THEM

DUGGIE FIELDS DEREK JARMAN ANDREW LOGAN LUCIANA MARTINEZ KEVIN WHITNEY

Andrew Logan interviewed by Derek Jarman, Alternative Miss World, 1973 ( Š Johnny Dewe-Mathews)

DUGGIE FIELDS DEREK JARMAN ANDREW LOGAN LUCIANA MARTINEZ KEVIN WHITNEY 22 January–15 February 2020 20 Cork Street London W1S 3HL +4 4 (0) 20 7734 1732 redfern-gallery.com

Andrew Logan, Alternative Miss World, 1973 ( Š Johnny Dewe-Mathews)

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FOREWORD

By James Birch I first came across “Them” on the hot summer’s day of the 19th of May 1974 when I was invited by Joanie de Vere Hunt and her daughter Emma to a party on the Biba roof-garden.

I was still in my teens and was stunned by this fabulous crowd dressed in incredible outfits. There were bands playing in the Rainbow Room downstairs including Ian Dury’s Kilburn and the High Roads and Bad Company.

I was introduced to Andrew Logan, in white artist’s smock, large bead necklace, dark glasses and over-sized white beret. I was immediately fascinated. Later on I met all of “Them” at one of Joanie’s soirées’ about the time of Peter York’s article and was introduced to their work. I was impressed and quickly realized it was the next oeuvre after Pop Art: refreshing, bright, garish, big and beautiful.

It is now more than forty years since Peter York’s article, that this exhibition is inspired by, captured a time — perhaps the last time — before culture became commodified. While that moment seems fleeting, it has nonetheless endured. The art created by the artists remains fresh and exciting, almost timeless, and still invested with the power to provoke, excite, amaze and disorientate. So this exhibition is an homage to “Them” for a vision that changed my life.

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Duggie Fields at home

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THEM

By Polly Stenham Luciana Martinez de la Rosa shot out of the suburbs with one breast exposed. A post-Pop pre-punk Lady Godiva, Luciana was a radical muse with radical roots. She remains poorly documented (on IMDb she is still ‘alive’) yet is arguably the lynchpin of the group of artists featured in this show. She is the only significant woman but also the least well-known practitioner of the group. This is in part because of her death at 47 from meningitis – a death as dark and as disfiguring as Kevin Whitney’s paintings of Luciana are deifying and passionate. Any retrospective glance at Duggie Fields’, Andrew Logan’s , Kevin Whitney’s and Derek Jarman’s works will reveal her importance within the group. In glass, glitter, stencil and cellulose they were drawn to capturing her again and again.

Through her you see ‘Them’.

‘Them’ as defined by Peter York is a code of ethics, a comment on fashion rather than fashion itself. ‘Them put their ideas in their living; they wear their rooms, eat their art.’ Nowhere is this more epitomised than in Andrew Logan’s Alternative Miss World. A pageant of the surreal and marvellous that every artist in this show attended – either as judge, performer or part of the production team.

One of the most iconic photographs of Alternative Miss World shows Luciana Martinez as Logan’s co-host, one breast out, cupped by a luxurious white fur trim.

In her costume the mongrel of ‘Them’ aesthetics is clear: the decadence of glam and pop, the attitude of punk. A melting pot of the camp and controversial, playful and shocking.

The glamorous and pop-tastic carnival often ended in public sex, piss through the ceiling and happy violence before the lights blacked out and barefoot punters sliding on food and vomit made a feral scramble to safety.

There is an important paradox to the effervescence and anarchy. The fun and games are deadly serious. The role of play for these artists is not just entertainment, but rather as a comment on the nature of distraction itself. An escape from the tyranny of survival – especially in a group marred by so much early violent death (Derek Jarman and Chelita also died horribly young). The serious ‘play’ in the work has a more existential function than first visible.

As an architecture student Logan wrote his thesis on leisure. In it he imagines a world in which there is no distinction between work and play, ‘people need to know what to do with their leisure – create things, do things, not beat up old ladies out of boredom’. Free time is where frightening questions and thoughts can flourish. Play can fill this hole in the dark, the colours and the glitter going some way to rehabilitate the blacked body of a 36-year-old muse and friend alone in New York. It is both provocation and salve. As Logan himself said, “Cover your glasses, I’m about to scatter you with gold’.

The point is not to be attractive, but to be interesting.

If this idea is a direct prelude to punk, then AMW is a large scale metaphor for this cultural transition.

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Gerald Incandela, Alternative Miss World, 1973 ( Š Johnny Dewe-Mathews)

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THEM

By Barry Miles Them, as a name for an art movement, didn’t catch on. Perhaps because unlike Impressionism, Cubism or Surrealism, it didn’t describe what the artists did. This is understandable. Them [they] are hard to define. They issued no manifesto, they had no defined objective, they were allusive, fugitive, occupying a nebulous hinterland: post-Pop, pre-Punk.

