Gee Vaucher haunts my dreams

Saw this bit of street art in one of my regular east London haunts the other day and immediately thought "that looks like Gee Vaucher", and ... indeed it does. Or so I think. (It's true I tend to see Gee Vaucher in almost everything - street art, stuff on social media, in my dreams ...).

One is not amused: royal face-palm

Anyway, I assume this "face-palm" image is a visual riff on Vaucher's excellent Oh America. According to my calculations (ie when I started noticing it on a wall in Shoreditch), this one went up around the time Donald Trump graced the UK with his presence last month, including that excruciating state banquet where he was hobnobbing with the Windsors at Buckingham Palace. I've said before, that Vaucher's John Heartfield-like work for Crass was a major part of my interest in them back when I was still in my teens. That and their ice-cold contempt for regular politics and any kind of establishment "system". Very bracing. These days, while I still enjoy dipping into Crass's amazing back catalogue (eg Christ - The Album), I find myself just as interested in spotting Vaucher-type design work on city walls layered with old posters, street art, tags and other urban detritrus. The layering is especially important, I think. When you see photos of closed-down buildings - like this series on the Guardian site this week - it's the stuff that's attached to the buildings after they've been closed down that that's often the most interesting. The tags, band posters, daubs of spraypaint. Even the steel shutters over windows and the ugly steel railings they erect are all part of this. With current street artists like Protest Stencil popping up on bus shelters over London, it's good that there's still a Vaucher-like edge to some of the stuff out there. It doesn't all have to be that vacuous five-star-hotel-commissioned work which is disfiguring more and more of London - whole walls given over to corporates who get "artists" to feature their nauseating company logos in supposedly "hip" new street settings. No, I have to say one is not amused by this crude use of a street "art" for the tacky purposes of providing supposed cultural capital to big businesses. And the same goes for those £250-a-night hotels that like to book in a DJ for their foyer at the weekends ...

Anyway, I've long thought that some latter-day Iain Sinclair figure needs to go around our cities (and town and villages come to that) and create a huge map of all the street art, all the scrawls, all the little home-made stickers that people put on street poles. They're always changing - new layers, walls knocked down, painted over - so the project would be enormous, constantly in need of renewal, infinite. It would be an exploration of the visible-but-strangely-hidden world of all our unofficial street adornments. It would be a psychogeographical/hauntological endeavour to end all such endeavours! Who could do it? I think there's only one person capable of undertaking this enormous feat of labour. Someone who already dreams about a nighmarish world where everything is designed by Gee Vaucher ...