The global awareness that Jamie Reid’s loss of life has garnered has been astonishing, from the LA Periods to the Hong Kong Day-to-day News, television, radio, and the monumental digital screen at London’s Victoria station beaming down the information to scurrying commuters. Someway this amount of focus for a lifeless artist would seem way higher that nearly anything we are employed to in the airtight art environment. Why has it occurred? Mainly because Jamie Reid’s perform, from his breakout artwork for Malcolm McLaren and the Sex Pistols in the late 1970s to the timeless, spiritually and druidically inspired land artwork of his final decades, had a profound have an affect on on British well-known tradition way past that of pretty much any artist I can consider of. And Reid was most absolutely an artist, a classically skilled just one, with a every day follow. It is just that his most successful medium was the ether, and that is a position the place the ineffable exists.
I very first achieved Reid when I was tasked with organising a massive retrospective of his work in New York in 1997 named Peace Is Challenging. He arrived with a phalanx of Scousers and settled in to the Gramercy Park Resort, hanging a God Conserve The Queen flag—his shock-inducing, epochal 1977 protect artwork for the Pistols—out of his resort window.
He was guarded but generous with his time. We circled each and every other but came from very similar London backgrounds, he from Croydon, and I from Bromley. That exhibit travelled to Athens, Tokyo and then to Dublin, which became an additional accumulating place for his tribe. We experienced lasers of his drawings shooting across the Liffey and audio from Iarla Ó Lionáird of Afro Celt Sound Process. We had a wonderful time. A substantial Union Flag with its centre burned out was snatched from the gallery by heavies and thrown into the river to float away. We by no means uncovered out if we experienced offended the loyalists or the unionists. But it was a victory for Reid, irrespective. He experienced achieved out and touched a nerve.
Reid was normally interesting. Request him about Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen and the Sexual intercourse Pistols and he would convey to you about Henry Purcell. Talk to him about his childhood and he would notify you about Fulham FC.
Later in the 1990s I started off operating with Nan Goldin on the Bowery neighbourhood of New York, and my time for Reid experienced to be curtailed, however we stayed in touch. When I returned to the British isles in 2006 a single of the initial matters I did was set off for Knighton in the Welsh borders with Reid and his wife Maria Hughes, wherever we talked and walked.
Jamie Reid, Work and Participate in, 1972 Courtesy Tate Collection
Thereafter we were being close doing the job partners. Reid was normally fascinating. Check with him about Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen and the Intercourse Pistols and he would notify you about Henry Purcell. Inquire him about his childhood and he would explain to you about Fulham FC. Constantly evasive but under no circumstances boring. Occasionally little snippets of his heralded past would slip out. The moment we had been in a taxi crossing Manhattan and I pointed out that we would shortly move the Chelsea Hotel in which Sid and Nancy’s horrible drama came to its climax. Reid turned visibly agitated and insisted that we make a major detour. His coronary heart had been cleaved by Sid’s demise in 1979 and had not healed. Lots of years later on he was lying in a lodge home late at night, listening to the radio when an hour-extensive programme by his pricey close friend Malcolm McLaren came on, Jamie turning the light-weight off and lying there in the dark, making the most of the magic.
Despite the fact that from Croydon, Reid lived for virtually 40 several years in Liverpool, exactly where he was embraced principally mainly because of his like for the Scouse queen actress Margi Clarke. They had shaped a gloriously quixotic partnership in the ruins of the Pistols, running away to Paris to live in penury. Together they wrote songs and labored on a challenge known as Leaving the 20th Century, a phrase Reid experienced settled in print a decade just before when he’d been questioned to style the layout of Christopher Gray’s 1974 translation of the writings of the Situationist Global (SI). It is typically whispered that punk had its roots in the SI but it is an incontrovertible truth of the matter that it did. Reid referred to Situationist tenets frequently in his afterwards many years, not least decrying the Modern society of the Spectacle and the domination of Funds in excess of Neighborhood in our cities and cities, but also the infertile “green factories” of our agricultural industries.
