12 MAY 1967, Page 19

Pop strikes camp

ART PAUL GRIN KE

Whenever Patrick Procktor's work comes on public display critics dig their toes into the carpet and wriggle with mute embarrassment. He appeared like a jack-in-the-box in the 'New Generation' show of 1964 and has been spryly dancing around the scene ever since, teaching, writing, organising and painting. So far he has invariably proved himself at least two jumps to one side of anyone's expectations.

Procktor is a figurative painter and a stage designer, but in close touch with the younger generation of abstract painters. His understand- ing of and sympathy with their work is equal to any man's, but he has carefully kept his own isolated, almost anomalous, position. The only identifiable interchange of ideas one can spot in his work is with David Hockney, with whom he shares a certain community of in- terest if not of technique. Kitaj also has had his share of influence on Procktor's approach to the dramatisation of material, but the handling of paint and the disposition of subject- matter is entirely his own.

The Redfern Gallery show hangs on a hand- ful of large anecdotal canvases with some less significant paintings and an enormous body of supporting work on paper. This kind of painting hasn't been seen in London since Michael Andrew's enormous All Night Long and The Deer Park and it could well swing the tide back in a figurative direction.

The scene is set in large empty rooms, usually with a raised platform or a stage at one end with a montage of superimposed figures placed at random across the floor. Only Long Live the Great Leap Forward shows any kind of co- ordination of the figures, but the two groups of Red Guards are characterised as groups and not as collections of individuals. AU the figures are flat, their poses and gestures taken from magazines and films rather than life. Procktor hints at this himself by frequently painting empty clothes with no heads or bodies, as if to say, 'Look, I've cut out this fashion picture but the head was wrong. This witty but dispassionate presentation gives a clue to his feelings about the subject-matter The Red Guards, Leather Boys and Pop Stars are seen in an entirely uncommitted way. so that they become about as topical as Bill Haley and his Comets and as unconvincing historically as Brando's Wild Ones with their coonskin caps and scrambler handlebars. Even :he Rolling Stones arc shown in vintage drag This is evi- dently a private world of allusion where the outsider doesn't get a look-in. In the Great Leap Forward the pivotal figures are the two transparent men, one wearing shades and the other a striped scarf—no one else in the picture is aware of them, but at a guess they arc Messrs Procktor and Hockney quietly taking in the scene.

It isn't easy to see how this 'I am a camera' approach relates to the Pop orthodoxy. None of the material is in any sense art-historical, a favourite shock device, nor is it topical save in the most coolly objective sense. I would sug- gest that Procktor has pitched' his tent some- where in the no-man's-land between Pop, as a pleasingly dated art form, and Camp, as a literary indulgence which appeals to his sense of humour.