Is something bad about to happen? Or has it just happened? It’s hard to tell. The room is dim and seedy, straight out of the 1970s, with its geometric wallpaper and dark, chunky furniture. We might be in a pimp’s lair, an adulterer’s den. Boris Johnson sits on the edge of the bed, wan and dishevelled, his bulk girdled in high-waisted briefs and white T-shirt. He’s on the telephone. He looks confused, as if trying to remember a falsehood. Perhaps he’s left something in the oven. His bedmate, Donald Trump, clutches a carton of Capri-Sun while scowling at the psychedelic décor. Has he seen a Mexican in the pattern? Is he composing a tweet? He looks unhappy. This is his presidential face, his build-a-wall face. It could be his sex face. There’s a sense of unease. After a long and gruelling night in the boudoir, Johnson seems to have been cast aside like a gremlin. We cannot be sure. And in the corner of the room, by the door, a man in a black suit looks on in disgust. That man is Steve McFadden.
Welcome to the world of Cold War Steve, the alias of Christopher Spencer, an artist whose absurdist, satirical photomontages have appeared on Twitter since 2016. His early work centred on Cold War scenes. Reagan and Gorbachev guzzling lager in the Oval Office while the actor Steve McFadden dozes under a desk. McFadden, in the guise of boozy bruiser Phil Mitchell, his character in EastEnders, is a constant figure in these bizarre and riotous tableaux.
The Cold War gives way to a culture war; now the interminable soap opera of Brexit provides the backdrop for Spencer’s expanding cast of grotesques and goons.
Noel Edmonds sits in parliament. Kim Jong-un pulls pints for the regulars in a seedy pub. Celebrity Brexiteers Morrissey and Neil Warnock head a grisly pro-Boris march based on The Dutch Proverbs. Prince Andrew looks up from a copy of Razzle while Trump, Putin, Cliff Richard and a braying Farage make a nuisance of themselves in a train carriage: the lads on tour. Part of the fun of a Cold War Steve montage is identifying the miscreants: Cilla Black, Dominic Cummings, Steve Bannon, Fred West, Tim Martin. Some are familiar, some not. We’re not always sure what’s going on. Danny Dyer brandishes a giant parsnip at David Cameron. Theresa May sniffs a Fray Bentos pie and Sam Allardyce gazes lustily at both.
The scenes are witty and weird – chaotic elegies – but there is no doubt who is being mocked: the vain and the venal, the spouters and spaffers who rule the land. Gangly swot Rees-Mogg (all pinstripes and common-sense), crumpled Johnson, sputtering Gove, slouchy Cummings: they are characters from an apocalyptic Carry On… film. In blighted suburbs and decrepit precincts, they busk, gurn, dance, jog, crash cars, wave flags, drink beer, cavort, vomit and filch. They are not so much leaders as looters. At best they are disaster tourists: they look silly and awkward in these dilapidated zones, lost in the farcical mess they’ve created. We smile, laugh, like, share. We scroll on. But not quite. Something else happens. We are drawn in. We look closer. We examine the details: a TWA bag in the Johnson-Trump tryst scene, a Sports Direct mug, a Lonsdale trainer, a saveloy. Spencer’s carnivalesque nightmares have a grimy opulence.
It’s been a good year for Cold War Steve. Two books (Festival of Brexit and A Prat’s Progress), a Time magazine cover, comparisons to Gilray and Hogarth. But Twitter is where his work is at its most urgent. The images fizz up at us, strange and funny, out of the blue light of disinformation and self-regard. Visions of decay and neglect, some based on famous paintings (Bosch, Van Gogh, Hockney). Britain is either grey and brown, eternally at war with itself, or getting drunk in the sunshine of an imagined past.
This Brexit is a very British Armageddon, nostalgic in its fury. Spencer has created an alternative newsfeed, a commentary not only on power and deceit, but on how we consume the news, on how we’ve allowed ourselves to view tragedy as farce. This is politics as Bakhtinian carnival.
The pictures have a rough, punkish quality at odds with the seamless wizardry of much internet imagery. These grim whimsies are not designed to look real, to gull. Constructed electronically, their aesthetic is one of scissors and glue. But there is truth in Spencer’s fake news. McFadden/Mitchell is always there: resigned, aghast, soused, maddened. Sometimes he looks out at us, as if imploring us to intervene, to do something. For we are part of the circus. Hapless gawkers, we are damned by our passivity, our voyeurism. We are all McFadden now.
