Alphabet book 1982

In the late 1970's, at a time when Clement Greenberg's theories championing painting as an exploration of purely optical phenomena enjoyed a wide currency, I began to make work using imagery. I was inspired partly by what little I knew, from art magazines, of developments in other countries, but my main motivation was a sense of invisibility. Everything conflicted, or vital, or problematic/queer had been made to vanish by invoking a higher logic which understood Art as having its own internal logic, rather in the way that Marx had conceived of history as the unfolding through the development of new forms of production. Anything queer or figurative, in the sense that it refers to human bodies and physical expressions was absent from this account and could only be a naive and inappropriate intrusion into the higher realms of Fine Art.

I wanted to find a way to include explicitly queer, gay, social and anthropological material which wouldn't be ambiguous or titillating. Around 1980 I made my first mature pieces these were groups of drawings made on sheets of layout paper, usually in biro, which I then assembled into rudimentary books. Alphabet Book was a development from these early works. I conceived of it as a small pamphlet which I took to commercial printer to print for me.

A principal source of the imagery for Alphabet Book is a Soviet children's book. Sweet and charming illustrations of the boys marching, having their hair cut, shining their shoes, etc. The appealing style of the illustration and the sugarcoated assumptions about the sorts of activities that little boys engaged in made of this book an interesting subject for reinvention.