Counter-realities and conflicted place: Gee Vaucher’s The Feeding of the Five Thousand in the punk art tradition

This article celebrates and critically examines Gee Vaucher’s artwork for the Crass album The Feeding of the Five Thousand (1978), drawing upon the enduring fascination that the work retains. Vaucher’s work is complex, disconcerting and mesmeric, and my intention is to pin down the facets of the work that achieve these qualities. The work sits in a tradition of collage and montage taken up in British punk and post-punk scenes, and I examine a selection of classic punk artworks in comparison to Dada artworks that represent the origins of radical montage art. Whilst acknowledging the established mode of interpreting this work through indexical context of elements and the force of juxtaposition (e.g. Linder Stirling’s punk work), I argue that Vaucher’s work achieves something more and requires additional methods of analysis. By developing a formalist approach of illusionistic harmony and integrity, I consider the space of the picture plane, as a traditional art concept and the space and place of the depicted behind the picture plane. Vaucher’s work offers an enduring feeling of a conflicted, disrupted and corrupted space – you feel you can step into a real space within the picture but prefer to hover on the safe side of the picture plane. This property embodies what the author Mark Fisher calls the ‘weird and the eerie’. I then examine a number of artworks from within and around the canon of art – Alison and Peter Smithson, Martha Rosler and Tish Murtha – finding images that I feel have a strong resonance with Vaucher’s work in terms of the spaces they construct and the mode of construction. These canonical works offer some developed critical dialogue to bring to bear on Vaucher’s work in order to fully understand the power of this iconic record sleeve.