From Commodification to Communal Art: “Above Sex… Above Politics”

Abstract

The subject of art, often in a self-referential mood, is raised by a considerable collection of modern plays including Tom Stoppard’s Artist Descending a Staircase, Indian Ink, Arcadia, The Invention of Love, Arnold Wesker’s Their Very Own and Golden City, Terry Eagleton’s Saint Oscar or David Storey’s poetic Life Class. These and other art-oriented plays comprise a broad spectrum of approaches to the justification of artistic activity where the auto/biographical appears to be the most obvious. The aim of the present paper is to explore the manner in which two plays, David Storey’s Life Class (1974) and—more importantly—Lee Hall’s The Pitman Painters (Faber and Faber, London, 2008), hardly experimental, focus “im Zeichen der Kunst” on the way art is capable of reaching beyond the confines of gender, politics and economic commodification governing the practice of art appreciation, examination, observation and even contemplation in search for meaning. The process of disrupting prevalent systems of evaluation, shown in both plays, leads via expressionistic and surrealist concepts of art as, among others, involuntary activity, towards a re-integration of art in Hall’s insistence on communal participation and in Storey’s “invisible event” and performance. Both, temporally remote, plays can be classified as committed or “engaged.”

There is another story, a commoner one, according to which Remus, by way of jeering at his brother, jumped over the half-built walls of the new settlement whereupon Romulus killed him in a fit of rage, adding the threat, ‘So perish whoever else shall overleap my battlements’. (Livy, I,6).