Image & Text Analysis
Depiction of the English through contemporary art
Depiction of the English through contemporary art
by Mary Macleod
They live on an island close to our country, they eat fish with chips, they can have tea at any moment of the day, they love queuing, talking about the weather and they say sorry when someone bumps into them. They are, of course, the English. But from these clichés, pieces of art have been created to truly understand these people. So, it is through two works: “Untitled” taken from Ray's a Laugh by Richard Billingham and an extract taken from Watching the English by Kate Fox, that some “English aspects” will be depicted.
So firstly, it would be interesting to focus on the photographer Richard Billingham's life and works which will help to understand his photograph. This picture will be described and analysed then.
Secondly, one could focus on Kate Fox's career. This short biography will be followed by an analysis of this extract and it will be compared with some other works on the same topic.
Richard Billingham, “Untitled”, Ray's A Laugh.
- Author's life and works
Richard Billingham was born 25 September 1970 in Birmingham and is an English photographer and artist who is best known for his book Ray's A Laugh which documents the life of his two parents. He studied as a painter at Bournville College of Art and the University of Sunderland. He came to prominence through his candid photography of his family in Cradley Heath. His photos were first shown in the Barbican Art Gallery in London in 1994 and were entitled “Who's looking at the family”. It was published in the acclaimed book Ray's A Laugh two years later.
In 1997 Billingham was included in the Royal Academy of Arts's famous Sensation show of Young British Artists, which showcased the Charles Saatchi collection. Also in 1997, he won the Citigroup Photography Prize. After the overnight fame, he stopped taking still pictures, but moved on to hi-8 video footage, resulting in the 47minute TV film called “Fishtank”, commissioned by Artangel. It was the extension of his work in photographs and a return to places of childhood memory.
He was short-listed for the 2001 Turner Prize, for his solo show at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham. The turner prize is widely recognised as one of the most important and prestigious awards for the visual arts in Europe.
He has also made landscape photographs at places of personal significance around the Black Country (the industrialised part that is on the North East of Birmingham), and more of these were commissioned in 2003 by the arts organisation The Public, resulting in a book.
In late 2006 Billingham exhibited a major new series of photographs and videos inspired by his memories of visiting Dudley Zoo as a child. The series, entitled "Zoo", was commissioned by Birmingham-based arts organisation, VIVID and was exhibited at Compton Verney Art Gallery in Warwickshire.
In the following year he created a series of photographs of "Constable Country", the area on the Essex / Suffolk border painted by John Constable. These were exhibited at the Town Hall Galleries, Ipswich.
In 2009/2010 he participated in a collective exhibition at the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany titled: Ich, Zweifellos. He now lives in Brighton, and travels widely. He is a lecturer in Fine Art Photography at the University of Gloucestershire.
- Description of the picture
This photograph is the portrait of Liz, Richard's mother, who is playing jigsaw. This picture as all the other photographs of the books are untitled. However, the author named it “Liz working on a jigsaw”. The picture is cut into two parts. Liz is sitting on what looks like to be a couch on the top half of the picture. Behind her, one can see a mess made of cushions of different colours.
The lower part of the picture is the coffee table with the big jigsaw on it. The jigsaw is not yet done and Liz has on her knees the mixed up pieces in a box that she is selecting. On the foreground, where the subject should have been, there is a glass of orange juice and an ashtray with some cigarette butts in it. A cigarette case is also on the table and it is clearly written “sky” on it.
When one looks at this picture with its bad focus, he does not know where to look at, he feels a bit lost with all these information. So the composition can be said to be chaotic.
The photographer used a frontal flash which gave this effect of direct and crude light. The light came from his camera, as he was the one who was casting light on her. And it is in that light that the photographer is looking at his subject. The picture is raw, which means that it has not been retouched: it seems to tell the truth. It looks like a bad picture, the white objects are burnt or over exposed.
Liz's dress is made of the same colours of the jigsaw and of the tattoos on her arms. The colours are brash and if they are a bit flashy it is thanks to the light.
