London Calling (69 page)

Many of the Carburton Street people moved to a squat around the corner at 65 Warren Street; they included John Maybury, David
Hollar, Geoffrey Hinton and Christine Binnie, who shared a room with Cerith Wyn-Evans; they drew a line down the middle of
the room. It was a large building on the north side of the street and it was possible to walk right through to another squat
in a separate building on the Euston Road. Though there was a lot of interaction the Euston Road squat was more into drugs,
whereas the Warren Street people were basically Blitz-kids, into fashion and art. When Christine Binnie brought back some
L S D from a festival at Stonehenge, John Maybury and David Hollar were very disapproving. Christine: ‘They went berserk,
and they were really horrible to me because I’d brought drugs back.’

Although Grayson Perry performed with the Neo-Naturists on numerous occasions, the founding core of the group remained the
two Binnie sisters and their friend Wilma Johnson. Wilma first met Christine when she became Wilma’s ‘personal life model’
at St Martin’s College of Art. Christine was not like the usual agency models – bored housewives earning a bit extra – she
had a peroxide blonde beehive hairdo, with a turquoise streak through the middle, and holly berry red lipstick and was wearing
a pale blue negligee. Wilma thought she looked fantastic. She did drawings of her throughout the morning, but by lunchtime
they were bored so they went to Soho Square for a picnic and discussed performance art. Wilma: ‘By the afternoon, I had swapped
my flesh tint oil paint for some blue and gold body paint and transformed her into a voluptuous version of Tutankhamen’s sarcophagus
with the help of a feather boa I happened to be wearing. That was the beginning of the Neo-Naturists for me.’

The most ambitious Neo-Naturist event was in July 1982 and involved fifteen people living in the nude at David Dawson’s B2
Gallery at Wapping Wall for a week, sleeping in a large roped-off bed in the middle of the gallery. Each day had a different
theme, the first of which was Art Day. Christine invited all the artists she knew to come and use the Neo-Naturists as their
canvas.
Andrew Logan, Duggie Fields, Derek Jarman, all the people who showed at B2 came to the gallery during the day to paint them.
Christine finished up looking like a Jackson Pollock, with paint flicked and dribbled all over her body. That evening there
was a private view in which they all posed, motionless, as the art. Unfortunately there was only enough hot water for one
bath and as there were fifteen Neo-Naturists, they rarely were able to get all the body paint off each evening.

The Prospect of Whitby was just down the street, and at lunchtime they would all go there for a drink. Wilma had stitched
huge floor-length overcoats for them all, made from fun fur, which looked comical but kept them warm as they were still naked
underneath. Wilma’s coat kept falling open, endearing her to the men who worked behind the bar, who began bringing them the
unsold sandwiches from lunchtime as an excuse to see her naked in the gallery. Day three, Friday, was Macbeth Day, a very
uncomfortable day for Grayson Perry. They did two performances, a matinee at 3 p.m. and an evening performance at 7.30 of
a somewhat truncated version of the play. It lasted for only ten minutes and included seven witches, as that was everyone’s
favourite part. Christine played Mrs Macbeth. She spent most of the play draped in tartan, frying up Scottish pancakes, neeps
and tatties, haggis and porridge on an industrial cooker. Grayson single-handedly played the entire Birnam Wood, holding
above his head great bunches of buddleia that he had gathered from a local bombsite. He was covered in body paint mixed with
Scottish oats to give his body the texture of tree bark. Unfortunately the porridge set hard, trapping all his body hair.
At the end of the play, they were supposed to run screaming from the gallery. Grayson could barely walk as the slightest move
tugged at his body hair. He wrote: ‘The crusty oatmeal was
all
over me. It was very, very painful to move in, let alone wash off.’
¹³

On Fashion Day they modelled body-painted clothes and on Black Rapport Day they were only permitted to use black body paint.
This resulted in some striking designs being produced: stripes and tribal markings, spirals and blobs, everyone different,
including at least one painted child. When they were painted they went for a naked black picnic on Wapping beach by the side
of the Thames, where they were only allowed black food: black pudding, black olives, black bread, washed down with Guinness.
According to Grayson Perry they looked like a ‘strange, apocalyptic tribal gathering’.
¹⁴
A police boat stopped to observe them, but did not intervene. Some of the best photographs of the week-long event are from
this day.

