frame 49 February 2024
Revolting Women! How I became a Neo Naturist
by Wilma Johnson
Wilma Johnson is an artist, writer and Neo Naturist performance artist. She was born in London in 1960 and studied Fine Art at St Martins College of Art 1978-82. While she was there, she founded the Neo Naturists performance art group with Christine and Jennifer Binnie. Grayson Perry joined the group shortly afterwards. The group appeared at a variety of venues including The Spanish Anarchists Centre and the Royal Opera House, and collaborated with artists such as Derek Jarman, Michael Clark, Andrew Logan and Leigh Bowery.
WOMEN IN REVOLT! ART AND ACTIVISM IN THE UK 1970-1990 is open until 7 April 2024 at Tate Britain.
THE NEO NATURIST LECTURE: NUDES AT THE TATE - 25 February 2024, 14.00–17.00.
In 1981 I took a photo of Christine Binnie flashing in Soho. Forty years later, it is hanging in the Tate Britain’s exhibition Women in Revolt! Art, Activism and the Women’s Movement 1970-1990. In a way, it is ironic to be received with open arms by such a pillar of the establishment in honour of my work as an anti-establishment provocateur, but I’ll take it.
There’s a whole wall of paintings and photographs of my performance art group the Neo Naturists, and the flashing one is right in the centre.
A photograph has a magical power to take you back to the time and place where it was taken, and this image transports me back to when I was twenty and I first set up a ‘subversive feminist performance’ art group.
In many ways, it’s amazing it even exists. Starting with my bashed up old camera and the cut-price out-of-date film I always used. Then there was my slapdash darkroom technique. But I remember staring into the tray of noxious chemicals as it materialised and thinking, “Wow, I’ve smashed it.”
Then all my prints, negatives and slides were destroyed in a fire. Except for this one box of Neo Naturist stuff I gave Christine in a dramatic gesture when I left the group and ran away to Mexico in 1987.
I could say I’m surprised it ended up in the Tate, but really it’s dream come true - the idea was probably somewhere in the back of my mind as I pressed the shutter that day.
Later, when times got tough as an artist and a single mother, I would say to the kids, “Don’t worry, one day I’ll be showing at the Tate!” as I dished up another minimal dinner. It became a mantra I repeated whenever I couldn’t afford school trips/new trainers/food and they questioned my life choices. At times it seemed unlikely, as my career went so far underground that it would have taken an archaeologist to rediscover me…
So, my feelings on the opening night of the show are: 1. euphoria of achieving my lifelong ambition; 2. immense relief that I have enough guest passes for all three children (now old enough to buy their own dinner, of course). Thank God I didn’t have to choose between them. I imagined leaving one of my children on the street outside drinking Red Stripe, while the rest of the family sipped champagne in the inner sanctum of the British art world… I’m pretty sure the unchosen one would have disowned me.
I also found it a bit confusing to be sharing wall space with the original Women’s Liberation Movement and the Greenham Common activists, as in the 80’s, they seemed light years away from us. We felt so far removed from the official feminist establishment, we wouldn’t even have used the F word back in the day.
Feminists were women who wrote books, and had theories and rules, they wore dungarees and didn’t approve of make-up. We were ex-punks walking around London in gold body paint with sequins stuck on our tits. We didn’t have theories, we didn’t really have a plan. We just had a bag of body paint, a fuck you attitude and an anarchistic take on the art world.
The Neo Naturists happened almost by accident, starting with a chance meeting in a cor-ridor. This meeting would change my life.
I was at Saint Martin’s School of Art, where I found myself thrown into a world of Abstract Expressionism inhabited by macho men in boiler suits wielding palette knives. One afternoon, as I was leaving the building in a bid to escape the painterly brush marks and toxic masculinity, I saw Cerith Wyn Evans walking towards me in flowing priest’s robes. On his arm was a woman in a baby blue negligee and feather trimmed stilettos, her hair piled on top of her head in a peroxide blonde beehive with a turquoise streak through it. I had to hide my excitement, because excitement was deeply uncool, but I felt like I had found my people in this very corridor.
“This is Miss Binnie, my muse” he introduced her in his lilting Welsh accent.
