In the work Chambers made use of the disruptive connotations of collage and montage to undo the association of the nation with fascism. (Email correspondence between the artist and with Tate curator Carmen Juliá, 14 November 2012.)ĭestruction of the National Front is a direct response to the appropriation of a national flag by a racist nationalist ideology. Such was the presence of the NF at the time. All the students, all the people who saw, could immediately grasp its references. It was in this context that my piece was conceived and made. When the work was made, the National Front had a very strong presence and the streets of Wolverhampton, where I grew up, were festooned with NF stickers declaring ‘If They’re Black, Send Them Back!’ … With such casual, but insistent and explicit ‘in-your-face’ racism, came a range of concerted strategies of combating and resisting that racism The Anti-Nazi League, Rock Against Racism, etc. The political campaign saw the awakening of xenophobic sentiments in some sectors of the population and the rapid rise of the National Front, which reached the peak of its popularity in the 1979 General Election. Thatcher’s standing in the polls rose by eleven per cent after a television interview in January 1978 for World in Action in which she claimed that she ‘understood the fears of the British people of being swamped by coloured immigrants’. Across the four panels, moving from left to right, the image becomes increasingly torn, with the final panel consisting only of scattered pieces, no longer recognisable as either an image of the flag or the swastika.Ĭhambers made the work while studying for a foundation course at Coventry Lanchester Polytechnic, shortly after Margaret Thatcher came to power as the Prime Minister of Britain in May 1979. For the first panel in the sequence, the artist tore up an image of the Union Jack and reorganised it into the form of a swastika. Destruction of the National Front by the artist Eddie Chambers is a collage on four panels depicting the deconstruction of an image of the Union flag shaped as a swastika.
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