ABSTRACT
Artists are coming out from under the modernist dogma of purist-reductionism which has, in its final stages, so impoverished the great tradition of creative imagery in Western art. The organizers of the 1980 Hayward positioned their ideological response to British art in a way which would accord with the audience's ideological assumptions, thereby securing their consent to their own subjection and to the hegemony of 'serious culture'. Male New Image artists were accused of cynically infusing the market place by transforming painting into a vacillating performance of vacuous motifs. Hockney's approach was in fact quite complex in its relationship with the dominant art paradigms of the late '70s. While working at the Women's Arts Alliance in 1976, Alexis Hunter appropriated advertising techniques, experimenting with fetishistic reportage and staged sequential photo-narratives in her deconstructive Approaches to Fear series.
