'Hanging About’: The Teenage Moment of the 1970s/80s and its representation in British Art from the 1990s. With reference to artists: Paul Housley George Shaw Paul Rooney

Britain in the late 1990s witnessed a group of male, same generation artists begin to produce work that focussed on teenage culture as they experienced it in the 1970s and 80s in the West Midlands and North West of England. For a period, into the mid 2000s, this became a significant part of their individually diverse practice realised from their position as adult men, although they have never been identified as a coherent group. It is the nature of that realisation, its implications in terms of changing constructions of masculinity, and its articulation in visual practice that this research seeks to delineate. The research suggests that the prevalence of this subject matter for these artists at this time was primarily intuitive and subliminal, providing a kind of shop window behind which aspects of masculinity and identity were being played out.

Employing the optic of three key artists’ articulation of this teenage ‘moment’ the research will examine the impact of a nexus of social, political and economic factors on male identity and class construction, most directly the loss of manufacturing industry, a masculinity defining and class informing form of labour, and its impact on gender construction and gender relations in the late 1970s/80s. This thesis will argue that this loss, or shift in male identity, is realised, and negotiated, in the work of artists Paul Housley, George Shaw and Paul Rooney from the 1990s, as they ‘hang about’ in their teenage ‘moment’ of the 1970s and 80s. The research posits that this is evident in their work not only through period references to the popular culture of the time but more directly through the retrospective framing and filtering of this of this moment via the reception, consumption and memory of the periods pop music, film and television. Organised as case studies the research pursues an analysis of each artist’s work seeking to identify, through the treatment of this subject matter, a process of rehabilitating the past to the present that begins to make evident the nature of what can be identified as lost for male identity through this labour transition.

A constant thread in the thesis is therefore the dynamic of return, frequently explored in the research through the states of oscillation and stasis, and is employed as a methodology to interrogate the temporal inflection of memory and nostalgia that haunts the core of the research as it engages with the construction and narrating of the self. The centrality of temporality within the research is further indicated through the use of the term ‘moment’ to open up discussion about what informs this teenage experience and moving it beyond confinement to a predetermined set of ‘historical circumstances.’ Equally the notion of ‘hanging about’ is employed to indicate an inability to leave that ‘moment’ as the full impact of labour changes starts to be felt in the 1990s as these changes reach full critical impact.

The research posits that this ‘hanging about’ plays a significant role in shaping a strain of British visual practice over this period as well as providing an important contribution to a continuing understanding of 18 male, and class identity, in the ‘moment’ of the 1970s/80s and in its legacy for contemporary culture as it reforms under late capitalism and within the cultural discourses of Post-modernism

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