In the feedback to Assignment One, my Tutor, starting from the content of my works, suggested that I deepen my research on British author Cold War Steve (https://coldwarsteve.com), a.k.a. Cristopher Spencer.
I bought the photobook "The Festival of Brexit" (2019, Thames & Hudson).
As soon as I started reading the Cold War Steve book, I thought that my works had in common with his images only the content creation technique (collage of images cut out and pasted on a background photograph).
At first glance, in fact, the images of Cold War Steve seem to be satirical and funny, as well as his alias, while the works I proposed in my Assignment One have a melancholy content, given that they are inspired by the recent pandemic.
But I am not a satirist.
In fact, as stated by Jon Savage in the introduction to the book "These images are at once very funny and very cruel. They are designed to be. When organized politics is in chaos ......... then the only response is a scalding rage which, to avoid its turning inwards, must be transmuted into activism or artistic activity ... ".
The leitmotif of this book is the social/political operation, defined by Jon Savage as "...ostentatiously anglophilic breakdown..." which followed the popular consultation on Britain's exit from the EU, called" Brexit ".
According to Savage, the images constructed by Cold War Steve (called "Plates") are satirically cruel because, protesting against Brexit, they recall a period (up to 1970) in which "Britain (was) ....., kicking and screaming. (There was) ... a time of terrible food, casual racism, ideological conflict and street violence .... ".
In Cold War Steve's body of work, there are both the images of British characters, including Nigel Farage, Theresa May and Boris Johnson, and those of world-class characters (Trump, Kim-Jong-un, Putin etc). These figures, in all situations and in all positions, are inserted in a background defined as "Shit Britain" and made up of "bleak vistas" of "derelict caravans, roadside fly tips, derelict funfairs ....".
The satirical message is clear and determined: I believe it has its own political but also artistic and aesthetic value, just as Hannah Hoch's dada works of social denunciation had it.
The "Plates" in the book are made with impeccable technique (I wonder about the detail of the process, even if the author himself says he started collages with a simple smartphone) and induce to pause and observe character by character, object by object, wondering which is part of the original background and what was added.
For this reason, some passages from Joan Fontcuberta's book come to mind, where the author refers to the characteristic of digital photography to be ".... not literally true representations of facts .... that they are pure fictions ... "(Fontcuberta, Joan. Pandora's Camera: Photogr @ phy After Photography. MACK. Kindle edition).
Despite being an artificial composition, Cold War Steve's images construct a concrete message to what the author considers the reality of today's world, with all its uncertainties and misdeeds. All this to the detriment of people.
As I said, it reminds me of the Dada movement in Berlin, and it is interesting to see the differences, from a graphic point of view, in how the images cut out more than 80 years ago can be different from those available in recent years.
"I consider my work to be comedy, political satire and art."
(Cold War Steve, a.k.a. Christopher Spencer,
from "Alternative Facts - The Cold War Steve Story")
"...of my major artistic influences: Bruegel and Bosch. Like them, I use a lot of symbolism in my pieces..."
(Cold War Steve, a.k.a. Christopher Spencer,
from "Alternative Facts - The Cold War Steve Story")
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