Retro Strangeness
I went to an exhibition called The Secret Public / The Last Days of the British Underground at the Institute of Contemporary Arts last week. It was an interesting collection in lots of different ways.
I was struck, for totally frivolous reasons, by an image called Office at Night. It showed a woman in officewear in 1986. She wears slightly clompy court shoes and a herringbone suit with flared skirt. Completely lacking in shoulder pads, she could have stepped straight out of a current fashion spread. It’s odd when entire outifts work - each element cycling back into style at the same time.
The favourite exhibit for my friend was an installation called Enough Tyranny - a large room full of early 80s kitsch, blasting out Ziggy Stardust. I also liked the room but it gave me a weirdly creeping feeling of being very young. I didn’t clearly remember most of the items that were scattered around in the display but I guess some subconscious part of me recognised the style and the era and harked back to the age I was when they were commonplace.
This experience was quite similar to the feeling I used to get when wandering around my childhood city of Bristol when I first moved back there to go to university. It is strange how these feelings operate. I discovered when I returned to visit Bristol for the weekend before last, that the city now haunts me with my late teens/early twenties rather than my childhood. That might have been the result of spending more of the sunny weekend in pubs than in playgrounds though…
