The Pleasures of the Lowly: Beryl Cook’s Sticky Carpet Art

Words: Jennifer Jasmine White

Make it stand out

In 2022 the Acapulco Nightclub in Halifax sold sections of its carpet to enthusiastic punters past and present. The ‘Mighty Acca’, where drinks cost 75p, claims to be Britain’s oldest nightclub, and like many similar institutions, is a vast repository of social histories, intimate and shared.

It is these histories that people sought to retain a scrap of when, within an hour of the sale being announced, over 100 pieces of the carpet had been sold. It was black, though naturally lightly stained, and memorable for the garish swirls that adorned it. Most crucially of all, it was notoriously, gloriously, sticky.

From Clapham’s Infernos to the much-missed Hustle in my own hometown in Lancaster, there is perhaps no greater sensuous marker of British nightlife than the sticky floor. Smoke damaged, stomped on, and likely stained by the viscous elixir of a WKD, such textiles have long lent texture to the Big Night Out. Their disappearance, though perhaps good for the soles of one’s shoes, marks the unsettling ubiquity of an optimised and sanitised leisure culture in Britain. Increasingly cleaned up, corporatized, or demolished altogether, these cherished third spaces offered vital opportunities for hard-earned leisure time, and idiosyncratic glimmers of community. 
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As we mourn the life of nights gone by, where might we look to see such cultures captured? Despite its centrality to our national identity, to think of the boozer in British art history is to think of William Hogarth’s censorious scenes and little else. Our gallery walls bear scant evidence of the historic rituals and sensorial wealths of provincial pub and club culture. The art of Beryl Cook, primed for a renaissance, provides us with a gorgeous exception. 

In 1976, Cook’s painting of The Lockyer Tavern, notable as a safe space for Plymouth’s queer community, was reproduced on the cover of the Sunday Times. Cook quickly rose to fame, and would go on to be regularly cited as Britain’s most popular artist, but almost fifty years later she is all but entirely forgotten to a younger generation. Tate have repeatedly rejected calls to purchase her work, and her output has been roundly dismissed by the art world. Cook is permitted to occupy an ossified mid-century kitsch, but very rarely more. 

“To think of the boozer in British art history is to think of William Hogarth’s censorious scenes and little else. Our gallery walls bear scant evidence of the historic rituals and sensorial wealths of provincial pub and club culture. The art of Beryl Cook, primed for a renaissance, provides us with a gorgeous exception.” 

Cook was known for her portraits of working-class leisure, and fat, extravagant women. Interviewed at her home in 1980, she described finding inspiration “when I’m out drinking, and I see things I like, and I start to feel excited.” Cook’s oeuvre is notoriously grounded in the body: thick ankles and fat arses dominate her work, offering a vision of working-class femininity that luxuriates in unadulterated pleasure. Yet the interview shows a creative practice just as embodied as its products. The image of Cook in her thick-rimmed glasses, fag in hand, fizzing with excitement, is one that challenges our preconception of the great artist in situ. You can practically imagine her rustling away at a packet of salt and vinegar, letting her eyes feast on the operatic tableaus of the club or pub. You can imagine her, that is to say, up-close and personal with Plymouth’s most viscid floors.

In content, form, and affect, Cook’s was an art of the sticky carpet. For one, it is those literal textures that her work captures in attentive detail. In ‘Angela Singing’ the floor is made up of autumnal splodges, in ‘Conversation Piece’ a deep velvet red, and in ‘The Fun Fur’ a headache inducing grid of orange, green, and blue. Though Cook lamented ‘how difficult it is painting spilt beer!’, I’m convinced these floors were sticky ones. It’s the surrounding details that operate as giveaways, the garish ashtrays and the creamy pints. It’s in the ease painted so clearly on the faces of Cook’s singing, snogging subjects and the dance moves so bold that spills could hardly be avoided. 

These paintings cut at what it feels like to be a body in a community empowered by leisure and pleasure, and their emphasis on fat, working-class subjects posit an inescapable body politics too. The subjects of works like ‘Satin Dresses’ and ‘Getting Ready’ are statuesque and majestic. Their once unparalleled popularity shows that people up and down the country were not only comfortable with bodies such as these, but actively aspired to display them on their mugs, calendars, and PVC shopping bags. 

Understanding Cook’s as sticky carpet art is to make a claim about such popular forms. For years, these paintings have been denigrated as lesser almost exclusively on account of their popular appeal, a conscious move on the part of middle-class gatekeepers. The sticky carpet is a similarly designated space for the great unwashed masses, yet this is not to suggest an actual uniformity in either case. We might recall the words of left-wing cultural theorist Raymond Williams: there is no such thing as the masses – only ways of seeing people as such. Spend some time observing the diverse spectrum of existence perceptible from within the throngs of a sweaty dancefloor and you’ll find this point proven in no time. Cook’s paintings evidence a similar phenomenon. Look at them closely enough, and you’ll find them testament to the revelations and surprises of the individual body within the supposedly uniform crowd. 

In a current exhibition of her work at Clapham’s Studio Voltaire (which is celebrating its 30th anniversary in 2024), alongside cult chronicler of homosexuality Tom of Finland, younger gallery goers are finally facing Cook. On the afternoon I visited, girls, gays and theys alike could be seen peering, gasping, and giggling as they traversed the room. ‘Low art’ it turns out, might not be only an insult, but an indicator of vast affective potential. These are works that push against the silent elevation so often aspired to in the gallery space: to be met with the gaze of Cook’s subjects can be a full-body experience. It is fitting once again then, to conjure up the sticky carpet, itself a product of unruly bodies. Far more than an aesthetic choice, it reflects a way of being in public spaces. It relies on communal freedoms, representing a confidence and comfort in the presence of others, and in the residues they leave behind. 

Cook’s work provides an archive of the visual traces of a fading night-time culture, but experiencing it also provides an opportunity for viewers to step onto the shared carpet for themselves. Confronted with her laughing, sweating, dancing subjects, we might mirror them, let our pints overspill, and bask in the pleasures of the so-called lowly. To do so is to reject the classist imposition of so-called good taste, and look towards an art-history of our own.