The Affirmation of Social Class in the Drawings of Sally Taylor
- Submitting institution
-
York St John University
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 480
- Type
- D - Journal article
- DOI
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10.1386/drtp.2.2.363_1
- Title of journal
- Drawing: Research, Theory, History, Practice
- Article number
- -
- First page
- 363
- Volume
- 2
- Issue
- 2
- ISSN
- 2057-0384
- Open access status
- Compliant
- Month of publication
- November
- Year of publication
- 2017
- URL
-
http://ray.yorksj.ac.uk/id/eprint/2295/
- 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)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This article is the first peer review publication to emerged from a sustained collaboration between Corby and Taylor. Corby has presented conference papers that interrogated the role of social class in the academy (AHRC CentreCATH, Leeds, 2002) and the reception and making of the work of Richard Billingham (College Art Association, Dallas 2007). This enquiry remained at the margins of her research activity, however, until Taylor invited Corby to write a short catalogue essay for an Arts Council England funded solo exhibition SALLY TAYLOR drawings (2011).
Written in the summer of 2016 this paper is a retort to the Left’s vilification of white-working class communities immediately after the EU Referendum. It focusses on Taylor’s solo exhibition That Head That Head, at the Rabley Drawing Centre and begins by locating it within contemporary drawing’s understanding of the medium as both an act and trace of becoming human (Bryson, 2010). It’s discussion of class offers a supplement to the discipline’s focus on ethnicity and gender, however (Meskimmon & Sawdon, 20??). First, it situates Taylor’s head motif as a negotiation of the ignorance attributed to the ‘blockhead’ working-classes (Williams, ). Second, drawing on the writing of sociologist Zygmunt Bauman it argues that the charge of racism levied against Leave voters has removed the moral obligation to help disadvantaged communities. Finally, drawing on Taylor as a precedent and the writing of Herbert Read, it argues for the power of materially driven practice to circumvent need for pre-existing privileged art historical knowledge, and thus open new possibilities for arts and audience engagement.
The provocation was taken up in Corby and Taylor’s continued collaboration via the co-convening (with O’Donnell) of the 2017 Drawing Matters Symposium YSJU, the subsequent editorial written for the Special Issue of TRACEY, Drawing, Visualisation, Research (2021) and YSJU’s Impact Case Study 1.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
