Lauren J. Joseph Transcript:
Hi. Good afternoon. I am Lauren J. Joseph.
If you want to sit down, you can, because it's going to be 20 minutes... so yeah, get comfortable. There's no mic, but I'm going to try and project.
I'm going to share two pieces with you this afternoon. The first piece is an essay I wrote for my Substack when I heard that this show was happening, so it's really nice to be rounding out the circle with you this afternoon. It's kind of an academic lecture, but I'm using this terminology very loosely. Rather it's a reading of Beryl Cook's paintings through a specific queer trans working class lens. It's very personal, as I often say that I was raised by the women in these Beryl Cook paintings.
The second piece is going to be slightly more 'performative', to use a cursed word. I'm going to go a bit more free form, and that is going to illustrate this sentiment that I was raised by the women in Beryl Cook's paintings, or as we say in Liverpool, 'Beryl Coo-k paintings'. I'm going to be with you for about 20–25 minutes. And the second piece will also be on my Substack as of next week, so like and subscribe — isn't the modern world so degrading?
Yes, I'm going to put on my specs for this first piece because it's terribly scholarly. If I'm too quiet for once in my life, then please gesture. Okay, so here we go.
Canonical iconography from one very naughty lady
As a child in the 90s Beryl Cook’s pneumatic housewives were as familiar to me as the cast of Father Ted, Mr Blobby, or the panda on a bottle of bubblegum pop. On wall calendars, birthday cards and stamps, in coffee table books and occasionally framed and on display in a café, these ladies were everywhere; strutting, stripping, laughing.
Myself I was always most comfortable in the company of women, and luckily I was, for the most part, allowed to live in their world until well into my teens. As an effeminate little boy I was there with them, with my mother, my aunts, their friends, but simultaneously at a distance from them. I remember both an indulgence and a pity, they found me entertaining and my attention flattering, but they also couldn’t help but reveal how sorry they felt for me, were I to turn out as they feared. I learned a great deal from them, about men and sex, about navigating social bureaucracy, about keeping secrets for a rainy day. I stored it all away, the underclass glamour, the mannerisms, the politics and wry humour worked deep into the cult of anecdotes, it all became foundational.
I feel a kind of kinship with Beryl Cook in a strange way, when I think of who she was and who she painted. A shy little lady with specs and a sensible grey crop, immortalising gargantuan good time girls in leopard print miniskirts; I wonder if she wasn’t in a way painting for her own sake, a different sense of self. A world in which she was a va-va-voom dame herself dancing with a sailor, rather than the slender figure sitting sipping a G&T in the corner and sketching on the cards she kept in her handbag. Apparently she was so timid that she declined to go to Buck House to receive her OBE, choosing to pick it up at a smaller ceremony in Plymouth. Yet even her most modest paintings bulge at the seams with pure exhibitionism. Just look. A lady driver walks to her car in a Marinière and patent leather pumps with a sassy terrier under her arm seemingly rolling its eyes at the viewer. Two old ladies swan out of The Algonquin bundled in furs like Emperor penguins, another feeds her cat at midnight in full white tie and tiaras drag, another dances flamenco on her unpaid bills. Surely there’s a sense of wish fulfilment at play here of being someone else, someone bolder? And is it just me or are some of Cook’s girlies, with their broad features and dangerous curves, giving secondary transsexual pin-ups? Perhaps I’m over-identifying now, but all the same I can safely say that many of my finest aesthetic choices were most definitely shaped by Cook’s images.
Because they were so ubiquitous during my childhood there never was any shame or scandal attached to them, despite the fact that they’re full of ladies in peek-a-boo bras waving whips, and women naked under fur coats exposing themselves to passers-by. Not to mention the gay bars, prostitutes and drag queens Cook painted, outsiders she portrayed without any of the mockery or moral judgement that defined the era’s attitude towards queer people. In spite of Gen Z’s much discussed love for them, the 90s were weirdly cruel and conservative; every other week Madonna was being threatened with excommunication for simply flashing her muff and a lesbian kiss in a soap opera was enough to send the media into meltdown.
Perhaps then it’s against this suffocating background that Cook’s artworks so popped. None of the people in her paintings seemed ashamed or afraid, rather they flaunted their assets and ogled each other. The paintings are all brimming with life, they’re undeniably joyous, full of camp titillation, adult in their themes but still somehow naive, as if painted by a very talented little girl. I don't mean to say they are unsophisticated but rather that there has always been to my eyes at least, something of the fairy tale to them, a glint of magic realism. They are illustrations of nights out on the tiles as I imagined them, from listening in to my mother describe them over the phone to my Auntie Dot. Sometimes when I look at them it feels as though Cook has painted all my adolescent eavesdropping, wide of the mark as I’m sure it was.