Fundamentally, like most other art movements, they were a friendship group, close friends whose work practices gave rise to collaborations. For example, it was in Duggie Fields’ immaculately over-designed flat in Earl’s Court that Derek Jarman filmed his Andy Warhol-style Andrew Logan Kisses the Glitterati [1973] and At Home with Duggie Fields [1974].

Derek became a part of the gay art community during his years at the Slade School of Art [1963-6] and through his shows at the Lisson Gallery1: ‘through David [Hockney] and Patrick Procktor I met all the young painters; this changed my life. There were shows and parties and nights on the town; we all fell in and out of each other’s beds. It was enriching. Sex was bonding, pedagogic, a way of learning.’ 2 But then he met Peter Logan, a fellow student at the Slade, and his younger brother Andrew, who was then studying at the School of Architecture in Oxford, who both loved to organize parties. Derek gravitated to the younger crowd and moved into a studio with Peter.

Andrew Logan: ‘You have to remember that in London in those days there were very few artists and only a handful of clubs, there wasn’t that culture, it simply didn’t exist. [Derek] was very gregarious and loved people [ …] There were always people around; very rarely did you get Derek on his own.’3 Jarman biographer Tony Peake wrote, ‘There were the innumerable young men he met in bars or on the

Heath. There were fellow artists: Duggie Fields, Kevin Whitney, Luciana Martinez, John Dewe-Mathews. There were writers, models, musicians…’4 Jon Savage quotes Andrew Logan: ‘By 1975-76 the mood was changing. The ecstatic permutations of the glam era were being replaced by something harder that was more in tune with the oil crisis and recession. An early harbinger can be seen in At Home With Duggie Fields (1974), which captures the pioneering artist and living sculpture at the peak of his futuristic impact, as Deco retro turned into 1950s nostalgia and ‘austerity binge’ aesthetics: the paint-spattered, Jackson Pollock floor and proto-punk leather-jacketed young man.’5 In fact, many of them were not exclusively recognised as painters at all: Andrew Logan was as well known at that time for his Alternative Miss World pageant, which as of 2018 has been staged fourteen times intermittently since March 1972, and for his mirror jewelry. Derek Jarman was seen as a film-maker – Sebastiane [1976] and before that as a stage designer: Ken Russell’s The Devils [1971]; The Savage Messiah [1972].

Although Duggie Fields had been given solo exhibitions as early as 1971 in prestigious Mayfair galleries, receiving critical and commercial recognition for his distinctive post-Pop painting style, his greatest fame came a little later, in 1982 as a fashion icon. Duggie told Anthony Everitt, ‘Patently, art is linked with fashion and style.

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My paintings refer to those things.’6 At the age of 37, with his distinctive Bill Haley kiss-curl, he was the face of Shiseido’s teenage range, named ‘Perky Jean’, and was mobbed by young girls on the streets of Tokyo. Duggie: ‘This brand despite Shiseido’s usual sophistication was a “cute” youth line, and I was somehow to be its image, for a season.’7 Both Kevin Whitney and later Luciana Martinez de la Rosa (Lulu) were well exhibited painters but they were also known as actors in Derek Jarman’s films: The Art of Mirrors [1973], Sulphur [1973] and cameos in Sebastiane [1976]. Luciana is also in Jubilee [1978] and Corfe Film / Troubadour [1975] and they both appeared at Andrew Logan’s Alternative Miss World. Luciana died an untimely death from meningitis in New York, aged 47 in October 1995 and her paintings were not seen again until The Gallery, Liverpool, showed them in 2017.

Kevin, obviously, stars in Derek’s Kevin Whitney [1973].

Kevin’s wide interests go back to his art school origins, first at Ipswich where he made experimental sound recordings with Brian Eno and later when he was at Chelsea School of Art where he filmed Psychedelia [1969] with Syd Barrett. He exhibited at Tate Young Contemporaries and was later given a solo show at DM Gallery where David Bowie purchased two of his paintings. It was not until 1982 though, when Whitney became the first ever official artist to the Olympic Games, that his art attracted greater recognition.

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Though they had much in common – they were all figurative artists, though their figuration often had abstract elements - it is their very diversity that enables us to group Them together as Post Modernists in the sense that one of the core definitions of post modernism (if one can define it at all) is that they should transcend genres, to blur boundaries, and this they did. They saw no barrier between fine art and popular culture and were happy to recycle ideas and images from both. Image appropriation, a post-Pop Art nostalgia and a tendency towards pastiche rather than parody, all added post- modern elements to their work which often seemed to have invisible quotation marks surrounding it. Of course, as postmodernism only entered the critical lexicon in 1979, they are also pre-post-modernists.8 Irony was much valued.

