Sophy Rickett and Rut Blees Luxemburg’s provocative images – with a dose of 1990s nostalgia – might have something to tell us about the power structures of today
Sophy Rickett was fresh out of art school when she realised the black-and-white photographic series Pissing Women (1995). It delivers on the promise of its title, comprising a trio of full-length portraits of Rickett and her friend and fellow flaneuse Rut Blees Luxemburg standing up to urinate against a series of symbolic London locations. In 1994, both women were working in the City of London, exploring the environment they worked in out of office hours. They dressed up in formal office wear and posed for each other, collaborating on both Pissing Women and Blees Luxemburg’s own series Chance Encounters (1995).
Rickett’s series has just been published as an eponymous book, alongside a collection of essays, for which this show (a doubleheader with Blees Luxemburg) is a tie-in. As to why this particular moment has been chosen to revisit bodies of work created 30 years ago, we might point the finger at current nostalgia: in this case, for the 1990s, a period now being revised and repackaged for the twenty-first century. You can see the process at work in the essays on Rickett’s pictures, which for the most part consider them, often in rather one-dimensional terms, as contemporary emblems of female empowerment. That’s not an entirely worthless reading, but it is a reductive one.
The artist’s targets were macho structures, certainly, but precisely defined ones: the service economy, as represented by a City office block clad in reflective black marble; and the security state that safeguarded it, represented by a satellite listening station at Silvertown and the then-recently-completed headquarters of MI6, looming above Rickett in the background beyond Vauxhall Bridge. You’re reminded of Michel de Certeau writing about seeing Manhattan from atop the World Trade Center (in his essay ‘Walking in the City’, published in English in 1984), or Patrick Keiller’s film London (1994). Similarly, Rickett’s pictures can be read as a tactical manual for personal autonomy in an increasingly strategised, surveilled city, itself framed as a monochrome dystopia.
Blees Luxemburg’s photos are more fun in their reframing of corporate London after hours. Unlike Rickett’s monochrome, she used a stylised palette for her street photography, heavy on bleeding colour that gives her pictures the feel of drunken snapshots, blown up to proportions that lend the suggestion of a wider, cinematic narrative: Chance Encounters (City of London) (1994), for instance, the artist sharing a joke with two baseball-bat-wielding City boys, their double-breasted suits and goofy grins giving them the air of light-relief goons in a mafia movie. She’s described her approach to the series as ‘cosplaying’ an invented persona, and the sense that even an impersonal business district can be repurposed as an arena for a ludic dérive is never far from these pictures.
Regardless of the rationale for the exhibition-book package, the desire to revisit these pictures isn’t for any nostalgia for Britart sensationalism; and it’s certainly not a prompt from the noisy discourse of contemporary slogan-feminism, as expressed in the book on Rickett’s work. Both series are possessed of Situationist nuances that might have been lost in a context of ‘Young British Artist’ hype and tabloid panic over ‘ladette’ culture. Since 1994, the mass surveillance Rickett identified in Pissing Women has become ever more widespread, to the point we’re transmitting personal information from our pockets. Meanwhile, London has become so expensive that the subversive expressions of personal liberty the work communicates seem an altogether alien concept. If we miss the 1990s, well, small wonder.
Stream at Cob Gallery, London, through 27 September
