Arena Homme+ | Words by Michael Collins
‘Fireside Scene’ Duggie Fields, 1969. Redfern Gallery
'Everyone has the potential to become an artist,’ Duggie Fields once said. He was by no means the first contemporary artist to make the claim, and with the coming of a new century it felt like old news anyway.
By the end of the 1990s anyone with sufficient funds and a steady hand had the potential to be a post-pop artist, following the launch of the Apple iMac. Those of us who never picked up a paintbrush could use the mouse and the minimal palette of shapes and colours supplied by the software to copy objects or artworks. (Battenberg, Colonel Sanders, and Hockney’s ‘A Bigger Splash’ in my case.) These were the fledgling days of the internet when websites created by design agencies were virtual works of art. They were impossible to navigate — but it didn’t matter. What was evident was this platform didn’t merely have the potential to make everyone an artist but a film maker and a musician too, such was the scope of the brave new world wide web. The digital art work - those vectors; those pixels - hinted at the post-pop art produced in the wake of the old American Pop masters. It brought comparisons with Michael Craig-Martin’s later work and the cartoon-like Day-Glo paintings of Duggie Fields. In 1995 Fields himself purchased a Macintosh. He was soon producing his own digital work, dividing himself between the computer and the canvas: 'I thought I was just going to do collage and archive my past but I soon discovered you could do movement and sound. After a few starter lessons I pretty much taught myself to do music, production and animation.’ He compiled his ‘MAXIMALism’ manifesto as an homage to excess, as the digital age erupted. 'Painting is the more sensual act,’ he said. ‘But the computer takes me into areas of creativity I never expected to find myself.’
While the technology that Fields applied himself to was evolving, the artist, his work, his habitat appeared to be preserved in aspic. He could so easily have been one of those London eccentrics who turns cuddly when the changing times catch up. This was true of Quentin Crisp during his final years in the capital, before making the voyage out to New York. The sharpness of his output and his outlook, were overshadowed by a caricature as dusty and crusty as the Beaufort Street bedsit he'd not cleaned since he first paraded the streets of the city 'blind with mascara and dumb with lipstick’. If Duggie Fields was in danger of being assigned to a time it was not so much an epoch, a decade, but a year: 1975. A vintage year, no less. One that deserves the scrutiny that has been allotted to say, 1968.
It was Christmas 1968 when Duggie Fields moved into the flat he continues to occupy at Wetherby Mansions in Earl’s Court. The interior has been documented almost as much as his signature look and his oeuvre. His longevity and his art have elevated him above the 'Them’ he was synonymous with, having outlived the core players namechecked in Peter York's Harper’s & Queen essay from 1976. Fields is cast as the ‘key Them artist’ and ’the definitive Them’. Much has been said of the early days in the Earl’s Court flat, when he shared the rooms with Syd Barrett. Photographs capture the artist with shoulder-length hair, kooky shoes and braces. A touch of Ozzie Clark with the wardrobe of children’s television presenters of tomorrow. By 1975 he was fully-formed. As was his art. As was his abode. The three had become one.
Fields never belonged to the psychedelic 1960s space that Barrett occupied. Even though he arrived in the capital from the counties as part of that post-war generation that headed for art schools as the decade started to swing. 'I came to London in '63 and met a whole lot of other people my age’, Fields has said. 'Everyone came to the art schools in London essentially. And it was just as the King's Road was taking off. So I met a whole other lot of people who were the same age, all starting off as art students, designers, architects, and a lot of them went on to be very influential.' He was not part of the graduate class of 1968 who forsook art for politics and found their way into cushy careers in the public sector, as part of that long march through the institutions. Nor did he fit with the queer-east-end-gangster-meets-west-end-rock-star contingent featured in ‘Performance’. A film that, like the final chapter of Christopher Booker’s ’The Neophiliacs’, buried the counter culture of the decade. Fields and his ilk were formed from the pop art sensibility identified with a figure considered to be the founding father of Them - Andy Warhol, and the ‘camp’ deconstructed in Susan Sontag’s celebrated essay. Come the 1970s Them were, as York points out, the antithesis of everything the Sixties had bequeathed to the mainstream.
The accentuated Dracula eyebrows and the hook curl suspended like a noose below a coal black quiff, arrived in 1975. The white shoes, sharp suits, cartoon shades and pop art ties followed and remain with him still. They spring from the season when Thems sacrificed sexy for interesting, and a look that came with codes to be deciphered by those in the know. It’s been said that Fields' appearance embodies his ‘post pop-art masterpieces’ as much as his home. This was what distinguished the definitive Them according to York: 'Them put the idea into their living; they are their rooms, eat their art.'
The clothes and the interiors are as intertwined as Pee-wee Herman and his playhouse; as the designer Vincent Darré and his surreal Parisian apartment. Fields could be a fusion of these two figures.
His first t-shirt design with the words ‘Earl’s Court Elegance’ originated in 1975. It was an ironic take as his was an aesthetic at odds with a neighbourhood known for the concert arena, Australians, and a gay S&M bolthole: ‘Nothing in my house is of intrinsic value, apart from my work. Everything else is old and repurposed. But when I change it around, paint another canvas or add something that interests me I’ve found in a charity shop, it breathes new life into the place.’ The work features cameos from a number of his departed peers - ‘The Gang’ at the apex of Thems. The components of his home are redolent of original Them interiors: Mondrian colours, leopard prints, dismembered mannequins, Action Man and imagery of lips and nipples.
