A woman phoned me the other day to ask if I would speak at a conference looking at ways of encouraging students from all backgrounds to access art education. “Basically, why I am asking you,” she said, “is that you are not posh.” And I suppose I’m not; though I do not come from a poverty- stricken background it certainly would not qualify by income or culture as middle-class.
My childhood home contained very few books and the only artworks on the walls were a few cheap prints. I didn’t enter an art gallery until I was 16. I took advantage of the golden age of class mobility in this country. I went to an excellent selective state school, I received a full grant to attend tertiary education and after that the dole, and squatting, eased my early years as a fledgeling artist.
In many discussions about art, class is often the elephant in the room. Born and bred middle-class people perhaps do not feel able to comment on the class structure of a world where they have a distinct advantage in terms of access. Working-class people seem to lack a sense of entitlement: “Not for the likes of us,” says the unconscious voice that underlies the working class’s self-exclusion from the arts.
There seems to be a lot of hand-wringing about access to the arts. Museums, whose funding depends on footfall, are always introducing schemes to target groups who don’t traditionally enjoy contemporary art or feel entitled to. Is it middle-class guilt? Are museums saying to the workers: “You must take your share in our expensive, heavily subsidised cultural leisure activities, after all your taxes helped pay for them”? Or is it evangelism? “Come join the cultured,” they are saying. “You will learn to appreciate the fine things in life and eat with your mouth closed, dress nicely and teach you kids not to steal.”
Who are these schemes trying to attract? I don’t even know what you call them these days, those people with awful taste, with their net curtains and Turkey Twizzlers. I can’t call them the poor because many are a lot richer than some of my skint middle-class friends. I call them working-class but a lot of them don’t work. Probably the defining characteristic is lack of education. I wonder if these schemes really work. You can lead a chav to culture but can you make him think?
Understanding art takes time. It is not a catchy pop tune or an addictive soap opera. Art needs a lot of looking and reflection, skills we most easily learn as children. I think the way to get more people interested in art is to improve their schooling.
Class is a big issue in the arts, so top marks to the curators Nav Haq and Tirdad Zolghadr for organising a year-long exhibition and research project called Lapdogs of the Bourgeoisie, which starts at the Gasworks near the Oval cricket ground on Friday. The project will look at the role socioeconomic class plays in all aspects of contemporary art and will travel on to Stockholm, Istanbul and Cairo.
Art tends to be a middle-class business worldwide and I sometimes feel I have more in common with an artist or curator from Delhi or Düsseldorf than I do with a Sun reader from Doncaster. Haq recounted to me how Danish galleries have tried to compensate for the cartoon affair by staging shows of art from Muslim countries, but the fundamentalist protesters are probably from a socioeconomic class that does not visit art galleries.
The Swedish artist Annika Eriksson, who works performatively with groups as diverse as the insurance firm Swiss Re and the Stockholm postmen’s orchestra, is intervening in the social codings of that quintessential art event, the private view. She is inviting groups of people to the opening who would not usually be invited or think of attending. This is an interesting and potentially awkward idea. Santiago Sierra formalised this dynamic, much to the discomfort of partygoers, when he presented a line-up of 200 African migrant workers, whose hair he had dyed blonde, at the opening of the 2001 Venice Biennale.
I once invited a group of Essex biker mates to a private view of mine in Fulham. When they arrived they sent in a scout to recce the party. He must have taken back reports of it being too posh/ bohemian/gay for they turned round and went home.
In the Gasworks show the Swiss artist Sam Keller is exhibiting photographs of various artists’ works as they are displayed in situ in the homes of their parents. This is a genius idea as it succinctly speaks volumes about the class dissonance between the world an artist finds himself in and his background. I often hear artists bemoaning that their parents don’t appreciate their achievements. But often the parents are ill- equipped by their working- class culture to understand the rigours and deprivations necessary to succeed on the cultural coalface.
I know from personal experience that often the only way for an artist from a working- class background to gain the respect of his family is to sell work for large amounts of money. Being nominated for the Turner Prize, or having a one-man show at MOMA, seems to mean nothing to someone with a copy of Constable’s Haywain over the fireplace in a gold plastic frame.
But blissful ignorance of the realities of the art world can extend to those who seek entry. If I had left school this year I doubt I would have become an artist, I would never have risked embarking on such a financially precarious career saddled with student debt. One piece in Lapdogs of the Bourgeoisie reminds me of the misguided hopes some outsiders have about the career path and earnings potential of the average artist. Erkan Ozgen and Sener Ozmen’s video features two businessmen mounted on a horse and a donkey reminiscent of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza crossing a bleak Turkish desert landscape. On meeting a peasant they ask: “How can we reach Tate Modern?”
A friend who works at a London art college has regaled me with tales of working-class school-leavers from the suburbs applying for art degree courses, who labour under the belief that making art is a route to easy money. Some who hoped to embark on a lucrative career in the visual arts had never even ventured into Central London to visit a gallery.
I hope some of these students, like me, wanted to attend art school because they love making art as there are definite advantages for an artist not coming from a middle-class background. Working-class credentials can be flaunted as a badge of authenticity, the exotically vulgar bit o’ rough who won’t swallow all that polite middle-class bulls***.
The downside is that it took an awful lot of therapy to rid me of the feeling that someone was going to tap me on the shoulder and say: “Get out of here, you’re not the sort of person who has exhibitions in museums.”
Lapdogs of the Bourgeoisie runs at the Gasworks Gallery, 155 Vauxhall Street, London SE11 (www.gasworks.org.uk, 020-7582 6848), from Friday until Jan 14
