About the Work
In 1983 I decided to make a work about the female groups of peace activists, camped outside the Greenham Common air base, not far from London. They were constantly in the news. The peace activists were objecting to the installation of American nuclear Cruise missiles aimed at Russia, which they saw as irresponsible patriarchy and a dangerous provocation. Most of the British press dismissed them as crazy feminists with Private Eye using their derogatory term 'wimmin'. Yet the wimmin were right. In 2015, a US presidential declassification showed that the world in 1983 was the closest it has ever been, since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, to all-out nuclear war. Check 'Able Archer 83.' The peace activist who took the 1983 Mercedes photograph described the missiles to me as willy-waving. That inspired the picture - flash car, big telephoto, man on top. So together, we set this photograph up. The second photograph was taken a decade later by my wife. A few of the wimmin were still there. On the side of the BMW is my collage on the subject which I had ditched ten years before as unsatisfactory. I rediscovered these photographs over thirty years later. They contained far more resonance for me than that clumsy collage. Including my old fondness for willy-waving cars.
″I still use the same approach to my work: I get an idea, think of the title and then make the work. So not much has changed since 1964″
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