Towards the late 1980s, Reid was thrown a lifeline by the designer and founder of design firm Assorted Illustrations or photos, Malcolm Garrett, which introduced him in to Shoreditch, east London, with the offer of a studio room and a color photocopier. Both have been utilised to an industrial stage, with Jamie revelling in the mire of it all. Listed here he grew to become close friends with a new gang of London wonders—Michael Clark, Judy Blame and Dave Child, Frick and Frack, and Boy George.
Anyone liked Reid, and as an artist who revelled in collaboration and prospect, he would offer his generosity to all who knocked on his studio doorway. In time, that building on Curtain Highway was taken about area by space by the Strongroom recording studios and thereafter by Reid, who adorned the many rooms by means of a 10-yr interval in a tumult of color and magical symbols, not the very least the OVA which turned his glyph—essentially an encircled A for Anarchy with a V for Victory. The Curtain Street do the job stays, even though sadly not simply accessible to the general public. It was right here that he fulfilled the also not long ago departed musician Simon Emmerson, starting to be a absolutely paid out up member of his beloved Afro Celt Sound Program.
Jamie Reid, detail of artwork at Strongroom studios, Curtain Street, London, that includes Reid’s OVA glyph—an encircled A for Anarchy with a V for Victory Picture by Patrick Dunn. Courtesy Jamie Reid Estate
Jamie’s fantastic uncle George Watson MacGregor Reid (c1860-1946) forged a extensive shadow around the spouse and children. He experienced possible been included with Glasgow anarchists but also with a nascent Golden Dawn since of his fascination with Japanese esoterica, remaining gifted the MacGregor identify as an inner initiate. Aleister Crowley briefly turned a close friend and then a foe, as George Reid’s interests ended up substantially far more benign. He grew to become MP for Clapham South, hosting putting miners, keeping mass rallies on Clapham Common, and in his parallel daily life as Preferred Main of the Druid Get, hosted fence-leaping protests for accessibility to Stonehenge for solstice rituals, typically obtaining into enthusiastic conflict with the legislation for his troubles.
Jamie Reid, Dawn more than Stones, 1990. Reid’s good uncle had been Selected Main of the Druid Get Courtesy Jamie Reid Estate
This twin-hemisphere world of societal and non secular improvement was a little something the young Jamie grew up with. His father Jack Reid experienced been the City Editor of the Each day Sketch but never ever invested a penny in his existence. He relatively invested his more youthful son—Jamie’s brother Bruce was five decades older—with a love of both equally the Romantics and Thomas Paine, the guy who encouraged not 1 but two countrywide revolutions, in the United States and then France, dying penniless. The Reids experienced at first arrive from Montrose, and claimed Rob Roy as a direct ancestor which, as with several Reid family members legends, may have a lot more than a grain of improbable truth of the matter in them. Uncle George was evidently a great teller of tales and inventor of remarkable cases. I strongly suspect that when Jamie Reid first met Malcolm McLaren at Croydon College—trying to engineer some electrical system with zero specialized skill and most possible endangering not just his have life but of the relaxation of the faculty—he felt a rush of common, rebellious comradeship.
Reid at Glitterbest, the Intercourse Pistols’ management organization, 1978 Photograph Barry Plummer
In recent several years, Reid took to praising McLaren for his genius, any time the chance arose. He was permanently supporting the underdog (he was probably the only person outside of Nancy Spungen’s personal family members to say that he favored and admired her for her intellect and willingness to toss her family members fortune to the wind), not the very least Charlie Mingus, whose 1971 ebook Beneath the Underdog was a continual reference, as was Mingus’s songs. Reid had found Mingus walk off phase early at a Ronnie Scott’s gig, in London, followed him out into Leicester Square and watched him scowl his way as a result of plate immediately after plate of chips. Jazz genuinely was Reid’s pleasure, not punk rock. In his common calls (someday up to a few periods a working day) he would convey to me about his loathing of electrical power constructions, be they church or condition. He was unexpectedly and similarly disdainful of both Boris Johnson and Keir Starmer, acquiring observed them exit parliament as two Oxford chums, sharing a joke.
