Class! The Bourgeoise, the Worker & the Angry Young Chav

CAN we still pin down class in Britain? The ArtSpace mulls over boundaries and divisions in Class! The Bourgeoisie, The Worker & The Angry Young Chav, for the next six weeks at the ever-challenging gallery in Tower Street, York.

Gallery co-owner Greg McGee says: "There's been a breakdown over the last 20 years, if not in communities, then in identities we used to assign ourselves. We briefed our artists about the causes and symptoms of social labels, and we've received a thrillingly varied response.

"There's the redemptive quality of alternative art, from Dexter or Alice Stevens, or the resigned ennui, the dismal tedium of stepping on to the conveyor belt, sharing identical expectations and becoming like Pink Floyd's Brick In The Wall, as seen in art from local artists Jon Proctor and Adam Sunderland."

Liverpool artist John O'Neill grapples with shifting values in post-industrial cities; Danny Cameron hints at the prescriptive values of the class system; Laura Kavanagh's Dead Fox is a reminder of the most upper class of sports, fox hunting.

If all these works are dark, Eddie Saul stands out by connecting with the salty humour of what was once the working class.

"Inspiration comes from the everyday things I see around me, " Eddie says. "My style is scratchy pen and wash, which suits the urban theme. Iconic settings work just as well for me as the mundane and everyday."

According to Greg, reflecting the working class has "proven to be difficult". "The closet we've got is Dexter's beautiful nostalgia piece from the 1940s, Ford: Local Boy Makes Good. This is probably because Thatcher splintered the working class in the 1980s, and now all we've got left are fragments, broken even more by New Labour's taxes, " he says.

"There's very little in the traditional working-class idea for the artists to reflect now. What was there has now sunk into the underclass or non-working class - or chavs as some like to call them.

Labels for small groups of people - such as gangs and, at a push, families - are pertinent, but labels for communities aren't any more.

"Maybe Thatcher was right - there's no such thing as society.

Only individual men and women.

I'm from Middlesbrough, believe me I know what I'm talking about.

There are estates everywhere that used to be desperately poor but proud, co-operative and united; now they're crack-drenched war zones, ruled by ten-year-old boys in hoodies."

Co-owner Ails Denholm is quick to counter Greg's rant: "Class! is not a pessimistic show. There's a lot of humour there, twisted though it may be and we're not taking the word 'chav' lightly. It's overused, in many ways it's the new c-word, and a lot of the times it's used to show economic contempt for whole groups of people, " she says. "A lot of people sat in offices or staff rooms find arty expressions embarrassing. They wear their hostility to inventive, exciting conversations like a badge of honour. The Angry Youngf Man used to be eloquent, educated and have a cause. Maybe there are no causes left, or maybe our middle classes are too knackered now to lead a revolution. It's up to the Angry Young Chav to take all that dark glamour now."

Although the exhibition title deals with labels given to groups of people, the ArtSpace curators are more interested in how these labels merge or vanish, not least in Kippa Matthews' photographic portraits.

Most striking of all is his study of a little girl skipping at the end of her road in a rundown Burnley street. Where will her life land?

"When Greg asked me if I had anything in my archive that represented class, it got me thinking, 'these days, what is class?', " says Kippa. "I grew up in a family where my father went down the pit at 15, my grandfather was a miner and so was my great grandfather, but that was an era when class had a clear identity. Now it's not so clear."

Kippa, a York photographer with north-eastern roots, says he does not judge anyone. "It may sound a cliché but at the end of the day, I believe we're all equal, and there's beauty in the everyday. You can have a street where three-quarters of the homes are empty or burnt out as the BNP takes over, but there's that little girl skipping in the road.

"So you have the innocence of the small child, but does she have a chance in life, or is her life preordained?"The question hangs in the air, like the girl mid-skip.

Ails points to Kippa's photos as the perfect representation of the exhibitions's concerns. "They show perfectly how much more complicated life is than giving pigeon holes to people. There's the churlish defiance of a prostitute and wild eyed fever of the thespian, both giving the 'V' sign, apparantly now the order of the day when a Tory Party leader comes to visit; the infinite patience of a nurse, one of the last remaining champions of what used to be the 'working class'; the numbed middle distance stare of John Major's final exit from Number 10, the Tory Party's own one time 'working class hero', disposed of when his time had passed; above Major, the portrait of a dead eyed Kevo, convicted multiple murderer. All at some point must have been photographed free, young, smiling, as is 'The Skipping Girl' exhibited here. We are left to imagine how much more alone these people are once the eye of the camera is put away, and how much more like they'd be if luck and skill had served them differently, for better or for worse, as the wheel turned."

Class! The Bourgeoisie, The Worker & The Angry Young Chav runs at The ArtSpace, Tower Street, York, from today until May 10.