ABSTRACT
The artists have little reason to see their work as consciously avant-garde any more, and the self-confidence that this affords has allowed them to make work which can connect in a variety of more interesting ways with other parts of the world. Campbell's art school performances invoked a conceptual approach to figuration, leading him to treat the image as a sign rather than as an expressive device. While other artists continued the largely discredited Photo conceptualist project of exposing 'media myths'. The devices used by participants drew heavily on the pictorial languages of early twentieth-century modernism, and there was little acknowledgement of the impact of the politics of representation. The mud produced by the art boom at the turn of the 1980s could most obviously be witnessed in the new mixture of public and private funding, a mixture which was often of mutual benefit.