As for the material, the photographer used the cheapest silver film he could find.
- Analysis
“My father Raymond is a chronic alcoholic. He doesn't like going outside, my mother Elizabeth hardly drinks, but she does smoke a lot.
She likes pets and things that are decorative. They married in 1970 and I was born soon after.
My younger brother Jason was taken into care when he was 11, but now he is back with Ray and Liz again. Recently he became a father.
Dad was some kind of mechanic, but he's always been an alcoholic. It has just got worse over the years. He gets drunk on cheap cider at the off licence. He drinks a lot at nights now and gets up late.
Originally, our family lived in a terraced house, but they blew all the redundancy money and, in desperation, sold the house. then we moved to the council tower block, where ray just sits in and drinks. That's the thing about my dad, there's no subject he's interested in, except drink.”
She likes pets and things that are decorative. They married in 1970 and I was born soon after.
My younger brother Jason was taken into care when he was 11, but now he is back with Ray and Liz again. Recently he became a father.
Dad was some kind of mechanic, but he's always been an alcoholic. It has just got worse over the years. He gets drunk on cheap cider at the off licence. He drinks a lot at nights now and gets up late.
Originally, our family lived in a terraced house, but they blew all the redundancy money and, in desperation, sold the house. then we moved to the council tower block, where ray just sits in and drinks. That's the thing about my dad, there's no subject he's interested in, except drink.”
Ray's a laugh is from the name of a radio domestic comedy show of the BBC. Billingham shows that his family is resisting even-though his father is an alcoholic and his mother a huge smoker. The photographer says the opposite of sitcoms. He focuses on details, assessing reality without any moral judgement. Ray’s a Laugh is, like the quality of the pictures, a raw, intimate autobiographical portrait of the artist’s own dysfunctional family. It portraits the poverty and deprivation in which he grew up. This is how the photographer introduced his book:
"[…] It's not my intention to shock, to offend, sensationalise, be political or whatever, only to make work that is as spiritually meaningful as I can make it - in all these photographs I never bothered with things like the negatives. Some of them got marked and scratched. I just used the cheapest film and took them to be processed at the cheapest place. I was just trying to make order out of chaos.”
The motif of Liz's dress reflects the difficulty of the jigsaw. She will finally complete it and an image will appear as clearly as the word “sky” on the cigarette packet. Everything happens as if by putting together the jigsaw pieces, she is putting together the pieces of a dispersed life. The authenticity and frankness of the series is provided through the disrespect of photographic rules. Apparently, the photographer took so many pictures of his parents that they did not even noticed that he was taking them. In this picture, Liz is not pretending but living her everyday life.
To some extend, this manner of representing the truth in portraits can be compared with Avedon's crude portraits through some details (in the skin, the attitude of the subject etc)
One of the more shocking things that these pictures show is the squalor the family lives in. They seem to tread a delicate path between voyeurism, social commentary, and intense self-exposure.
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This work again can be compared with Nan Goldin self portraits. As she was beaten up by her boyfriend, she took herself in picture everyday so as to describe the misery she was living in.
Ray, his father, and his mother Liz, appear at first glance as grotesque figures, the mother is an obese chain smoker with an apparent fascination for jigsaw puzzles. This picture looks funny as there is such discrepancy between Liz and her love for jigsaw. However, there is such integrity in this work that Liz ultimately shines through a troubled yet deeply human and touching personality. The critic Julian Stallabras describes Ray and Liz as the embodiments of "what is in legend a particularly British stoicism and resilience, in the face of the tempest of modernity."
This picture tends to show something that is far from what you could expect English people to be as they are seen as sophisticated people. It is as if the true Englishness has been defined through this picture. What is being English if not being ordinary people living England? So this series raised social, political and artistic debates in England.
