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. |
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