THE SOUND OF SADISM: WHITEHOUSE AND THE 'NEW' 'BRITISH' ART

The problem with self-conscious extremism is its need to definite itself against a social norm. In this sense, rather than challenging liberalism, a group such as Whitehouse merely reproduce the reigning ideology. Whitehouse are 'notorious' for their track Right To Kill, a slogan that takes liberal ideology to a 'logical' conclusion. Regardless of whether Whitehouse set out to arrive at a reductio ad absurdum, the notion of rights is very much a product of the enlightenment, and remains so no matter how ridiculous the results when applied to animals and murder. Despite their inability to move beyond liberalism, as the Rolling Stones of industrial muzak, Whitehouse do have the merit of acting as a waste-disposal unit for every trendy art 'theory' animated by that old idealist fallacy about 'the critical autonomy of art'.

The reactionary aspects of 'critical' 'theory' have become increasingly transparent in recent low-grade restatements of Frankfurt School positions. A paradigmatic example of this is the throughput of the Camerawork Gallery curator John 'Porno' Roberts. While this Frankfurt School groupie imagines he is engaged in the creation of an aesthetic doctrine which responds specifically to the activities of the current crop of 'young British artists', the fact that his 'ideas' can be applied wholesale to Whitehouse demonstrates that he's failed to ground his creed in the material unfolding of history. In an article entitled 'Mad For It!' published in both Third Text and everything magazine during the course of 1996, Porno Roberts announces:

"Throughout the 1990s,... we have become familiar with the contra or anti-exhibition title, the title that mocks the assiduousness of theory-led curatorship. These are titles that know no decorum or circumspection, 'in-yer-face' displays of rudery and the pleasures of popular culture and speech. Unembarrassed by a lack of intellectual propriety, they are avowedly anti-professional and disputatious. Those who devised the titles of recent shows such as... Sick certainly don't want to be thought of as earnest and well-intentioned - this is for art nonces who have spent too much time... 'getting into the critique of identity'. To organise a show today entitled Identity, Representation and the Dialogic would seem as smart and vital a move as Tachism's existential gibberings did to many seventies conceptualists."

This is, of course, something that Whitehouse and their industrial peers realised long ago. Back in the eighties, Whitehouse proudly strutted their stuff in both South London boozers AND art spaces such as the Ground Zero Gallery. Whitehouse always claimed they were producing art but for them, the art was surely keeping a straight-face while their comedy act was consumed as serious culture by po-faced bores. Why else would Whitehouse have described their concerts as 'live actions'? Why else grind out novelty synth numbers with titles like On Top, The Second Coming, Coitus, Total Sex, Dominate You, Ultrasadism, Erector, Shitfun, Ripper Territory, Pro-Sexist, Pissfun, Rapeday, Her Entry, Buchenwald, Incest 2, Peter Sutcliffe, Cock Dominant, Tit Pulp, Gilles De Rais, Pro-Rapist, Death Penalty, Bloodfucking, Queen Myra, New Sadist, Ass-Destroyer, Rapemaster, I'm Coming Up Your Ass, My Cock's On Fire, Hungry For Pain, To Die, The White Whip, Master Of Overviolence, Never Forget Death, Asking For It, Torture Chamber and Anal America? As these titles indicate, Whitehouse's output from 1979 onwards fits very neatly into what Porno Roberts categorises as the 'newer art practices'. Indeed, Porno Roberts could be writing about Whitehouse when he states:

"The truth is, playing dumb, shouting 'ARSE' and taking your knickers down has become an attractive move in the face of the institutionalisation of critical theory in art in the 1980s... This has created in certain metropolitan centres (specifically London) a crucial awareness of what was needed to move art forward generationally, to take it beyond the radical expectations and conformities of the critical postmodernisms emanating from New York and cultural studies departments of British universities. A younger generation has had to find a way through these congealing radicalisms. For some this has meant the chance to free-wheel and play the idiot savant, for others the liberating turn from critical virtue has allowed them to refocus on the theory's underlying social and political realities from a more formally open position. This is why it would be mistaken to identify the new art and its fuck-you attitudinising with anything so simpleminded as the 'depoliticisation' of art, as if this generation had hitched itself gleefully to the brutal inanities of the new Lottery Culture. Despite much of the new art's unqualified regard for the voluptuous pleasures of popular culture... it does not seek to assimilate itself to popular culture in fazed admiration, as if its only ambition was an anti-intellectual release of libidinal energy. Rather, it treats the aesthetically despised categories and pleasures of popular culture - the pornographic, sleazy, abject and trivial - as things that are first nature and commonplace and mutually defining of subjectivity and therefore needing no intellectual introduction into art. This is not a generation of artists who, in utilising the stereotypes, archetypes, signs and product-images of popular and mass culture, employ them as a means to revivify the content of fine art. After postmodernism, the bridging of the 'great divide' between popular culture and high culture is formally, at least, a dead issue for these artists."

