OUTPOST Yellow Pages, selected by Scottee

OUTPOST Yellow Pages, How do you curate working classness? Selected by Scottee.

Featuring work by Adam Neal｜Dolly Sen｜Dorrell Merritt｜Matthew Challenger｜Megan Rudden｜Nick Smith｜Selina Sagina｜Sam Blackwood｜Tara Collette｜Thomas Abercromby

Design by Studio Rose - @studiorose.uk

OUTPOST Yellow Pages is a one-off publication produced by OUTPOST during the Nationwide lockdown in the Summer of 2020. The publication is designed to offer artwork for free to the public during a time when OUTPOST gallery was closed. Selected by Scottee, the publication includes artwork from 10 UK based practitioners from lower socio-economic/working class backgrounds.

In this game you can often feel like the only commoner in the village, a stranger who speaks the same language but uses different lingo. As a result, you assimilate or risk being outcast ...or both.

The analogy of the art world being a village is a good one - this middle England village I find myself in is often solely white, its residents with enough cultural cache and/or financial capital to survive dinner parties with three forks and the onslaught of late capitalism, protected by endowed nepotism. These cobbled roads are safely populated by those I call posh - the guilt-ridden middle classes and less guilt-ridden upper echelons of so-called polite society.

The working class make up less than 20% of the workforce in the performance, music and visual arts industry yet we are about 63% of the UK population according to the Great British Class Survey (April, 2017). We are the disproportionate - unheard and underrepresented in a sector funded off the broken backs of working people’s taxes. To add insult to injury, it’s typically the precariats, service workers, “traditional working class” and benefit class who generate the £90m a year for the art sectors of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, who profiteer from the optimism, escapism and potential the National Lottery offers those of us seeking softness, security and permanence.

Whilst other sectors have mobilised to support their working class workforce, pushed forward by trade unions lobbying and implementing equality and anti-exploitation legislation, it’s still seemingly acceptable in our sector to demand free labour, to exploit the workforce and create structures, environments and conditions that are at detriment to its workers health, wellbeing and survival - no one is more so affected by these conditions that the working classes in our field.

This quiet conversation our sector believes it is now having on what it calls “socio-economic access” is well overdue. This conversation was offered, it was grabbed, kicked and shamed into a performed submission. This isn’t the dawning of a new age, we’ve just managed to kick the back door in - we have the rest of the house to upturn before it sees us as equal.

Until we see proportionate, meaningful and well thought out representation in our institutions, organisations and workforce there is work to be done, grief to be grieved, rage to be raged. Well, that will take more than a publication to solve ...but a publication is more than what most are doing. - Scottee

How do you curate a group of people as one body, one mass, collate them as the ubiquitous working class under one cohesive banner?

How do you fit the intersections between the pages and bind them close enough that they make sense but still give them enough space to acknowledge their differences?

How do you choose what you consider to be the most exacting, the nail on the head that offers the reader a sense of who we are, where we come from, what we need, why we’re proud and where our shame can be found?

Do you present working classness or platform artists who just happen to be working class? How do you curate a representation of those constantly misrepresented?

The truth is you can’t, or at least I don’t think you can, and so this comes with a massive disclaimer - this publication that sits in your hands isn’t a definitive list of working class artists. This isn’t a definitive guide to working classness or working class art. It’s a representation of some brilliant ideas by some brilliant artists.

The work I’ve chosen for these pages isn’t just art by working class artists (although that sadly would still be considered a radical act in the UK). This work is working class artists, making working class work about working classness and where that intersects with their other identities. It’s a glimpse, a snapshot.

If you are in a position to commission - these artists and their peers are a good place to start - we don’t have to perpetually commission middle class artists to tell working class stories. If you are a middle class artist then these artists and their peers will broaden your knowledge of us, our work and how we got here. If you are a punter - support these artists, their peers and their work. Find them online and tell them what you think. Go to their shows, buy their prints or at the very least buy them a pint. - Scottee

The OUTPOST Creative Programme aims to contribute to the better representation of artists and practitioners from a diversity of backgrounds, by promoting upcoming artists through programming and providing beneficial development opportunities. During 2020 to 2023 OUTPOST will facilitate a series of exhibitions, events, and workshops dedicated to giving artist practitioners from lower socio-economic backgrounds a creative platform.

We are delighted to have produced this publication, selected by Scottee, bringing you some of the most exciting artwork currently being made today. The artwork in these pages covers a litany of authenticities, from Selina Sagnia’s beautifully compositioned artworks and honest text illustrating the lived realities of being a black artist in the UK today to Tara Collette’s humorous take on British contemporary culture. Works of this nature exist alongside Adam Neal’s Dutch Still Life inspired photographs of everyday objects, quietly capturing the material of working classness, and bookended by the always relevant and provoking text pieces created by Thomas Abercromby.

We offer this publication for free to share these incredible pieces of artwork with anyone and everyone. So please take your time to read and explore these practitioners, and

Tomorrow

We go To

BIG TESCO

Funded by Arts Council England, the OUTPOST Creative Programme supports and provides opportunities for artists from lower socio-economic backgrounds, and/or individuals that consider themselves as a working class artist.

View online version of the publication below: