This one day symposium will explore the contributions to the
twentieth-century British avant-garde by artists and writers of
working-class heritage.

The avant-garde is often conceived to be the domain of the elite – those
with the financial backing, education, and networks to succeed in this
competitive arena. Indeed, studies such as John Carey’s divisive text,
Intellectuals and the Masses, have understood the high intellectualism of
the twentieth-century avant-garde to have developed in response to the
improved education of the mass populace: a means to retain the divide
between the masses and the elite. This symposium explores artists and
writers who are outliers to this rule: the working-class figures who
partook of the elite world of the avant-garde.

8.30-9: Registration

9-9.10: Welcome

9.10-10.30: Canonical Modernists

- Courtney Pina Miller (Brandeis University), ‘Working Class
Intelligentsia: Orwellian Class Paradox in D.H. Lawrence’s Lady
Chatterly’s Lover ’

- Robert James Sutton (Coventry University), ‘Henry Moore:
Neo-Working-Classicist’

- Bernard Vere (Sotheby’s Institute of Art, London), ‘“It’s Up to
US”: James Fitton and the Alpha Group’

10.30-12.10: Modernist Fringes

- Benjamin Kohlmann (University of Freiburg), ‘Proletarian Modernism
in the Long 1930s’

- Henderson Downing (LSBU), ‘“To be by Another Aloneness Loved”:
W.S. Graham and Cornish Modernism’

- Alexandra Bickley Trott (Oxford Brookes), ‘Gin Palaces on the
Waterloo Road, and Other Reasons for Art’

- Chris Clarke (University of Southampton/Independent), ‘“It’s all
chaos, who has what’: B.S. Johnson, the Arts Council, and the Faltering
Literary Avant-Garde of the 1960s’

Lunch: 12.10-1.10

1.10-3.30: Jewish Culture in London’s East End

- Evi Heinz (Birkbeck/Independent), ‘John Rodker’s Modernist Drama
and the Yiddish Theatre in Whitechapel’

- Matti Ron (University of East Anglia), ‘Avant-Garde Antagonisms in
the East End of Simon Blumenfeld’s Jew Boy ’

To and From Other Shores

- Ian Dudley (University of Essex), ‘Working-Class Avant-Gardism in
Decolonial Guyana: Art and Pedagogy at the End of the British Empire’

- Karolina Kolenda (University of Krakow), ‘The Uses of American Popular
Culture: British Pop Art’s Challenge to the Elitist Definitions of the
Avant-Garde’

- Louis Armand (Charles University), ‘“The Barbaric Peoples of the
Earth”: Gaudier-Brezeska & the Revolt Against Civilisation’

Populist Edges

- Nick Lee (Royal Holloway), ‘Escaping the Cage of Shadows: The
Outrageous Fortune of Archie Hill’

- Mark P. Williams (University of Duisberg-Essen), ‘The Escape of the
Outsider: A Working-Class Dialectic of Escapism and Subversion in the
British Countercultural Fantasy of Savoy Books’

- Matt Martin (Birkbeck), ‘“Sogbo is the Protector of Flags”:
International and Interracial Solidarity in the Poetry of Bill Griffiths’

The Banality of Labour & the Aesthetic of the Factory Floor

- Katherine Jackson (University of British Colombia/Slade School of
Fine Art), ‘The Problem with Steel: Use-Value and Surplus in Garth Evans’
Placement with the British Steel Corporation (1969)

- Carina Brand (de Montford University), ‘Stuart Brisley’s Performance
as Proletarian Horizon: The Politics and Aesthetics of the British
Avant-Garde’

3.30-3.50: Tea Break

3.50-4pm: Intro to ‘Agit Disco’

4-5pm Punk, Post-Punk & DIY Messthetics

- David Wilkinson (Manchester Metropolitan University), ‘Class,
Post-Punk and the Avant-Garde’

- Aaron Williamson (Artist), ‘Splitting the Atom: Post-Punk and DIY
Messthestics’

6-7.30: “Agit Disco” with Stefan Szczelkun

Organised by:
Dr Alexandra Bickley Trott
Dr Leon Betsworth
Dr Nick Lee