Her subjects were well known to me, working women hooting around kitchen tables, gawping at strippers, hauling bags back from the supermarket. They are almost folk art and in a way I think that’s why they were so well received by women like my mother and her friends. They saw themselves in the paintings and knew Cook was giving them a little wink. Oh, the Julie Walters of it all.
Of course this, the truly populist appeal of Cook’s work, is in part why she has always been rather sneered at by the art world proper. She didn’t go to art school, she ran a B&B in Plymouth and started to paint relatively late in life, it is quite against all odds that she became as successful as she was. Still, very few major institutions own any of her work and she has largely been derided as belonging to an end of the pier tradition, to a world of saucy postcards and naughty nighty parties on housing estates.
So much of the way she was received is laughably sexist, not to mention the product of pure class prejudice, though Beryl of course gets the last laugh. Her work is instantly recognisable to a huge number of people who would offer you little more than a shrug should show them a work by Anselm Kiefer or Jenny Holzer. And it isn’t just because they’re kitsch although they undeniably are, and I don’t think Cook would’ve been affronted by any such assessment, the paintings really are great.
They could be novels, each one is so characterful and human, they’re idiosyncratic and full of inexplicable details that make them true to life. Why has the woman in the bandana brought her pet mouse on a leash to this party? How has Granny come to be reclining on a corduroy sofa with a group of punks? Where is this parade of sexy girls dressed as six identical French maids headed to? We aren’t told but we feel we might know, or at least we are given room to join the fun and speculate.
Cook said many times that it was the joy she wanted to capture on her canvas, and the delight which her work brought to people that motivated her to continue doing so. They are very funny, as Victoria Wood said, Cook was “Rubens with jokes,” though this framing has hardly helped buff her auction room credentials any. I don’t see why though, certainly her earthy, bawdy humour is not unique in the history of art, when you put her side by side with Man with the Moneybag and Flatterers for example, she seems like an urban Baby Bruegehls. Her playful character sketches drawn from the world around her can also bring to mind the satire of George Grosz’s A Married Couple although our Beryl is much less malicious, her wit collaborative. Otto Dix too is somewhere in the mix, his Procuress is Cook’s nihilistic second cousin once removed.
Besides, her work is simply not all fluff and flannel. You can feel the diligence that went into the images, the responsibility she felt to her work and to her buyers, to the fans who wrote to her in their hundreds and to whom she replied, diligent as JoanCrawford. She often spoke of being disheartened and “bitterly disappointed” with the finished paintings, of putting them with their faces to the wall until she could bear to look at them again, months later. She painted on through all of her self-doubt,through decades of critical dismissal, and that’s something I personally find incredibly heartening. Cook saw beauty and elegance all around her, in gay bars and in catalogue stores, and despite what it cost her she painted it. I love her for that, and for how raucous her work is, how bombastic and true, how plain speaking. She painted large ladies, she said, because she “didn’t like doing backgrounds”. How marvellous! Would that we were all so honest with ourselves and our practices?
Thank you.
Right. Specs off for this next one. As I said, it's a little more performative. I have to be ever so careful, as I'm trying to get this water. I've already laddered my tights once, but I think that's quite in character, don't you?
So yes, this next piece is actually taken almost entirely verbatim from phone calls and conversations with my mother. I wrote it about 10 years ago, actually, but I never knew what to do with it because it's such a bizarre piece. It's basically like an eight-minute monologue, as many of my conversations with my mother, in fact, are. And it's based on these conversations I had with my mother in which she told me all the 'goss' about my Auntie Jackie, who is obviously not my mother's sister, but a woman that she's been friends with for 20 years. I think that's the true metric of being working class in Britain. How many of these aunties you have hanging around, and how many of them go to spiritualist churches?
So this is a kind of debut, and I'm going to try and do it without the script. I'm going to go off piste and see where the spirit leads me, I suppose. It's called You've gorra laugh, haven't you? which I think could be the title of a Beryl Cook painting.
You've gorra laugh, haven't you?
A Monologue in Scouse
Oh no, I wasn't calling for no particular reason, or if I was a I can't remember what it is now. Did I tell you we've got some new neighbours next door. Well, they seem like really nice people, even if she is a bit too fond of the Tina Turner mega mix. I mean, not that I've got them against Tina Turner, of course. God, I wish I had her legs.