Performance art is post-modernist, and Alternative Miss World was certainly that.

There were many others in their friendship group who appeared with them in events and happenings and whose ideas influenced Them. A prime example would be dramatic fashion designer Zandra Rhodes.

Andrew Logan was her companion to the Australian TV awards in 1982 and they stopped off in India on the way back. ‘For me it was like going home. I felt a great affinity. Such a bombardment of the senses.’9 India, of course, has a great tradition of using mirror and Andrew has been one of the few sculptors in Britain until Anish Kapoor came along decades later to use it so extensively.

Not easily catagorised, Them, as a ‘g roup’ have been largely overlooked by an art world intent on commodifying art production, yet they were part of the art historical fabric that exercised a subtle influence that reached from Bowie, Bolan and Ferry ultimately to the YBAs. Them were among the precursors of the New Romantics, another cultural grouping that critics found it hard to label. Duggie Fields’s personal style, his flat and his art were all as carefully studied as the living-art lives of Gilbert and George and had been extensively covered by style and fashion magazines. And there has never been an explosion in the dressing-up box that can surpass Andrew Logan’s Alternative Miss World, and its gorgeous participants. Even Derek Jarman experimented with flamboyant clothing: ‘On more than one occasion I wore a cloak from Sebastiane down the King’s Road – briefly dyed my hair bright orange to win Andrew Logan’s Miss World. Bigger brighter earrings, and in the long hot summer of ’76 I carried a fan.’10 You recognize Them when you see Them and realise that they have been here all the time.

1. Jarman won the Peter Stuyvesant award for painting at the Tate Young Contemporaries show in May 1967. That same month he opened the Lisson Gallery in a joint show with Keith Milow followed by a one-man show there.

2. Derek Jarman. At Your Own Risk, London: Hutchinson, 1992. p22 3. ‘Derek Jarman as Filmmaker’ by Jon Savage in Derek Jarman’s Sketchbooks, London: Thames & Hudson, 2013. p21 4. Tony Peake. Derek Jarman. London: Little Brown 1991. p151 5. ‘Derek Jarman as Filmmaker’ by Jon Savage in Derek Jarman’s Sketchbooks, London: Thames & Hudson, 2013. p21 6. Quoted in Anthony Everitt, ‘Duggie Fields’ Ikon Gallery, London 1980.

7. Duggie Fields. ‘They Came Waving Their Magic Wand’ duggiefields.com (accessed Nov 2019) 8. Francois Lyotard. La Condition Postmoderne, Paris 1979.

9. Interview with Rosemary Bailey, spring 1984.

10. Derek Jarman. Modern Nature. London: Century 1991. p96

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Duggie Fields, 1973 ( Š Johnny Dewe-Mathews)

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DUGGIE FIELDS F i r e s i d e C o o k e 1 9 6 9 A c r y l i c o n c a n v a s 1 5 3 × 1 9 0 c m

DUGGIE FIELDS B l o n d e w i t h s t r a t e g i c a l l y p l a c e d C u s h i o n 1 9 7 0 A c r y l i c o n c a n v a s 7 6 × 1 0 1 c m

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DUGGIE FIELDS S t u d y f o r S h e e r O b s c u r o 1 9 7 5 A c r y l i c o n p a p e r 4 6 × 41 c m

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DUGGIE FIELDS S t u d y f o r S M a r t 1 9 7 6 P e n c i l o n p a p e r 41 × 41 c m

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DUGGIE FIELDS S M a r t 1 9 7 6 A c r y l i c o n c a n v a s 1 6 3 × 1 6 3 c m

DUGGIE FIELDS S t u d y f o r M e t a p h y s i c a l L e g P u l l 1 9 7 6 A c r y l i c o n p a p e r 3 0 × 3 0 c m

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DUGGIE FIELDS S t u d y f o r ‘J o i e d e V i v r e ’ 1 9 7 8 A c r y l i c o n p a p e r 6 0 × 5 0 c m

Derek Jarman, 1973 ( Š Johnny Dewe-Mathews)

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DEREK JARMAN S t u d y f o r L a n d s c a p e 1 9 6 6 M i x e d m e d i a o n p a p e r 1 7. 5 × 2 3 . 5 c m

DEREK JARMAN P y r a m i d i n L a n d s c a p e 1 9 6 6 O i l o n c a n v a s 3 3 × 3 7 c m

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DEREK JARMAN N e w Ye a r s ’ E v e 1 9 7 8 E t c h e d s l a t e 1 5 × 2 0 c m

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DEREK JARMAN T h e K i n g d o m O v e r t h e S e a 1 9 8 7 O i l , g l a s s , w a x a n d m e t a l o n c a n v a s 41 × 3 1 c m

