“While the story of anarcho-punk pioneers Crass has been extensively documented, that of their resident artist Gee Vaucher is less well recorded,” writes Edwin Pouncey in his review of Gee Vaucher: Beyond Punk, Feminism And The Avant-Garde by Rebecca Binns in The Wire 466. “As Rebecca Binns’s exhaustive account of the artist’s life and work boldly underlines, Vaucher’s enormous contribution to the group’s image (through painting, collage and design) sent out a war cry that was more sociopolitically charged than first wave punk rock’s no future chorusing.” This extract discusses the returning significance of Vaucher's artwork Oh America!.

The growing recognition of Vaucher’s considerable influence on visual culture culminated in her first major (UK) retrospective, Gee Vaucher: Introspective at Firstsite (Colchester), 2016–2017. The exhibition’s opening coincided with the shock election of Donald Trump as President of the United States. The Daily Mirror featured Vaucher’s image, Oh America!, on its front cover, having been alerted to its widespread adoption as a meme on social media platforms. The publicity this generated meant the gallery incidentally received an added influx of visitors.

Oh America! arguably came to epitomise public sentiment towards the election of Donald Trump in the same way that kennardphillipps’s Photo Op had encapsulated the disillusion of the general public with New Labour in the aftermath of the Iraq War. One telling difference, however, is while Photo Op had been created as a response to the current situation, Oh America! was an image from the 1980s that had been seized upon by social media. When Photo Op was created in 2007, Facebook had only been available for a few months, while Twitter was still a niche tech product without a clear purpose, and memes were still largely spread by email forwards. By 2016, the online world had been transformed beyond recognition, and with this came the potential for images to be repurposed to signify something completely outside the original authorial intent.

Oh America! was created in 1989 as the front cover image for experimental hip-hop outfit Tackhead’s Friendly As A Hand Grenade LP. The core members had previously been the rhythm section for Sugar Hill Records (NYC), providing the basslines for iconic, early, politically inflected hip-hop tracks such as Grandmaster Flash’s “The Message” (1982), and Melle Mel’s “White Lines” (1983). By the late 80s, UK producer Adrian Sherwood had persuaded them to relocate to England, where they played a similar role on his pioneering On-U Sound project.

Tackhead was a collaboration between the band and Sherwood that brought heavy, industrialised sounds combined with a politicised message to hip-hop. Its staccato, collaged style, often using sampled ‘found’ vocals, has some associations to the visual style Vaucher used for Crass, especially in her visual backdrops for their live shows. Her contribution to the album, however, resists collage and is instead a painted depiction, although as with much of her work, it takes a recognisable image and alters it to communicate new meaning.

Its release coincided with Reagan’s vice-president, George Bush, being elected for a third term by a Republican candidate, but the image itself seems to be more a reflection on the failure of the American Dream. While her work with Crass had a clearly definable subcultural audience, away from their home territory of New York, Tackhead struggled to articulate any subcultural connection, and despite the power and innovation of the music, the project failed to live up to expectations. That said, the cover image provided by Vaucher served as a clear statement of intent, and reflected the group’s political leanings. Indeed, it influenced how the tracks – many of which were instrumental – were interpreted by the audience, who read into the heavy industrial beats a politicised commentary on contemporary America. By contrast, the meme came to function as a shorthand for despair, expressed humorously, in the wake of Trump’s election victory. While retaining its power as an image, its functioning as a meme in this respect is fleeting and reductive. As such, while the image reached a far wider demographic than would have been the case with her earlier politically charged work, the complexity of the messaging was necessarily reduced.

Read Edwin Pouncey's review of Rebecca Binns's Gee Vaucher: Beyond Punk, Feminism And The Avant-Garde in The Wire 466. Subscribers can read the full article via the online library.