The biggest audience was for Punk Day, for which someone brought
along a huge tub of Evo-Stik glue – a punk reference to the Ramones’ song and
Sniffin
’
Glue
magazine. By now word had got around and the gallery was packed for the official closing party. David Dawson made professional
videos of each day but all this valuable documentation was lost when someone stole the video recorder and all the tapes. Grayson
and a few others had made their own records but nothing so extensive. The installation remains a legend, like the banquet
held for Le Douanier Rousseau by Picasso at the Bateau-Lavoir in 1908, much discussed and fondly remembered.

Jennifer and Grayson next moved to the basement of the building that Marilyn, Boy George’s friend, had squatted at 26 Crowndale
Road. There were several junkies in the building, the woman on the top floor was a prostitute and there was a guitarist called
Firewolf, with spiderweb tattoos all across his face, who moved into the squat next door. The basement was in terrible condition,
having had both a fire and a flood, but they were desperate and made the best of it. They furnished it from skips and filled
the walls with paintings and posters, curtains and pieces of jewellery. Grayson constructed a throne for himself out of scaffolding
planks and made small sculptures at a work table in front of the window. Jennifer used the largest wall in the living room
for her paintings, tacking huge canvases on to it, then taking them and hanging them out to dry in another part of the basement
while she tacked up a new one. Her paintings expanded from the canvas and soon she was painting furniture found in the street
and in skips, old chairs, tables, a television set. The place had a distinct, gothic feel.

The junkies and the prostitute moved on: Christine Binnie took over the top floor, Wilf Rogers and his girlfriend the upstairs
rooms, Cerith Wyn Evans and Angus took the ground floor, and Grayson and Jennifer remained in the basement. They were there
for several years. Grayson had originally studied sculpture while he was at Portsmouth but in September 1983, a year or so
after he moved to London, Christine Binnie persuaded him to join her in the evening pottery classes held at the Central Institute.
He enjoyed it so much that he began going three days a week. Pottery quickly became his main interest. It also allowed him
to use anything as subject matter as he knew the police were never going to raid a pottery exhibition, no matter how obscene
the subject matter used in the decoration of the plates and pots. He told Joe La Placa: ‘When I started making plates, it
was about how I could wind people up… I’m attracted to things that make me feel uncomfortable, that make me think, “Oh my
god I’ve stepped over the mark here”. So I started using sexual and fascist imagery.’
¹⁵
Pots have titles like ‘We’ve Found the Body of Your Child’ or ‘Saint Claire 37 Wanks’ and take as their subject matter run-down
housing estates, abused children, dysfunctional families, high-rise blocks of flats, often juxtaposed with details from classical
oriental pottery, all to unsettling affect.

Meanwhile, Jennifer was having some success with her paintings. The art dealer James Birch had a gallery on the King’s Road,
James Birch Fine Art, specializing in British Surrealism but he was interested in exhibiting contemporary work. He saw a Neo-Naturists
performance for the launch of Derek Jarman’s
Dancing Ledge
in which they blew up an inflatable paddling pool, fried up some fish fingers, then attempted to fill the pool by pissing
into it from a balcony before ‘launching’ Derek’s book by throwing it into the pool. Derek was delighted; so was James. He
got to know them and liked Jennifer’s work so much that in June 1984 he put on her first show. At the opening Jennifer and
Christine gave a performance, making dresses for themselves from see-through Sellotape then painting themselves in body paint.
The audience was very appreciative and the paintings sold well. Then Jennifer said: ‘Why don’t you show my boyfriend, Grayson
Perry?’ so James gave him his first show. Perry was mostly making plates at the time, priced around £30–£60 and the show sold
out. The second show a couple of years later contained more pots and had greater critical acclaim, but did not sell so well.

