Wising up to the Marks

Getting out of the kitchen to rattle those pots and pans Alex Michon interviews artist Josephine Wood to discuss working class beauty, inequality, punk armchairs, and Hilda Ogden’s curlers

'Hungry darkness of living
Who will thirst in the pit? (hooked in metropolis)'

Ghetto Defendant, The Clash 

William S Burroughs credits Jack Kerouac as having suggested the title Naked Lunch for his cult novel published in 1959. Burroughs himself explained the meaning as ‘the frozen moment when everyone sees what is on the end of every fork.’ The poet, Ann Waldman, sees the phrase as offering a stark contrast to the prevailing vision of reality during the post war Eisenhower years: ‘It's not the woman with her Kelvinator refrigerator, opening the door to show you how crisp the lettuce stays,’ says Waldman ‘It's the 'naked lunch' ... where you see reality clearly, you see the lettuce decomposing’. 

Known for his heroin addiction, it is maybe not the decomposing lettuce, which Burroughs is warning against ingesting. ‘Junk’ he says ‘is the ideal product . . . the ultimate merchandise. No sales talk necessary. The client will crawl through a sewer and beg to buy’.

Whatever the meaning, the phrase has come to be known as symbolising that moment when the scales fall off and you see the world as it really is and realise that it is not all that pretty. Burroughs told an interviewer in 1970 ‘I do definitely mean what I say to be taken literally, yes, to make people aware of the true criminality of our times, to wise up to the marks.’ 

 At the End of Every Fork is one of the first paintings Josephine Wood shows me when I go to visit her in her Stratford studio for the first time. 

‘I was reading Burroughs at the time and I have done a whole series of paintings with that title’ she explains. 

Josephine Wood, At the End of Every Fork, 2018, acrylic & oil on canvas, 175x170cm 

This large painting with its explosive libidinal energy reminds me of those wax crayon drawings I used to love doing as a kid, where you put down a series of colours, cover it all with black and then scrape through to make images, usually of fireworks. But as with all of Wood’s paintings you are forced to look deeper beyond the first encounter. Reinforced by her insightful title and on re-looking I see a load of spectacles, some with, some without eyes leading back to the Burroughs’ quote of looking at something as if for the first time. The painting suggests a mini cosmos/blackboard jungle of sure-fire mark making, shouting out its secretly subversive language of signs. 

I am curious to learn more about the painter’s process and ask Wood about how she begins to make work.

JW: ‘Well I always start off with a drawing on paper, maybe just a doodle I might have an idea of what I want to do, then I sort of let things happen, I trust in the process, and let whatever comes to the surface, however there is a lot of editing, and re-painting of the final image.’  

AM: Do you have an internal dialogue while you are painting? 

JW: ‘Well yes but when I start I don’t really want to create a painting as such because there is all that weight of  expectation so I allow it to become very instinctive and automatic, it becomes like a physical thing and you are just responding to the marks you make and the images stored in your memory so that it becomes instinctive and if I allow myself to make a ‘crap’ painting the results are more satisfying. I think it is very important as a painter to have a subject even if you don’t always paint the subject but it should be there underpinning the work. A subject can be a collection of themes. My themes tend to be domesticity, gender and class.’ 

AM: So how does that subject reveal itself through the paint and the marks or does the subject impose itself on the paint and marks? 

JW: ‘I think it’s simultaneous when the application and the subject meet and collide and it becomes very automatic – so that I am painting subject without consciously painting it.  It sounds very cheesy but it’s like the paint is able to access the deeper recesses of your mind and this library of images that you have in your head crystallises and comes to the surface of the canvas. Also I listen to really loud music when I am working which helps to switch off from self-criticism and my own idealism. It helps not to actively pursue a subject whilst painting and just let whatever happens, the subject will be there in some form. Sometimes it feels your on a tightrope, the painting gets to a stage where one false move could wreck the whole thing, at this point you have to be focussed and decisive’ 

Kitchen Confidential 

Wood often uses domestic and utilitarian objects in her paintings, notwithstanding the forks; toilets, pots and pans and other household objects make regular appearances in her work. Not included as some kind of nicey-nicey bourgeois accoutrements, they represent a far more feminist/socio-political refusenik position. Her work includes domestic scenarios gone awry, utility objects, cheap food and body parts merging and clashing in eroticised compositions within the abstracted field.

