1. Body Politics
Images of masculinity, manual labour and the performing body from 18th century to the present

2. BODY POLITICS
A commentary on some of the images of manual labour shown here can be found on this website in the text ‘Gospel of Work’. There are also notes to some images

3. Hobbes and the Body Politic

5. Architecting the body

6. Corbusier : Modulor

7. The Classical Olympic Ideal

8. Body Typology

9. Athletic Bodies

10. Popular anti-semitic stereotypes: An Edwardian postcard

11. Hands On

12. Internal Orientalism

18. Working with earth, air, fire and water
ELEMENTAL LABOUR
Working with earth, air, fire and water

19. The Nain Brothers : The Blacksmith and his forge (1650)

20. A Von Metzel : The Steelworks (1880)
With the advent of industrialism the forge moves into the factory, but it retains its central role in the mis en scene of manual labour, the pivotal point around which all the foundry workers congregate as in this painting .

21. John Ferguson Weir : Forging the Shaft (1887)
This painting again dramatises the spectacle of labour harnessing energy into a productive force. It is very deliberately composed as an animated tableau for this purpose.This is a narrative painting in which the ‘actants’ are the fire

22. Ferdindand-Joseph Gueldry The Rolling Mill (1901)
The naked male torso becomes a feature in representations of manual labour from
the mid 1850’s onwards - these are bodies stripped of the ordinary decencies , subject to all manner of indignities but redeemed by their heroic poses and ‘Promethean’ musculature.

23. Peter Kroyer The Impoverished Worker (1861)
Sweated labour was not often portrayed as such, but the effect of labour on the body was. . Here the emaciated body of the worker (and also his two young apprentices) caused a stir, but critics objected most to the drop of sweat on the end of the smith’s nose. The shaft of light from the window , out of which can be seen an idyllic rural scene, , offers not so much a ray of hope, but a chiaroscuro effect to highlight the wretchedness of these working conditions

24. Washing off

25. George Hicks The sinews of old England (1857)
An idealised picture of the navvy as a yeoman in overalls; his ‘yeowoman’ bids him farewell in front of their cottage while their son waits patiently , spade in hand, to grow up and follow in his fathers footsteps. The day labourer is here turned into an approximation of the homespun artisan .
labourers and agricultural workers in general were the preferred subject for depictions of elemental manual labour from the time of Constable and Turner right through to WW2. This is not only because they constituted a large, though ever decreasing, proportion of the workforce, but because they fitted organically into the mis en scene of English landscape painting in both its picturesque and sublime modes. The fact that, unlike France, England lacked a peasantry, as a result of the enclosure movement and the ‘industrial revolution in agriculture’, did not stop landscape painters from reinventing farm hands as ‘yeomen of England’. The notion of the dignity of labour, so central to the Victorian gospel of work was largely derived from this idealised portrayal . The back breaking nature of farm work is rarely if ever shown.

26. Paul Nash The Thresher
This woodcut , which shows the influence of Eric Ravilious, gives centre stage to the mechanical thresher – which already looks like a piece of industrial archaeology. The writhing forms on the left , and the treatment of the hay , also ow something to Samuel Palmer, and cast a somewhat threatening aspect over this otherwise idyllic scene of man, nature and machine at common purpose with one another.

27. Ford Maddox Brown Work
The picture shows two navvies ‘in full pride of manly health and beauty’ as one Victorian commentator put it, laying a water pipe in Heath Street Hampstead. The navvies are definitely the stars of the show in this most famous of all paintings depicting the Victorian Gospel of Work. Tim Barringer has written in depth and detail about this painting , pointing out the way in which both the representatives of the residuum, with their misshapen bodies and the bourgeois bystanders, are portrayed as ‘idle hands’; as such they are literally upstaged and put in the shadow by the brilliantly lit performance of heroic masculinity and manual labour at the centre of the composition. It is perhaps worth remembering that at the time the painting was done many of London’s middle class streets were being improved with the introduction of new sewage, and transport systems. For the first time middle class society came face to face with considerable numbers of manual workers, on their doorstep , digging up the road !

28. Leon Kossoff Building Site (1956)
This makes an interesting contrast to Maddox Brown’s Work. The visual rhetoric associated with the Victorian gospel of work has been replaced by a meticulous annotation of its physical ‘equipement’ . But does this picture still tell a story?

29. William Bell :Iron and Steel (1861)
forging an alliance between two key groups of workers in heavy industry , but within a pre-industrial setting – celebrating manual labour as God’s work.

30. Catalogue of World Exhibition 1851
A top down view : labourers with the tools of their various trades grouped subserviently at the base of the plinth on top of which an array of higher powers are displayed .

