With the exhibitions Dirty Tricks [1984] and The Shining City on the Hill [1986] 1 John Yeadon established his reputation. It was no coincidence this should happen at a time when painting was re-emerging after a long period of hostility within the art world. Yeadon was one of those artists responsible for the re-introduction of figurative imagery-a new discordant and overtly expressive imagery, capable of representing the ideas of our time. The New Painting embraced literature, history, and story-telling as the exclusive codes of Late Modernism [which disallowed such things] were challenged by a new generation of artists. Although the extravagant promotion and huge market success of New Painting turned it quickly into an international fashion and encouraged work which was little more than feeble pastiche, it was now possible to conceive of painting pictures as a radical and critical activity. John Yeadon had long since held this view and indeed differed from most of his contemporaries in that his subject-matter concerned the realities of the modern world. The nostalgic and romantic themes, and the modish eclecticism which came to typify so-called Post-Modernism were anathema to Yeadon and his large paintings in the early Eighties engaged openly in a critical commentary on ‘late capitalist society’.

“I believe that if you wish to paint today you have to have special reasons for doing so. For me the problem is a straightforward class issue; to challenge high art traditions and formulations, and to make an intervention into the fortress of bourgeois ideology and to violate taboos”. 2

Yeadon’s aims are difficult to achieve. In common with many twentieth century artists who have sought to make political art he has struggled to devise a language that takes into account the sophisticated evolution of visual art in our century, but at the same time remains accessible to a wide audience. For Yeadon the High Modern tradition with its emphasis on formal values is too elitist and too subservient to capitalist society, whilst the alternative of Socialist Realism, despite the attempts of Rivera and Deineka 3 offers no more possibilities than any kind of academic realism. Yeadon locates those artists and their use of satire and irony within a ‘critical tradition’ which also includes Ensor, Grosz, Beckmann and Picasso. “Turning the world on its head is a recurring device to be found in the traditions of Grotesque and Critical Realism“. 4

Yeadon certainly belongs to this tradition. By choosing to paint pictures and by utilising a pictorial rhetoric which allows a sociopolitical viewpoint to inform his compositions about the brutalisation and banality imposed upon society to new patterns of urbanisation and post-industrial economics, he has attempted to extend the language of Critical Realism and adapt it to the specific conditions of late twentieth century Britain. His intention is to subvert by destroying one’s sense of the orthodox. He approved of Roland Barthes’ proposition that “the contemporary problem is not to destroy the narrative, but to subvert it – today’s problem is to disassociate subversion from destruction“. 5 Yeadon’s large paintings are disturbing and uncompromising in their depictions of violence and sexuality, demonstrating [subversively] the impossibility of distinguishing between pornography and art. “My sexual imagery is part of a serious enquiry, not jokey in a superficial sense. It is primordial research. They are powerful images that disturb, amuse or offend. To dismiss such potential would be ignorant.“ 6

“The Carnival sense of the world, permeating these serio-comic genres from top to bottom, determines their basic features, and place image and word in them in a special relationship to reality… There is a weakening of its one-sided rhetorical seriousness, its rationality, its singular meaning, its dogmatism… Thus even in our time those genres that have a connection, however remote, within the tradition of the serio-comical preserve in themselves the carnivalistic leaven or ferment… the sensitive ear will always catch even the most distant echoes of a carnival sense of the world..” Mikhail Bakhtin 7

In the late 1920s, the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin developed his ideology of carnival, an exploration of the serio-comic elements in Rabelais and Dostoevsky. Yeadon has been acquainted with Bakhtin’s ideas for a number of years and of the opportunities ‘carnival’ imagery offers to an oppositional artist. That such imagery holds a possibility to confuse or subvert social differences and is capable of speaking a deviant truth in societies where lies prevail, has inspired Yeadon to invent his most formidable grotesque to date – the one-armed Blind Bifford Jelly. Blind Biff is a remarkable creation – a head with legs and wearing pantaloons but with only one arm. He lost the other when sneezing violently [a sneeze at the beginning of a story should always be taken as a warning as to its truthfulness] and has of course, a problem with his sight. Biff is a relation of Mr. Punch, Monsieur Ubu, Daumier’s Ratapoil and Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel. He is also a Blemmyae, although it seems that the standard Blemmyae had no head, but instead had its facial features on its torso, with the eyes on the shoulders and the mouth in the middle of the breast. Poor Biff is a buffoon, a naive fool, and sometimes a tragic victim. Yeadon asks us to “confront the contradictions of our world through Biff’s innocent and bandaged eyes. The intention is the same as Jonathan Swift’s – “to vex the world rather than divert it.” 8

