Matters of imagination
John McEwen
Nigel Hall is one of a select group of British sculptors with an international reputation, so it is no surprise to find him consolidating his position with an excellent show of new sculptures and drawings at the Juda Rowan Gallery (till 19 December). The idea for his three-dimensional pieces remains essentially the same: configurations of thin aluminium rods are attached, like pictures, to the wall. But, as one has come to expect with such a consistent artist, a logical advance has been made. Exotic colour — blue, green, even sugar pink — has been used for the first time, and this greater diversity and impact of colour is matched by more complicated structures, brought about by the use, also for the first time, of a welding-torch. The lightness of the material allows the rods to stand out some distance from the wall, and in this way they can be seen to demarcate planes and volumes by implication. As one walks past, all sorts of new spatial and linear relationships are revealed. As before, the pieces suggest more than they describe, making substance of the insubstantial. One is called 'Air Pocket', another 'Turbulence'. 'Turbulence' was suggested to the artist by the undulations of a flag in the wind. It makes sculptural form not of the flag itself but of the volumes of air to which the flag is subject. Hall's temptation is to over-complicate, only indulged in in one piece — blue and tucked away. A piece, it must be said, not improved by being difficult to see properly — impossible, that is, to view through 180 degrees. The upstairs gallery is largely given over to drawings, where much the same spatial disclosures are suggested in two dimensions. Here, too, possibilities have been opened up by the most recent lines going off the paper.
Next door to Juda Rowan is the Angela Flowers Gallery with a show entitled Badge Art (till 16 January). Many galleries at this time of year hang up everything they have not been able to sell in the past 12 months and call it a 'Christmas Show'. Angela Flowers, who is both too energetic for this and mercifully free of art-world pomposity, invariably sets her gallery artists a jolly Christmas task. This year she has got them all to design badges. The preparatory designs make an exhibition of pictures upstairs while the badges themselves are on sale and display below at 60p each and a discount on ten. Unfortunately the artists have not risen to the occasion. Stockingpresent hopes are dashed. Clearly most of the participants looked upon the exercise as an unasked for piece of homework and dashed it off as painlessly as possible during the tea-break. There is no reference to Christmas, but those who suffer dyspepsia just at the thought of all things Yule might find some seasonal consolation in David Troostwyk's elegant 'Burn a Rose Today'.
At the Waddington Galleries there are shows of new sculpture by Barry Flanagan, and recent and not so recent sculptures and etchings by the Spanish master Joan Miro (till 24 December). Flanagan is the Squirrel Nutkin of British Art, always leading his more pedestrian colleagues a dance. Sometimes there are japes — as when he placed a turd-like piece of stone behind an elephant-like piece of bronze by Henry Moore at an open-air sculpture show — sometimes jokes, sometimes wit, sometimes whimsy, but always there is a relish and feeling for materials; and this, as in the past, is the saving of his present, folksy, show. Mad March hares are its most obvious subject, followed by lumps of marble carved to look soft, an elephant, a freestanding dog, even ding-dong bells designed to serve as a dinner-gong. In a catalogue foreword the artist declares his pleasure at being involved in a corporate activity. The work — the casting in bronze, the carving in stone — has been done by craftsmen, leaving, as he puts it, 'only the modelling bits' to himself. The modelling, of course, being the only vital element.
Flanagan is a modeller to his fingertips. He handles clay with the pleasure and something of the manner of a pastrycook. His newest and most roly-poly hares are fleshed out with very stylised pleats and flaps. His rocks are chiselled to look kneaded and folded. The hares box — even (hilariously) stand on end, as a pair of acrobats. They undoubtedly give the hare in art — and there have been some very distinguished ones — a new lease of life. It is also true that much of this other new animal work looks disconcertingly like upmarket Elizabeth Frink. The slightly louche and abstract way Frink has at her best, that is, with additional jokes and ironic emphasis. There is an inherent sentimentality and conservatism in the rustic interest that always threatens, and sometimes succeeds, in getting the better of wit and invention. The heffalumpish elephant, a hare dancing on a cricket wicket, the Xmas bells, the dull dog, if these point to the future then the tail of Flanagan's reputation is in jeopardy.
Things are not improved by Flanagan's juxtaposition with such a master of caprice as Miro. With Miro one has imagination rather than variation, an unforgettable, unique, visual language. It is folklorist but never folksy, rustic but innocently so. There is a positively mediaeval gusto to his ribaldry, his delight in sex and its absurdities — cuckolds, cockalorums and the rest — most evident in this work of his seventies and eighties. And yet there is also the refinement, the cultural assimilation, the independence of derivation. The colour and iconography is familiar, but the fact that Miro is the master of a language, not a style, gives his work a freshness, a degree of flexibility and renewal, that makes familiarity irrelevant.
At the Institute of Contemporary Arts the downstairs gallery is given over to pictures and tableaux by Conrad Atkinson, 'one of Britain's most important political artists' (till 23 December). His work deplores various generalities like the destruction of the environment and the North-South imbalance, with the use of statistics, quotations and metaphor. The sort of information, in other words, that can be gleaned any day from a respectable newspaper. The whole thing looks like a socialist reading of the Brandt Report presented in visual form for the benefit of the Lower Fifth. However, there are signs of reform. Atkinson used to document events without much concern for aesthetic niceties of presentation, but current fashion for frivolity in the arts seems to have softened his resolve. Everything is quite pretty for a change, some of it in the latest Italian style. Could this be a sign that he too has fallen a victim to capitalist exploitation? On the other hand it might also mark a dawning and long overdue understanding on his part that art is a matter of imagination, not documentation.
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