In the early to mid eighties I had been making photomontages from ripped
up magazines for some time. Back in my home town of Glasgow, I started to
notice that all the windows of empty premises were covered in posters, which
were invariably ripped to reveal earlier ones. This was Thatcher's second
term, and many of these posters were for political gatherings - meetings
and demonstrations - which, as the eighties wore on, seemed more desperate
and futile in the light (or dark) of the rise of the right.
There seemed to me a certain poignancy in the way these posters told the
stories of the ripped-up dreams of a generation of the unemployed and
former trade unionists thrown out of work and scrambling for a living wage
in the new market economy. This document of these "Rip Offs" from that time
hopefully conveys some of that sentiment. Posters that even then were several
years old, like "Stop The War In The Falklands", had been covered up and
then re-exposed as a reminder of an alternative history that might have been.