She was a life model, and she explained that models were not always confined to the life room - you could book a private model for a ‘special project’.
That sounded intriguing. It hadn’t occurred to me that I needed a muse, but all the Great Artists seemed to have one so I booked her as a model for the following week, without having much idea what my ‘special project’ would be.
The first morning I did an action painting in oils on a huge roll of paper. Then we went to Soho Square for a picnic of rollmops and cider, and she asked if I minded going to pick up some body paint for a performance she was doing at the Blitz. (Blitz Kids weren’t much into nudity, the paint was to perfect the ethereal pallor which was dress code for the club.)
I had no idea of what body paint was anyway. Images of hippies and tribal initiation rites flicked through my mind.
We arrived at the Charles H. Fox theatrical make-up shop in Covent Garden where, among the wigs, tinsel eyelashes, plastic noses, warts and all, there was a shelf of brightly coloured Aquacolor paint.
I had a flash of inspiration. “Hey, next time instead of just painting a picture of you, why don’t I actually paint you?”
After a bit of research, I gathered that this hadn’t really been my idea at all, but that I had been gripped by a primal instinct as old as womankind. Anthropologists think that one of the leaps of progress that separate Homo Sapiens from the less boho Neanderthals was the invention of ART, quickly followed by the fermentation and imbibing of alcoholic beverages. Perhaps that explains why the two have stayed hand in hand ever since.
The first art was body art, even before cavewomen got the urge to paint woolly mammoths on the walls of their caves. Of course, they had no access to neatly pack-aged Aquacolor, so they used whatever came to hand: ochre, woad, menstrual blood. I wasn’t quite ready for that, so I bought the ready-made version.
In our first few sessions together, I used Christine as my canvas and then took pictures of her in the photography studio, in my own studio and around college. Yet, one day, after exhausting the possibilities of the fire escape and rooftops, I still had some film in the camera… It seemed a shame for her to wash off my artwork, just for it to disappear down the drain of the tepid college shower. It was the perfect moment for us to take the look out into the real world.
The real world was Soho which still had an edgy underworld glamour. There were grocery shops from round the world - at a time when a croissant or a jar of artichoke hearts seemed exotic - there were artists watering holes like the Colony Room and the French House, drag bars, gambling clubs and casinos… and the acceptable face of nudity.
Strip joints, peep shows, adult bookstores, phone boxes wallpapered with cartoon images of Busty Blondes and rubber clad dominatrixes, and newsagents’ top shelves with the display of lad mags from the tasteful Playboy bunnies to the hardcore covers like a line of glossy technicolour Sheela na Gigs. This was how most people were used to seeing naked women, through the filter of the male gaze.
Ram Books, with its ‘New Spanking Cinema’ was the perfect backdrop for our new take on nudity - the Neo Naturist female gaze.
Things took off from there and we started performing on the streets and in clubs and galleries - everywhere from the Spanish Anarchist Centre to the Royal Opera House. We were surprised by how shocked people were by our real, unfiltered, ‘imperfect’ bodies. The shock was a catalyst for what the exhibition catalogue now calls ‘challenging the objectification and commodification of women bodies’. We wouldn’t have put it quite like that. We were just rebelling against the patriarchy, the matriarchy, the New Romantics, the Abstract Expressionists, the censors, the prudes, the fashionistas and whoever else had an issue with us choosing to walk the streets naked in the name of art.
If people found us revolting, we would revolt.
The main shock at the Tate’s private view in November 2023, was that we turned up in clothes - but it was winter, after all.
I’d warned my kids that the event might be a bit formal, I’d be working and might not even have a drink (I’m sure they didn’t believe that!), but as soon as I walked in it felt like a celebration. I was overwhelmed by the feeling of joy and solidarity. A lot of the artists in the show had practically been forgotten, they hadn’t had their work exhibited for years - if ever. If it wasn’t for the visionary curator Linsey Young, discovering archives in studios, attics, and dusty portfolios under beds, much of this work might never have been seen. I realised that all the different women’s groups were much closer than I’d realised. We were all fighting the system in our own ways and, that night, it felt like we had finally stormed the citadel.