Jamie Reid, Nurture Mother nature (2023) Courtesy Jamie Reid Estate
Immediately after a long time in Liverpool (marrying Maria Hughes in 1996), Reid found a superb community at the Florence Institute in Toxteth. A friend had released him to the decrepit ex-boys club and drew him in to the marketing campaign to rebuild and reopen the creating as a community centre. In 2016 at a conference to examine a probable exhibition of Reid’s print operate, he and I discussed quietly the likelihood of employing the room to show a full retrospective, which we did, hanging early drawings and paintings, mid-1970s operate from his time as co-founder of the campaigning magazine Suburban Press, critical pieces from the Pistols time period, by means of protest function from the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s, hangings used for druidic rituals, the fairly pleasant Fuck Forever mattress, a choice from hundreds of rough canvas paintings produced through the prior decade, and the 7.8m-long Sexual intercourse Pistols Mural, made from the walls of the Brixton Gallery—torn down after a show there in 1984, framed and subsequently travelling with Elizabeth Sussman and Iwona Blazwick’s 1989 study of Situationism, On the passage of a handful of people by way of a relatively transient minute in time... Such actions in off-grid areas have been typical for Reid as he was cautious of the art entire world and they wary of him. Whilst his work is rightly in main institutions all over the world, they have almost never supplied him exhibitions. Probably that will adjust now. We will see. I look after his archive, and although we often lend products out for exhibition (a human body of political get the job done that travels less than the title Having Liberties is now in exhibition at De Montfort College in Leicester, travelling on to Northampton College later this yr) I can not help but would like he experienced obtained extra institutional focus in his life time.
Land artwork in Cornwall
His closing important do the job is nowhere close to a gallery, even so, but in a discipline in Cornwall. Two several years back he was supplied the free of charge use of a wildflower meadow at Heligan in Cornwall. We agreed that we would sow a enormous OVA in the industry with the assistance of our good friend Richard Scott from the Countrywide Wildflower Centre. Of system laying out a geometric shape tilted to due north at 100m diameter on a slightly domed and tilting industry is no signify feat, but it was reached, and final yr Reid’s OVA emerged in the Cornish sunlight. We aligned the challenge with the druidic concept of the Eight Fold Calendar year, celebrating the equinoxes, solstices and quarter-working day festivals at the discipline. The remaining party was for the Spring Equinox, that includes a procession, smoke and some incredibly wonderful tunes. Wildflower seeds from the area have been solid in a lot of spots, together with at the web page of Extensive Kesh prison in Northern Ireland, a position significantly in have to have of splendor.
Jamie Reid, OVA, 2022, Heligan, Cornwall Courtesy Heligan Gardens
Despite the fact that Jamie Reid’s well being intended he could not make it to Heligan (with me a really poor substitute) we were being able to just lately beam him in by means of Zoom to the Nuart Festival in Aberdeen, which he appreciated greatly. Thankfully, items have finished on a high—a considerable ebook is approximately drafted, a film is underway and a 12-inch single, “Calling Back The Ancestors”, is about to arise with accompanying video clip. Reid was definitely adamant that we move forward with making this challenge arrive excellent, even even though he could not just take aspect, so it’s possible there was some prescience there.
Reid in his Liverpool studio carrying a person of the shirts he made with the New York apparel enterprise JCRT (2023) Photograph by John Marchant
He was a dear close friend, who taught me far more than I could ever comprehend. Even though I will go on to get the job done with his archive and fortunately present his do the job to intrigued curators and site visitors, I will overlook his obsessions and digressions, his generosity and love.
Jamie Reid is survived by his daughter Rowan, grand-daughter Rose and at minimum two generations of Romantic schemers worldwide.
Jamie MacGregor Reid born Croydon, south London, 16 January 1947 spouse of Margi Clarke (a person daughter) married 1996 Maria Hughes died Liverpool 8 August 2023.
- John Marchant is a Brighton-centered gallerist and curator, who holds the Jamie Reid Archive and was near to Reid from the 1990s. Marchant has also experienced very long-standing operating interactions with Nan Goldin and Gary Hume.