Oh, that's what it is I was going to tell you. Jackie has left Joe for good. She's gone to live in Brighton. I mean, you've got to laugh with her. She's always been a bit barmy, hasn't she? She was going on for a little while about how she and Joe don't have sex any more and how she needs it. She was saying, “I may be your grandmother, Elaine, but I'm still a woman.” Well, you know how she is, don't you? I thought it would all blow over, but then around last Christmas, she said she's getting a divorce. So she drags me off down to Southport Crown Court with her to get the papers. I mean, we stopped off at Debenhams for a coffee, first of all like. Because her Tracey still works part-time on the Chanel counter there, so we get a discount in the café.
Personally, I would have preferred Marksies, but well, Jackie's a very demanding sort of character, isn't she? And you know me, anything for an easy life. So after we'd had a bit of a mooch around Debs, we went over to the court. Jackie goes in there, doesn't she? Like a heat seeking missile. And I had told her not to get a double shot in her latte, but would she listen? She goes straight up to the woman sitting at the registrar's desk and she said, "I want a divorce!" And this poor woman sitting there says, "But darling, we're not even married yet." and I thought that was quite funny myself.
But Jackie chose not to hear it. She just said, "I've been married to him since 1969. I deserve my freedom." You know, like she rehearsed it. She probably had and all, knowing her. And the woman at the desk says, "Oh I see. Well, whose fault is it, would you say?" And Jackie says, "His, of course. I haven't had any sex for five fucking years."
Well now, the woman at the desk, she took it on the chin. Probably hears all sorts in that job, doesn't she? But the old fellow behind us who'd only come in about renewing his TV licence. God, he turned a terrible shade. Well, you would, wouldn't you? Stuck listening to Jackie going on about Joe and his erectile dysfunctions and how he can't make love anymore, ever since he joined that Status Quo tribute band. I mean, she says it's not the music, it's just all the drinking they do after the show. But I'm not convinced.
So we get the papers and then we go and have another look around the shops, because, well, we're already there, so we might as well. And I said to her, "Jackie, are you sure this is what you want to do, love?" You've been married to Joe for 40 years, what would you even do without him, love?" And she says, "I'm going to get a new fella, aren't I, online via the internet." And I said, "What? You can't just put in a bid for a new fellow on eBay, love. That's not how it works." And she said, "I know that, Elaine. I'm joining eHarmony, actually. I've already started on my profile." I said, "What? At your age, you're barmy."
And then do you know what she said, the cheeky cow. She said, "I only look the same age as you, Elaine." The cheeky fuck. She's nearly 60, I'm only 52. We do not look anything like the same age. And then she says, "Since I lost all the weight off my hips, in pilates, I'm wearing a size twelve and all like you, Elaine." Well is she shite. She's a size 16, if she's anything. And she says, "Oh, don't worry, though, I didn't lose anything off me bust. I've still got great tits, Elaine." I mean, what a thing to say. I'm right in the middle of the British Home Stores Christmas clearance sale and all. I just said to her, "You have spent too much time on the sunbeds, girl. You need to calm down." And then I had a bit of a route through the 'buy one, get one free' underwear rail, because they do have some nice stuff in there, you know. If you're ever looking for a very reasonably priced matching knicker and bra set, I can wholeheartedly recommend British Home Stores to you. I mean, she does look good in it though, doesn't she for 60? I'll give her that.
I mean, she should do, shouldn't she? With all their money. You know she won the lottery? Oh, yeah. About five years ago. She didn't tell no one, but I figured it out. I knew as soon as she started shopping at Sainsbury's because she'd always been devoted to Morrisons, hadn't she? Then she started going on all these cruises, and then she went to Poland for that mini facelift. I thought that whole trip was very suspicious, actually. She'd never expressed the slightest interest in Eastern Europe beforehand, hadn't she? And then when she got back, she said, "Well, Elaine, our Tracy couldn't even recognise me when she picked me up at the airport.” I said, "Well, that's highly surprising, isn't it, love? Your Tracy's got a stigmatism, and she won't wear her spectacles in public. She doesn't know what she's looking at half the time."
And that's true, actually. Her Tracy's a very vain woman. You know, once she went to pick up their little Kieron from the nursery, and it wasn't until she was halfway back down the Formby bypass that she realised she had someone else's kid in the car. A little girl called Brittany, actually. Oh, lovely kid. Now, thankfully, little Brittany's mother was a manic depressive in an upswing, so Tracy got away with a suspended sentence, which is very lucky, actually, considering all their previous DUIs.
