Direction Action versus Online Activism: Toby Mott, Neal Brown and Stewart Home in discussion

1 February 2022 
 
Neal Brown is an artist and writer based in London. He has written for most UK art magazines and is the author of the book A New Concise Reference Dictionary. He was the writer in residence for the first Liverpool Biennial, and curated New Religious Art at the second. Brown also writes about punk.
 
Stewart Home is an artist, writer and activist who works in the Arts Council of England Collection. His literary works include, ’69 Things To Do With A Dead Princess’, ‘Tainted Love and ‘Brucesploitation And The Sleazy Joys Of Lowbrow Cinema’.
 
Toby Mott is an artist, collector, designer, publisher and organiser of Cultural Traffic; a global arts fair that he founded as a platform for social change through DIY practice. In 1985 he led the Grey Organisation’s Cork Street Attack. Recent projects include the publication of; Punk in Print 1976-1980: The Compete Mott Collection, Kraftwerk: Dance Forever and Dictator Banknotes.
 
The Grey Organisation’s Cork Street Attack is the subject of an exhibition at The Mayor Gallery. The windows of The Mayor Gallery and those of the other art dealers on Cork Street, were covered with buckets of grey paint during a night-time act of artistic anti-establishment protest on 21st May 1985.
 
Curated by William Ling, Cork Street Attack will showcase new prints created from photographic evidence that recorded the immediate aftermath of the event alongside related artwork, ephemera and documents taken from the Grey Organisation archive kept by artist Toby Mott, the group’s spokesperson and central protagonist.
 
The works span the breadth and depth of the group’s output, including drawings for the Labour Party’s 1985 election campaign, hand prints, calling cards, preparatory studies for De La Soul’s album cover ‘3 Feet High and Rising’, and photographs of a performance outside the ICA.
 
The Grey Organisation (GO) was a post-punk art collective that emerged from East London and Soho in the early 1980s, folding in 1991.