secret public

Reviews of the Neo-Naturists in The Secret Public:

"The exhibition itself is a mix of the overtly political .... with the flamboyant performances of Michael Clarke and Leigh Bowery....

Placed somewher in the middle were artists like the Neo-Naturists, a core of three women plus various collaborators, including Turner Prize winner Grayson Perry.Wearing nothing but bodypaint they devised performances around everyday rituals such as cooking or singing that may have suggested a political agenda, but weere just as much about having fun.

"Everything we did was a bit toungue-in-cheek,"says founding Neo-Naturist Christine Binnie."When you went to nightclubs at that time in London like Heaven or Blitz, everyone was dressed up, wanting to be photographed. We were showing off too, but we were also about exposing the po-faced posing of it all."

In addition to introducing Perry to pottery, Binnie's claim to fame is to be one of the few women to be asked to put clothes on for a Page Three shoot in the Sun. "When we took all our clothes off and got painted we were told we'd have to put our knickers back on," Binnie says."We refused."

Helen Sumpter inTime Out.

It was a period overseen by Margarte Thatcher's Conservatives .... a decade, as this exhibition surveys, of intensely politicised and oppositional art-making - part style party, part protest. In the clamour around the Young British Art that would take off towards the end of the 1980s, it has become somewhat overlooked that a robust, largely underground art-making scene had been creating beautiful outrage for ten years previously - only without the support of fashionable new galleries and super-rich collectors.

Consider, for example, the archive of the Neo-Naturist group, seen for the first time in The Secret Public. Here are the eccentric relicsof a loose-knit collective (among the future Turner Prize winner and Times columnist Grayson Perry), who opposed the dandyfied sensibility of New Romanticism which actions and events that championed its very opposite; messy ungainly and using naturism as their portable and attention-grabbing medium.

Michael Bracewell in the Times

The three diseases that invariably affect shows here- lack of space, lack of rigour, lack of cojones- afflict this one severely. I thank it though, for reminding me of the antics of the neo-naturists. I'd completely forgotten how Christine and Jennifer Binnie never needed any persuasion to drop their kecks and flash their bits because "neo-naturists love taking their clothes off for the sake of it." The Turner prize--winnign potter Grayson Perry was once a member of the group, and I kept an eye out for him among the terrifying expanses of untopiaried pubic hair and madly bouncing mega-breasts preserved here on agit-film, but could never be sure I'd spotted him : surely he's not the one with the dodgy new -romantic sideless mullet?

Waldemar Januszczak in the Sunday Times

There is also fascinating documentation of performances by the Neo-Naturists, a network of arstists and musicians who, during a period of five years from 1979-84, collaborated with over 70 people, including Grayson Perry , Cerith Wyn Evans and Helen Terry of Culture Club. Films of their performances, which include naked sun-bathing as well as shows in nightclubs and public spaces, seem particularly sealed within another era.

Nostalgia is in fact strongly evident throughout the show, and despite the obvious influence of the show on contemporary artists and designers, it is difficult not to fall into reminiscing. The exhibition notes boldly state that this was a period of British culture " before the rise of the consumer environment", yet many of the most evocative memories are caused by branding and mainstream references - an ancient Coke can and cigarette packet on Stephen Willat's sculpture "Living like a Goya", and the appearance of a Mr. Man yoghurt pot in aNeo-Naturist filmseem to conjure up the era as much as Wolfgang Tillman's photos of 80s clubbers or Jon Savage's bleak shots of urban late-eighties London.

Creative Review

Documentation of the Neo-Naturists from 1980-1984 brought back to life this feminist collective of colourful promulgators of naked truth and mind-expanding body painting.

In the end the sheer calibre of the art works in the exhibition won me over.

Dominic Eichler in Frieze