The aim of this research is to investigate and attempt to read critically the ways in which depictions of male-to-male association in Vaughan’s work reflects on representations in contemporary discourses of male ‘homosexuality’ and its purported aetiology in the period after the war. Discourse is used here in a Foucauldian sense to include not only linguistic and textual but also social and institutional forms of discourse, sometimes embodied or materialised in the use of gestures and objects (such as cigarettes, tools and weapons) as extensions of the action of the body in playing social roles. Of particular interest will be the ‘social turn’ taken by explanations of the aetiology of ‘homosexuality’ that challenged or mitigated dispositional explanations of the cause of ‘becoming’ a homosexual in genetics and/or early development.[1]
Model of discourse that name and explicate the homosexual and their social behaviour are contested of course and this debate is acknowledged,[2] especially in relation to the specific use of queer theory in the background of this argument with its stress on performance, on the one hand,[3] and other forms of challenging binary concepts which are said to structure the concept of normativity.[4] Of course queer theory is often contested because of inconsistent use of this term. Lewis (2013) argues that we should take queer theory to often talk with a difference when it is talking, either about ‘being queer’, an identity politics, or ‘thinking queerly’, an analytic attitude that is antagonistics to the reifying effects of norms.
The discourses of importance as either establishing subject positions that equate with gay identity, even if in a contested way are Law, Psychosocial norms, Medicine & Psychiatry and the actions, institutions and prescribed encounters that a sociological approach would identify as homosocial practices and communal political agencies. All of these factors emerge in Vaughan’s work an artist concerned with the depiction of homosociality across his career. For instance they emerge in 1947 in early illustrative work for children’s book such as Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Newby’s homosocial political fantasy, The Spirit of Jem. The interest here in both institutional, and habitual assemblies of men emerge in Vaughan’s attempts to depict ‘assemblies’ in the language he employed to title the work done in his art and in purely visual modes in which space and time are both complicit as might be expected by a painter who stressed performative models of the notion of painting, in which the performance of painting was, as in Pollock’s ‘action paintings’ to be read in the reconstruction of his handling of paint or other media.
In his early work Vaughan concentrated, as an aspirant artist in both words and visual forms, on representations of male groups encountered in the war in his role as a conscientious objector (CO) in the non-combatant corps. It was in these bodies of men that the body of art took plastic form both in his conception of the individual and the social. Social icons in which the group and individual co-operatively inform each other (using ‘inform’ as an active verb meaning forming from within will occur in representations, often aping groups favoured by older masters and war-time contemporaries such as in reserved occupations like harvesters, farmers, and heavy-duty workers (in Moore and Sutherland miners). Such work could be learned from War Artist colleagues whether formally made so like Sutherland or informally like Vaughan’s war-time correspondent and fellow CO and Neo-Romantic, Norman Basil Town.[5] Some of the latter’s work were often misrecognised as early work by Vaughan, including an early rendering of Rimbaud’s Hell (much more social in theme than Vaughan’s lithographs on the same) but his mining works and illustrations, (including some to Sid Chaplin’s The Thin Seam) emphasise his attraction to the isolated male as the definitive form of masculinity. This is indeed apparently Vaughan’s conclusion that, ‘he is like a piece of spiritual machinery with one side cut away so that he can watch it working. He opens only on himself’.[6]
Figure 1: Mine Worker with Lamps (England, 1950) Watercolour, pen and ink on paper
Signed and dated ’50 (http://www.leicestergalleries.com/19th-20th-century-paintings/d/norman-basil-town/11086) Use link to see picture.
In Chapter 2 I contrast this painting, which emphasises machine and spirit in isolated but ‘mutual’ relationship with an early Vaughan, Coal Fatigue (1942). In both the orthogonality of foreground and background lose definition but the main contrast is between differences in the treatment of group and individual. Whilst Town sees a man staring out his inner demons, Vaughan depicts complex relationships and mediations within the group and between the observer and the group, which will be analysed in full.
Vaughan’s own sense that the role of planning in his painting practice changed in the 1950s no doubt influenced by myths of Pollock as Action Painter.[7] I will argue that this also changed his relationship to the act of composing assemblies (assembling as a process) and to the assemblies of figures that were his subject. The viewer stops being interpolated as amongst the assembly but is instead forced to participate in the act of assembly of the visual image.
In terms of art criticism the degree of absorption of the viewer is related to the changing function of Vaughan to the performance of painting as his key action becomes the painting seen as an expression of the theatrical action depicted in the painting. He often expresses this in comparisons between art as representation of the articulated (the jointed) individual body, the relationship between male bodies and the social body of the group or assembly on the one hand, and of the fluid plasticity of the painted image of a compositional whole at the level of the painter’s painterly performance. This is done through various studies of masters. I will concentrate on studies of the Laocoön Group, in consideration of which Vaughan raises these concepts in his Journals to contrast the jointed bodies and a body of males and the plasticity of the icon of the unjointed serpent. Bodies which firm up or melt together – solids, fluids (the phenomenology of paint. Live, think and feel in terms of paint.
Interpenetrative groups – use Street Group (1964 before going on (Hastings unpublished)
[1] Waters (2013)
[2] Weeks (2012)
[3] Butler (2011)
[4] Sedgwick (1985…2008)
[5] Nahum (2019)
[6] Vaughan Journals cited Vann (2014)
[7] Vaughan in Barber (1964:81)
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