“George Shaw Woz ‘Ere”

.. review by John Yeadon for the Morning Star, Friday 16th December 2011.

 

As Coventry Council refurbish the roads and paving, tarting up the
city centre prior to the Olympics, the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum
in Coventry celebrates images of the city of  gloom and decay. Turner
Prize nominee George Shaw’s exhibition, I Woz Ere, opened in his home
town with a sense of local pride and popular celebration. The irony of
the occasion might have escaped some city fathers but many Coventrians
demonstrate genuine affection for an accessible art in which they
recognized themselves and the world they live in. In Shaw’s case this
accessibility is something of a Trojan Horse. This is the ‘world
upside down’ where insult becomes praise and abuse turns into
benediction.

George Shaw has for 15 years doggedly painted Tile Hill housing estate
on which he grew up and his mother still lives. He records the lowly
and mundane of this suburban hinterland as it disappears and changes
with the dedication of a hobbyist using Humbrol Airfix enamel paint,
as Laurence Sillars (curator at the Baltic, Gateshead) points out,
Humbrol ‘harks back to a solitary adolescent pastime – the creation of
a world of one’s own’. These ‘non fine art’ materials are Shaw’s witty
imperceptible nod to conceptualism and process.

As with Lowry the specific locality is probably the least interesting
thing, these neglected empty spaces of graffitied shop fronts, flats,
regimented houses, bus shelters, derelict garages, fences, gates, this
melancholic unloved wasteland and abandoned woodlands, this feral
landscape is all too familiar, no matter where we come from. As with
Edward Hopper, the American painter, the theme is the aftermath,
emptiness, the void.

Unlike Hopper, however, these are not paintings of the urban
landscape, that is, they are not of the inner city, nor the teenage
angst of Morrisey’s suburbia or the suburbia of Larkin, though these
are important literary sources. These are paintings of a working class
estate and this has no name. Shaw gives this unregarded, anonymous
landscape identity. Shaw has invented a genre, Shawland has been
coined. For me they are, in part, the decline of a post war optimism.
An optimism that saw the development of the ‘New Town’ and estate
based on Ebenezer Howard’s egalitarian ideas of the garden suburb, a
blend of city and nature. Shaw talks about the building of Tile Hill
estate, the regard for nature and the environment, how trees were left
and houses built around them. In Shaw’s dystopia we see the trashing
of this optimism, he sees this landscape as ill. In this sense Shaw’s
paintings are the antithesis of William Ratcliffe’s ‘Hampstead Garden
Suburb from Willifield way” of 1914, which celebrates the garden
suburb. Shaw’s works inevitably take on a particular resonance in
Coventry, with Coventry’s scars, the Blitz, then the Post War
reconstruction and the loss of manufacturing in the 80s, Shaw’s Father
worked at British Leyland.

In Shawland there is never anybody about, like the aftermath of the
neutron bomb, which was supposed to kill people whilst preserving the
buildings, but Shaw’s vision is not depopulated, just deserted, they
are probably at home watching the tele, they could be peeping out at
us from those darkened windows. We see a light on in the social club,
but the towels are still up and the bar has not opened yet.
“To me, they are teeming with human presences”, he says. “The people I
grew up with, family, passers-by, they are all in there somewhere,
embedded in the paintings.”

English landscape painting has often been about meteorology, the
favourite English topic of the weather. Constable studied clouds and
knew Luke Howard’s essay on Modifacations of Clouds, of 1803, where
Howard categorized clouds like species of plants and animals. In
Shaw’s case the weather is banally indeterminate but the time of day
is important and it is often twilight, neither day nor night, neither
one thing or the other. As with Shaw’s use of Paynes Grey, neither
light nor dark, twilight is an in-between state. For Leonardo twilight
was the ideal light for painting, trees become silhouetted against the
sky and with Shaw’s limited palette, just 7 Humbrol paints, close
tones become difficult to differentiate, eerie and illusive, you have
to look intently, strain to try and see what you are looking at.

