were beginning to show cracks – the dinosaurs were head-butting the concrete as the viewers voted on who gets eaten next.

In other areas of cultural practice, the cult of the personal and the autobiographical had replaced Style Watching as the mainspring of self-expression and self-promotion. Never had there been a better time to declare yourself a one-person Bloomsbury Group. But where had this obsession with the personal, the confessional and a kind of omni-vision voyeurism actually come from? One answer might be that this was a generational neurasthenia, picking up on the Flaubertian notion (as picked up by his posthumous analyst-biographer Sartre) of art and creativity being the result of ‘the ever hidden wound’. So did we all feel wounded in some way?

Another answer to the question, though, might be boredom and a craving for one-shot celebrity, prompting a culture of ‘to the max’, which was spun to keep raising the pitch of its own superlatives. (‘Ultimate Terror! Ultimate Destruction! Look-at-those-dinosaurs!’)

From the early to late 1990s, across the temper of the times, the ‘ever hidden wound’ was being exposed, and made public. Could this disarm its artistic effect? For rather than undergoing the translation into a (Flaubertian – or even Warholian) model of art and creativity, in which the presence of the artist was converted wholly into art itself, the wound was being offered up, raw and direct, as a kind of celebration or cult of actuality in relation to the personal. Just what would people be prepared to do to get their little nugget of celebrity – to do their circuit of the dinosaur park? Throughout the second half of the 1990s, the answer to this – not surprisingly, perhaps – would be ‘absolutely anything’.

From the mutation and conflation of confessional culture and mediated ‘real life’ had emerged the broader trend of the barbarism of the self-reflecting sign – every bit as threatening, in its own way, as the gradually mutating dinosaurs unleashed by the founder of Jurassic Park’s blasphemous fiddling about with natural evolution. Shame on such grandiosity! We should have remembered the testament of Pee Wee Herman, returning from Texas with his beloved bicycle: ‘I’ve learned something on the road, you know – Humility!’

Tracey Emin

Sitting with the posture of an obedient child, Tracey Emin lights another Marlboro, inhales deeply, ponders for a few more seconds, and then pronounces: ‘Fundamentally fucked, but ideologically sound, that’s me.’ She concludes this definition of herself with one of those laughs you usually hear coming out of a phone box when three teenage girls are in there daring one another to ring up boys. And somehow this laugh speaks volumes about the woman.

For in her rapid ascent from the legions of Young British Art to being nominated for the Turner Prize, the whole point about Tracey Emin has been the fact that she expresses herself as the original precinct kid and disco girl: ‘Mad Tracey from Margate’ – as she described herself on a banner being towed behind a plane above the seafront of her home town.

As an example of myth-making within the history of art, you could say that Emin has used her perceived ‘ordinariness’ to much the same effect that Salvador Dali used his eccentricity, converting herself into a modern icon. In Britain, the yobs and the snobs have always had a soft spot for one another, and even the street-trader twang of Mad Tracey’s Thames Estuary accent has caused a shiver of delight down the spines of the male metropolitan gentry who tend to be in charge of the art world. For within the marble halls of the cultural establishment, a woman like Tracey Emin is wholly exotic.

But now Emin’s fame has splashed way over the edges of the enclosed, confusing world of contemporary art. In Tracey Emin – and the woman and her work are completely indistinguishable – the zeitgeist surfers of the late 1990s have identified the perfect mascot for contemporary Britain’s twin obsessions with real-life drama and public confession. Her art is entirely autobiographical, presenting only Tracey Emin’s highly visceral account of Tracey Emin, across a whole range of media from films and neon sculptures to writing and embroidery. And as it is a depressing fact that most women experience verbal abuse from male strangers, so much of Emin’s art is a direct response to all of the men who have called her a slut or a slag. Similarly, she explores her own relationship with those degrading labels, using a kind of child-like sincerity as her torch to see by.

Emin’s source material for the agony, confession and sexual memoirs that comprise the written pronouncements in her art begin with her birth. She describes the conception of herself and her twin brother, Paul, to be the result of a passionate affair ‘when my Mum and Dad got a crate of gin and a crate of scotch and fucked on the carpet in front of the fire – that’s how we came about’. With her distinguishing frankness, Emin has made no secret of the fact that her Turkish Cypriot father, a chef, was maintaining one household in London and another, with her mother, in Margate. Tragically, at the age of thirteen, Tracey was raped. Subsequent to this, she became sexually promiscuous ‘between the ages of thirteen and fifteen’, and more or less gave up attending school. Next stop would be art college.