However, photographed as source material for his painting studies, this body of work was never intended as a socially driven document, but rather as an experimental study of the human figure in interior spaces. The spectator is invited into the most claustrophobically private family moments, but instead of presenting a forged domestic idyll, Billingham introduces us to a family battling poverty, alienation, vice and the disruptive chaos of acute alcoholism. In our reality obsessed voyeuristically driven culture, we seem to have a perverse curiosity to poverty, but Ray’s a Laugh represents something more genuine and profound than that.
This picture as all the others of Ray's A Laugh take you from despair (the mess, the squalor in which Liz lives) to happiness (candid picture of his mum). Ultimately, this work can be compared with the work of Martin Parr. Parr is a Magnum photographer who takes pictures which have very saturated colours so as to present a very funny portrait of English people.
To conclude, this is a portrait which is not really a portrait but an intimate picture taken from a reportage on the English lower class. It is far from the clichés one could have on the English. The photographer did not convey any message to his picture, maybe this is why there is no title. He wanted to show the truth with no artificial device, the image is pure.
Untitled can be compared with Kate Fox's Watching the English; as she wanted to be honest and to find out who the Englishmen truly are.
Kate Fox, Watching the English
In Watching the English anthropologist Kate Fox takes a revealing look at the habits and personality of the English people. Through a mixture of scientific analysis and her own unorthodox experiments Kate Fox discovers a culture governed by complex unspoken rules and codes of behaviour which tell us about “Englishness”. At the heart of her book is her assertion that the way the English behave is largely governed by a social dis-ease - a lack of comfort in social situations that has resulted in the making of values and reactions to cope with.
- The author and the purpose of the whole book
Before being a writer, Kate Fox is a social anthropologist and Public Relations director. She is the director of the Social Issues Research Centre (SIRC). She is the daughter of an anthropologist and as a child she had to live in the UK, the United States, France and Ireland. She studied for an undergraduate degree in anthropology and philosophy at Cambridge University. After a period in publishing and marketing in 1989 she became a co-director of MCM Research
Her works and publications deal with aspects of human behaviour that the reader can find in Watching the English. She is also a consultant on issues such as customer psychology, complaint handling, team leading and crime prevention.
In Watch the English, she had to define the specificity of the Englishness, that is to say, the general behaviour of the English. As an anthropologist, she adopted scientific methods used in primitive societies and an observation method in order to study the behaviour of her fellows in public and private spheres. She based her observation in London and Birmingham and used herself as a reluctant guinea-pig . The purpose was to find common rules which would lead to these behaviours but not to prejudice. She listed the aspects she found in two main codes: “conversation-codes” and “behaviour-codes” in which you have:
“English reserve”, “politeness”, “the weather”, “hooliganism”, “hypocrisy”, “queuing”, “fair play”, “Humour rules”, “Pub talk”, “Eccentricity”, “Privacy” etc. The author examines these stereotypes as a scientist would do and with humour uses the metaphor “human genome” to introduce her work on English culture.
- The description of the “social disease” and its analysis
However, this extract is taken from the conclusion entitled : « Defining Englishness ». It is written with an insider's knowledge, but from an outsider's perspective. There is a brief speculation at the end of this conclusion, but mostly this is study in observation, not explanation. The main purpose of this final part is to define the “national character”. She first describes it as a disease with its symptoms which are contradictory: “English reserve” (l.8) and “English loutishness, hooliganism and other anti-social behaviours” (l.10). She compares her patients – the English – with the famous bi-polar character “Jekyll and Hyde” (l.11) so as to underline the complexity of the definition. This "Social dis-ease" is the "central core of Englishness". She holds this congenital awkwardness responsible for almost everything.
In a very linear way, Fox compares four main possible reasons of this “disease” with what happen in other nations:
-The first one is the weather: cold and rainy but not very different from Scotland's, Ireland's and Wales' climate where people are usually known to be more friendly than the English. It is only a factor, not a reason.