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Andrew Logan on Biba Roof Garden, 1974 ( © Johnny Dewe-Mathews)

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ANDREW LOGAN O r c h i d 1 9 7 1 F i b r e g l a s s , c a n v a s a n d p a i n t 2 1 w × 8 0 d × 1 9 0 h c m

ANDREW LOGAN B i r t h , L i f e , D e a t h 1 9 8 1 G l a s s , f i b r e g l a s s a n d r e s i n 1 7 0 w × 1 2 0 d × 1 2 0 h c m

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Luciana Martinez de la Rosa

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LUCIANA MARTINEZ DE LA ROSA P r u P r u 1 9 8 2 O i l a n d p a s t e l o n c a n v a s 1 8 3 × 2 1 3 c m

LUCIANA MARTINEZ DE LA ROSA P r i n c e s s J u l i a 1 9 7 9 P a s t e l a n d c r a y o n o n p a p e r 1 1 1 × 7 6 c m

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LUCIANA MARTINEZ DE LA ROSA L i l i e s 1 9 8 1 O i l a n d p a s t e l o n c a n v a s 9 1 × 1 2 2 c m

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Kevin Whitney, 1974 ( © Johnny Dewe-Mathews)

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KEVIN WHITNEY C h e l i t a 1 9 6 9 O i l o n c a n v a s 1 2 0 × 1 8 0 c m

KEVIN WHITNEY R e d F e a t h e r L u c i a n a 1 9 7 6 O i l o n c a n v a s 3 1 × 2 5 . 5 c m

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KEVIN WHITNEY P o r t r a i t o f J o h n M a y b u r y 1 9 8 0 O i l o n c a n v a s 2 4 × 1 0 c m

KEVIN WHITNEY A n t o n i a 1 9 6 9 O i l o n c a n v a s 2 7 4 × 1 7 0 . 5 c m

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KEVIN WHITNEY G e o f f r e y 1 9 6 9 O i l o n c a n v a s 1 5 2 × 1 5 2 c m

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KEVIN WHITNEY Tu a n 1 9 7 4 O i l o n c a n v a s 1 6 8 × 2 1 3 c m

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KEVIN WHITNEY L u c i a n a N u d e 1 9 8 0 O i l o n c a n v a s 1 5 2 × 1 0 4 c m

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Gerald Incandela, Alternative Miss World, 1973 ( Š Johnny Dewe-Mathews)

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THEM

By Adrian Dannatt

The architect Louis Kahn would ask ‘what does the building want to be?’ and likewise one might ponder ‘what does the exhibition want to be?’ What does it mean to mount a show on Them right now, what are the implications and lessons within our current aesthetic climate ? There is certainly enough pleasure in itself in re-reading Peter York’s Them, his seminal essay first published in Harper’s & Queen in October 1976. What used to be a mere magazine article turns into an ‘essay’ when enclosed in book covers and laid down in our cultural cellar for forty years and Style Wars, the volume of writings in which it is included, published in 1980, makes rich reading today. One can happily go through it line by line, paying proper attention like some New Criticism ‘close reading’, a formalist attention to detail which belies the supposedly superficial or transitory nature of the content.

Of course ever since modish literary criticism became about ‘texts’ rather than sonnets and sestinas, a forty year old magazine article is just as worthy of serious scrutiny as Beowulf. Indeed subgenera ‘style journalism’ has rather come into vogue, whether Dick Hebdige’s 1979 book Subculture: The Meaning of Style (and his subsequent celebrity as the secret hero of I Love Dick by Chris Kraus) or Rachel Kushner blurbing the late Glenn O’Brien who got his own recent full-scale academic conference at the prestigious Center for Fiction in Brooklyn. Reading York’s texts, with their dense mesh of allusions and cross-references to the very material of the material world, socks and haircuts and shoes, proves oddly like reading Perec’s La Vie mode d’e mploi or

other classics of the Nouveau Roman like Nathalie Sarraute’s Tropisms with its short vignettes capturing brief scenes in obsessively precise detail. And the Nouveau Roman with its focus on objects, things, subordinating plot and character to the details of the world, leads eventually to Nicholson Baker - as opposed to Danny Baker- and his fetish of minute surface detail, versions of what York terms ‘ all these little details which may or may not mean everything under the sun…’

York’s essays also have some impressively prescient references worthy of any futurologist, whether ‘the great job cut-down’ of 1974 which is still very much with us, or his use of the term ‘onstream’, as one word, an early version of today’s ‘online’ ubiquity when he writes that ‘throughout the seventies everything was onstream and it was available all the time…’

Certainly it is interesting to try and track the remaining traces of the culture that York describes, a fleeting reference to New York’s Paradise Garage matched today by a fashionable restaurant that recently opened in Peckham called ‘Levan’ after the DJ Larry Levan, or Millennial Pink and those other very now pastel shades so overtly derived from the Memphis design group of Milan. Indeed there is a whole subset of contemporary art and design practice based around revisiting the tropes of post-modernist design, which Charles Jencks famously dated as beginning in architecture in the year 1972; thus the artist Mark Leckey found fame with his film Fiorucci Made me Hardcore, in homage to that fashion brand who opened their first London shop in 1975, whilst Pablo Bronstein devotes himself to researching the

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essential post-modern buildings of Britain, as a now historical movement.

