From Gaze to Witness: Masculinity and Loss in George Shaw’s Paintings of Tile Hill
- Submitting institution
-
Manchester Metropolitan University
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 241014
- Type
- D - Journal article
- DOI
-
10.2218/forum.27.2902
- Title of journal
- FORUM: University of Edinburgh Postgraduate Journal of Culture & the Arts
- Article number
- -
- First page
- 1
- Volume
- N/A
- Issue
- 27
- ISSN
- 1749-9771
- Open access status
- Compliant
- Month of publication
- December
- Year of publication
- 2018
- URL
-
https://e-space.mmu.ac.uk/622168/
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
-
0
- Research group(s)
-
B - Art & Performance
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This research situates the witness gaze as central to a reading of George Shaw’s paintings of his home, Tile Hill, Coventry (1990-2017). Identified through the painting’s composition, mirroring the camera’s viewfinder, the viewer becomes witness, with Shaw, in this site. Characterising this gaze as passive rather than active, facilitates identification of these works with the loss of a construction of male identity formed in relation to industrial labour, homed at Tile Hill in the 1960s. Shaw begins these paintings in the 1990s as this loss impacts generationally. Employing industrial Humbrol paint, the works encapsulate two modes of labour, the industrial, of which the paint and Tile Hill are a product; and the laboured surface, from Humbrol’s limitations and the photo realist style - both ironically erased in the obliteration of the hand. A paradox around labour and how it can signify rifts across the works’ surfaces, compounded by the passivity of the gaze, suggesting uncertainty about how masculinity can now be read. The research pursues this loss by applying Lacan’s psychoanalytical theory of the ‘mirror phase’ identifying Tile Hill as a ‘specular’, ideal image. Shaw’s burying of the photograph in the painting maintains a reading of Tile Hill as a site of manufacture, as Shaw transforms the photograph to equate with his memory, erasing contemporary Tile Hill, associated with loss and a particular masculine identity. The duration of paint enables the persistence of the former model, and its oscillation across the present, as masculinity seeks new ways to find its place. This research posits an alternative view of 1990s, YBA dominated, British Art, by addressing connections between masculinity and labour, disrupting the period’s popularist masculine constructions to foreground one of loss and re-negotiation. The research lays the ground for a forthcoming monograph on memory.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -