The Secret Public
The Last Days of the British Underground 1978-1988
7 October – 26 November 2006
Opening: 6 October 2006 7pm
Kunstverein München
Galerie Strasse 4
80539 München
Tel. 49 (0) 89 – 22 11 52
Charles Atlas, Bodymap, Leigh Bowery, Victor Burgin, Marc Camille Chaimowicz, Michael Clark, Duvet Brothers, Peter Doig, Gorilla Tapes, Brian Eno, Cerith Wyn Evans, Gilbert and George, Richard Hamilton, Derek Jarman, Isaac Julien, Tina Keane, Sandra Lahire, Linder, Stuart Marshall & Neil Bartlett, John Maybury, Neo-Naturists, Julian Opie, Jon Savage, Peter Saville, Mark E. Smith, Wolfgang Tillmans, Trojan, Stephen Willats and others.
The Secret Public. The Last Days of the British Underground 1978 1988 is an attempt to critically re-evaluate Britains recent past, while also presenting the lasting impact that artists and cultural producers of this period have on the cultural and political fabric of Britain today.
Occurring at a time of lowering political, economic and social change, from the recession and civil unrest of the 1980s, through the advent of AIDS and the rise of Thatcherism, a dark flowering of creativity emerged in the UK that seemed to take shape in a covert form outside the institutional canon of the time – creating its own underground network of activities, events, economies and celebrities. As a generational grouping of artists and personalities, it is well described by the title of a fanzine published in Manchester in 1978: The Secret Public.
Just as punk had made a volatile, ambiguous celebration of violence, negativity and protest, reflecting the notion of modernity itself reaching critical mass, so the artists represented within The Secret Public were responding to a darkling view of the modern world.
Both, informing and informed by the broader introduction of post-modern ideas, they addressed that aspect of the post-modern condition, which presented modernity itself as a maelstrom of, skewed, jarring quotations, sodden with irony, playing games with authorship and intentionality.
The Secret Public aims to present the hitherto neglected or retrospectively played down cultural productions in Britain of the 1980s; it seeks to throw into relief the subversive dimension of the British post-punk era in order to delineate its far-reaching, but nevertheless underestimated implications for contemporary cultural production today. The Secret Public thus surveys perhaps the last period in British culture before the rise of the consumer environment and the flattening of sub-cultural manifestations and creative industries into a single, pasteurised range of commodified styles.
Taking the course outlined by the exhibition The Secret Public as a starting point, Kunstverein München will hold the international conference From New Order to New Labour in February 2007.
The Secret Public was conceived by Kunstverein München (Stefan Kalmár und Daniel Pies); co-curated by British author and critic Michael Bracewell; associate curator is Ian White (Adjunct Film Curator, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London).
Kunstverein München
Galerie Strasse 4
80539 München
Tel. 49 (0) 89 – 22 11 52
www.kunstverein-muenchen.de
