As ever, Devoto’s stance was one of disaffection and dissatisfaction – rejecting the early complacency into which punk rock so readily dropped, prior to becoming little more than a picture postcard parody of itself. With Magazine, he explored the causes of this stance through lyrics and performance at once disturbing and playful, self-aware and endlessly self-questioning.
Musically, Magazine comprised the formidable teaming up of Dave Formula, John McGeoch and the legendary Barry Adamson, whose own solo work would pursue the idea of attempting to solve the case of oneself. In hindsight, Magazine would have found their place in the history of music on the strength of just one of their early recordings, ‘Shot by Both Sides’.
‘Magazine was its own particular blend of trying to contain a certain sort of intelligence in that sort of music. One of my partners of those years, asking about a Magazine lyric, said, “Is that about you and me?” And I said, “You’ll never know because I swap them around.” But also in Magazine there was the idea of me addressing the audience and making ambiguous pronouncements about our respective roles – your idea of me, and my idea of you. And I was really playing with that during the period of the first two Magazine LPs – when I was in the prime of my ambition. I’m still proud of Magazine. Half a lifetime of feeling went into it.
‘And I’m sure that I tried to rant on about the importance, to me, of paradox and contradiction. That there is some state of grace or point of ultimate knowledge in trying to come to an aesthetic understanding of these things. I’m trying to explain the Magazine song, “Shot by Both Sides”, I suppose, and this is the area which I’ve explored in everything I’ve done since the Buzzcocks.’
In many ways, Devoto’s life since adolescence, when he first started to write, has been an epic of self-portraiture. Even now, he is writing his autobiography and recording it as a spoken word document, to be left to the National Sound Archive after his death. He has barely reached the middle Seventies and the work is already twenty chapters – ten hours – long, including one hundred and fifty samples of music. Not surprisingly, one of his favourite authors is Marcel Proust. His own writing, as a lyricist, has articulated his personal position with an eloquence and originality that rivals much of the best contemporary fiction and drama.
But at the heart of his constant enquiry – as revealed with brooding poignancy on his final LP with Luxuria, Beast Box – seems to lie a fear of what he might discover if he could actually answer his own questions about himself. ‘They’ve opened the Beast Box haven’t they?’ he concludes the title track of that LP, and even on the haunting crescendo of ‘Railings’, which he recorded in 1998, for the rock group Mansun, his distinctive voice appeared to croon from its own grave, ‘Don’t burn your hand on the window, if you just want to take in the view …’
‘Life is hell,’ says Devoto during this interview, neither joking nor seeking to shock, ‘I don’t think I’ve ever strayed very far from that idea since I was about twenty. Now, in the last ten years, since I’ve essentially quit music, I’ve come to some kind of accommodation with that. But at a blood and brain level, that’s really how I feel, and it’s one big reason why so far I don’t have kids.
‘From where I was, in 1990, I suppose that most people in my position would try to find another niche for themselves in the music business. But I have too much damaging, damaging pride. And if you take my lack of confidence, and you take my pride – well, there you really are shot by both sides.’
Contemporary Interventionism
In the Whitechapel Art Gallery’s survey of British experimental art from 1965 to 1975, ‘Live in Your Head’, there was a work by Keith Arnatt from 1972 in which the artist had been photographed standing on a busy street, wearing a placard which proclaimed, ‘I’m a Real Artist’.
Dour and faintly absurd, yet with a confrontational edge that flits between threat and polemic, Arnatt’s street sloganeering seems particularly relevant to a new sensibility that has emerged in contemporary British art, and that seeks to rearrange or dismantle the purpose and cultural status of current artistic activity.
In ‘Live in Your Head’ the foregrounding of documentation over aesthetics, for example, and of politics over individualism, could be seen as a direct rehearsal of the ICA’s ‘Crash!’ exhibition, or the ‘democracy!’ show curated by students on the Visual Arts Administration MA at the Royal College of Art. Taken as a gear-change in the zeitgeist, these shows and a host of lesser-known pamphleteers, activists, interventionists and ideologues, comprise a distinct reaction – or response – to the agenda set within the visual arts throughout the 1990s.
On the one hand, there is a sense in which dissident, confrontational or otherwise socially engaged artistic practice would seem to become disqualified the moment that it has any relation with the ‘elite’ white cube of the gallery, or the social systems of the art world. On the other, within the gradations of artistic dissent – from artists engaged in direct street action, through to those who are actively reinventing the notion of art in the community – there still seems to be room for such work to be curated without losing its integrity.
‘Many of the major new galleries have engaged artists to work with communities in imaginative education and outreach programmes,’ says Teresa Gleadowe, the Course Director of the Visual Arts Administration MA at the Royal College of Art; ‘Such activities have little relation with traditional studio-based practice – they involve public participation, research, conversation, exploration, shared interests and causes. Social engagement is a common concern. Most of these projects do not result in the production of art objects, and some may not easily be recognized as art at all.
‘The “democracy!” exhibition took on the job of representing some aspects of this activity and of finding ways of presenting it in a gallery situation. This is a difficult and even paradoxical endeavour, which demands from the visitor a level of deep engagement – reading, listening, forensic investigation. As an exhibition subject it is a risky enterprise, and one which might not easily be undertaken by an established institution. It seems appropriate that young curators, working within the research environment of a curatorial course, should give themselves the task of making manifest practices of this kind.’
Evidence that such socially engaged art practice is swiftly gaining in significance, raising a host of issues related to venue, craft, distribution and commodity, can be seen at a glance from some of the artists involved in ‘democracy!’. Sarah Tripp’s documentary project, for example, interviewed a network of people about their faith and belief; Group Material – best known for their ‘AIDS Timeline’ – were an artists’ collective based in New York’s Lower East Side, ‘committed to art’s potential to effect social political change’. Also for ‘democracy!’ Jeremy Deller worked with elderly people, ‘opening the doors of the Royal College’s Senior Common Room to the members of a local drop-in centre’.
Taken point for point, a freshly politicized approach to making art can be seen to exchange the sexual, nihilistic, aesthetically exquisite and pop culturally individualist agenda of last decade’s ‘Sensation’ generation, and replace it with a virtually existentialist reassessment of art’s capacity and function. Where the lucrative visceral shock tactics of Emin, Hirst or the Chapman brothers could be seen as the convulsions of outraged romanticism, so the various practitioners and collectives of the latest sensibility appear to be based in a kind of philosophical ethnography, questioning social and cultural power structures from the outside, and developing an art that is largely impossible to own, display or accord a financial value.
For the novelist, pamphleteer and founder of the Neoist Alliance, Stewart Home – who famously went on ‘Culture Strike’ between 1990 and 1993, refusing to make any new work at all – this relationship between culture, commodity and distribution is central to both his writing and its publication. He regards both Tracey Emin, with whom he once exhibited, and Damien Hirst as artists who have ‘recouped’ on his ideas (his ‘Culture Strike’ bed, and his ‘Necrocard’,