ART
Putting the clock back
BRYAN ROBERTSON
The opening show at the Institute of Contem- porary Arts';'-new premises in Nash House is called 'The Obsessive Image 1960-68,' but the nature of the fixation is hard to decipher. The works are set in a long, narrow gallery which, though happily lit by daylight, reminded me of a rather grand Australian sheep station where the indoor pens had been converted by Heal's in the 1930s. If this seems like a rough wel- come for a rehabilitated organisation which has had its share of problems, wait till I describe the show—standards in London are getting flabby and some lean thinking is in order.
' We are proffered a miscellany of figurative art along lines envisaged first by the Institute's chairman, Sir Roland Penrose, and extended by another devotee of surrealism, Robert Melville, who then fell ill - and handed the reins over to Mario Amaya, editor of Art and Artists. The result has been cheerfully Ventilated by Mr Amaya with the proper inclusion of what he happens to like anyway: pop art and the misleadingly named 'new realism' (same old anatomies, same old situations). Recalling with disfavour the forerunner for this tired old caper in New York, 1959, 'New Images of Man' at the Museum of Modern Art, my gloomier fears for the present exercise were unfounded—we have been spared 'New Images of Men.' But, although the show provides in its auto-erotic diversity something for all sexes, its theme might have seemed more appropriate at Burling- ton House—though that bastion of tradition would certainly have improved on the present shakily sustained and grossly inconsistent his- torical premises.
The crucial issue is that the show is wholly unsuitable as an inaugural gesture from what is now the most lavishly subsidised centre in England for cultural trail-blazing. It must have cost a bomb and the result is an old-fashioned corridor of redundant information from Picasso, Ernst and Magritte through to Hock- ney, Blake and Phillips, placed alongside Ameri- can and continental contemporaries. This arbi- trary conglomeration does no service to the younger artists on show and is a betrayal of their seniors. The exhibition has no relevance whatever to the central concerns of modern art; instead, it panders to all that is most reactionary, whimsical, cute, sick and camp baroque. Before
this sort of culturally self-indulgent cruising can take place there is work to do and money to find to implement it. We have not yet seen in London the kind of historically definitive survey of either surrealism or dadaism which might well be inaugurated by the Tate—before their figurative repercussions are recorded at Burlington House. We look to the ICA, surely, to celebrate more radical contemporary experi- ments. The latest work set out at Nash House was all resolved at a higher imaginative level in the 'twenties and 'thirties—witness even the token show of Picabia and Man Ray now at the Hanover Gallery. If eroticism was the guid- ing light, it has often been more concisely and stylishly deployed in the recent past at the Robert Fraser Gallery.
I do not understand the thinking behind the ICA show, but am forced to recognise at least one disagreeable factor which conditions it: the desire to pack the pliblic in and then shock it. In a notably silly preface to the catalogue, Sir Roland writes: 'We find the arts in forms that only a few years ago would have been con- sidered outrageous, infiltrating, even becoming welcome. But a change of attitude leading to a better understanding of the arts encourages, inevitably, further revolution among the artists and the arts they create.' Does Sir Roland really imagine that artists watch the public and its reaction to what they've made and then, if it is accepted, change tack accordingly to imple- ment the punishment routine? The public as a whole barely grasps at all the nature of the revolution in art of the past fifty years; what little is understood is mostly disliked as a sup- posed sell-out (Tatlin, Malevitch, Mondrian, Rothko) of a hypothetical humanism. The only thing which the public is indeed familiar with, to saturation point, is the theatricality postu- lated by this show. That aspect of modern art has indeed been done to death—and bounces back at us from every Tv commercial or shop window display. The other side of modern art, which does not so easily beciime prostituted, is still largely ignored.
If a dated element of schoolboy daring or goading hovers over large areas of this exhibi- tion, the possibility of tension quickly descends to friction of an infantile order. The solid, head- less and elephantine bathing belle of Niki de Saint-Phalle, for example, is a cartoonist's
travesty of neanderthal Venus : the beauty of a daisy is corrupted by the faux-nail motif which lumbers round the lumpy breasts, the colour green itself betrayed by Miss de Saint- Phalle's execrable use of it in the painted bath- ing costume. Rarely has aesthetic cynicism descended to such depths of futility. This artist. with Tinguely and Cesar, is one of a number of ungifted continental exponents of a tired fantasy-dada hybrid clearly desperate in its attempts to recapture the initiative taken by the American Cage-Rauschenberg-Kaprow hap- penings. If I dwell on this one negative aspect of the show, it is because its debased principles are implemented just as mindlessly elsewhere in the assembly : in pandering to them, the ICA is not only failing to discharge its duty to the public, it is positively trouncing the goodwill of artists who have supported the Institute for years by handing over works of art, their sole stock in trade, for annual sales with which to replenish the funds.
If we are in the field of obsession, why is Joseph Cornell not represented? His collage- assemblages are among the most claustrophobic- ally obsessive images to come from America this century, and would have been less expensiVe to import than the excessively large works elSe- where on show. If Bacon is included, why not Burra—one of our most consistently obsessive figurative painters? And, if two de Kooning quasi-figurative canvases are brought over, where is Auerbach who paints the female nude with certainly comparable distinction? A water- tight case could also be made out for Ayrton, Freud, and both Vaughans: if Hockney is acceptable, then Procktor is equally obsessive with the human figure and perhaps more con- sistently so. If Allen Jones is allowed in, with a characteristic mock-Poeuil of a girl's legs in manically high-heeled shoes, why no popping- breasted pin-up by Mel Ramos. a West Coaster who provides more generous information? Why dismiss Butler in the catalogue as superfluous to the theme, and include Ipoustegy who is in the identical realm as Butler but greatly inferior to him? If the wooden folk-art totem of Wester- mann is approved, where are the obsessively stuffed phallic antennae of Flanagan. or the bell hung Cathidrules englouties in relief of Richards?
Two lovely and recent canvasses of Picasso are corrupted in this tawdry context, so are a masterwork of Balthus and fine examples of Magritte. So much bad art does, however, take in its stride the only Moore sculpture I have ever seen which forces me. for the lira time, to take the point of his severest critics. This sculp- ture should be recalled to the studio.
If the public takes such a show seriously— with its falsifications. omissions, biases, naivete and kinky, nostalgic brie--brae —then art moves back twenty years or more in this country. And that is why I write with such passion—at a time when money for art is so hard-won, when the awareness and sympathy of the public are so precarious. when the material position for artists has never been more dangerous, and when so much that is fine and good is congealed by so much that is false and bad, the issues are very serious: and the tca must redeem itself speedily if its currently privileged position is to be justified. An institu- tion of this kind should not, of course, be con- cerned with gate money and publicity—or notoriety; but, if that is the order of the day. its showbiz capers must be less vieux jeu and. above all, conducted at a far higher level of critical discernment.
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