In fact one could easily conceive of an alternative exhibition of neo-Them and new neo-camp contemporary artists, a very specific strand in current practice as exemplified by the Nick Mauss show Transmissions at the Whitney in 2018 devoted to a deliciously ‘q ueer’ history of modernist ballet.

Likewise one could celebrate Viktor Wynd and Volker Eichelmann with his Gutters of Gold as they both channel the spirit of Stephen Tennant or Marie Jacotey and Luke Edward Hall riffing on that very Them coloured-pencil illustrative mode. There is also Adam Nathaniel Thurman with his po-mo shocking colour schemes, the performances of Monster Chetwynd who used to be Marvin Gaye Chetwynd, the drawings of France-Lise McGurn and trompe l’o eil of Lucy McKenzie, the embroideries of Enrico David and glorious glitter of John Walter (so nearly John Waters) and his exhibition Two Peacocks - A Department Store.

It is hard to think of any precedent for an exhibition based around a magazine article published almost 45 years previously and which gathers together a set of artists who, surprisingly, have never previously enjoyed such a group show. For of course Them were ‘named’ by someone else, just as the Impressionists and Fauvists were named by jobbing art critics of the era, unlike the Futurists or Situationists who created their own identities. None of these artists ever announced ‘Oh, I am a Them’ but they may well end up doing so, despite themselves. Finally, in the quest for full enlightenment I called on Mr York himself. York is quietly dressed in tweed and sweater mode and delights as always with his own special vocabulary and inimitable intonation which can only be hinted at by ‘inverted commas’ and italics.

Adrian Dannatt; I have here a copy of your article entitled Them…

Peter York; Have you read it? Because I haven’t but I simply must, it’s clear that some people have been reading it again recently. Now do you have the original from Harper’s & Queen ?

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AD; No, this is in the book Style Wars.

PY; The article is so much more fun because it has all the pictures of all the people, Anthony Price painted green, it’s considerably more enjoyable to look at, you really have to see the original article as an art work in itself.

AD; What do you think it means to do a show about Them now in 2020?

PY; Well, all sorts of things about the Seventies are coming up for review and for all sorts of reasons, not least the dull banality of the current visual culture despite all our freedoms now, that ‘loss of greatness’ is a disappointment.

AD; It is amazing the way everyone now looks exactly the same, which one would never have predicted, so many lively subcultures which you identified and named all subsumed by this great wave of leisurewear and sportswear, what you call in the book ‘lacklustre mainstream youth.’

PY; Well it is true that nowadays most people look pretty awful, dressing well is consistently looked down upon and treated suspiciously, the now standard and somehow disparaging comment is ‘you look very dapper’ which sounds like a criticism, I would rather prefer at least the term ‘natty’.

AD; One used to see wonderful looking people in the streets of London…

PY; Ah, you are so rare and so intense, ooh you’re lovely, you’re magical…

AD; Curiously there are now so few decently dressed people that you can practically go up to anyone else wearing a suit and tie and start talking to them on that basis. It’s particularly extreme at airports, I was at Stansted and saw this one impeccably tailored man and then realised it was actually Bryan Ferry but nobody else seemed to see him, he was as if invisible, somehow they couldn’t tell that he looked completely different to the rest of them.

PY; Bryan was always so important to Them, more so than Bowie perhaps, because Bowie owned Them but they didn’t own him, they had more ownership of Bryan, all those eager fans of Roxy in serried ranks at the Rainbow Finsbury park, there they all were, so very, very exciting. Those art school cliques were so central, from 1965 to 1975, their own tastes became the prevailing high fashion, the Deco Darlings, and for a while there was the appearance that the art school people were winning out but it dinna happen…having said that I myself have no interest in clothes any longer, I am only really interested in politics.

AD; That role of the art school is very topical today, as you wrote ‘art schools both increased their intake and changed their nature…the numbers going into some kind of art education rose by about seventy percent…’ and now that proliferation is really extreme, there are just so many art students.

