“Any time we either produce or understand any utterance of any reasonable length, we are employing dozens if not hundreds of categories.”  George Lakoff: Women, Fire and Dangerous Things.

List making is a significant part of John Yeadon’s obsessive process of aesthetic production. He acknowledges the powerful influence of Hogarth’s Analysis of Beauty, with its witty selections of compartmentalised “things”, its ironically exemplary categorisations. Both the humour of Hogarth and the underlying significance of the joke, inform the way that Yeadon relates groups of objects in his recent series of works which he groups under the overall title of “Viol Bodies” and “Comparative Anatomy“.

Before there is zoology there must be natural history, classification precedes analysis. The foundations of our knowledge and of our psyche lie in lists, taxonomies, mnemonics, stories and poetic devices, thus category is the basis of culture. Lists fascinate, they draw us in, they seduce us into acceptance of ways of ordering the world. From the genealogical lists of the bible – who begat whom – indeed, from the very earliest written documents – inventories and accounting lists – through the statistical lists and censuses of the Roman empire, the taxation records of mediaeval kings and queens, the new knowledge based on the lists of Linnaeus and Mendeleyev, down to the double helix and beyond, they structure our being and define what is possible, what can exist.

Literature loves lists. At the birth of the novel we find Defoe carefully enumerating the contents of Crusoe’s wrecked ship, salvaged to the island. The archetype of the new individual of capitalist culture begins his allegory by making a list. At the other end of modernity – the high modernism of T S Eliot counts them all out:

O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,
The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant,
The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters,
The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and rulers,
Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees,
Industrial lords and petty contractors, …

(from East Coker)

Later still in the twentieth century, Jorge Luis Borges plays with the concept of category, dividing animals into:

1. those that belong to the Emperor,
2. embalmed ones,
3. those that are trained,
4. suckling pigs,
5. mermaids,
6. fabulous ones,
7. stray dogs,
8. those included in the present classification,
9. those that tremble as if they were mad,
10. innumerable ones,
11. those drawn with a very fine camelhair brush,
12. others,
13. those that have just broken a flower vase,
14. those that from a long way off look like flies.

(from The Analytical Language of John Wilkins)

While lists and classifications may thus be either devices of coercion and power or objects of amazement and delight, while they can function as shackles or as ornaments, it is, it seems to me, a particularly English quality of Yeadon’s art to bring together the serious and the frivolous aspects of category to create something disturbing and subversive. English culture is the home of the anorak, the obsessive, the hobbyist, of train spotters, cricket statisticians and record collectors (as portrayed in Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity). All these activities work only through a kind of suspension of disbelief. You have to take them straight-faced and serious. Once you admit humour, they become merely ridiculous.

But England is also the home of hypocrisy. When Macaulay remarked that nothing was so ridiculous as the British public in one of its “periodic fits of morality”, he could have been describing the activities, two hundred years later, of Mary Whitehouse invoking an obsolete statute to imprison a writer for sexual thoughts; seeking to deny the existence of an unacceptable sexuality through the erasure of its voice.

In the end it may be not the poets, as Shelley believed, but the comics who are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind. Humour is always subversive. Oppressors can never understand the jokes that undercut their authority. Mary Whitehouse, like Margaret Thatcher, was famously impervious to laughter, but laughter has been aligned with rebellion and resistance at least from the beginnings of the modern age. The art works above all others that ushered in the age of enlightenment – Beaumarchais’ Barber of Seville and Marriage of Figaro were revolutionary precisely because they dared to make fun of the nobility and to oppose to the worthless pomposity of the aristocracy, the wit, intelligence and humour of an emerging democratic class. The fear of laughter by authoritarians is traced through a web of political and sexual intersections in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose.

Sexual repression, in England or elsewhere, is profoundly linked to political power. That is part of the source of Beaumarchais’ significance, since both plays revolve around illicit sexual liaisons which transgress class boundaries. As sexual repression is aligned with fascism, so sexual and political liberation are allied in the modernist project. Thus the anarchist Gustave Courbet painted the shockingly explicit Origin of the World. Thus a high court judge worried that Lady Chatterley’s Lover might fall into the hands of wives or servants. Most recently in popular literature (Joanne Harris) and film (Lasse Hallstrom), a promiscuous, atheist single mother overthrows fascist patriarchal power through the revolutionary consciousness of sexual bliss, symbolised as Chocolat..

In the 1960s, while John Yeadon was beginning his career, a profound shift in sexual sensibility began within European and North American culture. Sexual and political revolution fused together in a unique moment of youthful celebration and feast of misrule. Student riots began as demands for the sexual desegregation of university accommodation and came to the point of threatening state power on both sides of the Atlantic. The partial failure and setbacks of that revolution have to be judged in the light of its achievements, most importantly of all in gender and sexual politics – the rights of women, the end of prohibitions on contraception and divorce, the legalisation of male homosexuality.

The completion of that liberatory project is perhaps the last remaining item on the agenda of the modern. The weapons in the hands of the revolutionaries are irreverence, wit and the infinite subversiveness of pleasure. John Yeadon’s humorous taxonomies of musico-phallic objects are located centrally in that continuing revolution.

Will Barton, August 2002.