Cultural cloning … now there was a thought. If you could just identify the most efficient little gobbets of an image or an idea – well, you could simply think of it as sampling, taking out the best bits and doing them like mad. Fads such as these were as old as the hills, of course (Hollywood cloning its stars, England its Beat groups) but the sheer extent of media in the 1990s – when the ‘mass’ in ‘mass media’ appeared to amplify a thousandfold on endlessly replicating channels, added to a burgeoning cultural conservatism – would make for an especially arid monoculture, based largely on promotability and marketing. The trick, for cultural practitioners, was to identify which of the principal species they were cloned from, and not try anything surprising. Culture could be led by market research, and very often was.
(Also, in the Nineties, the culture of superlatives demanded the most popular bits – the fondant centres, the strawberry cream, garlic butter – were simply lifted out of their context, so they became little more than a gooey mass. A diet of fondant centre …)
An example would be the extraordinary success of Helen Fielding’s romantic comedy, Bridget Jones’s Diary: the success of her idea was multi-cloned across fiction, film, advertising and print media, established as an entire demographic model and then used to sell the idea of Bridget Jonesness back to people who’d bought it in the first place. At the wallet end of marketing the proof of the cloning would be found in a multi-million-pound cosmetics promotion which offered ‘a Bridget Jones-style Diary’.
On terms such as these the idea of originality per se had become subordinate to the cloning process, and the baby dinosaurs crept out of their broken shells to rule the Earth again.
Cloned Media
Prior to the latest cloning boom in ‘zoo media’ (Chris Evans et al. to ‘The Girlie Show’) and ‘reality TV’, the process has perhaps reached its apotheosis with the phenomenal, pan-media, super-cloned success of Irvine Welsh’s novel Trainspotting. What began as a neo-realistic account of life and living death among Edinburgh drug addicts – couched in the vernacular tradition of James Kelman’s Booker Prize-winning novel, How Late It was, How Late – has become, by way of the movie, the soundtrack CD, the t-shirt and the advertising campaign, a form of media shorthand to signify Youth in general.
The greatest irony, perhaps, of this conversion of a novel into a free-floating logo for youthfulness was the appropriation of the orange and white graphics, made famous by the film of Trainspotting, to advertise the winter sale in French Connection’s chain of high street boutiques. There is a somewhat spooky connection between the desire to buy a ribbed brown cardigan and the need to identify, as a consumer, with the desperation of a heroin addict. And the proof of the cloning process would be inadvertently sealed by Sarah Champion, in her introduction to Disco Biscuits: New Fictions for the Chemical Generation, where she wrote, ‘we now have Trainspotting, the attitude’.
The cloning process, by converting issues and substance into the short-term safe harbour of provenly marketable ‘attitude’, has created a tendency within contemporary media – and even the broader span of contemporary culture – to fear any innovation that does not correspond to whatever attitude happens to be riding high. And at this point, cultural phenomena become merely vessels – the medium is the message, after all. Too true, Marshall!
Similarly, our decade-long love affair with mass retro-culture within the poppier packaging of just about everything (the cloning of suspended styles) would prompt the suggestion (with more than just a pulse of real panic in there) that at this rate we would ‘run out past’ by 2005 – that culture was faced with a chronic ‘retro shortage’. (A further Jeff Noonism would be the idea of ‘Post-Future’, a point at which the Future – as a thing, concept, temporal or descriptive – no longer existed. Thus there would also be ‘post-future kids’, for whom the idea of fashionability, modernity or keeping-up-to-speed would be utterly – and, you imagined, blissfully – meaningless.)
The endless cycles of pop cultural revivalism – the imagery of modern culture as a database and dressing-up box – describe the extent of retro-culture. You could also throw in the importance to Interior Design in the 1990s of Mid-century Modern styling (the Fifties coming up in price), which was morphed with the brushed-metal and bleached-oak effect of shop-fitting chic to create the basic Loft Look. Out of this came a kind of ‘Pod and Spike’ approach to Lifestyle – Pod being the cocooning impulse to feed on infantilism, and Spike being the exquisite good taste of the tamed avant-garde.
At its most expensive, styling went the whole way to Minimalism: this required lots and lots of open floor space to turn your loft into a gallery (Pod) – one science-fiction exotic cut stem of some spiky flora (Spike), a couple of Whitefriars vases perhaps, and the rest was whiteness. Hence the irony of the urban very rich seeking to define their Lifestyle by vast areas of emptiness – they and their possessions becoming exhibits, an aubergine or a Diptyque perfumed candle (Pod) taking on the aura of sculpture. More often than not, any actual art in a minimalist barn would be screaming how fucked-up it and everything around it was (Spike), or, at the very least, pronouncing an exquisite conundrum of neurotic self-concept.
Tim Noble and Sue Webster
Visceral yet lumpen, lurid yet delicate, the art of Tim Noble and Sue Webster is filled with contradictions. Encountering their work for the first time, a viewer will be struck by its mixture of vivacity and savagery. Mixed messages of love and death, ambition and nihilism, are carried on a style that alternates between cartoon delinquency and a kind of modern baroque.
Sue Webster was born in Leicester, in 1967, and Tim Noble in Gloucester, in 1966. The couple first met at Nottingham Polytechnic, in 1986, where they were both studying Fine Art. Their personal relationship, from this initial meeting, has become a major informant of their creative partnership as artists. The couple do not claim to be two people working as one artist; rather, the direction of their work is dictated and considered by the conflation of their separate ideas, enthusiasms and acquired skills. As Tim Noble remarks, ‘We are consistently inconsistent; that’s one of our greatest strengths.’
Over the course of their career, Tim Noble and Sue Webster have worked in many different artistic media: they make paintings, sculptures and assemblages of lights and neon. The couple have also turned their hands to fly-posting montaged pictures of themselves, and once held their own street tattoo parlour during the ‘Livestock Market’ art fair held in Rivington Street, east London, in 1997.
Above all, however, Tim Noble and Sue Webster have worked with the idea of themselves, as artists who are making works within the somewhat febrile climate of contemporary British culture. Their intentions are maybe explained by a work they made in 1998, called ‘Dirty White Trash (with gulls)’. In this piece, ‘six months’ worth of artists’ rubbish’ has been meticulously assembled and crafted – itself a contradictory act – in such a way that when light is projected upon the seemingly chaotic heap, it casts the shadow of the artists in perfect profile.
Caught with the accuracy of a silhouette, this shadow piece shows the couple relaxing back to back, the one sipping a glass of wine, the other enjoying a cigarette. Meanwhile, two stuffed seagulls are picking at a few discarded chips on the edge of the dumped rubbish. What could this tell the viewer about Tim Noble and Sue Webster as both a couple – they live together as well as work together, and they have an uncanny physical similarity, which makes them look like brother and sister – and as artists?
One answer might be that they regard themselves as determinedly careerist, within a line of work – the art world – that they regard as a complex game, and one in which cheats, short cuts or open ridicule of the prevailing mainstream can all be taken as valid moves. Following hard on the heels of this assessment of the pair, however, is the fact that their work can be divided into that which is extremely simple