Salvation Magazine Issue 1 - Magazine - Page 16
How an art collective that espoused anarchy and art
terrorism ended up drenching London galleries in a
mixture of grey paint and creative angst.
The justified rage of disenfranchised artists or
petulant posturing by art students in search of
15 minutes of infamy?
Dave Edmond delves into the colourful past of the
Grey Organisation to find out.
MONOTONE
Paradox, or maybe contradiction, I think
it’s one of them, perhaps it’s both? This article is about the Grey Organisation, but very
much it’s about Britain in the 1980’s; what
it was, and what its legacy is. Like the 1980’s
itself the story of the GO is riddled with
paradoxes, or maybe it’s contradictions.
I
n many ways 1980’s Britain was the
bleak, crumbling, dystopia that people
say it was. It saw the rise of Margaret
Thatcher and the disintegration of communities, empathy, and compassion, that
her government sneeringly redefined as
weaknesses. It saw the miners’ strike which
effectively destroyed trade unions, and
many aspects of working class values, maybe even starting the decline of the Labour
Party in its post war incarnation. Parts of
London, and many cities such as Birmingham, Liverpool, Edinburgh (and others),
were ravaged by a heroin epidemic which
mirrored the problems that were part of the
desperation felt by a growing underclass.
Britain went to war over the Falklands, a
small group of islands that were actually
near Argentina; though at the start most
people probably thought they were near
Scotland and were famous for jumpers. It
was the decade of the Brixton and Toxteth
(and other cities) riots, the Police’s notori-
14/Salvation
ous SPG “special patrol group”, and in 1990
the Poll Tax riots. BUT, at the same time, it
was a decade of great cultural change, great
music and fashion, and all those things
benefited from the poverty, decline, and
zeitgeist of discontent.
Ordinary people could still buy a house,
buying on credit was an easy process. On
a wave of Reaganite/Thatcher reforms ordinary people became share holders as
Thatcher sold off national assets. People
who previously may have been spivs or market traders became city traders as the City
of London opened its doors to a new age.
Football hooligans began wearing designer
clothes and swapped beer for wine. While
some people were dying with syringes in
their arms others were achieving wealth
and social status their parents could never have comprehended. Artists, musicians,
general bohemians lived for free in squats,
including in central London locations. Kids
in their teens or twenties found club venues
fallen on hard times and spawned a culture
of “one nighters” that provided a meeting
place, a catwalk, an information exchange,
a hub. Artists like Damien Hirst and Tracy
Emin propelled the new school of Young
British Artists. In the midst of all this came
the Grey Organisation
The origins of the GO can be found in the
Anarchist Street Army, an offshoot of the
punk movement of the late 1970’s. The early
punks had been about The Sex Pistols, The
Clash, bondage trousers, and Seditionaries
clothing. The ASA was a later harder edge
immersed in bands like Crass and much
more serious about anarcho left wing politics and class war. Four friends, Toby Mott,
Daniel Saccoccio, Tim Burke and Paul
Spencer, formed the GO in 1982, centring
their operations from a house they shared
in Bruce Road, Bow, East London..... Then
a grim neverland at bargain rental prices,
now fashionable east end living with an average property price around half a million
pounds. Dressing uniformly in grey suits,
shirts without ties, and with shaved heads
they looked a lot like comedian Alexei
Sayle or a skinhead sub genre, their image
has been described as a parody of yuppie
and Soviet “corporate monoculture”. So,
they had a distinctive look - important at
the time - and they also moved in the right
circles, also important. In 1984 the GO organised a concert for the band a Psychic
TV, a group - nee collective - that went far
beyond music into numerous experimental
areas of what you would loosely call music, performance, and art. And so we reach
1985 and the event that would earn GO
notoriety to last a life time - The attack on
Cork Street art galleries.
T
uesday May 21st. 1985. Members of
the GO began the evening drinking
in the French House, a small pub in
Soho popular with people who wouldn’t
like regular pub chains. They had a van
ready which contained cans of watered
down grey paint. Sometime - allegedly around midnight they donned boiler suits
and drove to Cork Street in nearby Mayfair
- a street famous, both then and now, for
its many art galleries. Stationing look outs
on the street corners (this is pre the time
of blanket coverage CCTV) they moved
down Cork Street taking the cans from the
back of the van and flinging the grey paint
inside over the windows of the galleries.
After the deed was done they went to the
Zanzibar, an upmarket, late night, private
members bar in Covent Garden. Bearing
in mind they had spread posters around,
and left press releases boasting of the “art
terrorist” action at UK newspapers ground
zero, Fleet Street, it wasn’t hard for the police to solve this mysterious act of vandalism. Shortly after the group were arrested
amidst a flurry of press headlines and great
photos. The GO were banned from central
London and made several court appearanc-