By foregrounding sexual confession, accounts of her own despair and the innermost secrets of her relationships with friends, lovers and family, Emin has slipped into the whole current cultural climate which puts forward soft-core sociology as a subtle form of authorized, and highly ambiguous pornography: the daytime-TV studio debates that cleverly mingle sex with violence, the broadsheet columnists who offer up every last detail of their private lives as insights into the way we live now, and the docu-soap television programmes that derive their power from zooming in on the breakdown of their subjects.

‘That’s the whole reason why I’m popular,’ she says. ‘It’s the way the psyche of the nation is right now. Ten years ago, in terms of art, there was no room for me anywhere. No galleries would show my work or listen to my ideas. They’d presume me to be pathetic, and self-indulgent …’

Then Emin gives another of those laughs, and makes a kind of ‘yes, I know what you’re thinking’, eyes-raised-to-Heaven expression of self-criticism, before adding, ‘And there’s a lot of people who still think that I am pathetic and self-indulgent …’ When you meet her, Emin seems fragile to the point of bird-like: a petite, slender woman wearing embroidered mules and an elegantly simple dress, with a pink cashmere cardigan loosely knotted around her waist. She looks much younger than her thirty-seven years. The force of her personality seems to reside in her almond-shaped, coffee-coloured eyes – the strongest evidence of her Turkish Cypriot background – which can shift their expression from mean suspicion to melting vulnerability from one second to the next. She seems too small for the large red sofa on which she is sitting, in her vast, top-floor studio loft in the heart of Whitechapel – the district of London’s East End that is enjoying renewed fashionability due to its increasing population of young artists, and their accompanying galleries and cafes.

‘During Thatcherism,’ Emin continues, ‘if you didn’t fit in with the crowd, you were on the outside, and if you were on the outside then you were a nobody. And that was the general feeling for everything, no matter what your place was in the hierarchy: you had to fucking fit in, and if you didn’t – forget it. And the whole culture was built on that. But get rid of Thatcherism, and everything was turned around. Then, it became the cult of the individual, the loser and the outsider – because those were the types who had been ignored for fifteen years.

‘So suddenly we’ve got everything from “The Jerry Springer Show” to Princess Diana’s confessions on TV, or Paula Yates saying all those things the other night that – well, I didn’t find them difficult to listen to, but I did find them surprising. That your husband died from this auto-wanking thing rather than committing suicide. But that’s how much things have changed: there’s an audience who want to listen to these things now, whereas before there wouldn’t have been. It’s like people want to watch “East-Enders” because they don’t want to think about their own lives; then you’ve got this other thing where you home in on real people’s tragedies, lives and stories. And people feel that they can relate to that.

‘But that’s also why a lot of people don’t like my work – they’re sick of me. But the fact that I’m there is because of the psyche of the way that people are thinking now. And of course, that’s all going to change – I know that. But I’ve always done self-portraits, anyway. It’s like I read Julie Burchill’s autobiography, I Knew thatI was Right All Along, and I read her column, too, and there are loads of cross-over things with my work in that.’

Kneeling on the floor behind her, an assistant is working on one of Emin’s famous embroidered textiles: a large square montage of fabrics that shouts out its witty slogans (‘Planet Thanet’, for instance) in what look like letters made of fuzzy felt, as part of a vivid, visual cacophony of accusations, confessions and emblematic signage. At a glance, it looks like a multicoloured version of the graffiti in a bus shelter, but it is a strand of Emin’s work that is compelling, somehow managing to coerce the reader into studying every last centimetre of its public announcement of private feelings.

In terms of its artistic lineage, it brings to mind the feminist reinvention of embroidery samplers made by women artists in ‘The Subversive Stitch’ exhibition, or the ‘Fun City Bikini’ pieces made back in 1970 for the ‘Cunt Power’ issue of Oz magazine. Similarly, the famous poster campaign developed by the Madeley Young Women’s Group in the early 1980s, using slogans to educate boys in their social treatment of girls – ‘We hate you when you call girls slags’ for example, or, ‘What You Staring At?’ – rehearsed aspects of the sentiments and tactics that can be found in Emin’s embroideries.