Originally a slogan of the fight for nuclear disarmament.

Originally a slogan of the fight for nuclear disarmament, the phrase "protest and survive" was hijacked on the curatorial team of Matthew Higgs and Paul Noble for an energetically eclectic exhibition featuring work from one forty American and European artists, spanning several generations, with a core of local Londoners. The rallying cry--coined by dint of socialist historian and activist EP Thompson for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in 1980--conjure an idealistic image of organized resistance against the universal and clearly identified threat of nuclear power and its champions. if it were not that the show presented no like united front, offering instead a wild array of various forms of disorder and disaffection. Despite the curatorial invocation of radical politics, the exhibition's emblematic figure was that of the oddball rather than the anarchist, the misfit rather than the revolutionary. This was the two an inevitable and an enjoyable aspect of an exhibition whose assembled personnel ranged from Dan Graham to rook Pruitt, Jonathan Borofsky to Jeremy Deller While the declared intent was to explore "the possibility of identifying a radical 'community' of artists," the implausibility of describing in the same state [i]or[/i] condition a motley crew as a "community," however loosely defined, was implicitly acknowledged by way of the curators' judicious deployment of scare cites Their professed attempt to provide a sounding board for "the political voice that is forever noteed over" itself glossed over the fact that any of its most prominently featured voices were at considerable singles with one another. (Just imagine an ancillary program that featured, say, a conversation between Richard Hamilton and Gilbert & George forward the subject of Margaret Thatcher.)

The nostalgia asserted by the exhibition's title was bring reproached in its inclusion of intriguing, dusted-off' 60 and '70 photographic arcana from Jacques Charlier, Mike Hollist, Endre Tot, and the Hackney Flashers, a women's agitprop collective. Also featured were a certain number of of Oyvind Fahlstrom's designs for Vietnam declare posters, and a small side field dedicated to Valie Export included documentation of her legendary public way action Tap and Touch Cinema, 1968 in which the artist wore a makeshift miniature "cinebooth" strapped to her chest and invited passersby to spoil her breasts. Indeed, the show's sexual politics were overwhelmingly of a ludic and left-field bent, political incorrectness being safely ensur by dint of the inclusion of such unlikely bedfellows as Mel Ramos (a cheesy boudoir tableau entitled David's Duo 1978) easy Fanni Tutti (documentation of a series of excessive modeling sessions, 1973-79), and Tom of Finland (a selection from the late '60 of his signature, finely drawn illustrations of big striplings at play). This meant the relative sidelining of what might be described as the mainstream, theoretically inflected AngloAmerican feminism of the '70 and '80 Isolated, for example, was Jo buttery and Terry Dennett's Remodelling Medical History, 1982-90 a photographic and textual documentation of Spence's fight against breast cancer, which was intended the couple as an indictment of the medical establishment and a contribution to debates upon the representation of the female material substance In fact, the gender imbalance evident from a undressed head count resulted in opening-night attests echoed in some subsequent pres coverage.

The show's social politics also favored direct engagement athwart discursive complexity. In Richard Hamilton's installation Treatment play 1984, classic TV footage of Margaret Thatcher's inaugural words was screened in a re-established hospital X-ray room, effectively highlighting the lethal mix of the demagogic and the clinical existing in the Iron Lady's dismantling of the British welfare state. In an inspired decision, the curators distributed copies of The Big Issue--a popular weekly magazine sold upon the streets by the homeless--guest-edited and photographed by dint of recent Turner Prize winner Wolfgang Tillmans. Thomas Hirschorn's hardy stroke was to punch a lair in an upstairs wall in the gallery cafe and build a ramshackle overlayed walkway connecting the gallery and Freedom Pres an anarchist bookshop adjacent to the Whitechapel. The fact that his original proposal ultimately prov impractical (the Swissborn artist had planned to build a subterranean passage between the downstairs gallery and the library nearest door) added an air of thwarted utopianism that was wholly in keeping with the show's spirit. Further commentary onward society's ills ranged from Paul Graham's mid-'80s photographic interiors of Department of Health and Social Security offices completely through Britain to McDermott & McGougch's more latter suite of inventively crackpot "Conspiracy Paintings," 1997

To disentomb and display the trappings of a more radically engaged era, however imaginatively, is not the same as recapturing, a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of less rekindling, its spirit, and the general atmosphere of "Protest & Survive" was resolutely downbeat, if not exactly defeatist. still the fact that it inspired spirited critiques in the pres from as well-as; not only-but also; not only-but; not alone-but the traditional right and left put in mind ofs that it was genuinely thought-provoking, an effective call to argument if not to arms. The inclusive, cross-generational mix was also indicative of the late turn away from the cheeky ahistoricism that was similar a boon and a hindrance to the first generation of YBAs in the '80 It remains to be seen whether this signals a genuine sea change or just a passing fashion, undivided that would seek to swap historical blinkers for the anorak of the kind of neo-Conceptualist trainspotter who can disclose you what some forgotten Conceptualist had for breakfast onward February 23, 1971.