PY; Yes, the absolutely key thing was the art school or art school manqué, and now it simply must be stopped - the art school madness…

AD; And this huge art education boom is not just in Britain, the frightening thing is hearing about the Chinese art schools, which are gigantic and pumping out hundreds of thousands of graduates all the time…

PY; Now one thing which utterly mortifies me in the original article is where I used the abbreviation ‘Jap’ and even the words ‘an exquisite yellow couple’ for what the intellectuals would term Chinese. I am now very happily politically correct and never use such terms. I fear I probably was actually a little racist, when the Japanese were obsessed with all things Western I suspected the Asians might ‘steal our souls’ like those Tokyo imitators of Duggie Fields. Back then I remember thinking if I was a more sophisticated person I would just get on Air Japan and go to Narita and it would all be very, very exciting. When Nigel Coates was so big in Japan it was a little bit thanks to me, I did an article on his amazing apartment for Harper’s & Queen, lovely shiny pictures, and this was back

when the Japanese devoured Western glossy mags in a biblical way, they were like magic goods from afar, a cargo cult. But in the end these same Asians actually proved to be far more loyal and generous than the rather more fickle and superficial tastemakers over here.

AD; Perhaps our interest in Them is related to our new use of the term ‘They’ in our happy post-gender world? Certainly ‘they’ and ‘them’ can be nicely confused and there was a strong gay and bisexual basis to your team, not least Michael Roberts who managed to be both gay and black, the best thing ever, it was as if you had today’s ubiquitous ‘they’ already in your sights…

PY; Yes, of course some Thems could be They, there was a lot of sexual pioneering, being a bit ‘fluid’ as we all call it now, and then some appeared to be very gay but were in fact the opposite of the mystery.

AD; You do term it ‘The deceptive pronoun’ and even ask ‘what’s a pronoun between friends?’

PY; Well of course the ‘pansexual revolution’ was very Them and there was a sense in which the whole Alternative Miss World was very much of today with its innocence, fluidity and avant-garde artsiness, but I suppose in the end it’s ‘now’ in the measure of its not nowness. It’s important to remember that back then there really was a Miss World, what I would currently call cis-gender heterosexual women.

AD; Did you have difficulty coming up with the term, the definition ‘Them’?

PY; No, I knew what to call them as everyone always said, “Oh, THEM!” The name came early and easily, it was what people all said, ‘Oh,Them…’ and they would then look at you in an interrogative way, all code and subtext.

AD; I remember in the very early 90s being with Iwona Blazwick trying to come up with a snappy name, a

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term for all the young British artists and in the end they were just called that, ‘YBA’, which was rather a let down…

PY: But they did extremely well out of it, they carried on exploiting the YBA name for decades, living off it. Them was a relatively more innocent age, each successive group cranks the whole thing up a notch, now everyone is so savvy about media and money, people are born YouTube star performers, with ‘social platforms’ to buy their art.

AD; You have always maintained a certain distance from all these groups, not least as you have a proper, real job as a management consultant…

PY; I did like the Thems but could only be considered a vague fellow traveller, the person who knew them personally was Miles Chapman, who was the Chief Sub on Harper’s & Queen when I wrote the piece, he knew all the big art theory and irony theory ideas that underwrote Them, all so shot full of irony and references and Duchamp. Miles was key to Them, a crucial figure.

AD; I’ve always been fascinated by him, ‘Merciless Miles’, I used to see him about in New York.

PY; Well he was a ‘Barometer’ person, a ‘Barometeer’ contributing to the trend spotting column invented and run by Ann Barr at Harper’s & Queen….

AD; That was the first writing I ever got paid for, sending in ‘Barometer’ ideas to Ann Barr as a teenager and I remember the great excitement of getting an actual cheque when she began publishing them. There is a similar column with the same name in the Sunday Times Style magazine today.

PY; I did Miles a good turn, I told him there’s a perfect opportunity for you with Tina over the road at Tatler, she would love to have you, go to her right now, and he did and then of course Tina took him with her to New York for Vanity Fair where he edited the ‘Vanities’ section.

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AD; There’s not much to be found on him today, he’s been obscured by a comedian with the same name, it seems he’s living in Shepherd’s Bush with his boyfriend the artist Bouke de Vries and he’s become a jewellery designer himself, Madonna bought a ‘FUCK OFF’ necklace he created.

PY; I could never have written Them without Miles, and the support of Ann Barr and also the editor at H&Q Willie Landels. I stole lots of things from Willie, the idea of wearing Black Watch trousers with dinner jacket, which looked no end smart, but I did not take his idea of wearing back crochet shawl at all times nor using a Sloane bicycle with wicker basket to cycle round London. He would say such wonderful things with his fabulous accent, ‘Ze windows in Harrods are TERRIBLE, if they had these shop windows in a tiny town near Venice they would be STONED!’ AD; The key things about Them is their intertwined relationship to punk, a far more symbiotic friendship and complex chronology than was later claimed.

