As I begin to write about this work there is a season of 5 minute observations about art and 1968 by John Tusa on Radio 4. One of the 'Eleven key looks for summer' in the Financial Times monthly How to spend it magazine is Neo-hippie, 'this 1960s/1970s folk-festival-inspired look', featuring a silk blouse by Roberto Cavalli, price £1,680. Last year summer of love, this year revolution. As teachers, Simon and myself spend a lot of time with students trying to get a sense of how to re-visit past cultural resources given the phenomenon- post-, hypermodern- of cultural feedback: the unplaced image/text which the evolving communication industries are delivering to us.
All this un-placing and re-placing has the potential energy of a new version of twentieth century collage- if it had any politics or ethics. The market place, including a fair amount of contemporary art, largely limits its ambitions to irony. Simon's earlier work was documentary, informed by the make-it-visible ethos post-Magnum and on to ten-8 journal. His recent work seems to me to be trying to avoid a kind of victim-ness one can feel sometimes with the 'new topographic' photography which has shown a brittle Britain. His manipulations move beyond record to keep or re-open something like a political dialogue. But one cannot pretend that there are hermetic seals now to a highly ill-defined soup of tone and reference.
Robert Galeta