Art
Ambiguities
John McEwen
It is difficult to imagine Bob Law's moreor-less white-on-white and all black paintings causing much righteous indignation anywhere except in philistine old England. However, following an uncomprehending hatchet-job by Fyfe Robertson on television last year, he suddenly became a figure of the utmost controversy, the 1977 equivalent of the Tate bricks. Now the Whitechapel Gallery (till 29 October) clears up the mess and makes personal amends to the artist with a show that both traces Law's evolution and presents the drawings and paintings to their most communicable advantage. Anyone, 'Robbie' included— he should really do another programme in expiation — who still fails to get at least the superficial point of Law's work after this, should see an oculist.
In the sense, therefore, that it explains Bob Law's work, the exhibition succeeds, a job ably completed by Sandy Naime's intelligent catalogue chronology; but in doing so it also subtly diminishes it. It deprives it of its theatricality or, a word that is perhaps closer to the spirit in which it has been made, magic. The scaffolding of figurative drawings by which the representationally untainted icons of his mature style came about, are not particularly distinguished and better earlier than late; the earliest of all being also the most revealing of the later paintings, dealing, as they do, with a periphery and a central field. They were done in St Ives and record the visual experience of lying on your back in the open. Formalised natural details run around the margins of the paper, rather in the way they do in certain Alfred Wallis pictures, leaving the centre void. In later landscape sketches such feelings are sometimes better expressed by the caption than the work itself: 'Richmond Park looking across untrodden snow to a dark spinney on a frosty morning'. The minute variations of tone, the infinitely delicate marginal variations of the resulting paintings can, in the light of such information, easily be understood to convey the artist's wonder of natural space in abstract terms, but it also serves to demystify them. A Law installation should be as pure as a Saenredam church interior. Busily didactic, as at the Whitechapel, only the most penetrating of the 'black' paintings are allowed to cast their spell; the effect, especially in the case of the last 'white' paintings, can even begin to look chic.
Also at the Whitechapel till 29 October there is an exhibition of photographs by Boyd Webb. Webb's early work is very much a reflection of someone arriving here from abroad, as he did from New Zealand, and humorously pinpointing some of the local idiosyncracies, such as betting-shops and poachers. This he did with an admirable eye for detail, a hallmark of all his work, and often the use of long, dead-pan descriptive captions. But these jokes, as the guffaws that interrupt the holy Whitechapel air still testify, were basically one-liners, and since then Webb has consciously gone for less humorous, though often wittier, and increasingly visual and ambiguous 'tableaux' of human behaviour. The best of these, and they are his best pieces to date, invariably deal with some sort of antagonism, while the very latest have lost some of this fire and tend to concentrate too much on the visual impact at the expense of the wit, which is running a bit thin. Like some of the protagonists, who clime) and peer mysteriously in and around what was once a ping-pong table, he seems momentarily to have lost his way.
Peter Joseph's new abstract paintings at the Lisson (till 29 October) intensify his preoccupations of the last eight years or so. As before, an internal field of colour is tonally balanced by a darker, distinctly drawn border at the canvas edge. This may sound as if they are a variation of the same theme as Bob Law's, but in appearance and conception they have little in common. Above all they explore tone, an activity that has been almost outlawed by modern painting, and their impact is more emotional. A 'black' painting by Law has nothing sad or foreboding about it, a blue one by Joseph in the current show, its awkward rectangle emphasised by the customary border, is disturbingly oppressive. Joseph selects his tones by sifting through endless combinations of commercial coloured papers, most of their tones altered, even if they are meant to be identical, by the marginal differences in the dyeing. When he has found the two tones he requires he mixes acrylic paint to match them exactly. This involves many colours and results in the final one being oddly ambiguous. He often paints a grey central area, grey, the tone that is made up of the whole colour spectrum, offering the greatest range. In this latest work the border optically merges with the central field in one case, while the earliest painting in the show, by contrast, balances a dark blue border with a wide cream interior to no less harmonic effect. They are dependent, like all paintings of this degree of colour subtlety, on a long viewing, the natural light by which they always must be seen, shifting the values from moment to moment. In the clean space of the Lisson they have the required freedom and make a fine and serious showing.
'This is my twenty-first one-man show. It's what you call an overnight success story,' said David Oxtoby of his latest widely acclaimed, busily attended and refreshingly orchestrated show at the Redfern (till 17 October). With his old pals from Bradford, David Hockney and Norman Stevens, Oxtoby learned how to draw the Richard In grams is on holiday hard way and remains with them one of the best draughtsmen around. Like them too he is happier drawing than painting. Nevertheless, despite an early taste of success, two years ago he was so poverty-stricken he could not afford the insulin required to keep him alive. At the last gasp he was saved by Editions Alecto in the person of Joe Studholme, who offered him an advance on some prints. Since then he has come rockin 'n rollin' back to greater fame than he had even in his first hey-day in thevarly Sixties. All the pictures are of his usual subject matter, pop-stars, in this case Fifties rockers, his tapes providing the authentic backing to the work and attracting as colourful a crowd to a Cork Street gallery as can have been since his last show. The occasion also marks the publication of Oxtoby's Rockers by David Sandison (Phaidon £4.95), his up-and-down story, which should be made into a smash-hit musical tomorrow, simplY told with a glorious array of colour illustrations dominating the text. Good value, also, for the little biographical captions on the stars themselves. Sir Henry RushburY, once Keeper of the Academy Schools, wrote to his pupil in 1965: 'You are one of the few whose work I respect, for I know that behind it all is wit and fun and an excellent sense of design — and a lovely colour sense which never deserts you. You are a gay lad, so don't let the intellectuals get at you and turn you into a parrot, talking and thinking their jargon.' He has not; but at the risk of sounding like one of them myself, I hope one day he will return to the erotica and satire that fleetingly inspired his work fourteen years ago.
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