DISOBEDIENTS
COIL/GEE VAUCHER
Works from the archive of Lee and Kim Oliver
Sat 23rd, Sun 24th, Fri 29th, Sat 30th Sept & Sun 1st Oct
1-6pm
COIL
For clarity, the focus for Disobedients will be the two primary members of COIL:
Geoff Rushton (1962-2004, known throughout as (John) Balance and Peter Christopherson (1955-2010, known throughout as Sleazy).
COIL emerged somewhat amorphously in 1982/3 when Balance and Sleazy fused their personal and creative worlds. Since 1974 Sleazy had worked with design group Hipgnosis, creating some of the most memorable album covers of the 70s and 80s (also designing the logo of UK fashion label BOY London). During this time he was also part of Coum Transmissions, a performance art collective that was to evolve into the industrial music bandThrobbing Gristle (TG). Within TG, Sleazy manipulated pre-recorded tape machines and samples, producing discordant or harmonic electronic sound. Upon TG’s demise or “mission termination” in 1981, Christopherson co-founded experimental art/music group Psychic TV (PTV) in 1982.
Balance revered TG and during 1979-82, co-edited 7 editions of experimental music fanzine Stabmental, through which he was to meet Sleazy (becoming lovers), and joining and recording with PTV. Acknowledging constraints within PTV, Balance began to evolve Coil, developing a dual project album, Transparent with the group Zos Kia before ultimately forming Coil with Sleazy in late 1983/early 84.
Direct creative influences were artists and occultists such as Aleister Crowley, William Burroughs and Austin Osman Spare, Balance having a natural affinity with paganism from a very young age. Rehearsals and recording sessions were to involve ritual magick or spirit channelling, long drug-fuelled sessions matching acoustically with analogue keyboards, synths and exotic instruments which produced expansive tracks, rich with dark and light energies, resistant to definition. Guest artists and collaborators contributed further to this process, magnifying the diverse sound, spirit and appearance of their work.
The output of Coil ranges from the avant-garde (including soundtracks for experimental filmmaker Derek Jarman), to forays into popular dance music, experimental neoclassical and folk to pure electronica. Balance frequently collaborated with others as guest artist, remixer and producer. Commissioned work by Coil includes a soundtrack for Clive Barker’s Hellraiser (rejected by the studio as too frightening). Limited edition vinyl releases (often coloured vinyl) were signed by the band, with additional inserts, info sheets and original paintings, enhancing the art/occult object. Following the untimely death of Balance in 2004, Sleazy ended Coil, moving to Thailand to pursue other musical projects where he sadly passed in 2010.
GEE VAUCHER
Born in 1945 in South London, Gee attends S.E. Essex Tech College and School of Art in 1965. Here she meets her creative partner, Penny Rimbaud, and Dave King, founding an ‘open door’ centre for their pursuit of ideological and political freedoms at Dial House in Epping in 1967. Together they form EXIT, a performance art group playing London venues in the early 1970s.
Seeking artistic adventure and personal freedom, Gee relocates to New York City, working as a freelance political illustrator for clients including The New York Times and Rolling Stone magazine. This generates enough income to finance issue one of The International Anthem in 1976, a newspaper style vehicle for her own work, critiquing patriarchal systems and power structures with collage and drawings, alongside text from Rimbaud.
Editorial restrictions on her freelance work compel Gee to return to England and Dial house, and enter into CRASS, an art-collective punk band that formed around Rimbaud and Steve Ignorant in 1977. Dave King designs the now famous logo for the band while Gee and Mick Duffield produce video and film projection for live performances of the band.
Thus begins the period that Gee is most known for - albeit anonymously as G-sus - in keeping with Crass’s collective ideology. Record covers, flyers, posters and handbills, are meticulously painted in black gouache yet resemble paste-up collage. Albums such as Stations of the Crass and Penis Envyunfold into 36” x 24” monochrome posters to contain lyrics and as much written and visual information as possible. Similarly, single covers open out into 21” x 14” poster billboards, ideal for fans’ walls, and made affordable for many by the band’s decision to design the tenet ‘Pay no more than....’ onto the cover to ensure a fair maximum price.
Despite frequent pictorial critiques of the oppression of women, Gee has consistently resisted the limitations of categorisation, eschewing isms, including feminism, to pursue a humanitarian critique of human and animal rights, anti-fascism and environmentalism.
In a surprising moment of public prominence, Vaucher’s painting Oh America 1989, (cover art for the ‘89 Tackhead album, Friendly as a Hand Grenade), an image of a distressed Statue of Liberty, crying into her hands, was to become a Daily Mirror front page, marking the election of Donald Trump on 9/11/16.
Gee continues to paint and create at Dial house alongside Penny Rimbaud, establishing a publishing house, Existencil Press, to publish books and editions rather than exhibit her paintings.