Pictures are dangerous. Winston Smith, who's been plying his anarchic trade of art-crimes for more than a third of a century now, is by such an account a very dangerous man indeed. But by the same measurement in which his art is so perilous to many, for the greater sum that is the rest of us Winston Smith may also constitute our last decent shot at salvation. Why? Because the inherent malevolence of pictures is that they are by and large a pack of lies produced, proliferated and discretely manipulated by corporate shills, aesthetic apologists, consumer illusionists and governmental hacks to disguise, deform or in any other way deny actuality through the hypnotic power of appearance.

Smith may be no different from the purveyors of pop culture imagery whose mass of mediated distortions he uses as the base iconography of his art. His, after all, is surely a fine art of persuasion that is pathologically proximate to propaganda. The substantive difference, or saving grace of his craft however, is that herein lies a cornucopia of lies that collectively assembles a corrective to the dominant misrepresentations of our pre-existing pictorial language. It's not like you're supposed to believe this stuff, rather you should consider it as a disavowal, a provocative way of questioning consensus reality, by which we might, in the end, learn to disbelieve all the rest. Winston Smith is surely one of the most visually literate people out there today.

He not only knows every minutia in our full junk food diet of pop culture detritus, he chews his food so well that it inevitably comes out in some of the most acerbically scathing, uniquely subversive and hierarchically inverting de-compositions of meaning, message and methodology.

For all his potent intuitions on our social landscape and primal art brut force in attacking the ruling political paradigms of our day however, Smith has always turned to the plethora of mundane media sources over the more revered academy of modernisms to which his art is so inherently linked. For the sake of Winston, who cares more for the emotive potential of his medium and its direct impact on viewers than he does for the history of fine art, as well as to his audience that may still most likely place him in the catalogue of punk rock art, let's indulge a quick primer on the degenerate legacy from which ushers forth his dark catalogue of cultural critique.

If Winston Smith's creative modus operandi is collage, his choice of weapon is as intrinsically radical as his employment of it. Born at the dawn of the Twentieth Century, collage and its sibling forms of assemblage, frottage and montage, could arguably be held as the ideal mediums to convey a semblance of meaning amidst the constantly accelerating visual overload of its now hundred years of existence. In the inundation of visual information Western culture is currently experiencing, there is certainly no more apt form to convey this frenetic life-in-a-blender maelstrom than the absurdist recontextualizations offered up by the cut and paste antics of collage.

First discovered as a compositional practice by the Cubists, who spliced together sundry shards of pictorial information as elements of alternative appropriative pictures that could assault and arouse our normal cognitive modes of perception, the closest forefather of this group to Smith's work today remains Max Ernst. It was in the massive social upheavals of a decade later however, when, during the First World War, artists of the Dada group took to this new mode of composite art as a way of expressing the unrest, disaffection and uncertainties of society at large. While Marcel Duchamp brought forth the philosophically based aesthetics of transformation, by which the most lowly, abject and ugly objects could be elevated as the l'objet trouve, and Hans Arp denoted new notions of beauty in his randomly reassembled mutant forms, it was truly the German Dada group that took what was previously a simple confrontation with the strictures of art to a revolutionary level that attacked the despotic authority of conformist and totalitarian society. To such a group, there is little doubt that Smith shares much the same sensibility with Kurt Schwitters' Merz work, and a more abiding politics of protest with John Heartfield. Hartfield, who anglicized his name from Helmut Herzfeld as a way of voicing his decent to World War I, joined the Berlin Dada group in the Weimar period, fled with the rise of fascism to Czechoslovakia, and raged a "one man war against Hitler" in Germany producing some of the most acute and influential photomontage depictions of Nazi tyranny.

The strategies of visual intervention set forth by collage as a matter of opposition toward the status quo is a lineage that continues throughout the past century. It was a common vernacular of much protest art, particularly amongst the Situationist movement, which spawned the likes of Jamie Reid, who's seminal album covers for the Sex Pistols have made the ransom letter style of graphic fonts a mainstay of the Punk aesthetic and certainly deserve an equal place along side Smith's Dead Kennedys album covers in the pantheon of great rock art. Closer to Smith's roots is a wealth of post and proto-psychedelic collage work done in the Bay Area by mind-warping masters such as Jess. The invention of the copier machine in 1938, and its subsequent proliferation by the likes of Xerox throughout the Seventies certainly exerted an immeasurable impact in allowing for the affordable and democratic use of self-publishing to create a wealth of fliers, copy art and zines. And in a digital age where tools like the X-acto knife and copy machine are quaint if not obsolete, it remains a significant part of his craft that Winston Smith uses such arcane methods over the photo-shop facility of a computer.

Of course Winston Smith doesn't really keep track of whatever progenitors he has in the transgressive ranks of glue-sniffin', razor wielding, picture thieving collagists, and has done much of his work in complete ignorance of such a pedigree until only recently. The battle in fact is so near, dear and desperate - not only in that his art's most dire and paranoid predictions of the past now seem a matter of fact, but as well in that once the advertising executives in the Fifties figured out the seductive possibilities of montage through the Surrealists artists have had to contend with the wider corporate cooption of their own best subversive means of capital parody -

Winston's just been too busy in the trenches making and tossing his own incendiary devises to notice.

But whether the directive is against social norms, perceptual ideals, governmental agendas or simply the deluge of commercial print imagery that is subsuming our entire sense of identity, what Winston Smith and those before him truly share is that dangerous minds think alike.

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