31. Trade Union banner
This banner of the Amalgamated Engineering Union , shows the gospel of work from the standpoint of the labour movement and reverses the hierarchy shown in the previous slide. The motto reads ‘Be United and Industrious’ and the banner shows two blacksmiths rampant with halo lording it over an inventor and civil engineer.

32. Gustave Caillebotte The Floor Scrapers
Caillebotte had no formal art training but was influenced both by Courbet’s realism and by contemporary photography. He had a penchant for ‘unusual’ subjects and perspectives.These ‘floor scrapers’ are shown stripped to the waste , the sure sign of the ‘navvy’ who undertook the more menial tasks associated with woodworking , as part of their skivvy role. The association of unskilled , and especially boy labour with the despised features of womens’ work- in this case scrubbing floors- is here made very clear. I have discussed this aspect of male apprenticeship , in relation to the oedipal dynamics of its rituals of initiation, elsewhere.

33. W Wyllie : Toil, grime, glitter and wealth on a flowing tide

34. C.R.Nevinson Making the Engine (1917)
This series of paintings were done as part of Nevinson’s commission as a war artist. They are the first attempt to capture the industrial work process in an aesthetic idiom that belonged wholly to the ‘machine age’- namely cubism. Nevinson is perhaps best known today for his painting ‘The Machine Gunner’ which dramatises the mechanisation of modern warfare. These pictures of the home front use cubist principles of composition to depict man and machine as folded into the same dynamic visual field.

35. Glasgow shipyards
As a war artist Spencer spent WW2 living and working amongst shipyard workers in Glasgow. In these murals he gives a lyrical account of the complex division of labour to be found in the shipyard, showing in great graphic detail the different kinds of work done by riveters, welders, caulkers and so on. Yet in moving from rural Cookham to industrial Clydeside, he has somehow managed to imbue these figures with the same kind of robust spiritual qualities that he saw in the Berkshire villagers. These too are yeomen in overalls although the bodies are curiously ‘unisex’.

36. Stanley Spencer
As a war artist Spencer spent WW2 living and working amongst shipyard workers in Glasgow. In these murals he gives a lyrical account of the complex division of labour to be found in the shipyard, showing in great graphic detail the different kinds of work done by riveters, welders, caulkers and so on. Yet in moving from rural Cookham to industrial Clydeside, he has somehow managed to imbue these figures with the same kind of robust spiritual qualities that he saw in the Berkshire villagers. These too are yeomen in overalls although the bodies are curiously ‘unisex’. These paintings make an interesting comparison with the heavily masculinist renditions in the Rockefeller murals and also of course, stylistically, with Nevinson’s work.

37. Dock workers

39. The tricks of the trade
An apprentice lumper being shown how to use special shoulder pads to balance planks of wood.

40. Jean Gaumy Men at sea
Gaumy worked for several years on deep sea trawlers making this study. The title is of course double edged. By focussing on the fragility of labour confronted with the immense power of the sea , as well as the strength of the intimate human bonds which are forged in the face of it, he explores the other side of the heroic image of the trawlerman. The use of strip images is also intended to convey the intimate consequentiality of work on deck, where the timing of actions involves making crucial judgements about the ship’s behaviour under different sea conditions.

43. Manuel Salgado Archaeology of Manual Labour
Salgado’s work creates sculptural forms out of the labouring body and its environment. His work has been criticised for its ‘monumentalism’ but this is a conscious aesthetic decision – the need to create a permanent memorial to fast vanishing but still elementally heroic forms of masculinity and manual labour.

44. Channel Tunnelers

47. Skilled Trades: The Winch Operator
The winch operator – like the crane operator – is a sovereign power in this ‘bailiwick’ of workers control

48. Skilled Trades: the Welder
Welding combines elemental and artisanal labour

49. Skilled Trades: The Foundreyman

50. The Modern Artisan
The figure of the blacksmith retained its sentimental appeal as an image of elemental labour – either as a artisan heroically continuing the craft tradition – or as somewhat more demonic figure – long after it had been officially relegated to the Museum of Labour History,

51. Nice work if you can get it
This iconic photograph of scaffolders on the Rockefeller Centre building taking a lunch break and a nap perched nonchalantly on a girder hundreds of feet up in the air looking over Manhattan, came to adorn more than a million homes in the USA. Capitalism here offers the American Worker a place in the American Dream , a commanding prospect on the world which is also an all too perilous purchase on prosperity.

52. Leger: The Worker Acrobat
An alternative vision of elemental labour has focussed on workers who defy gravity and work on the construction of skyscrapers and other monumental buildings. Leger’s Builders(1924 ) are nothing if not acrobats, and they seem to be making light work of it.

