On leaving Nottingham, the couple took up a residency, in 1989, in the sculpture studios at Dean Clough, in Halifax. It might be taken as eloquent of their artistic temperament – or of the recurring motifs within their later work, suggesting a desire to keep themselves at arm’s length from their peers – that Noble and Webster headed north just as the movement that would become mediated as Young British Art was beginning to gather momentum in London.
As Damien Hirst had curated his influential ‘Freeze’ show at the PLA building in London’s Docklands the previous year, so within two years the mere idea of ‘young British art’ would have become a usefully malleable phenomenon. Taken up by the media, as much as the patrons, galleries and collectors, this new direction in British art – as it merged with other pop cultural strands – would be taken to represent the temper of the zeitgeist.
In 1992, Tim Noble came to London to study on the sculpture MA course at the Royal College of Art. By this time, the whole phenomenon of Young British Art was following, point for point, the route between a fledgling metropolitan bohemia (those former urban badlands, colonized by artists) and ‘uptown patronage’ which the American cultural commentator, Tom Wolfe, had defined in his book The Painted Word nearly two decades earlier.
Cutting-edge contemporary art, ‘warm and wet from the Loft’ – as Wolfe describes it – can enjoy a relationship with its patrons that benefits both parties. The ensuing social and cultural milieu created by this relationship – and as seen, in Britain, to have been achieved through the mediated phenomenon of ‘yBa’ – becomes a new kind of orthodoxy, influential in taste-making, and provoking inevitable response.
The translation of young British art into a social phenomenon, with its own cast of characters and social types, and its particular topography around the Hoxton and Shoreditch districts of east London, seems central to an understanding of the earlier work of Tim Noble and Sue Webster. As the couple moved to Hoxton in 1996, holding their first solo exhibition, ‘British Rubbish’, at the Independent Art Space, they arrived on the ‘YBA’ scene as the partying of that movement was already approaching its second wind. For Noble and Webster, the appropriation of ‘YBA’’s own idea of itself – as an oven-ready phenomenon, as it were – became their point of intervention.
In terms of their style, Noble and Webster have been claimed by some critics to revive the aesthetics – and tactics – that were set in place by the first wave of British punk rock between 1976 and 1978. Too young to have participated in this movement as anything other than youthful observers, Noble and Webster can be seen to have taken a received idea of punk – the strategies, the baggage and the healthy bloody-mindedness – and applied it to their own generation’s attempts to re-route popular culture through the media of contemporary art.
Prior to ‘British Rubbish’, Noble and Webster had already made works that centred on the sloganeering, fly-posting and do-it-yourself ethos of punk pamphleteering. Tim Noble had usurped a billboard poster competition run by Time Out magazine in 1993, with his work ‘Big Ego’. The competition was open to people who had been resident in London for twenty-five years (which Noble had not) and to this extent Noble’s design – a crudely assembled poster, featuring his face and the statement, ‘Tim Noble Born London 1968’ – was revelling in its own falsehood. Noble, after all, was born in Gloucester in 1966.
Similarly, in 1994, Noble and Webster doctored an image of the legendary artists Gilbert & George, by simply sticking their own faces over those of the original. They called this work ‘The Simple Solution’, and it followed the same thinking – in terms of making a creative virtue of hijacking an existing graphical device – as Noble’s disruption of the Time Out poster competition.
If one of the distinguishing characteristics of the ‘Young British Artists’ – as a mediated, social type – was to own or affect an image of ‘dumbed down’ rebelliousness (the ‘Boho Dance’ in Tom Wolfe’s definition of the type), then Noble and Webster were amplifying this tactic to the point of caricature.
More than one critic has remarked how their street tattoo parlour, with its amateurish, felt-tip-pen ‘tattoos’, exposed the way in which a previously working-class, light industrial area of London had become colonized in the name of art from the power-base of a bourgeois economy and lifestyle. This was Wolfe’s ‘Boho Dance’ made visible. As David Barrett was to write of the event: ‘Young artists finally had the hardcore tattoo they’d always wanted, and they strutted up and down Charlotte Road like a bad actor doing the LA Bloods.’
By the middle of the 1990s, however, Noble and Webster were beginning to plan intensely crafted pieces. Inspired by a trip to Las Vegas – although they say that watching videos of films about Las Vegas inspired them more – the couple began to work with light pieces. Exuberant, vivacious and redolent of the perverse glamour of British travelling fun-fairs, these light pieces took the ‘trash aesthetic’ of rockabilly gothicism and turned it into free-floating emblems of desire and sensory overload.
The visual joyousness of these pieces – simplistic promises of glamour, carnival and success – were matched by two further developments in the work of Noble and Webster. In many ways, their do-it-yourself aesthetic had become the signature of their vision: that despite themselves, almost, they were honing a view of contemporary culture based on the imminent implosion of cultural materialism itself.
What was emerging in their work, through their monolithic model of themselves as a quasi-neanderthal couple – ‘The New Barbarians’ (1997) – and their gruesome projections of themselves off the contours of garbage, was a targeted celebration of aimless nihilism. This was not the pro-active nihilism preached by Nietzsche, as a phase of spiritual empowerment. Rather, in the imagery of decay, violent death and destruction, honed with wit and tempered with sentimentality, this was the imagery of romantic nihilism: tribal, insular and dancing on the imagined grave of a society that might one day choke to death on the sheer waste of its own consumer products. The triumph of terminally dumbed-down culture.
In one of their most recent works, ‘British Wildlife’ (2000), Noble and Webster have consolidated the themes and techniques of their ‘shadow’ pieces. As with their obsessive involvement in crafting the ‘trash’ of their ‘white trash’ pieces, the couple have assembled a quantity of inherited stuffed animals – themselves reminiscent of a forlorn, morbid notion of Britishness – which will cast a monumental shadow of their combined profiles.
Through working with the legacy of taxidermy, in which they can describe the nuances and cruelties of the natural world, Noble and Webster present the viewer with a compelling tableau of morbidity and ghoulishness. If ‘Dirty White Trash (with gulls)’ put forward the idea that Noble and Webster saw themselves as trash, trashing in turn a rubbished society, then ‘British Wildlife’, with its poetically archaic assemblage of stuffed animals, seems to amplify the themes of mortality. In all of this, however, they celebrate their relationship with one another, reversing the sentiments of the classical ‘Et in Arcadia Ego’, to suggest that in the midst of death there is life.
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.