With their sharp suits, skinhead coifs and studiedly menacing demeanour, the Grey Organisation (GO) cut a conspicuous dash in the mid-80s London art world.
The four-strong post-punk collective were ostensibly anti-establishment: they organised events (mainly warehouse parties) and sometimes produced what they termed Post Original Art. This included painting around their own outlines, saving their nail clippings, bottling their urine and squashing beer cans. At one point they made t-shirts for the Labour Party. But they mainly did a great deal of posing and railing against the art establishment, which they declared to be “boring and lifeless”.
The GO’s finest hour was when, around midnight on 21 May 1985, they carried out a self-styled “art terrorist attack” on Cork Street. This “complicated and risky operation” involved splattering grey paint across the windows of all the 20th-century galleries along Cork Street—then the epicentre of the London art scene.
“This action is a statement and should not be interpreted as vandalism,” declared their accompanying statement, which also carried an advertisement for their first Grey Organisation painting exhibition in the former badlands of Old Street. For what many suspected at the time (including your correspondent) was that all the grumpy Grey Boys really wanted was a gallery to call their own, and ideally one of those on the receiving end of their paint-slinging.
Now, 37 years century later, this wish has been granted with a show at the Mayor Gallery, one of their former Cork Street daubees. Here, former Grey Boy Toby Mott has joined forces with curator William Ling to mount Cork Street Attack, which combines GO artworks and ephemera with blown up contemporary photographs of paint-splashed windows, bemused policeman, and a youthful James Mayor, (who—as he did in the 1980s—pragmatically declares himself happy for the publicity).
In the face of today’s cultural climate the GO’s self-important boyish shenanigans seem pretty inconsequential, but as a redeveloped Cork Street yet again becomes a spruced up commercial art hub, the moment when it had a pot of paint flung in its face should probably be remembered.
And while we are on the subject of Cork Street memories, let’s not forget the Neo-Naturist Protest which took place a couple of months later, at the 1985 Cork Street Party in July. Here the artists Christine and Jennifer Binnie and Wilma Johnson also left their colourful mark when, naked but for lashings of vivid body paint, they cavorted in galleries and sprawled across the bonnets of parked cars along the entire length of Cork Street. They gave and bared their all in opposition to the elitist, white male-dominated art establishment: an infinitely more legitimate and (sadly enduring) cause for complaint by an organisation whose members, I’m happy to confirm, are still making brilliant work today.
• Cork St Attack: Grey Organisation, The Mayor Gallery, until 25 February