A Neo-Naturist Christmas performance
Are we having fun yet? Yes we are. Well, at least the Neo Naturists are. In fact, they never stopped. To celebrate this ongoing idea of exuberance, Jane England of England & Co. in Notting Hill has brought all that the Neo-Naturists gave to the world in to one orderly place. A loose-knit, anarchic, and deliberatively primitive group of artists who had more influence on Grayson Perry "than any other during (his) formative years as an artist", the Neo Naturists formed a kind of parallel underground scene to the elitist art world of the early and mid-1980s. They were performers, they painted their entire bodies as "a celebration of their bodies as paintings, rather than being painted", they were nearly always naked - sometimes in places like the British Museum where that kind of thing doesn't go down too well - and they were permanently smiling.
An integral part of the club scene that cushioned the likes of Leigh Bowery, Derek Jarman, Boy George, John Maybury and dancer Michael Clark (the group's "all-time favourite man in tights"), the NNs were nevertheless an antidote to the consciously stylistic happenings of the time. "Willfully unfashionable", says England, "the NNs were - like the New Romantics -'showing off' too, but were more about exposing the po-faced seriousness of it all". Friends Jennifer Binnie and Wilma Johnson had got the ball rolling when they were painting students at St Martins' and joined forces with a gold-pumped and beehive-haired Christine Binnie - their life-model and Jen's sister - and so planted the seeds of a decade of strictly amateurish fun.
Christine Binnie
The dressing up and the going out was an unrehearsed combination of ancient rituals and contemporary life. It involved many others like Grayson Perry, Wilf Rogers and Cerith Wyn-Evans; it went hand-in-hand with the creation of paintings and sculpture and lots of lovely pots and its early champions included the incomparable James Birch who then ran a gallery "at the wrong end of the King's Road". "It was the beginning of the Thatcher era, Harrods had just been bombed and Art was just beginning to become fashionable," says the legendary dealer and curator. "I first noticed the NNs at the launch of Derek Jarman's book 'Dancing Ledge' where they blew up a paddling pool, added water, fried some fish fingers, urinated in the pool and threw the book in the water. I love them."
It was at Birch's openings, Jane England told me, "that Grayson first appeared in willfully dowdy dress as Claire (Grayson has described Claire at that time as looking like an off-duty nurse or an Avon lady), who often added an acerbic note to leaven the post-hippie proceedings."
Grayson himself explains the origins of the group's inspiration. "Christine Binnie went to Berlin in 1979 and met some German punks. What impressed her was that they were not mired in repressed angst like English punks - "all white-faced girls in black bedrooms". They had tans and walked around in the nude and swam in the lake, yet were still punks. It was this mix of anarchy and health and efficiency that characterises the NNs.
Christine Binnie also cites her mother, who was the sort of woman who "always had a craft project on the go, a bag of raw wool needing to be spun, elderflower wine bubbling away". Her mother was also a Girl Guide leader, and the influence of camp-fire singing, the Church of England and cooking with Calor Gas runs through the entire NN oeuvre.
Grayson Perry recalls a particularly chaotic performance at the Spanish Anarchists Association in Brixton where the group were goose-stepping around, making pseudo-political gestures and declarations. "At the end there was a dead silence. The only sound was of us laughing in the men's toilets, wondering, 'What have we done?'"
Plate by Grayson Perry
England's exhibition has hours of rarely seen NN footage on a big screen downstairs; it presents an array of Grayson Perry's early collages, pots and plates - 'Hello Mum' says one, 'Essex' announces another, 'If Evil Must Exist' another. There are a number of Jennifer Binnie's Crowleyesque paintings of upright dogs and girls smoking Gauloises on scrolls of canvas. Much documentation of the group's spirited Sellotape- and Scotch pancake-heavy performances can be found throughout.
Standing out from these documents are photographs from 1984 of the 'Swimming and Walking Experiment' in the fountains that used to erupt from the base of the West End skyscraper Centrepoint. They remind us that the sight of a red-faced, beleaguered young policemen trying desperately to avert his eyes while arresting a naked and spirited young woman cavorting in a fountain is, alas, a thing of the past. There's a veritable treasure trove to look at too; a rash of bits and bobs in glass cases: small furry shoes, Worzel Gummidge notebooks, pamphlets about aphrodisiacs and newspaper cuttings from the early 1980s.
Across the street on opening night there twitched a dangerously calm and unpredictable looking man clutching a can of Stella, seething on about how much he hated artists. He probably didn't get it and nobody seemed to notice anyway. Then it was announced that there'd been an almighty flood in the downstairs gallery loo. Somehow, everything seemed to fit.
Laura K Jones
Laura K Jones is a London-based journalist and a regular news correspondent for the Saatchi Online daily magazine.
The Neo-Naturists
Until 21 July
England & Co
216 Westbourne Grove
London W11
T: +44 (0)207 221 0417
Grayson Perry and Jennifer Binnie at last week's opening
Jane England and Jennifer Binnie
Nicky Haslam and Dougie Fields
Anthony Haden-Guest and Laura K Jones
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