Whitehouse are famous for their bad behaviour, attacking their audience and in one celebrated incident, debagging and spanking a fan during the course of a 'live action'. This fits in perfectly with Porno Roberts's arguments that:

"The 'bad behaviour', the journalistic and demotic voicing in the new art, is a way of saying that, as the shared and unexceptional conditions of modern subjectivity, these categories and pleasures do not need to be incorporated into art in order to validate them... There is a way of reading the new art, then, as a generation moving the critique of representation out of the domain of academic reference onto the 'street'.... It is understandable, therefore, why the 'professional' critique of representation pursued by the likes of Victor Burgin, Mary Kelly and Hans Haacke in the Seventies and Eighties began to appear so censorious to this generation. Such moral strenuousness and the intellectualisation of pleasure looked bathetic... If, in the 1970s, the dominant form of art's presentation was the sociological display (Haacke, Kelly)... today artists have looked to a more informal aesthetic... in this case what counts is the maximum entertainment value, the fact that the 'private' moment of encounter with the discrete, individual artwork is disturbed and exposed to a non-aestheticising milieu."

The fixation with crime and fascism evident within the Whitehouse oeuvre is indicative of the fact that their work is at least partially structured by non-aesthetic elements. If the notion of the 'sublime' is at work here, it reappears under a reversed perspective, a mirror held up to the fears of the romantic movement first given theoretical expression in the Philosophical Enquiry of the conservative die-hard Edmund Burke. Whitehouse commodify terror and mass murder as an entertaining spectacle, and the consumption of this as 'art' mimics the fascist obliteration of private space. This tendency is manifested most obviously on the Whitehouse album New Britain, which features the tracks Movement 1982, Roman Strength, Will To Power, New Britain, Ravensbruck, Kriegserklarung, Viking Section and Active Force. While some critics have accused Whitehouse of fascist sympathies and exhibiting poor taste by celebrating murder and rape, giving any credence to the ideas propounded by Porno Roberts would force one to look at these issues in quite a different light. Thus Whitehouse could be viewed as enacting "the revenge of a stereotyped proletarian cognition (pure appetite, a body without subjectivity) on the deracinated body of bourgeois culture and the piety of an identity politics that has no place for the voluptuous and the transgressive... they are not out to destroy art but to show what remains bitterly excluded from its presence: the sensitivities and judgements of the nonspecialist spectator."

One of the many reasons why I vehemently reject Porno Roberts's arguments is that he has unwittingly produced a justification for the fascination Whitehouse display towards nazi death camps and paedophilia. For a detailed analysis of the flaws in the forms of historical periodisation adopted by Porno Roberts see my essay 'From Arse To Arsehole' in the pamphlet Disputations On Art, Anarchy and Assholism (Sabotage Editions, London 1997). As I have already demonstrated, Porno Roberts produces what all positivists produce, the eradication of the subject as agent. Thus while the doctrine of the philistine is supposedly grounded specifically in an 'appreciation' of 'nineties' art, as I've made clear it actually applies equally well to the body of work produced by Whitehouse during the eighties:

"The pleasures and brutalities of the encounter between the body and commodity culture is something they inhabit and work from as a matter of course. There are two primary causes behind this. The waning of the institutional and intellectual force of modernism, which in the '70s and '80s defined what an art of the 'everyday' should distinguish itself from, and the transformation of popular culture itself as a space of radically expanded subjectivities, pleasures and alternative forms... This is why we shouldn't treat the widespread adoption of the pornographic, vulgar and profane in the new art as the coat-tailing of media-sensationalism, but a refusal on the part of artists to feel shame about engaging with the categories of the everyday through the abject. The general effect has not only been a new sensitivity to the brutalising rituals and tropes and late capitalist mass culture, but also a greater tolerance for the profane and vulgar as forms of working class dissidence... whatever the class origins or critical intentions of the new British artists, there is a refreshing sense that certain modes of critical decorum are being tested, even pulverised into submission. This has acted to release a new candidness about the representation of the quotidian..."

If I have been brutal in dismissing Porno Roberts's fantasies as having no grounding in the material unfolding of history, he should try and be grateful that I have found an object worthy of his idiocy. It is amusing that an academic drone should unconsciously produce such an audacious justification for a band as self-consciously 'incorrect' as Whitehouse. As Porno Roberts observes, and I rather suspect William Bennett would agree with him: "Talking dirty - literally - and showing your bottom for the sheer delight of it has become a proletarian-philistine reflex against '80s feminist propriety about the body. Reinstating the word 'cunt' as a mark of linguistic pride and embracing the overtly pornographic and confessional, have become a means of releasing women's sexuality from the comforts of a 'progressive eroticism' into an angry voluptuousness..." For Dave Beech, David Burrows and Robert Garnett - this is virtually an exhaustive list of those dumb enough to take Porno Roberts seriously - listening to William Bennet scream 'you don't have to say please, just get down on your knees and suck my cock', will never be the same again.

Written circa 1996

Also check out 'Cheap Night Out' on the Stewart Home spoken word CD Cyber-Sadism Live about a Whitehouse tribute band.

More on aesthetic and other froms of fascism in industrial (Death In June) and post industrial (Sol Invictus) musical culture.

Skrewdriver (Nazi punks fuck off!)

More on John 'Porno' Roberts