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On the average day visitors to the Gamble
Room of the Victoria & Albert’s Museum in Knightsbridge
can marvel at the glories of Britain’s nineteenth-century
expansionism, and wonder if the nation will ever again live up
to the greatness of its past. But an event in late September – the ‘Style
Lounge’ round-table hosted by Marmalade magazine, a new digest
for creative people – hinted at the shape and direction of
Britain’s next economic and cultural empire.
An audience of young, colourful and opinionated designers, artists,
writers, filmmakers, students and musicians listened in a debate
on the issues facing Britain’s booming creative economy.
None of the panel, however, were the besuitted mandarins typical
of highly profitable industries. Instead they closely resembled
their audience, and included the seminal graphic designer Neville
Brody; the ‘guerilla filmmaker’ Franny Armstrong; indie
record label boss John Wolzencroft; and Marmalade’s creative
director Sacha Spencer-Trace – creative entrepreneurs with
application and initiative to match their vision and talent. You’d
scarcely guess their work contributes to a sector which now employs
1.9 million in the UK, generates £21 billion in London alone
and is growing faster than any other area of the economy.
As everyone in the Gamble Room was vividly aware, creativity is
suddenly very big business in the UK. ‘It is seen as the
next big differentiating point for business, and the exchequer
have very much got their eye on it,’ says Greg Orme, chief
executive of the Centre For Creative Business, a new government-backed
venture aiming to import business acumen into a flamboyantly productive,
yet financially leaky economic realm.
But it’s increasingly the case that creativity is also about
very small business. Soaring applications to art, fashion and design
courses at university indicate a generation’s aspiration
to work creatively. Yet while job opportunities remains scarce
and funding restricted, the same generation are seizing the creative
initiative and Doing It Themselves.
Today at the grass roots of British youth culture there is an
entrepreneurial creed evolving in the fields as diverse as music,
film, publishing, food, fashion, art, design and, yes, knitting
- whose mandate is perhaps best expressed in Neville Brody’s
observation on the evening that: ‘If you have an idea, you
make it happen.’
Do-It-Yourself for a previous generation may have meant a Sunday
putting up shelves. During punk, the widely-touted ‘DIY ethic’ described
how launching an idealistic band, fanzine or record label could
effect a new social order. In 2004, however, it signals a prismatic,
generational sweep of can-do cultural activism that is providing
employment for some, entertainment for many and conceivably a future
purpose for the V&A’s Gamble Room.
Consider the fact that it’s now routine for new bands to
promote themselves through ‘guerilla gigs’ – spontaneous
concerts publicised by email that circumventing established venue
circuits. Or that Mylo, this year’s breakthrough dance music
act, produced his album before signing a record contract. Or that
the founder of Innocent Smoothies, Richard Reed, had no training
in business whatsoever before launching a brand that will turn
over £17 million this year (‘It was as if you had to
get someone’s permission to do this,’ he recently said. ‘We
just walked into shops and started selling them.’)
‘Graduates aren’t leaving university now expecting
to go into jobs with other people – they’re expecting
to have portfolio careers working for a number of clients in a
very, very specialised area,’ says Ian Danby, creative industries
workforce development officer at the West Midlands Arts council. ‘What
we get more of is young people looking to do more creative work
in a do-it-yourself way.’
At the centre of the DIY generation is Marmalade, whose slogan
- ‘the creative spread’ – tables its agenda to
showcase and connect emerging talent and ideas across the creative
industries, and it’s no coincidence that the new DIY bible
itself began as a DIY publishing project.
‘Most magazine content is PR-led - you end up reading the
same content again and again,’ says Spencer-Trace. ‘We
came up an idea that would be fun but also functional and generous
- a network for creative “stuff”. You always get someone’s
email address in article about them, for example.’
Launched 18 months ago by Spencer-Trace and her partner Kirsty
Robinson, Marmalade’s sales exceeded forecasts almost instantly,
initially targetting an established audience in design, music,
advertising and fashion. Yet they hadn’t banked on the overwhelming
interest from graduates aspiring to become the next Alexander McQueen,
Jonathan Ive or Tracey Emin – the emerging DIY demographic
who define themselves no longer by what they buy, but by what they
create.
‘The high street has hijacked music, fashion, art, and is
brilliant at delivering packaged lifestyles,’ Spencer-Trace
says. ‘But there’s too much out there. Unlike in the
Eighties when people began expressing who they were by what they
consumed, today the only way to express real individuality is to
create stuff yourself.’
Marmalade’s pages reveal a close tonal reflection of the
culture it both speaks to and emerges form. Layouts on, say, knitwear
art or online protest films look spontaneous, ad-hoc and florid.
They resemble art-school scrapbooks rather than the slickly self-aware
and constipated aesthetic of the fading style magazine sector.
