Opening Thoughts

By Katie Beswick

Class is complicated.

I say this all the time.

But what does it mean?

Beverley Skeggs’s article ‘Feeling Class’¹ maps the affective contours of class complication. That is, she uses theories of social class to think about how class feels, and how those feelings influence the complicated ways we relate to each other. On this website, Women Working Class, a female collective of working-class artists, responds to Skeggs’s article in a section called ‘Coming back to Skeggs’. The project is one of several commissions documented here, through which working-class women explore their class positions, and work out how to navigate an artworld that often seems impenetrable.

In ‘Coming back to Skeggs’, each artist records a section from ‘Feeling Class’ by reading it aloud, sounding the words in their mouths and bodies. How does theory feel when you say it? How does it feel when you hear someone else say it? I listen to the recordings in bed, during lockdown. I think: are my sticky sheets, the warmth of my dog lying next to me, the sound of her licking at her paw, the cold from the spring snow flurry outside class feelings?

Marina White Raven has responded to ‘Feeling Class’ with ‘Impeccable Taste’. The photo of tinned spaghetti, shiny and orange, triggers a sense-memory of the sweet/sour tomato flavour of the sauce, the metallic twang as you suck soft overcooked pasta off a stainless steel fork. ‘Impeccable’ is written in a digital imitation of chalk on a chalk board, the thick cloying dust that would float about the classroom, clinging as it settled to the tinned spaghetti stain on your school jumper.

I think: How do we account for these sensation memories as part of a critical understanding of class?

The vocalised readings make Skeggs’s essay resonate differently to scanning it on the page. They highlight themes and connections that bring theory to life in new ways.

I like how sometimes the artists trip over Skeggs’s words as they read them. It gives the listener (me), a sense of the women feeling out meaning as they go, the way you feel out another person through conversation. You can hear the artists’ thoughts behind their recitations — their emotions spill up in moments of laughter, hesitation, repetition.

What does this mean? You hear them thinking. What does it mean to me? 

Kyra Cross’s ‘Are You Class’ has as its central image a cartoonish impression of the gold clown pendant you could buy from Argos through the 1990s. Working-class girls used to wear them on long gold chains, with hooped earrings and Rimmel lipstick in the shade Coffee Shimmer. Argos’s Elizabeth Duke jewellery brand was the only place we could afford real gold. I didn’t have one of those necklaces, but I remember the weight of their hollow metal and the way they moved their articulated clown limbs. That’s class affect.

I listen closely to the artists’ voices, particularly the accents. I notice I am attuned for signs of class position as I listen. Skeggs discusses this kind of interaction as relational affect in action; the way we feel out and feel in response to other people. What I make of their voices is an example of ‘repetitive symbolic loading’: in other words, because of symbols we’ve received through wider cultural messaging (on film, on television, in music video, through the news) we have come to figure some voices as working-class, and feel things about them as a result. What I feel about the artists’ voices is already conditioned by what I know about class. The sound of someone’s voice is a class feeling. The shape of my mouth as words leave them is a class feeling.

In response to Skeggs, Fox Irving has filmed the sea from a view through a window. The waves smash against the beach, repeating themselves over and over again. The piece is called ‘Affect and Symbolic Violence’.

In her book, Where We Stand: Class Matters, the writer bell hooks relates her experience of patriarchal control in her working-class childhood home, where her father set the economic and emotional conditions under which the family lived. Hooks’ home replicated ‘the space of heterosexual desire’, where ‘a woman had to be dependent on a man for everything.’² Cath Hoffman relays something of the conditions of heterosexual desire in her piece, ‘Illicit Pleasure’, downing a bottle of prosecco as she lists all the ways she found pleasure in her working-class childhood, away from a ‘bastard’ father and a living-space where pleasure was non-existent.

The enduring resonances of childhood come through the ‘WC Identity’ section of this website. Here, the artists each offer a photograph portrait that encapsulates their working-class heritage. A girl-aged Hoffman stands squinting in a garden on a housing estate, framed by grey pebble-dashed houses, under a slice of blue sky. Charlotte Cooper pulls faces in a series of black and white photo-booth snaps. Jasmine Shigemura Lee compares past and present, collaging a baby picture, where she reclines in a turquoise sweater, bright red splotches on her toddler cheeks, with a contemporary photo where she reclines in a similar outfit. The fact that most of the women have chosen photographs in which they are children or teenagers speaks to that complicated class feeling that is something like nostalgia and sadness. I think of it as the hope for a better past that endures, even as time passes. The sense that then is always present now; how we are always defined and limited by what came before.

Kelly Green’s response to the ‘WC Glossary of Art Lingo’ does something with this fluid sense of time. Her definitions are framed by flowing strips of leopard-print that move like Möbius strips; their deceptively simple shape impossible to orient. The fluid undulating shape, like the Möbius strip, might be read as an affective expression of the social and psychic impact of living with complicated class feelings. It encapsulates the way ‘markings left on the social body can leave traces deep in psyche, while the phenomenal experience does not stop at the level of the subject but informs our interactions with others.’³ What we feel bleeds out of us, influencing all we do.

Green’s dice depiction of inspirational working class artists similarly uses shape to convey feeling. Its simple cut-out-and-build form is a testament to the do-it-yourself nature of working-class culture, while the dice shape suggests the risk that working-class artists must navigate, and the always possible hand of chance in the outcome of any endeavour.

Class is complicated.

The works here begin to show us how. In taking them seriously we can perhaps learn what these artists have to tell us about being working-class, and what a working-class sensibility can offer the art world.

 

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¹ Skeggs, B. (2012). Feeling Class: Affect and Culture in the Making of Class Relations. The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Sociology. John Wiley and Sons, p. 269-286.

² Hooks, b. (2000) Where We Stand: Class Matters. Routledge.

³ McKinney. J (2013). Scenography, Spectacle and the Body of the Spectator. Performance Research. 18: 3, p. 63-74.