By foregrounding class in my discussions of my case studies, I am able to provide original readings of them, as class is the least theorised aspect in the critical literature. As well as treating working- class experience and subjectivity as central topics of these works, I also theorise the ways in which working-class lived realities shape the works themselves. By doing this, I make the case for the works to be understood within a tradition of autodidact working-class artists, producing work that comes from and speaks to a working-class aesthetics. By interrogating the existing literature on Spence, Billingham and Morley, I prove that their work has most often been judged according to middle and upper-class standards of artistic value, against which it can only fail. I show that all three case studies must be seen and evaluated on their own terms, rather than judged to be lacking against work made by more finally privileged artists and institutions.
This is evident in the critical revulsion shown towards the working-class subjects of all three artists’ work, since all three feature and present working-class people as their main focus. These negative readings stem from the negative attitudes aimed at working-class people and their / our lives. My readings differ strongly to the hegemonic middle-class critical literature, as I share a point of view with my case studies, artists and with the women represented in their works. My analysis counters these dominant readings, and demonstrates original and insightful ways that these works can be received.
One problem inherent in sharing an empathetic relation to the works discussed is a desire to defend the material, and by extension its producers. Although I have tried to be reflexive in my readings, it has been difficult to avoid a level of defensiveness in my analysis. However, given the
189 overwhelmingly negative critical judgements on these works miss so much of value, there is a very real need to articulate a defence of what is valuable within them. The works I discuss have been written off or pigeon-holed in so many ways. In the case of Billingham, the critical focus has been almost exclusively on critics’ own anxieties around questions exploitation, shock value and transgression. Spence’s large body of work has been overwhelmingly categorised as being “about” illness, to the detriment of serious consideration of her extensive body of writing discussing her lifelong struggles with class difference, present in the phototherapy works that worked through class shame and pain of class mobility. In the case of Morley, the least critically written about of all my case studies, The Alcohol Years is read through the lens of a Manchester nostalgia that foregrounds the time and place rather than the girl in the centre of the story; or else critics simply fret and moralise over her sexuality. What is least discussed is her ambition, and the reasons for her experimentation: little attempt is made to understand the experiences of a young working-class women who isn’t in education or employment, who like her male counterparts is trying to make it in the Manchester music scene of the 1980s but is side-lined and cast aside due to being female. My contribution to the literature on all three case studies counteracts the limited, stereotypical ways that each have been understood, to restore complexity, richness and value to our understanding of these works as existing within a working-class culture.
One of this thesis’s major contributions is exposing the substantial deficit of research on class in the visual arts. The more I searched for materials discussing class in this field, the more this gap became apparent. This also extended to class discourse on my case studies: in spite of all three coming from working-class backgrounds, depicting working-class subjects and overtly dealing with class issues, class was still the least theorised aspect of the work. My suspicion at the start of this research that class was being systematically ignored in this area was proven to be correct. Nowhere was this more vividly apparent than in the critical literature on Mother Daughter Shame Work, from Spence and Martin’s photo therapy sessions. Spence repeatedly says in her own own writing that during her photo therapy sessions she explored the shame she felt at her class background, and the distance her class-mobility provoked between her and her mother. Yet in the critical writing on this work, class and the experience of splitting-class-identities of these two women is ignored – even though the clue is in the title of the work. I framed the absence, identifying class as a blind spot that writers cannot or choose not to see, even if it is explicitly presented in the work. Repeating this “absence testing” in the chapters on Billingham and Morley, I found that there is a systematic failure to take into consideration how class features in these works, to understand how class works as an identity, a situation, background, and subjectivity. On the occasions when class is mentioned in the literature on my case studies, it is usually included as a list of labels, like
190 “British” or “woman” etc.: class is used as a stamp rather than as something that shapes, describes or reveals.
Another aspect of this critical blind-spot around class analysis can be seen in the assumption that all artists must be middle-class. As if, they may once have “come from” a working-class background, but with education and culture they transcend neatly into the middle-classes. I have shown through the personal accounts of all three case studies, as well as the other memoirs and personal testimony, that this is not how most working-class people experience it. Classed subjectivities remain and are carried with us throughout new classed spaces, adding to and blending into our sense of what class we belong to. As Jo Spence termed it, we experience a “split-classed subjectivity”, a feeling of no longer really belonging in either class category.
Exposing this narrative is an important contribution to research on the visual arts, not only because class is absent from so much critical discussion of these images, but also because the producers of those images carry with them a discomfort due to being in spaces dominated by the middle and upper-classes. Although many artists from working-class backgrounds are able to pass in such institutions, it is important that their/our identities are not disavowed, but are taken into account as factors in the shaping of the work, in its production and consumption.
This thesis tells my own story of coming to art, of encountering work by Billingham as a young A-level photography student and gaining the confidence to make work about my own classed background and identity rather than be shamed into assimilation into the middle-class milieu at my art college. I draw out the important narrative of working-class autodidactic traditions of using local libraries, alternative music scenes and involvement in political activism as avenues to learn and explore knowledge and culture. This account produces a counter-history and culture of learning for working-class people, against the more recognised and valued routes of higher education and university. I argue that these alternative avenues are crucial in shaping a working- class culture of shared learning.