Marmalade’s tone of voice is enthusiastic rather than the
default mild-cynicism of the style press. A recent edition was
themed ‘the mistakes issue’ – the handmaiden
of any DIY endeavour, artistic or otherwise.
‘What our readers like is people who communicate something
with feeling,’ Spencer Trace enlarges, ‘even when it’s
bumpy and full of mistakes, the bumps become interesting because
we’ve had have such as smooth surface for so long. It’s
like, “wahey, here’s some texture.”’
***
It’s tempting to root DIY’s current flowering in the
fierce oppositional politics of the punk era when radical music,
art and fashion emerged in reaction to a conservative social consensus.
And while the role models of today’s British creative elite – Damien
Hirst, Vivienne Westwood and Alexander McQueen – owe a clear
debt to punk, the new DIYers operate in a different climate with
a new enemy: an unholy trinity of flatpacked lifestyle marketing,
vacuous celebrity and corporate monoculture intent on stifling
individual expression.
What new DIY practice does very well is ‘bootleg’ existing
cultural phenomena for its own purposes, and reroute established
channels and media to present unique experiences, an idea typified
by graffiti artist Banksy’s subversion of authority symbols – policeman,
soldier and city gents – painted on the ignored canvasses
of urban wall space. Consider also ‘guerilla curators’ Catherine
Patha, 31, and Tom Morton, 27, whose new exhibition Man In the
Holocene (meaning the current geological era) shows at semi-squatted
space in a zone of East London you won’t read about in Wallpaper*.
From the outset the duo aimed to challenge curatorial practice,
and Holocene is as interesting for its content as for the mildly
situationist manner of its execution, which Morton likens to ‘a
reverse Millennium Dome,’ no less.
‘Most people get a space and decide what to do with it,’ he
says. ‘We define what we do in opposition to that. We started
putting the programme together last November and didn’t have
the space until July.
‘Catherine was the director of a Cork Street gallery and
I’m editor of Frieze, so it’s not as if we’re
punky outsiders. We’re closer in the spirit to late-Eighties
rave than punk - that’s what informed our generation. Our
idea of how to create shows didn’t fit in with the places
on offer, so we made our own and did it on our own terms.’
Their plan is evidently paying off, as the duo have attracted
interest from top-line curators Hans Ulrich Oberst and Maurizio
Cattelan. ‘We came with this idea to some major figures and
they responded immediately and very positively,’ Morton says. ‘It
shows there is a space for DIY thinking within the art world.’
A mile or so further down Kingsland Road towards Shoreditch, brother
and sister duo Teresa & Nick Lechford’s Carbon Industries
typifies DIY the approach in an altogether riskier discipline -
property development. ‘Maybe we were stupid,’ says
former fashion journalist Teresa, 28, surveying her bar, Dreambagsjaguarshoes,
an enterprise which now appears less stupid than brave, popular
and profitable.
What the Lechfords lacked in capital and business skills they
overcompensated for in drive, initiative and vision. ‘We
wanted a hub for people like us,’ Lechford reflects, ‘who
were interested in the same creative things. We did it the back-to-front
way and on a shoestring, but we knew what we wanted to do and were
prepared to risk it. We had to beg, borrow and steal. Compared
to other bars who were opening up in the areas, it was a small
amount of money, but a lot to us.’
In a stroke of genius they retained the original signage (it was
formerly a pair of derelict accessory wholesalers) when they renovated
the premises into a bar and gallery in 2002 – providing precisely
the kind of consciously guerilla’ed ‘bump’ that
sets it apart from its blandly standardised competitors. A great
deal of elbow grease later, the Lechfords own and operate a micro-empire
of creative locales including a café-shop (No-One), takeaway
joint (Bang) and art space (17Space) all within staggering distance
of each other in terminally fashionable Shoreditch.
Marmalade, Dreambagsjaguarshoes and Man In The Holocene point
to a new appetite for making and consuming ideas, which in any
economist’s words means a market. Thrust of the new DIY also
owes much to connections and skills enabled by technologies (desktop
design and music package, email, internet and mobiles) that were
unthinkable even a decade ago.
‘There’s only one craft now, and that’s making
your computer work so you can make music, art or writing and get
it out to the world - it’s not about companies spending millions
of pounds promoting something,’ says Bill Drummond, the ex-KLF
star. Having cut a swathe through from punk (he managed Echo & The
Bunnymen) to pop (The KLF sold millions) to authorship, Drummond
now pursues a range of DIY art projects that exist both on- and
offline (in people’s kitchens, in the case of his latest
cookery-themed ‘work’, Soup). he views the sense of
possibility and do-it-yourself empowerment offered by the internet
in terms closely matching the spirit of punk.
‘Punk was incredibly invigorating,’ he says. ‘It
made me feel everything was possible. I love the idea now that
with the net everybody be in contact with everyone on the globe.
If your project has got anything going for it, it will find its
audience.’
© Kevin Braddock, 2004
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