'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 ...