Anyways, Jackie decided she was going to put the divorce on hold for a while because they've got the kids, haven't they? And the grandkids. Anyway, the eHarmony membership was going to be 25 quid a month, and she wasn't going to pay that. She said she'd rather put the money aside and save up to go to Turkey for a tummy tuck. I thought that was quite sensible of her? Ey you know what? I've lost quite a lot of weight myself this year. Well, I've been working this new job, haven't I? And they'd have me run ragged. And then I started a new diet and all, living a generally healthier lifestyle. Now, what I do is I have a piece of toast with a tiny, tiny bit of butter on it at breakfast. And then I'll have the same thing again, around 6:00 when I give the kids their tea. I mean, I do have coffee during the day.
I'm not starving myself or nothing. It was quite hard to begin with. Well, new diets always are, aren't they? But then Teresa, you know the woman who lives above the laundrette, she told me that she had this weight loss powder. She said it really helps with cravings. So I thought, “Oh, right, I'll give that a go then.” And you know what? It really helped. The weight came right off. Gave me blinding headaches like, but all the same. It really helped. And it wasn't for about a month or so, I reckon, then I realised I was actually taking speed, yeh. Our Jess comes into the kitchen one morning and says, "Mother, what the hell are you putting in your Five Alive?" I said, "What is this? Oh, this is just a dietary supplement that Teresa, who lives above the laundrette, gives me." She snatches it off me, and she says, "Mother, there's no dietary supplement on the market that comes in a little plastic bag with lipstick kisses on it. This is amphetamines. You've been taking speed."
And so I had. I mean, I don't recommend you try it. Although the whole house was immaculate. Didn't mention that to Jackie, though, did I, no. She's always been dead funny about drugs because she used to be a traffic warden. She wouldn't even take HRT when she went through the change. Which probably explains why she's so friggin sex crazed now, doesn't it? You know, the last time she was up here, she was going on and on and on about this rampaging rabbit of hers. I didn't know what she was talking about, did I? We were in the cafe, Tiffin's as it happens, where we always go, because I'm obsessed with the egg custard. And she's been going on for about 15 minutes before I realised she wasn't talking about a pet, was she? No, she was talking about a bloody sex toy. Our Jessica looked absolutely mortified. And we had this waitress hovering around us the whole time, pretending like she was taking the orders, but I could tell she was just all agog at the situation. She could not wait to get back into that kitchen and tell the girls what she'd heard. I could tell by the look on her face. Cheeky cow.
Anyways, Jackie's given us the full rendition, hasn't she? About the love gels and the whatnots that she found in Ann Summers. We really didn't need to hear it, especially not since she was enunciating every word like she was auditioning at the RADA. She was saying, "You take the love gels and you put it on before you use your vibrator, you know, on your cli-tor-is." Now, our poor Jessica, she's not a baby, she's 21 years old now, but she looked like she wanted the Earth to open up and just swallow her whole. But of course, Jackie never being one to take a hint, has she now? Jackie doesn't shut up like any normal person would. She just keeps going, trying to cross the great generational divide and hand on some female wisdom to our Jess. And so she's going hell for leather with it. And right when the waitress comes back with the coffees and my egg custard, she says, "It's a simple technique, but it guarantees a much more explosive climax." Well, how that poor girl didn't drop the tray, I'll never know. Our Jess nearly fell off the seat. I mean, I thought it was quite funny myself. But you've got to laugh with Jackie, haven't you?
Anyways, the whole sex education, guess it did work out because now she's left Joe for good, hasn't she? Well, for a while, she was seeing this fella that she found on the Bay City Rollers message board. I mean, she'd never actually met him because he lived in Texas. That didn't seem to put her off. I didn't think he was much to look at when she showed me his picture. But apparently on Second Life, he's a third-level warlock, and that counts for a lot these days. But before she even got on the plane over to Texas to run off with her fancy fella, the virtual online fiancé was cruelly snatched away from her by her virtual online best friend, who she also never met. Well, she blocked them both on Facebook, didn't she?
She's quite down in the mouth about that, actually. She put up some of them big plastic butterflies outside the bungalow. You know the ones. Our Jess said "That place looks like it has been done up by Jeff Cooks." I said, "Well, I suppose she is a friggin cook isn't she?"
But then clear out the blue, I got this message on my Facebook wall last week and it just says, "Hiya Elaine. Met a new fella. Fallen in love and moved to Brighton for good. Text me." Text me. She's barmy, she is. I mean, good for her, I suppose, love is love. But what her fancy fella down there in Brighton doesn't know, that although in her mind, Jackie looks the same age as me and wears a size 12, she's nearly 60, and she's a size 16 if she's anything. Anyways, you will text me, love, won't you? To tell me which time train you're getting on Tuesday so I can pick you up at the station. That is unless I find a lover boy of my own and I run off to Costa Brava with him. Do you reckon they've got British Home Stores In Spain?
Ta-da. Thank you.
