The outsidersCultureEmily Mackay meets the Crass member and visual provocateur
“Have they got mohicans?” enquires the taxi driver who takes us out to Gee Vaucher’s home in Epping Forest. He has vaguely heard of her former band, Crass, and the legend of the scary punk hippies who live in the commune at Dial House. “I’ve got half a dozen children, most of them live in the cowshed,” smiles Vaucher on our arrival. “They live in a box. They’ve been there now for five years, so I hope that the mice haven’t eaten them…”
Of course, there is nothing untoward in the cowshed; Vaucher’s “children” are merely a series of unhangably large oil paintings. Dial House is not the cliched commune, just as Crass – for whom Vaucher played visual provocateur between 1977 and 1984 – were never the cliched punk band, thanks to a combination of art-prank mentality, think-for-yourself ethos, and a fierce sound that inspired the US hardcore movement.
“There’s no isms,” confirms Vaucher, a sharp, warm presence in simple, dark clothing, as we settle into one of Dial House’s many cosy, serene corners. “‘Anarchists’ wasn’t a title we gave ourselves. It was something that was given to us, and we thought we’d run with it. The anarchism I took on was to uncover myself. By looking at certain areas, you do create chaos inside yourself, because you’re taking away what you think is your solid ground.”
The fairytale farm cottage Dial House is a deceptively doughty manifestation of the Crass ethos. Gee and bandmate Penny Rimbaud rented the place for a pittance in 1967 after meeting at art college. “The idea was to create a safe house for people,” she recalls. “People know that if they have nothing, they can at least come here for a night and get their strength back and be fed and watered and hopefully go off with a better heart.” Visitors still come from all over the world to share ideas about activism, struggle and poverty. What little money the residents need comes from workshops on things such as permaculture and compost toilets, plus performances and creative work (though Vaucher does not sell original art, only prints and books).
After a long court battle with the owners, Vaucher and Rimbaud bought Dial House at auction incognito in the 90s (“We outmanoeuvred them,” she chuckles). It’s an incredible place. Every surface sparkles with care and love and craft: a very English anarchist idyll, heaving with carvings, mosaics, stained glass, fascinating bookshelves and, in one corner, a tiny dancing Shiva proudly sporting a sticker blazoned with the words “UP YOUR ARSE”.
“My roots are here,” says Vaucher. “My heart is in this garden and in this place. It’s where I think: ‘This is where I belong.’” The roots image is apt. In the 40-year-old organic garden are scattered many ashes, and Vaucher’s own mother came here in the final months of her life. Vaucher traces the growth of her own artistic mindset to her upbringing. “My mother and father’s house was open. The key was always just hanging, people could come in. My father was a great inventor of toys. He could pick up anything in the street, bring it home and make it into something fantastic. They had a profound effect.” Another formative experience was the two years in which Vaucher left Dial House to work in Manhattan as a graphic designer, specialising in political illustrations for magazines. She soon found herself drawing another kind of line. “It was a piece about president Carter’s brother, who was just raking in the money off his brother’s back. I made a very sarcastic illustration, and they said, ‘Gotta take that out’. So I did, and I felt rotten. I thought: ‘Never again.’”
She left New York after another piece was rejected, opting to join Crass full-time as a visual artist. These days, Vaucher says, her work is less overtly satirical: “But to me, art is politics, with a small ‘p’. It’s still just as political, but it’s much more domestic. I’m always very interested in the psychology of people.”
Vaucher shows me her studio, one wall dominated by the powerfully vulnerable face of one of her “children”, and with a riot of paper cuttings strewn across the floor, waiting to leap into witty juxtaposition in her latest project: a conjunction of the work of German artist Max Ernst’s 1934 graphic novel A Week Of Kindness and Scottish psychiatrist RD Laing’s 1970 book Knots. “It’s so intense, so anal and fascinating,” she says.
For all the conscious care that goes into Vaucher’s way of life and work, she’s very laid back as to how the world takes her. “Am I an outsider? I don’t really know,” she concludes. “I don’t care, really. If they wanna call me an outsider, that’s fine, they wanna call me something else, it’s fine. I just get on with my work.” She laughs uproariously as she tells me of a friend alerting her to a Crass drumskin that went on sale at Sotheby’s. “People assume you’re rolling in it, selling out to Sotheby’s! Nothing to do with us. You’d spend your life chasing this stuff up. People will say, ‘They don’t have a right to use that.’ No, they don’t, but get a life!”
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