PY: Of course, those people were all very nice and helpful to punks though I fear the punks were not very nice to them in return. I first met the punks through all those people, you would see the Sex Pistols at some warehouse, at the edge of a certain sort of party and it connected to my private and obsessional reading of the NME. It was crucial, the importance of Them to Punk, because they loved what was new and clever and arty, and Malcolm was so very art school, indeed they gave him and the Pistols a lot of encouragement and mentorship but were rather badly paid back - for being ‘bourgeois’ of course and ‘mimsy-ists’ all decorative and whimsical. Some of them even appeared on ‘the great t-shirt’, on the wrong side of that official division of what the punks loved and hated and Bryan was officially hated. I myself have a copy of ‘the great t-shirt’ in a frame now of course, it’s a genuine one, not least because the provenance is myself and well worth at least thirty bob.

AD; Those brightly coloured plastic sandals were as beloved by Them as by the Soul Boys and the punks, those sandals were a bridge between them….

PY; Yes, the ’Jellies’ were crucial, so cheap and so nothing but everything. Plastic sandals had so many more signifiers than the mere flip flop.

AD; But surely flip-flops have their own importance also, all that Gucci hip-hop and gay semiotics, ‘d runk and wearing flip flops on Fifth Avenue’ to quote Rufus Wainwright.

PY; Funnily enough his father Loudon the Third had a tender moment with my old friend Tracey MacLeod…..

AD; Do you have any classic Them works in your own art collection?

PY; No, I haven’t got anything Them-ological, I do remember thinking about it, that I really should get something but it’s now such a long time ago, I’ve missed out, no Duggie nor Andrew broken glass anything, that used to be the secret sign of the brotherhood and sisterhood to have a brooch made

by Logan out of broken glass.

AD; So how would you sum up the entire Them thing in retrospect?

PY; Them became ‘us’ or we became Them, people really are more visually sophisticated though you wouldn’t think it, there’s lots of cheap visual irony on TV. They introduced the prevailing taste but did not make any money, they were, if not exactly exploited, certainly never wealthy thanks to what they gave us, they believed all publicity was good publicity and were highly international unlike most British art of the time. We anticipated in a cheerful way some things which happened - but somehow it’s now rather less fun - all ‘this’ might be to their taste but they wouldn’t really like it.

AD; In the end, did you invent them yourself?

PY; If ‘Them’ had existed I would never have had to invent them, or vice versa. No, let me try and get this right, if Them had not existed I could never have invented them, or if Them had not existed I would have invented them, I would have pulled in all the strands - invented Them as a marketing exercise.

AD; But how wonderful we should have an entire exhibition, and indeed publication, in rightful homage to yourself….

PY; No, no, no, it is not in any way an homage to me - it’s an homage to Them for being Them, a vast celebration of their very Themness.

PY; Them was a marvellous little moment somewhere between, shall we say, nineteen sixty something and 1975 or 1976, a very unified gang but not a ‘movement’ because they all did very different things, but with a sensibility and milieu in common.

Because they were cheerful they made our lives much better. It starts with Duchamp, not what they actually made, but the idea of the ‘idea’, that it’s the thought that counts, they were more decorative, more camp, more fun loving. It’s very high concept, a lot of that stuff I must have learnt from Them, my high-conceptness, of which there’s a lot in marketing speak but never as arty.

AD; Is there any trace of their influence in the current cultural landscape?

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ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES

Duggie Fields (b.1945, Tidworth, UK) lives and works in London, UK. He graduated in 1968 from Chelsea School of Art, London, As a student his work moved from Minimal, Conceptual and Constructivist phases before arriving at a more hard-edge post-Pop figuration.

By the middle of the 1970s his work included many elements that were later defined as Post-Modernism and in the in the late 1990s He started working with digital media describing as Maximalist, and he is still working and exhibiting to this day.

Derek Jarman (b.1942 Northwood, UK — d.1994, London, UK) was an English film director, stage designer, diarist, artist, gardener, political activist and author. He was educated at the Slade School of Art and exhibited his paintings widely. Jarman’s first work in cinema was as a set designer on Ken Russell’s The Devils (1971), his first films were experimental Super 8mm shorts and his first full-length feature film Sebastiane was released in 1976, followed by selected films Jubilee (1978), Caravaggio (1986) and The Garden (1990).

Andrew Logan (b.1945, Witney, UK) is an English sculptor, performance artist, jewellery-maker, and portraitist. He was educated at the Oxford School of Architecture, graduating in 1970. His work challenges convention, mixes media and plays with our artistic values, across the fields of sculpture, stage design, drama, opera, parades, festivals and interior design.

In 1972 he founded the Alternative Miss World, an infamous “bizarre is beautiful” pansexual beauty pageant.

