Welcome to One Fine Show, where Observer highlights a recently opened exhibition at a museum not in New York City, a place we know and love that already receives plenty of attention.
Britain of the 1980s was a strange mixture of the future and the past: the future in that Margaret Thatcher’s attacks on unions and domestic industry would soon spread throughout the rest of the world, and the past because of the contemporary entrenchment of Albion as a special little storybook place, which resulted in depraved, inbred nationalism. For me, this dichotomy is best illustrated by the writer Alan Moore, whose V for Vendetta (1982-1985) and From Hell (1989) reached out along these two vectors to diagram a country that was, through its own actions, cursed.
These worst of times are documented in a new show at Tate Britain, “The 80s: Photographing Britain.” Showcasing the work of over seventy lens-based artists working or showing in the U.K. in that tumultuous decade, the exhibition captures that feeling of the party being over and people unprepared for what comes next.
How could you do a show like this without Martin Parr? His first book, The Last Resort (1986), documented seaside Brighton as it went from garish resort town to post-industrial hellscape. One photo from New Brighton, England (1983-85) shows three generations of pallor at the beach. Still repressing memories of the war, they gorge on Pepsi and crisps in unflattering bathing suits. What strange shapes will they try to force their country into? Another work from this series sees a tired but attractive woman working an ice cream stand as two shirtless boys openly ogle her chest.
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Not to say that there wasn’t some real joy in the era captured on film. They had i-D magazine, and the music was great. Included in this show is Buchholz + Buchholz Installation, Remix (1988-1992) by Wolfgang Tillmans, who studied at the Bournemouth and Poole College of Art and Design. The largest photo in that piece shows a woman at a club so lost in closed-eyed bliss that she allows another pair of hands to run through her hair as if they were her own. It is impossible to forget this photo once you’ve seen it, and somehow, it couldn’t have been taken anywhere else. The same could be said of Anna Fox’s Work Stations: Cafe, the City. Salesperson, 1988 (1988); the man at the counter in that photo has his eyes open and unfocused as he prepares to take a giant mechanical bite of some ketchup-laden national dish. That’s a kind of joy in England.
There is a quality to color photography from the country in this era that is unmistakable; the results are both too bright and too dull at the same time. The black and white ones are just as surreal. Karen Knorr’s Gentlemen series (1981-1983) offers a peep inside the terrifying gentlemen’s clubs of St. James—where there is much seating and the ceilings are dizzyingly high as if to accommodate Archons—paired with captions taken from Parliamentary speeches (e.g., “The Time has Come for us to play the Trump card. The more implacable we Play our hand in the Falklands affair the more likely we are to have a hand to play.”). The converse to this would be the photographs taken by the AmberSide collective, which documented the plights of the Newcastle working class losing their jobs thanks to the efforts of The Iron Lady. They display that cherished stiff upper lip, which was said to get them through the war with an external enemy.
Perhaps what makes these such good photographs is the self-inflicted nature of the plights from this decade. These people were expressing their emotions about a country that had begun to devour itself from the inside. Similarly, in these photos, all the drama is turned inwards at the edges of the frame.
“The 80s: Photographing Britain” is on view at Tate Britain through May 5th.