Josephine Wood, Dirty Digits, 2018, acrylic & oil on canvas, 175x180cm

JW: ‘I like fingers, I like the way digits can be penises or sausages or how sausages can be penises – it’s funny in a Carry-on adolescent sort of way’ 

The Beauty of Working Class Culture

A wide-ranging survey published in April 2018, entitled Panic! Social Class, Taste and Inequalities in the Creative Industries released by Create London and Arts Emergency found that: The percentage of people with working-class origins working in music, performing and visual arts was only 18.2%. It also noted that ‘Aside from crafts, no creative occupation comes close to having a third of its workforce from working-class origins, which is the average for the population as a whole.’

For Wood her working classness is inescapable, brought up on a council estate in East London and subsequently moving to another estate in north London which she describes as ‘a huge monstrosity like a really crappy Thamesmead’. 

AM: So do you consider yourself to be a working class artist?

JW: ‘Well yes I consider myself an artist from a working class background, there are not many of us are there?  but I don’t you know, wear it as a badge, for me it is just inescapable. There is a richness, a beauty in working class culture, the use of language and dialect which is hugely creative, exciting and radical and  is completely overlooked within the art world. Working class culture is usually pigeon holed, fetishised or perceived as too crass as a subject for art, For me it is really important, it is part of my psyche and my artistic sensibility.  In relation to this I am also responding to the horror of the situation we find ourselves in at the moment so a painting like ‘Trolley Wally’ and another series of paintings I made from 2017 entitled ‘Kill All Hippies’ which include aggressive skinhead yob type figures trampling on heads etc comes from the situation we are in now where people from really hard up communities are angry and reactionary, being seduced by the far right, due to being abandoned by mainstream politics and continually shat on from a great height…..I wish they would target that anger onto the real oppressors’ 

Josephine Wood, Trolley Wally, 2019, acrylic on canvas, 120x150cm

Wood says that she has 'always been interested in the domestic as a subject for painting; the complex relations between people and their environment, the power struggles and family dynamics ... I like the idea of the mundane becoming monumentally ridiculous'. 

Josephine Wood, Granny Takes a Trip, 2018, acrylic & oil on canvas, 180x185cm

Granny Takes a Trip is a painting I respond to immediately aesthetically I am drawn to what I call its historicity as it reminds me of a Picasso mixed with a kind of 70s wallpaper vibe. So it makes me laugh when Wood eventually explains that the white motifs are toilets and the colourful clusters of what I thought were hands were actually inspired by Hilda Ogden’s curlers! 

Throughout the ongoing preoccupations with class, social disintegration and counter-culture runs a rich vein of humour within Wood’s work. A kind of cheeky carry-on-ness which underpins and diffuses any kind of hoity-toity pretentiousness which can often be detected in artists dealing with serious socio-political issues.

Two paintings ostensibly called Punk Armchairs are particularly interesting in understanding not only how Wood’s collective store of images are used in the genesis of a painting but also go some way to explaining how a particular TV play was instrumental in leading  the way towards her becoming an artist in the first place. 

JW: ‘When I was younger, like 14 or something, I watched this Harold Pinter play (adapted as a film) on TV called The Homecoming and I was really engrossed in it and I did not know why, I had not seen anything like it before. The aggression and tension in Pinter’s writing was so compelling for me, where people are at the mercy of each other, the implication of threat. Pinter had great insight into the power struggles between people and how this plays out in the context of class, being a Hackney boy himself  his knowledge was subjective. It was a light bulb moment for me, an exposure to the avant-garde and I become interested in the arts. I bought a copy of Plays 3 which has a painting of an armchair on the cover that has this menacing presence, it is wedged in my memory and armchairs prop up again and again in my paintings.’ 

Josephine Wood, Punk Armchair (working title), 2019, acrylic & oil on canvas, 150x100cm

              

On writing at the end of May 2019, the European elections have resulted in Nigel Farage’s Brexit party securing their biggest gains outstripping both the labour and conservatives. The far right is gaining footholds all over Europe with Marie Le Penn’s party securing a huge majority in France. Back home  inequality not only of artistic opportunity but real food bank, universal credit poverty continues to increase and cause real hardships. It is not easy to be an artist in such times, Josephine Wood is one artist who is not afraid of ‘wising up to the facts’ to uncover the ‘true criminality of our times’ and who moreover is doing it with intelligence, nuance and most of all with a sense of humour.

Alex Michon 

May 2019 

Josephine Wood’s work can be seen in The Ruth Borchard Self Portrait Prize2019 at Piano Nobile Gallery, London, until 30 August. She is also in the group show If I was a Rich Girl curated by Clare Kenny at Kunstraum Riehen, Basel, until 30 June 2019.