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Luciana Martinez de la Rosa (b.1948, Hampshire, UK – d.1995, NYC, USA) was an iconic woman, artist and muse, sculpted by Andrew Logan, and painted by Kevin Whitney and Duggie Fields and appeared in Derek Jarman’s Jubilee (1978), In the Shadow of the Sun (1981) and Sebastiane (1976). Her passion was portrait painting and most often painted friends from the fashion, art and film circles of her time.

Kevin Whitney (b.1948, Aylesbury, UK) graduated from Chelsea School of Art in 1970, and exhibited in Tate Young Contemporaries in 1967 with another “Them” artist, Derek Jarman. In 1982 he was appointed as the first ever Official Olympic Artist in the world, producing work that combined his lifelong passion for Greek classical art with his fascination with the Olympic movement. He has painted many portraits of Luciana Martinez and other friends. He has exhibited widely, and his work is in public and private collections all over the world.

Alternative Miss World, 1973 ( Š Johnny Dewe-Mathews)

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AUTHOR BIOGRAPHIES

James Birch was born in London and educated at the University of Aix-en-Provence, where he studied Art History. In 1983 he opened his first gallery, James Birch Fine Art, on the King’s Road, London, where he specialised in the work of British surrealists, followed by the opening of Birch & Conran Gallery in 1987. In 1984 Birch gave the Turner Prize winner Grayson Perry his first show, with a second quickly following in 1985. He then concentrated on exhibiting Francis Bacon in Moscow in 1988, and Gilbert & George in Moscow in 1990 and Beijing in 1993. In 1997 Birch returned to exhibiting in London when he opened the A22 Gallery in Clerkenwell, where he showed Keith Coventry, Dick Jewell, Genesis P-Orridge and two exhibitions by members of The Colony Room.

Adrian Dannatt has worked, but only very occasionally, as an actor, curator, breakfast waiter, editor, writer and artist, in Paris, New York and his native London. His fiction and poetry has been published in anthologies including Best British Short Stories and PEN New Poetry and his books include the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, and most recently Les Lalanne: In the Domain of Dreams.

Barry Miles is an English author known for his participation in and writing on the subjects of the 1960s London underground and counterculture. He helped start the independent newspaper International Times and has written biographies of Paul McCartney, Frank Zappa, William S. Burroughs, Jack Kerouac and Ginsberg, in addition to books on, the British Underground Press of the 60’s with James Birch and the definitive history of London’s counterculture since 1945, London Calling.

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Polly Stenham is a playwright, screenwriter and director. Her work has been staged at the Royal Court Theatre and National Theatre and published by Faber & Faber. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and recipient of Evening Standard and Critics’ Circle Awards for Most Promising Playwright.

She is currently under commission to the Donmar Warehouse, the Almeida Theatre and the National Theatre.

Peter York is an author, journalist, broadcaster and management consultant – a Capitalist Tool. The subject of social groupings and market segments are his preoccupation. Over five decades has written some of the most brilliantly observed articles and books on modern culture, style and identity including his best selling book ‘The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook’, which he co-authored with Ann Barr.

Duggie Fields, Zandra Rhodes, Andrew Logan, Luciana Martinez

Thanks and Acknowledgements: Firstly we would like to thank Peter York for his article on “Them” in Harper’s & Queen October 1976, which inspired this exhibition and defined this group of artists. A big thank you to “Them”: Duggie Fields, Andrew Logan, Kevin Whitney and the estate of Derek Jarman and the estate of Luciana Martinez de la Rosa. Also we would like to thank the writers in this catalogue, Adrian Dannatt, Barry Miles and Polly Stenham for their essays. We would like to also thank Johnny Dewe-Mathews for his photographs of “Them”.

Furthermore we would like to thank everyone who has contributed in some way or other to this exhibition through their various fields: Janet Slee Sakib Khan Marta Perovic Clare Conville Prudence Cummings Sylvain Deleu Dick Jewell Clive Jennings Amanda Wilkinson David Capel Martin Green Paul Conran Charlotte Black Mark Inglefield

Princess Julia John de Olivira Georgina Dean Olga Lamas Louisa Buck Jacqueline Taber Michael Bracewell Prudence Walters Deniz Johns Maria Anastassiou Gavriella Abekassis Stephen Rothholz Tim Willis Zandra Rhodes

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Catalogue © The Redfern Gallery, 2020 Design: Graham Rees Design Print: The Five Castles Press Every effort has been made to find permission to reproduce images/photos within this catalogue.

Any omissions are entirely unintentional.

Published by The Redfern Gallery, London 2020 to coincide with the Exhibition

DUGGIE FIELDS DEREK JARMAN ANDREW LOGAN LUCIANA MARTINEZ KEVIN WHITNEY 22 January– 15 February 2020 This exhibition has been curated by James Birch ISBN: 978-0-948460-81-4 All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying recording or any other information storage or retrieval system without prior permission in writing from the gallery.