The death of graphic designer and activist Jamie Reid earlier this month was a huge loss for both the design community and the political left. Right until his death, Reid made incendiary works that incessantly attacked the political status quo.
Announcing his passing, his family and gallerist James Marchant released a joint statement describing him as an “artist, iconoclast, anarchist, punk, hippie, rebel and romantic”. This eulogy doubles as a shorthand for the anarcho-punk design language he weaponised throughout his career.
For most people, Reid’s legacy will probably be the posters and LP covers he designed for the Sex Pistols. This work is now synonymous with punk and has been imitated to the point of cliche.
Its ubiquity has diluted its potency. However, to his contemporaries, Reid’s cut-and-paste style was immediately recognisable as an affectionate homage to the DIY production techniques of punk fanzines. This art was born from necessity to give voice to those silenced in 1970s Britain and beyond. In his death, its important to remember the breadth and power of Reid’s work.
Punk aesthetics
The Sex Pistols single God Save the Queen (1977) was a riposte to the national anthem. Reid’s artwork for the single was deliberately designed to intervene within the nationalist tub-thumping which surrounded the Queens’ silver jubilee in the same year.
His cover for the 7" single release looked like a defaced postage stamp or commemorative mug. It depicted the Queen with her eyes and mouth obscured by the band’s name and track title.
Reid used a collage style of typography that resembled the sort used by terrorists and kidnappers within ransom letters. This added a threatening undertone of regicide and insurgency to the image. Then, as now, it is illegal to deface banknotes or threaten treason. Reid’s design did both.
This style is in the tradition of punk zines, which were reproduced on the office photocopiers of those lucky enough to have jobs in 1970s, depression-ravaged Britain. The irregular typography and grainy monochrome finish of zines was a defiant counter to the corporate polish of mainstream media.
As in the work of pop artist Andy Warhol, the Queen’s portrait is reproduced from a newspaper image. However, Reid’s work is far more subversive and sinister than the cool, detachment of pop art.
In the 1970s, newspapers used thick black banners in photographs as a primitive – and largely ineffective – way of disguising the identity of alleged criminals and those caught in the web of sleazy celebrity sex scandals. Reid’s use of this visual device, which symbolically dragged a supposedly heavenly ordained monarch into the gutter of tabloid journalism, is delicious satire.
Symbolic guerrilla warfare
For the subcultural theorist Dick Hebdige, punk was a form of symbolic “guerrilla warfare”. What he meant was that punks fought through words and images, rather than bullets and bombs. The power of punk resided in the way it repurposed, distorted and even defiled everyday objects and images with a monstrous, oppositional subcultural language.
Like the tactics of anarchist street militia, which often employed direct action and sabotage, the visual politics of punk were ad-hoc and opportunistic. To paraphrase, Hebdige, they both utilised whatever crude materials were available to get the job done.
With little disposable income, punks stole lavatory chains, safety pins and razor blades and wore them as grotesque jewellery. Like Reid’s anarchic collages, this counterfeit, rebellious style simultaneously critiqued consumerism and the prevailing social conventions of beauty and taste.
Beyond punk, Reid’s true legacy is a lifetime of artistic and political activism.
One of his earliest projects was an underground publication called Suburban Press (1971). This was influenced by both anarchism and the French revolutionary avant-garde organisation The Situationist International. Suburban Press also printed material for the Black Panthers and prisoner’s rights organisations.
Repeatedly, Reid aligned himself alongside the socially marginalised. Usually, in a collective struggle against the political establishment. This is self-evident within repeated artworks which denounce repressive Conservative Party legislation.
In solidarity with singer Boy George’s campaign against the anti-homosexuality Clause 28 legislation (1988), Reid depicted the gender fluid singer as a Renaissance cherub of holy love.
He also produced a poster in support of the UK Red Wedge movement. This was a campaign among musicians and activists to turn people towards socialist politics.
Reid’s image depicted then-prime minister Margaret Thatcher as a malevolent demon casting a dark shadow over Britain. Both Red Wedge and Reid’s image reference a famous revolutionary poster by Russian Constructivist artist El Lissitsky called Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge (1919). This symbolises the Russian Revolution of 1917 a red triangle splintering the old order. Conversely, the black wedge depicted in Reid’s image is a Thatcherite void sucking the life of the nation.
In his recent satirical works about post-Brexit Britain, you could see how his anarchic collages channelled the avant-garde spirit of Dada. This was an interwar movement, which made visual art and performances that protested against the insanity of war and capitalist society. Dada artists like Hannah Höch and Raoul Hausmann pioneered photo-montage and collage techniques that were an obvious influence on Reid.
Reid was also a passionate environmentalist. He campaigned against the state and English Heritage on behalf of druidic groups demanding access to Stonehenge on the Solstice. More recently, he supported climate activists Extinction Rebellion.
As Jamie Reid understood, anarchism champions individual freedoms against all forms of tyranny. To borrow the words of French philosopher Michel Foucault, I would argue that Reid’s work represents the “art of living, counter to all forms of fascism”. This would be a fitting epitaph, especially fly-posted over his grave in ransom note typography.
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