Coldwar Steve and Art
Why Ai could never
Christopher Spencer is an artist who would find fame by making collage pictures with a phone app on the bus to work. He would combine images of the cold war with contemporary photos, almost always with Steve McFadden (in his Eastenders role as Phil Mitchell) looking on in disgust. He posted the images to Twitter under the pseudonym McFadden’s Cold War. This later led to him adopting the pseudonym ‘Cold War Steve’.
In 2016, in the wake of the EU referendum, many of Spencer’s images went viral as they took on a more surreal tone, placing more contemporary figures like Donald Trump, Theresa May and Kim Jong-Un in strange places like the set of Blind Date, working men’s clubs or poverty stricken urban areas. He also includes distinctly non-A-list British celebrities like Cilla Black, Noel Edmonds and Danny Dyer, along with the ever-present McFadden. As society has continued to devolve since that year, sliding into authoritarianism, war-mongering and outright bigotry, Spencer’s work has taken on a sharper and sharper edge. Such as depicting Priti Patel and Suella Braverman at the podiums of Nazi rallies. Today his art is (rightly) held up alongside the work of comic satirists like…
