Picture the 1980s in Britain, and what comes to mind? Thatcher? Big hair? Striking miners? Shoulder pads? The poll tax march? Greenham Common? New Romantics? Yuppies? Dole queues?
Whatever you know, or indeed remember, of the country in its Sinclair C5 era, Tate’s exhibition The 80s: Photographing Britain will remind you that there is an abundance of other perspectives. In Tish Murtha’s study of unemployed people in Newcastle, a girl in a trench coat sits in a tipped-up armchair poking rubble with a stick while junked furniture burns behind her. Meanwhile, Savile Row-suited toffs lounge on Chesterfield sofas, safely out of reach of Mrs T in the boys-own world of their members club, in Karen Knorr’s series Gentlemen.
The exhibition starts out along thematic lines. The opening room is dedicated to protest, from the Grunwick strike led by British/South Asian workers in Brent, through clashes between pickets and the police at the Orgreave coking plant, and marches opposing the homophobic Section 28 legislation. In a gallery dedicated to money and the growing divide between haves and have-nots, Paul Graham’s grimly atmospheric pictures of DHSS waiting rooms face off against Martin Parr’s snarky snaps of garden parties and gallery openings. In the next section, the lens is turned on the landscape, and the transformations wrought both by industry and its removal.
Things enter more conceptual territory, with a section looking at the impact of Victor Burgin and other photographic theorists. Many artists of the period explored the fizzy possibilities of bringing text into the frame – among them Sunil Gupta, whose 1988 series Pretended Family Relationships spliced tender portraits of inter-racial couples with fragments of intimate poetry and images from Section 28 protests. It is always a treat to encounter Jo Spence, who excavated the awkward, unhappy and unphotogenic truths of life that rarely make it into the family album or high-street studio. Together with Rosy Martin, Spence engaged in “phototherapy” sessions, revisiting episodes from her own and her parents’ lives. Alongside these hangs a deliciously mischievous self-portrait, cracking up while reading Freud’s On Sexuality through googly-eyed glasses.
Around this point, the structure of the show starts to slide around, spiralling and repeating. The territory it covers is ambitious, including art and studio photography alongside the reportage and documentary work that provide the exhibition’s backbone. Such breadth is no bad thing in itself, but from the get-go, the exhibition pushes against its self-imposed boundaries.
Some of the strongest work here was made in the 1970s and 1990s, notably the irresistibly spirited self-portraits taken by residents of Handsworth in Birmingham in 1979, masterminded by John Reardon, Derek Bishton and Brian Homer. Their inclusion is made possible because the curators decided to cover the “long 1980s” stretching from 1976-1994, almost doubling the temporal scope. A focus on key exhibitions of the era also apparently gives licence to include work shown in the country in the period, notably the Constructs – life-sized self-portraits by American artist Lyle Ashton Harris.
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None of this would matter if the show wasn’t baggy, meandering and in need of a tight edit. There’s a long-winded pedagogical detour in the middle to focus on exhibitions of the era that doubles up on territory covered elsewhere. The closing section Celebrating Subcultures bypasses those usually associated with the 1980s (punks, goths, rude boys, new age travellers) but includes an entire wall of 1990s photographs by Wolfgang Tillmans, most of which were shot in Germany and Greece.
I’m a great admirer of Tillmans, and of Lyle Ashton Harris, whose performances to camera exploring the constructs of masculinity at the height of the Aids crisis are defiant and celebratory. Yet in both cases the inclusion feels capricious, the result of curation by committee in which everybody gets to choose their darlings.
The art world of the 1980s speaks strongly to our own, in particular, the shared interest in identity and representation. In short supply here is the punky irreverence of an era in which taking the piss was practically a national hobby. A bit of wit goes a long way – the suburban surrealism of Paul Reas’s deadpan shot of a driving instructor cleaning the inside windows of his car in front of a pin-neat new-build in Wales; Grace Lau’s cross-dresser stifling a giggle posing besides a guardsman in full regalia; a sea of improbable hairspray-stiffened barnets illuminated by Tom Wood’s flash on the dancefloor of the Chelsea Reach nightclub.
From John Harris’s picture of a mounted policeman wielding his truncheon at a photographer during the Battle of Orgreave to Rotimi Fani-Kayode’s artful studies of queer black bodies, there’s some great stuff here – but you have to work for it.