On May 21, 1985, a group of young artists armed with buckets of gray paint doused the windows of the venerable galleries—including this one—that lined Cork Street, then the hub of London’s established commercial art scene. While no charges were ultimately levied, the vandals were banned from central London, provoking a move to New York City. This fascinating survey exhibition includes ephemera and printed matter related to that incident, the most infamous action of the Grey Organisation (GO), an important if too-little-known collective active in London and New York between 1983 and 1991. Besides anarchist interventions like the so-called Cork Street Attack, GO dabbled in politics, music, and fashion, producing leftist propaganda, designing album covers for Tommy Boy Records, and modeling for Yohji Yamamoto.
A wall featuring mockups for a bold, graphic Labour Party T-shirt and the iconic flower-power cover of De La Soul’s 1989 album 3 Feet High and Rising demonstrates the group’s range as well as their knack for advertising, while other works engage with more art historically resonant strategies, like the process-based abstraction of Grand Street, N.Y.C., 1990, made by leaving a canvas to pick up errant marks on the floor of their Lower East Side studio. Drawn from the archive of principal member Toby Mott, the show positions GO as a hinge between the antiestablishment politics of punk, from which they emerged as young men coming of age in late-’70s Britain, and the ambivalent engagement with consumerism seen in ’90s collectives like ART CLUB2000, who played with the period’s mainstream yuppie aesthetic of the Gap—not unlike how GO subverted the Thatcherite corporate look of the nondescript gray suit with a white collared shirt. Siting the project at Mayor indicates the art market’s tendency to retrospectively valorize formerly contentious actions, and raises questions about the potential of such guerrilla tactics today, when galleries and museums appear increasingly eager to accommodate their own saboteurs.
— Alex Bacon
