Reflections on the past week... Project 2, Narratives of Class, Taste & Culture

I've spent a fair amount of time this week in the mode of both research and collecting.  The critical engagement is of course observation, and whilst our 'views' of class, culture & taste are often biased from where our own vantage point may be.  The 'starting point' has always been fundamental in the eventual location of class.  This is more simply explained as 'you tend to end up in the class that you are born into'...

Documenting the visual images of symbolism in class, culture & taste ( I shall abbreviate this to CCT), is highly engaging in itself. To scrutinise the way people, things, every-day objects are related to each other, but in particular, the status of the objects or 'things', whatever they may be, can link directly to the types of people, the class of people, who are within that particular environment, or are using the 'things' or objects.  At first, this sounds like gobbledegook, but when one applies a little thought, you can make that leap into another mode of observation.  This is the start of the narrative. It's like people watching on a grand scale, - something I think, most of us like to do,  but then doing the same with things and objects, so maybe I should call it, "thing-watching", or is it just plan old "observation" that I'm accidently trying to re-invent?

So take a random object... I'm looking out of the window at a bus... Who would be the types of people on the bus? what sort of person would be driving the bus? Where is it likely to be going at each terminus?  All of these enquiries can be assumed and equally, so can the answers to those questions.  They may be verisimilitudes, and assumptions can be wrong, but generally, the images of the mind, the imagination, is likely to be correct.  We have a cultural language, a vocabulary that can be drawn. It's more likely that the bus would have working class people using it. It's likely that the driver was born into the working class. The terminus points, particularly in town or city centres, tend to serve the greatest users of public road transport, so again can be safely assumed as being in a working class areas.   What an object then, is born into, the environment for which it's intended usage is going to be, gives an object or thing a kind of class position.  This is quite an abstract thought that has been going through my mind much of the last few months, much of the time.  I'm more aware of this underlying language, the symbolism and hence vocabulary of what's around me.

One can start to begin narratives through even the slightest snapshot of a view.  My reflection of Peter Doig's painting, "Grasshopper", (1990) Oil on canvas, illustrates this point, too, that a simple snap, like a click of a camera shutter, in any direction, at any time, can start a narrative.

Applying this imagination based on a narrative starting point through an imagistic, (perhaps in my own preferred 'painterly' way), - in other words through appropriate composition, is such a magical part of art's attractiveness, and particularly, the attraction of Contemporary Art that I feel is beginning to be understood by a much wider audience of viewers across all classes;  This is interesting as Art that was created say 200 years ago was generally only viewed by the privileged elite.  So, in this reflection, I'm making the case that art is at last becoming a class-free "thing" for which I'd set the boundaries up for in the beginning of this blog article.