In 1985, James gave Jennifer a second show and asked her what her dream would be for a perfect opening. She said: ‘To ride
naked down the King’s Road on a white horse.’ James: ‘She didn’t have long hair, she had a skin-head haircut so it was even
better. Of course it was raining at the time.’ That same year James showed Wilma Johnson’s paintings and instead of wine they
served cider to commemorate the old Coffee Spoon café that Christine had run. James remembered: ‘We didn’t have wine, we had
scrumpy and everyone got absolutely pissed and then, after the private view had closed down, we played spin the bottle.’
¹⁶

The Neo-Naturists were the last great hippie manifestation: they combined English village fête practicality with Girl Guide
common sense, hippie idealism, the spirit of love, a child-like innocence and amateurism, all in a post-punk context. The
Binnie sisters were brought up in a strong C of E environment, tempered by their father’s interest in Rudolf Steiner. Participating
in church services, carrying flags and such, gave them a taste for ritual. Like C O U M before them, Christine insisted that
there be no rehearsals as she didn’t want to put on a show or provide anything resembling entertainment. Rituals do not require
rehearsals and these were ritual performances, exploring everyday actions such as cooking or cleaning, celebrating nudity,
the Mother Goddess, and the different shapes of women’s bodies. Christine
had been inspired by the punks she met when she lived for a time in Berlin in the late seventies:

They didn’t wear all black clothes and sit in tiny weenie little rooms all the time going ‘Uugggghhh!’ like English punks.
They walked around their flat in the nude with stilettos on looking happy. Mohican hairdos. I thought they were fantastic,
and in the summer there we went off to the lakes for nude sunbathing. I loved it.
¹⁷

It was a great contrast with the negativity of the English punk scene.

Nudity appealed to her, it is a performance art classic: one of the most basic actions and one which had been thoroughly worked
over in the sixties. Consequently she was surprised when people were shocked at the Neo-Naturists. She had expected people
to be bored at yet more nudity and body paint, but the British audience reacted as if it was still the fifties. Their nakedness
was not designed to titillate; nor was it confrontational like Genesis P-Orridge. They were naked but not ‘sexually packaged’,
as Christine put it, and their performances incorporated many of the ideas that had emerged from the women’s movement in the
early seventies. One of their films showed them baking bread in the shape of the Venus of Willendorf incorporating their own
menstrual blood and James Birch remembered a performance at Heaven nightclub when they appeared on the same bill as Genesis
P-Orridge and Psychic TV. James: ‘They put flour in their pussies and they pulled it out and they mixed it in a pot and they
went round and they put this flour and pussy juice into everybody’s mouths.’
¹⁸
Grayson wrote: ‘The girls were fearless but I was always nervously aware that the dangling presence of a male member painted
blue with a bell tied to it lent the performance an extra edge to which some of the crowd could take exception.’
¹⁹

It was not always as a naturist that Grayson appeared; sometimes it was as his alter-ego Claire, wearing some variation of
Tenniel’s Alice in Wonderland dress. In fact, he was more vulnerable, and placed himself at much greater risk, by appearing
in public as a transvestite than by being naked. Nudity is commonplace but anything that challenges the traditional gender
roles causes tremendous anxiety in the public and is liable to cause considerable antagonism.

Their gallerist, James Birch, is perhaps best known as the organizer of a number of groundbreaking exhibitions in Communist
countries. A believer in the political power of art, he was the first to exhibit Francis Bacon in Moscow, following that by
showing Gilbert and George first in Moscow, then
in Peking.
²⁰
Francis Bacon was a friend of James Birch’s parents so he had known him ever since he was a child. Bacon trusted him, which
is why he immediately agreed when James asked if he would like to do a show in Moscow. It took two years and five visits to
Russia for James to organize it, but in the summer of 1988 forty-four paintings worth between £10m and £15m were taken by
truck under armed guard to Moscow. Bacon himself pulled out of attending the opening at the last minute, even though he had
been taking Russian lessons and had his bag packed ready to go. He withdrew because the British Council tried to hijack the
show and wanted to include formal meals with the ambassador and the British Council staff, speeches by Francis and a press
conference. James: ‘He just didn’t like the pomp and circumstance.’ The show opened at the New Tretyakov Gallery on 22 September
1988 and caused a sensation. 150,000 Muscovites crowded through it in six weeks and the 5,000 catalogues they had printed
sold out almost immediately. The show coincided with the first of the reforms brought in by Mikhail Gorbachev and would not
have been possible even two years before. James Birch: ‘I’m not saying art changed it, but it started the crack in the dam,
and that’s what I think is important. Art is something that actually has a longer impact than sport or anything.’