-The second reason is History dealing with the loss of the “empire”, violence, “loutishness dating back to the seventeen century” (l.37) could be as well factors of an “anti-social behaviour”. But as she quotes the date 1963: she recalls the Swinging sixties, so to say: the beginning of Sex liberation, the Beatles apparition, the Duke and Duchess of Argyll divorce scandals etc. The country starts opening itself to modernity. This “social disease” cannot be linked to any historical event.
-The third reason is Society through education and the police forces as she quotes the author of the English: Are They Human? But she does not seem to agree with him.
-The last reason is dealing with geography. She classifies the English as “an island race” which might have an impact on the national character with their “insularity”: being on a small island may affect their social ability to communicate with other countries. Their “density of population” is also seen as an important factor as she follows her explanation of this point with a long list of adjectives underlining this “social disease”.
Finally, she supposes that the solution might be a combination of all those reasons. Why are the English so unique? Maybe the English think they are unique but they may not.
Kate Fox tries to give a diagnosis like a psychiatrist, even though she does not have any clear answer; she seems to be a scientist but cannot give any reason. She mocks this pseudo-scientific way of giving a name to concepts, but in the end they are useless, “but identifying and naming a disorder tells us nothing about its cause” (l.15). By writing “I'm sorry” (l.77), she finally apologies as it is a failure: she could not give any solution, so where is the point of the novel?
But her way of proceeding is like in mathematics: until you find a solution that contradicts what you say, the rule is true. She is not being contradicted but cannot fully explain the reasons: she is true until she is contradicted. As she concludes: “you can challenge my diagnosis or offer a second opinion if you disagree” (l.85), she is addressing directly to the reader but as it is a novel, plus the the reader cannot contradict her, he can send her a letter but she needs to rewrite her book then. This whole challenge seems useless as well.
Fox's style is light and approachable. In fact, if anything she writes in an over-self deprecating way is a rather cynical ploy to illustrate the points she makes about the English. It itself humorous and light-hearted but is by no means light-weight for it has some serious messages which will interest anyone who is English or who has to deal with the English in daily life. By the end Kate Fox provide us with what looks like a scholarly study, but a study that makes you smile at her insights as you read. The Sunday Times would write: ‘She has not only compiled a comprehensive list of English qualities, she has examined them in depth and wondered how we came to acquire them. Her book is a delightful read.’
To conclude, Englishness is not a matter of birth, race, colour or creed: it is a mindset, based on a set of behaviour-codes that anyone can decipher and apply – now that Kate Fox has provided the key. This leaves her free to indulge in irony, humour and self-deprecation, thereby allowing for a more egalitarian and humane relationship with her readers than most academic anthropologists can manage. Making fun of yourself is a key of what we know about « Britishness » and this is exactly what Kate Fox does. This chapter can be compared with the BBC series Little Britain: which tries to define Britishness through common characters which are symbolical caricatures of British society.
To the question: “What does Britain mean to you?”, David Walliams, one of the two actors of the series said: “In Britain, we have to laugh of ourselves as all the other countries mock us, so we have to be the first ones to do so”
To the question: “What does Britain mean to you?”, David Walliams, one of the two actors of the series said: “In Britain, we have to laugh of ourselves as all the other countries mock us, so we have to be the first ones to do so”
Bibliography
Books:
-La photographie by Edouard Boubat, Le Livre de Poche, 1989
-Le musée de la photo, Editions Phaidon, 2006
-Manuel de la photo ratée by Thomas Lélu, Léo Scheer, 2002
-Watching the English: The Hidden Rules of English Behaviour by Kate Fox, Hooder & Stoughton, 2004
-Rules Britannia: the 101 Essential Questions of Britishness Answered by Rohan Candappa, Ebury Press, 2007
-Notes from a Small Island by Bill Bryson, Black Swan, 2000
-Pour en finir avec l'anglais, Chanteclair, Flammarion, 1994
Others:
-Pictures of Martin Parr: 50 postcards from the book Magnum, Editions Phaidon, 2007
-Little Britain: the Complete First Series, starring: Matt Lucas and David Walliams, DVD BBC2, 2004