The paintings have been called ‘photo realist’, they are not, but they
are Realist. Many artists have worked with phopography, from Degas to
Hockney, from Sickert to Francis Bacon non of these are photo realist.
Photo realism is impersonal, its subject is the photograph and it has
a closer affinity to various forms of abstract painting than it does
with figurative art or the social context. Shaw’s work is personal,
its subject is not the photograph but the landscape itself. He sees
the photograph or ‘snap shot’ as just a starting point. Photography
refers to a moment, a past moment, the photograph is always about
history, a memory of the thing gone. Painting however, is about the
present and though a painting can take several months to paint, with a
lot of looking, as opposed to the split second of the camera, the
painting can look as if it was painted yesterday even if it is
hundreds of years old.

Duchamp said that artists will be people who point, but these
paintings are more than sophisticated pointing. These places are
mysterious enigmatic and presented as sites of memory, of significant
events, some autobiographical some fictional and all unstated,
possibly places of ones first sexual encounter, adolescent smoking,
drinking with possible danger lurking somewhere beyond, a menace,
something remains hidden or something more horrendous, like 25
Cromwell Street or 10 Rimmington place. It seems that Shaw has more to
say, but he does not show it. As Jung stated when referring to
archetypes, ” images pregnant with meaning”.

Paradoxically these landscapes appear to be a parody on the
picturesque, the picturesque was an invention of the British who where
the first ‘tourists’. The ruins, follies or a crumbling classical and
historic building these 18th century landscapes contained seems close
to Shaw’s contemporary vision. Shaw is not the first to look at ruins,
looking at ruins is a aesthetic and Romantic pastime’

This work is both pop-culture and in the British Neo-Romantic
tradition bringing together the popular culture and so-called high art
forms, he is at ease when talking about Tony Hancock or the Likely
Lads on the human condition as he is with Joyce or Hardy, his literary
sources seems vast.

George Shaw had studied fine art video and performance at Sheffield,
worked as a hospital video technician and taught at a Primary School
before he went to the Royal College of Art. He continued his anarchic
performances at the College. Clearly, at the College, he became
disillusioned with the vagaries of contemporary practice and the
fashion driven London scene, he returned home possibly in search of
something more straight forward, less conceptual, more down to earth.
A real idea, removed from what he saw as a kind of art school idea,
something authentic.  He took hundreds of photographs, ‘snap shots’ of
Tile Hill, beginning to trace the psycho-geography of his youth. 15
years on he describes the paintings of Tile Hill as one big painting,
a mental map like the Mappa Mundi and possibly here we have a glimpse
of George Shaw the performance artist. Shaw has demonstrated that
there is a lot more that can be done in the traditional canon, yet
these iconic works are a residue of a much broader practice.

The exhibition in Coventry also includes painting and drawings he did
in his teen years, prior to art school when he turned his bedroom into
a studio. Here we see a talented youth exited by art, enthusiastic,
innocent and unsullied. This is the lost time that his later paintings
try to trace or grasp. Shaw feels that his teenage passion was diluted
along the way, especially at art school. Shaw is on a solitary
journey, between autobiography and fiction, the places still exists
but the paintings of these places are of a memory. His work is a
construction of those places that were familiar to him in his
childhood and adolescence, “places in which I found myself alone and
thoughtful”.

As T S Eliot says in Little Gidding,
“the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and
know the place for the first time“.

We know now that George Shaw did not win the Turner prize but he was
the peoples choice, if I was to be beamed down to the Baltic in
Gateshead, from looking at the Turner Prize nominees would I know that
this country, the world, was going through the most significant
economic and human crisis for over 70 years? Only with the work of
George Shaw might we get an inkling that something was up. Shaw tells
the melancholic truth, there seems to be a lot of escapism about these
days. Beaming down is a good test and I do it now with all
exhibitions, try it.

Here is John’s piece as it appeared in the Morning Star 0n 16.12.2011:

http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/news/content/view/full/113220

George Shaw’s exhibition, I Woz Ere, at the Herbert Art Gallery and
Museum Coventry is open until 11th March 2012.  John Yeadon has known
George Shaw since Shaw was 15 and was a tutor when Shaw studied at
Coventry University, Coventry Polytechnic, as was, in 1985. The Last
Tutorial: George Shaw in Conversation with John Yeadon will take place
at the Herbert Art Gallery Coventry, 7 p.m., 9th February 2012. Free
admission.