John Yeadon believes that if a joke has to be explained, it is no longer funny. It is the same with painting. Something always gets lost between looking at the art and the translation. Alternatively, John is aware that much of the frisson in the appreciation of art often arises from the power of suggestion, the magical arena of ambiguity. As an artist interested in exploring the unity between art, politics and humour, John Yeadon is a guerrilla of the imagination.

My most abiding memory of John is the time we sat around a roaring brazier outside the gates of Battersea Power Station in South London in 1971. It was the prelude to the 1974 miners’ strike that would result in the defeat of the Tory government led by ‘Giggling’ Edward Heath.

The night was bitter cold. There were five of us besides the miners, all raggedy students from the Royal College of Art. Arriving full of revolutionary enthusiasm, inspired by a speech from Jack Collins of the Kent miners, we were soon disabused by the inclement weather. To keep up our spirits John entertained us with endless witticisms and the occasional crude joke. He can quickly assume the posture of the recalcitrant Punch.

Resembling some mad bespectacled Rasputin, dressed as he was in the bohemian garb of long dark blue overcoat, mittens, woolen scarf, and black-scuffed boots, his non-stop barrage of humorous inanities kept us from thinking about our wintry predicament - that, and the fact that we had saved one bottle of ‘Newky’ Brown to celebrate our first-ever industrial picket-line duty.

John’s ability to act the court fool, in this case as a miners’ picket jester, was an aspect of his warm personality that was soon to establish itself as a constructive factor in all future political and artistic involvement. Politics is serious enough, and without the ability to be self-parodying - ‘to take the piss’ - the serious-minded can too often become entrenched in reformist pessimism or the flip side of the same coin, ultra-leftism holier-than-thou evangelism.

John had arrived at the RCA from Hornsey Art School in North London where he was involved in the famous 1968 occupation. Militancy was not a new experience for him. But it was not until four of us formed the first Communist Party branch at the RCA that John developed his theoretical appreciation of Marxism and its relevance to the arts.

Prior to this discovery he had produced paintings based upon the mandala, the oriental mystical symbol of the universe. A combination of the circle and the square, central to Renaissance aesthetics and the imagery of the Russian Constructivists, for John the mandala represented the Jungian concept of the collective unconscious or Hegel’s ‘world spirit’.

John needed the mature Marx to stand this philosophical idealism on its revolutionary materialist feet and realise, like other Communists before him, that aesthetic idealism had to be bedded in socially-based themes if it was to prove relevant to today’s world.

The question was: how? John’s initial solution was to immerse himself in study, particularly the history of revolutionary culture throughout the ages. Later he would develop his banners, posters, allegorical political paintings and his ongoing saga of The Travails of Blind Bifford Jelly.

The Artery collective, first established at the 1971 Communist University of London [summer school], became John’s arena for maturing his Marxism. Artery, which lasted until 1984, was the only magazine in Britain which advocated Lenin’s concept of a Second Culture - Socialist and international aspirations of the working people.

John Yeadon, aware of the tradition of the medieval Carnival - the day the world is turned upside down - began to produce agitational paintings from and for the street. Using silkscreen techniques he produced painted banners that during the days of the Anti-Nazi League and Artists Against Racism and Fascism were pertinent in their message. His interest in Carnival, depicted for instance in the paintings of Brueghel and the Mexican muralists, led to his pioneering work - the use of the medieval fool as a metaphor for the intervention of the artist in the class struggle.

In 1984 John exhibited a series of paintings, under the title Dirty Tricks, that had a strong homo-erotic theme. But he said they were not ‘gay paintings’. In the true tradition of social art, they transcended mere personal concerns and became political metaphors for liberation. They addressed such ruling class ‘tricks’ as imperialism, the struggle against fascism, the war against war and social alienation bound up with images of personal estrangement.

The Shining City on the Hill in 1986 had a similar theme. John said that since his lovers live in an alienated and sick society they appear as “metaphors for futility”, as the victims of sado-masochism. His “intention is to subvert by destroying one’s sense of the orthodox”. This is the climate that saw the birth of Biff.

John’s drawings are typical of the trauma inherent in his subject matter. Often dismissed as mere illustrations, they have a rough-hewn crudity that is born of humble origins. He makes no attempt to seduce his viewer with aesthetic niceties. Rather he embarks on a visual Blitzkrieg. The subtleties he demonstrates belong to the sophistication of his symbolism. The intention is to force the audience to grapple with the semiotics of meaning. Truth is not found in fabled Asgard, nor do the keys to the Elysian Fields come easily or cheaply. As Marx pointed out, truth is the process of changing the world.

Born in Burnley, in the country of Lilliput, of a family that had both working class and theatrical roots, John is very much aware of the culture of working people. Both his mother, grandmother, and two uncles were ventriloquists. It was with a sort of inspired genius that John saw his mother’s doll, Tommy, as a prototype for Biff - a much-loved alter-ego that could speak the grand supposedly unorthodox wisdom of the humble fool; the charmed buffoon, the impish Puck, who could, like Punch, take on the Devil and win. He was a terrorist of the imagination.

Biff is a grotesque who finds the world grotesque. Without conscious thought or philosophical concepts, he is an innocent abroad. He, unlike the logical Alice, confronts the world in baffled wonderment. Whether masturbating or pulling down the seat of government, Biff acts naturally. Wanking is not a symbol of frustration, nor is his attack on Westminster the act of a Quixotic madman. One is as natural to the loner as the other is to any person with a grain of sense.

Blind Biff asks questions about the meaning of life but doesn’t necessarily care about the answers. It is the actions which are important, since as points of conflict, they imaginatively provoke a paradoxical relationship - the words and images combining to provoke imaginative contradictions. It is the bizarre paradox, disturbing thesis, antithesis and synthesis to create an imaginative dialectical unity of opposites, that interests Biff’s alter-ego, the artist John Yeadon.

Jeff Sawtell April 1991