The interior is now so iconic in its own way that it was reconstructed for Glasgow International 2018 at The Modern Institute. Them have been elevated to the status that every tribe that once danced in the margins is eventually accorded. Every bit player becomes worthy of a profile; every diary and scrapbook of snapshots becomes as sacred as a cultural Dead Sea Scrolls. Them were the first of this breed in the 1970s, but the last to be officially recognised as a museum piece. This year London’s Redfern Gallery brought together work from key artists in the group: Kevin Whitney, Luciana Martinez, Duggie Fields, Derek Jarman. Curator James Birch wrote: ‘the art created by the featured artists remains as fresh and exciting, almost timeless, and is still invested with the power to provoke and disorientate, amaze and excite.’ Arguably, the work isn't timeless and it doesn’t provoke. The world has moved on, even if art hasn’t. According to Duggie Fields: 'What seems excessive becomes normalised and that’s a fascinating process.’ York pointed out that the single-mindedness of the definitive Them means they remain that way forever ‘and don’t metamorphose into ordinary adults’. If so, Fields has stayed true to the faith, sporadically courted by the harbingers of passing fashions. In the early 1980s he was momentarily big in Japan, courtesy of Shiseido. This century Comme des Garçons put him on the catwalk and reprised his ‘Earl’s Court Elegance’ line on a run of garments.
The stand-out Fields image from this year’s gallery show is ‘Fireside Scene’ from 1969, when he was Douglas Fields of the kooky shoes and quirky braces. Girls in vintage swimwear are sprawled across a floor in front of an art deco fireplace. The style, the colours and the content, although seemingly retro at the time, actually anticipate a later season, a later year: 1975. The final days of Nova; the last hurrah of Biba; when girls in diaphanous Daisy Buchanan dresses first wore Henna bobs. A vintage year, yes. The year that Warhol was in town to promote the publication of his philosophy. The year that Derek Jarman won the Alternative Miss World competition, the big Them event staged at the Butler’s Wharf Thames side warehouse that housed Jarman and Andrew Logan, the pageant’s creator and master of ceremonies. The following year Peter York’s essay appeared more as a eulogy, as other tribal outsiders had taken on the mantle and bubbled in the mainstream. By comparison the original Thems seemed too art school, too posh, too suburban, too middle class, too well-connected. A little bit Rocky Horror….a little bit rag week. In hindsight, in order to understand the impact of Them back in 1975 after glam had faded, and as punk began to flourish, you’d need to understand ‘Us’.
In the 1990s I was working on a BBC series about the 1980s, presented by Peter York. The pair of us were sat in his home in London’s Montague Square during the filming. The hallway was taken up with a Hockney-esque portrait of its inhabitant, painted around the time Them were in their element. According to his essay, 1972/3 was the high watermark. By 1975, they’d become the decades’s Bloomsbury Group or Bright Young Things to certain circles. We found ourselves agreeing that we should have been making a series about the Seventies, with the Them essay at the centre, before turning to a subject that would crop up in numerous conversations we’d have throughout the following years. We found ourselves discussing ‘Us’.
I was once one of Us. We were not from the suburban middle class and international upper class backgrounds of Them. Some of Us were cornered by a brutalist enclave in south east London, anchored between the docklands of Butler’s Wharf and the Old Kent Road. During the high season of Them we looked longingly beyond the new housing estate at the top of the street to a bigger London. One that housed the Them destinations touched on in Honey, Over 21 (Ritz and Interview were beyond our grasp), that were dwarfed by copies of Exchange & Mart and Forum on the shelves of the local newsagent: Swanky Modes, Sex, Browns, Zanzibar, Plaza, Acme Attractions. The good life was out there somewhere.
We were not alone, of course. Others raised on the wrong side of the tracks, the wrong side of the river, have written superbly of their geographical exile in that era. Charles D’Ambrosio for one, recalling his experience in Seattle in 1974: ‘anyone for whom the movements of culture feel rumoured, anyone like this grows up anxiously aware that all the innovative and vital events in the world happen Back East, like way back, like probably France, but before expatriation can be accomplished in fact it is rehearsed and performed in the head. You make yourself clever and scoffing, ironic, deracinated, cold and quick to despise…'.
For the likes of ‘Us’ it was not France but King’s Road that appeared to be the home of vital events, and where we eventually made the pilgrimage to. Fiorucci opened its doors there in that vintage year of 1975, and in the October we got to participate in a true Them experience when Roxy Music played Wembley Empire Pool. (The definitive pop star Them as the sound was the look.) The audience were a snapshot of what Eve Babitz alludes to in her bumper 1980 text ‘Fiorucci: The Book’ : 'all your conventional reservations and stubborn navy blues are nothing more than prissy hangovers from a past life that is no longer useful. We’re going to have to live on what’s left, to recycle the remnants of things past, to survive’.
Then back to those slate grey streets of south east London. Navigating those familiar, weatherbeaten turnings where Turks - tank tops, scuffed platforms and ankle-swinging flares - in the condemned tenements on Munton Road were stealing the bikes of a younger generation, repainting them and selling them. In the stairwells of the new estate Irish Catholic boys - bowling shirts and South Sea Bubble jeans, a hangover from an earlier northern soul summer - thought they were gangsters and finger-fucked girls who had barely reached their teens. The big families scattered around who actually were gangsters in their own way. The names of those families that were feared, by reputation and rumour: the Pimms, the Marnies, the Brindles. The shopping centre after hours. The subways all hours. How far is Shangri-la from here? - Wembley Empire Pool with our voices about to break, in khaki US army gear, plastic sandals, a St Moritz between the lips and with a whiff of jumble sales about us. Scoffing, ironic, deracinated, cold and quick to despise.… Finally we were Them. Or at least those ‘junior grade Them’ quoted in the famed Harpers & Queen essay, who would one day grow up and metamorphose into ordinary adults. Well, not all of them; not all of us.
Duggie Fields (1945 – 2021)
Originally published in Arena Homme+ April 2020.