Julie Andrews spins on a hilltop, her face alive with glee, as she whirls through a field of American flag swastika flowers, a gun in each hand, while nukes are launched from the mountains beyond. Above her are the words ‘The Sound of Maga’.
“We put that image up in Texas and they tore it down,” says the artist who created this work, Ben Turnbull, “They tore down the whole bottom section but left Julie Andrews' head and arms holding the guns. I actually thought it looked really good like that. But clearly they were just very angry about the American swastika. But this is America First again. Things have gone back to the 30s.”
Welcome to Rebirth of a Nation, an exhibition currently at the Truman Brewery and the latest work by Turnbull, a British artist known for his ‘Angry Pop’ art in which provocative pop culture collages and sculptures pastiche and pulverize American hypocrisy.
Except Ben Turnbull is no more. As he explains to me, he has now split between Turnbull – who he refers to in the third person – and Candidate Q, a new persona which has now taken over and produced this new series of work.
“Turnbull had just kind of had enough,” he says, “He'd been punched drunk by the art world and he was always trying to please the wrong people. He was going down the academic route, with shows where David Hockney in the other room, and it starts feeding your ego.
.jpeg)
We're making fascism fun, which is a pretty darn tricky thing to pull off. But you've got to make it entertaining, and I don't think Turnbull was making entertaining artwork. He didn't have that style that Q's got. He’s 100% style, he's 100% pure uncut.”
Q as pseudonym seems to have been a liberation for him and his working practices, which were previously “tortuous” but are now much more instinctive and free-flowing: “Something weird happened, a whole heap of comics and magazines fell on the floor and suddenly a couple of things went together, some eyes appeared over a building, with a little bit of stars and stripes, and I swear that was the origin for Rebirth of a Nation.”
Q features as a character in the resulting work, which references films The Parallax View and The Manchurian Candidate, as well as comic book characters like Superman. In Liberty once lost is gone forever, you’ll find Superman crying in the middle of a demolished America. It was all made a couple of years ago but suddenly feels frighteningly of the moment.
Turnbull calls it, “prophetic, hallucinogenic art…Q has foreseen the future and it’s not bright.”
It certainly isn’t, but the exhibition, despite the incensed fury boiling off the walls, is not one without hope. Indeed, with all its comic book verve, it feels like a winningly active response to attempt to capture a world turning bleak.
“People are doing what they always do, they're hiding behind the sofa, waiting for it all to go away,” says Turnbull, “But the big problem here is it might not. Ultimately, the middle class has virtually disappeared and now we've got very rich and the very poor.
-(2).jpeg)
I was working in Brazil for a while, and I used to see people making all kinds of stuff out of Coke cans. They've got nothing, but they're just still creating. Creating is the only way out of this. There's a song I was listening to a lot during this whole project and one of the lyrics is, ‘Hey, hey, hey, creation keeps the devil away.’”
For him, or rather Q, the work is an attempt to make sense of this situation and take it on. It’s as heroic as the superheroes glimpsed in his work.
“This might sound completely delusional, because it is, but I honestly thought Q could actually save America,” he says, “I swear. Hence ‘Candidate’ Q because it was about him putting his putting his presidential hat in the ring.”
Q did not get in, but it seems that his ultimate purpose is to exist as an outsider artist taking on America, and is dragging Turnbull along for the ride. And Turnbull is loving every minute of it. New perspectives are coming all the time, a new freedom in the way he works, that liberation that can only come when you wear a mask.
“Turnbull got coined with the Angry Pop tag, and I remember thinking, yeah, that's cool, like when I was a bit younger,” he says, “I'm 50 years old now and I've coined a better term: Degenerate Pop. This links to 30s and those nasty Nazis and what they were doing to modern art, banning it. I'm kind of bringing it back. I'm re-owning the word Degenerate.”
We’re not sure about fascism but degenerate art in this way is a whole lot of fun. And it may well split you in two.
Rebirth of a Nation: Ben Turnbull X Candidate Q, will be at Number 6 Dray Walk, The Truman Brewery, from 28 March to 5 April