53. Leger : Construction Workers

54. Oil Rig Workers 2007

56. MUMMERS,MINERS AND SWEEPS
Notes on English Blackface

58. The Sweep as ‘mignon’

60. The Sweeps Festival or Jack O’Green

61. Mummers 1936

62. Mummers carry the Olympic Torch 2012

63. Order in Variety
American minstrel troupes toured Britain in the late Vicgtorian period and largely replaced home grown traditions of ‘blackface’ in the popular imagination of difference .

64. Black and white minstrel show 1950

65. The Black Other

66. Edwardian seaside postcard

67. Blackface in modern protests

68. At the Coalface 1930’s

70. Joseph Herman Pictures from a Welsh pit village
These studies in tough and tender masculinities within the mining community of South Wales were done by a Polish artist, whose own family were miners, and who lived for many years in a pit village. Unlike most of the other material, these pictures emerge from deep and close observation , carried out over a long term by someone who was socially integrated into the community of labour he is representing. And it shows. The bodies of the miners are here depicted as at once immensely solid and intensely vulnerable .The influence of Kathe Kollwicz can also be discerned in some of compositions, especially in the domestic scenes.

75. In the Museum of Labour History

76. Time and Motion Studies
From the human dynamo to the post industrial worker

77. Edgar Marey

78. Eadward Muybridge:

79. Idris Khan Rising Series 2005 (after Muybrige)

80. Time and Motion Study

81. Giacomo Balla Beyond Horse Power

82. Boccioni The Cyclist

83. Goncharova The Cyclist

84. The Bio-energetic equation

85. Ergonomic Diagram

86. Measuring productivity : Optics and Metrics combined

88. According to Elaine Scarry repetition work and the Fordist production line resisted representation by photographers and painters alike, because it lacked heroic postures , and also because the frozen nature of the image could capture single moments of the labour process but not their reiteration.

91. Post Fordist Assembly

94. Imagining the human robot 1870- 2000
Automata
Imagining the human robot

97. Professor Arcadius

98. Dr Frankenstein with ‘Rastus’

99. Doppelganger

100. Dynamo Joe London 1948

101. Wish You Were Here

102. Bart Simpson

103. Hoeydonck : Mister Machine Man

104. Face the music and dance
Youth culture and extreme sport

109. Stairway to Heaven

110. Double Act

113. Physical Culture and the dream of the collective body
Fit for Purpose ?
Physical Culture and the dream of the collective body

116. Gymnastic Drill 1950

117. Busby Berkeley Mandala

118. Multiple Selves

119. Body Beautiful Moves

120. Synchronised kitsch

121. Kitsch Incorporated

122. The Active Spectator : Mexican Wave

123. Olympic Communitas 2012

124. The Embodied Spectacle: North Korean style

125. Leviathan Revisited

126. Choreographing Politics: The Isle of Wonders

127. Sport as a regime of envisagement

128. The crowd in flight

129. The Mosh Pit : Communitas or Confusion?

130. The Eye in the Crowd

131. Masculinity and Manual Labour in the post industrial world
Can We Fix it ? No, we can’t!
Masculinity and Manual Labour in the post industrial world

132. Ken Currie Hands

133. Ken Currie Phantom Body 1

134. Phantom Body 2

135. Peter Howson The Patriots
Peter Howson Patriots 1991
Tough masculinities released from the disciplines of manual labour,may turn nasty, as the ‘race apart’ struggles against its redundancy by re-asserting its as a backbone of ‘the nation we once were’ . The use of pit bull terriers here draws immediately on popular iconography : in the 1990’s pit bulls were associated with savage unprovoked attacks on children, and a law was introduced to muzzle them. Those who kept them as pets, were assumed to share their anti-social disposition, and became folk devils in a number of media campaigns. Skinheads were supposed to be especially keen on pit bulls, and by no coincidence the BNP youth paper was named Bulldog In titling the painting Peter Howson’s picture evokes this association, but viewed in a broader context it can also be read as a comment on a longer story about the mining communities of Lanarkshire , where bull terriers were not only the preferred pets of pitmen , but used, illegally in dog fighting matches. The dogs , like their owners, are here shown as off the leish, bounding forward in a common snarl against an invisible enemy. The final muzzling of the miners by the pit closures under Mrs Thatcher, the last ditch battles that ensued, and the pain and anger experienced by these communities are all part of the back story of this painting. In fact this could be described as a narrative painting without a narrative.

136. Danger ! Beefcake at work

137. The Body Builder

138. Rough Trade

139. Brian Griffin The Carpenter

140. Brian Griffin Liam , St Pancras station