Pink Cher

Adorning the February 2001 cover of Sleazenation, a Shoreditch-based lifestyle and fashion magazine for which Scott King was the art director, Pink Cher became an icon of the early noughties. The design won several magazine awards and was featured in the Barbican exhibition ‘Communicate: Independent British Graphic Design since the Sixties.’ The artist recalls the picture’s genesis. ‘Stefan Kalmár was, at the time, the director of a small gallery in Cambridge and he asked me to do a “giveaway” poster for Cambridge students at Fresher’s Week – something they could put on the walls of their bedsits. So I started thinking about the greatest clichés of student bedsit posters. Che Guevara seemed the obvious choice, but I couldn’t just replicate it. Anyway, one night Stefan was talking to our friend Gregorio Magnani and in his German-English, Stefan pronounced “Che” as “Cher” – they told me about this and I just copied it. So we made the poster and it was very popular. The people at Sleazenation liked it too and asked me to make it the cover on the first issue that I designed.’ By switching the revolutionary’s face for that of the pop star, King’s Cher Guevara makes a biting comment on the commodification of radicalism, the rebel’s face having long lost its meaning in a depoliticised, celebrity-obsessed era. Rather aptly, King came to rue the popularity of his own subverted icon as, like all such images, it took on a life of its own in the public sphere. ‘I fucking hate that image – it’s become the bane of my life. I had to give up self-googling because of it.’