Since I was born in 1961 the narratives of class in Britain have changed so drastically that I feel I have lost the plot completely. I was born in 1961 into a white working class family and so I was shocked to hear from a young middle class friend in London last week that they feel scared in white working class areas. Lets be clear this is not some incredibly privileged right wing student, this is a Marx-reading, Goldsmiths undergraduate. So what happened to class in the past 56 years in the United Kingdom and what have I done to avoid it?
I am beginning to realise to what extent my strategy for coping with the class divide problem in the UK has been to ignore and avoid it. However, I am not sure I want to continue to do so. In 1980s London my friends were mainly foreigners, artists or art students. After I graduated from art school I became a foreigner myself. The identity of a foreigner is an outsider in many ways. SInce then I have been a privileged outsider who does not always need to follow the social norm. I do not want to compare myself to a socially excluded and marginalized white working class person living where i was born and I can see how different we are and that I have become. This is frightening as this group seems stranger to me than many groups with which I have no common cultural past. Nevertheless I do know that in the 1960s and 70s being working class was not to be marginalised. I did not feel excluded from the mainstream of British culture growing up. The British have deep rooted class consciousness and maybe I am underestimating the snobbery of the 1960s and 70s. Of course middle class people probably looked down at us common people but we had a pride I am no longer detecting in the Britain of today. I was proud of what my grand father the NUR man did in the signal box where he worked. That job disappeared along with the railways as we know but where did that (my) class go? I can only imagine what the middle classes thought of us - but I would be surprised if they were scared. I suppose that I never heard those conversations and now when I visit the UK I do hear the middle class ones. Whilst my world in London still revolves largely around foreigners and artists like me I am now the foreigner there too which given the social divisions I count as a huge privelidge and which might give me the potential for some more detached research. to be continued....
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SInce the end of last year I have been returning to the idea of my work being a form of maintenance. On 8th October I wrote a note to myself to 'turn maintenance art on it's head'. There had been something compelling about Merle Ukeles Laderman's idea of maintenance art although I had been aware of the limitations, not to say fetishisation of the artist working within a city department.
Then in the new year I reread the Louise Bourgeois overquoted quote - the act of sewing is a process of emotional repair. This made me think about the idea of therapy and repair in a different way. The remaking of the identity and how we restitch ourselves together in therapy. So now I am trying to see where these two ideas fit together. The idea of maintaining what we have and the idea of repairing it when it becomes broken or worn out. Both these ideas really appeal to me. Instead of creating more stuff, using what we have through maintaining it and when necessary repairing it. The maintenance is essential; the repair is desirable. Repair could be seen as a type of maintenance. For example we clean the street but then when a crack appears we fill it in. We wash the shelf and the objects on the shelf but then we have to mend the plaster, the wood or the bracket or revarnish the wood. The jug falls off the shelf do we stick it together? The line between maintenance and repair is not always clear. The filling the crack or the varnishing the wood are like the sewing in these acts and all create types of marks which could be called lines. In the studio I am considering drawing tools for the acts of maintenance and repair. I am also making lists of the actions we use to make these acts. Yesterday whilst walking to Fuencarral - to see the cementary it became very clear to me that I need to continue to investigate and focus on the world of work. Although I have a continued interest in historical memory it is not nor should be a main focus at the moment.
It has been a month since we completed the MA and have time to reflect (and recover) from the process. I have been reading, resting and walking in July, rather than making, and thinking about what I have got from the process and how I can maintain the momentum and energy of the final stage of the course. The question of what is at the core of what I do is also at the forefront of my mind and needs to drive my next projects. Today I take down the ‘Narrativas Desconocidas’ exhibition and I am questioning where that work will go.
Although the MA was an amazing experience overall I think the main thing I take with me is the need to continue to push myself into uncomfortable places when I know they are the right direction. That could be anything from making myself approach an individual or organisation, pick up the phone being the most difficult action for me; to making myself perform as I did in the final project. The way I managed to do this for the final project was by interrogating the ideas behind the work and following it regardless of the comfort of the conclusions. A sub-section of this uncomfortableness is to create and maintain networks as I tend to isolate myself. Another way I label all of this in my head is risk taking but I feel that is too vague and that it needs to be risk taking with a purpose and that purpose needs to be rigorously examined and consistent. The second most important lesson was to become very organised, or at least to initiate a process of improved organisation. I have obviously improved on this in terms of documentation and managing my time but that is ongoing. In terms of where my work goes what does this mean? I hope that the ideas in the centre of my practice are the same. My concern for unknown people: and especially the world of work in so much as it tends to define and control us and who we think we are. I need to look at the past and present in order to do this. When I was in Yorkshire I visited the National Coal Mining Museum and was struck by the clinging to the sense of identity that work gave men which appeared to an outsider as against all reason. The danger to health and risk to life was all around. I vaguely remember the end of the miners strike and the feeling of great sadness that they had lost. Now I feel sad that the end of the coal mines was dealt with so badly but quite glad they are gone. The biggest victory of the miners strike appears to be the empowerment of the wives. The biggest question hanging in the air is why we feel the need to be defined by out work and why what we do continues to reinforce social class. Obviously I am not in favour of the current economic system and it’s acceptance as the natural order of things. In addition to these ongoing questions I have several starting points for projects and research. I would like to return to maps. I have a map of concentration camps of Spain and I would like to in some way combine walking with marking them in some way. I would also like to map abandoned villages through walking and identifying the work carried out in them in some way. Both of these ideas are about the past: and historical memory in some way. Both are about enforced labour to a certain extent. I am also reading more about the history of my neighbourhood in Madrid via the research of Peter Anderson who has been working at the National Library in Madrid and oral histories collected by Miguel Yunquera. As I read I will consider how this could work in terms of art projects. I am also thinking about my own academic writing and do not want to give this up, however I am not in a position to start a paper at this point. Finally I think I would like to continue to write in this reflective way as it helps me work through ideas so for the present I am going to continue to blog on my webpage. I have added a link and will use this post as the first on the new one to link the dialogue. This has been a wonderful journey thanks to amazing lecturers and cohort – Thank you! |
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