Spitting
Fox, Anna and Bruce, Andrew (2015) Spitting. [Exhibition/show, Photography]
A series of 40 - 50 large scale colour photographs of a collection of Spitting Image puppets. One of the most popular television programmes of the 1980s and 1990s, watched by an audience of 15 million people at its peak, Spitting Image was a British satirical show featuring puppet caricatures of prominent celebrities of the time, including international politicians and the British Royal Family, among others. The series was cancelled in 1996, but remains a seminal piece of British television.
On the termination of the series, James Hyman began to acquire some of the most important puppets used in the show for his private art collection, the Hyman Collection. Echoing the garish photographs made by Spitting Image creators Peter Fluck and Roger Law before Martin Lambie-Nairn approached them to suggest adapting their creations for television, Fox and Bruce spent weeks in the studio working with a selection of the original puppets, crafting these especially disturbing and ominous images. Photographed either against brightly coloured neon backdrops or shrouded by darkness; each image depicts a former Tory party member. Rendered in extraordinary detail on large format film, at times stripped of their clothing, every mark on the latex or foam is made visible and accentuated, including signs of wear, fragility and decay. Presented in this way, the puppets become evocative emblems of a past era and a faded power. There is an awkward tension in these photographs between the puppets as depiction of people, as cultural icons and also as crumbling modern artefacts. Key works in the exhibition include Margaret Thatcher, her predecessor Edward Heath and successor John Major, and cabinet ministers Cecil Parkinson, Norman Tebbit, Michael Heseltine, Leon Brittan and Douglas Hurd.
Fox and Bruce said: "Once we had them out of their packing cases, lying on the studio floor, the puppets looked broken, aged, decrepit and lacking any glimmer of life. The orange latex protruded pathetically from underneath their clothing as we re-arranged them on the stand. At one point, Norman Tebbit’s head came off as if he was being decapitated by some unknown force. The glamour faded, the sheen gone. Failed characters abandoned in storage. Spitting Image was a great show that was made, in the wake of Python, at a time when humour really could be outrageous. These puppets, imbued with satire, represented our most significant politicians at their worst. Now, like all political fortunes, we are left with the remnants of a different age."
One photograph purchased by the National Portrait Gallery, London.
Whole series purchased by Hyman Collection of British Photography.
Claire and James Hyman donate 125 prints to the Yale Center for British Art, including work from the series Spitting: https://loeildelaphotographie.com/en/2018/01/31/article/159992922/hyman-collectors-donate-125-prints-to-the-yale-center-for-british-art/
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7728-4660 and Bruce, Andrew
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