Biff permits Yeadon to indulge in and exploit his talents to the hilt. Full reign is given to the comic, the popular, the ridiculous, the outrageous. The satirical dimension is now more lightly touched on, and sex is balanced with humour. The influence of Hogarth and Gillary and the eighteenth century tradition of English caricature lurks behind these drawings of Biff’s adventures which take the form of illustrated moral anecdotes or allegories. On the one hand Yeadon is fighting to free popular culture from the clutches of capitalist commercialism while on the other he is relishing a full-scale attack on an art world bound by aesthetic convention. Biff’s adventures achieve the rare distinction of drawing the viewer into the narrative while implicating him or her in the dialogue – a situation both political and coercive. Biff can be understood by a wide audience, he is intelligently accessible. Yeadon’s use of illustration and graphic satire, his specific emphasis on time and place, and his unashamed celebration of bodily functions and carnivalesque imagery, challenges the puritanical notions of cultural elitism and high art.

The Biff drawings are a successful reaction against the extravagant gestures of the earlier big paintings. They are successful in that their touch is more sure and lucid. The social limitations of an overtly political style are avoided – the Biff series is too complex and too human to allow that and no simple explanation is possible. The series does at times involve an ironic distance between style and content, but above all Yeadon succeeds in disappearing as the artist, as the original creator. Instead Biff takes over. Although Yeadon recalls that Barthes in his The Death of the Author refers to the artist as a sort of intermediary between accumulated knowledge and the audience, a denial of originality and the myth of the creator, it may well be that Yeadon’s real source of familiarity with such ideas springs from his early experience of ventriloquism – his grandmother, mother and uncle were all ventriloquists. “What fascinates with the ventriloquist’s illusion is its parallel with creating a narrative in a ‘dumb’ image – drawing. Particularly, the limitations of this story-telling in dumb illustration, and the relationship of image and text.“ 9

“Paintings are aids to understanding reality and they will do different things at different times as the social conditions change.” 10

For the past twenty-five years painting has been viewed with suspicion by the avant garde. It’s been called a lot of nasty things [sometimes deserved] and has often been deliberately misunderstood and crudely maligned as a bourgeois [and therefore redundant] mode of representation. After the return of figurative painting in the early Eighties and its brief hegemony during this period, painting once again is barely tolerated, especially in those circles devoted to notions of endless innovation. Such thinking would certainly amuse John Yeadon. For the past twenty-five years he has involved himself in a dialogue with painting and has endeavoured to make painting re-enter life without resorting to old and outdated styles, but without rejecting the past. His radical and critical imagination has lead him to propose a kind of painting for our Post-Modern age. If the world changes then painting will have to change. From his provincial base in Coventry Yeadon presents a rewarding experience. The schizophrenic condition identified by Fredric Jameson 11 in his search for identity in ‘late capitalist’ society is an integral part of Yeadon’s work. Whether or not he is dealing with subjects such as drug abuse, homosexuality, or inner city squalor, Yeadon “aims to hold the contradictions and to deal with paradox: paradox is the dialectic of life, the play between truth and falsehood, reality and illusion, the art of fiction, contrivance and artifice.“ 12 In the present circumstance such courage is exemplary and badly needed.

Alexander Moffat, May 1991

1 Dirty Tricks, an exhibition of paintings, drawings and prints in Coventry [Herbert Gallery and Museum and the Lanchester Gallery, Coventry Polytechnic] and London [The Pentonville Gallery] from January to March 1984.. The catalogue contains an introduction by the artist entitled Old Tricks and Dirty Tricks. The Shining City on the Hill, an exhibition of paintings and drawings at Transmission Gallery in May 1986. The catalogue introduction by the artist is entitled The Shining City.

2 John Yeadon. From Old Tricks and Dirty Tricks.

3 Diego Rivera [1886-1957] the Mexican painter and muralist. Alexander Deineka [1899-1969] the Soviet painter who developed an epic form of Social Realism.

4 John Yeadon. From Old Tricks and Dirty Tricks.

5 Roland Barthes. Image-Music-Text, Introduction to The Structural Analysis of Narratives.

6 John Yeadon. From Old Tricks and Dirty Tricks.

7 Mikhail Bakhtin, 1929. Quoted by Timothy Hyman in his essay on Domenico Tiepolo The New World, Alba No 5. Domenico’s Punchinello drawings are amongst the greatest examples of the carnivalesque in Western art.

8 John Yeadon. The Genesis of Blind Bifford Jelly, catalogue, Lanchester Gallery, Coventry Polytechnic 1988.

9 Ibid

10 John Yeadon. From Old Tricks and Dirty Tricks.

11 Frederic Jameson. Post Modernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Verso 1991

12 John Yeadon. From The Shining City.