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ART
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The Whitetehapel Struggle
By BRYAN ROBERTSON
WHEN I first started at the Whitechapel Gallery fifteen years ago, I lived for a year near by, to explore East London and try to understand its mental climate. I worked at various clubs, old people's homes, even found myself lecturing to prison inmates (an experience best calculated to make the stoniest conscience embrace the cause of penal reform), gen&lly prowled around, and then gave up all `social' work because you can't play around on the side lines: it's too agonising, you either devote your life to it or quit. I came pretty quickly to the obvious conclusions that East London was,just like everywhere else, except livelier; East Lon- doners were no longer the educationally ill- equipped Dickensian characters that molt of their, neighbours in the West cherish in't`their imagination: public libraries, cinema an the telly have done their job; and most of the physi- cal terrain should be pulled down and rebuilt. The drabness of this half of London remain an adamant fact. As the standards of its inhabijeots are both sharp and high, I decided to ignore the gallery's environment and make a series of spectacles, celebrations if you like, which would not disgrace any national institution. A sym- pathetic board of trustees, and its chairman. Lord Bearsted, gave me freedom.
The miracle is that the gallery has survived. Until a few months ago, there was about £600 per annum with which to mount between six and eight vast shows every year, each one of which cost between £1,500 and £3,000 to stage. There's no income yet from the City of London. which seems odd to me as the place is crowded with city workers every day. The local Boroughs have done everything they can to help, so has the GLC, but it's never been enough. The Arts Council would only commit itself to regular sup- port (£1,000 per annum to begin with) just over a year ago, but is now doing more. The gallery badly needs subscriptions; a realistic income so that the work can continue with a staff earning proper wages; and an endowment, which it's never had, for emergencies. The background to work is still harrowing.
The constitution of Whitechapel is unique: there are no useful parallels. It Was built as a gallery in 1901 by Townsend in the art nouveau style, its finances on a voluntary basis. There must always be free admission. Canon Barnett founded it, believing that it was important for a gatlery to exist in that part of London `to show the best modern art of the day,' and he struggled to create it as a charitable trust, also believing that 'paintings hidden from the multitude are 'un- known tongues speaking truth.' I hope, on balance, the redoubtable Canon would agree that a lot of language has been unleashed in regent years, though his source of enlightenment came mainly from the RA: nearly 60,000 people thronged the Rauschenberg show in a month, 23,000 came to see a recent `New Generation' display. The annual attendance is startling. Somewhere, hovering over the policy of .the gallery as a whole, from Turner through to Caro, there should be the truth that Barnett knes lay 'rmant in art. though the forthcoming Warhol
show might have made him expand his references. He would have enjoyed its comment on society.
If anyone doubts that the public for art is classless, they have only to visit the Whitechapel on Saturday or Sunday and observe elegantly clad art-lovers from Belgravia or Kensington rubbing shoulders with mildly demented parents with kids (prams or bikes parked in the lobby) from Bethnal Green. all mixed up with art students from everywhere, people up from the country who might usually be found in Wilden- stein's or Agnews, and quite a lot of inquisitive local swinging youth, Teds fifteen years ago. now Mods replete with cool gear incredulously— sometimes enviously--assessed by office workers in their weekend tweeds. The poinl is that this gloriously mixed public enjoy each other as well as the art and actually speak to each other— I loathe the hushed 'reading-room' atmosphere of museums. discourage it strenuously, and it helps that you can smoke and stub a cigarette out on the floor.
Art is not a luxury, it is the most acute and . basic expression of the spiritual state of any society in any epoch. and its revelation should be an integral part of life, of common experi- ence, because it finally makes the shape of everything around us. But I dislike wagging fore- fingers and telling people what to think (being usually too busy yakking about my own reac- tions) and this is why a certain ambience gener- ates itself at Whitechapel--there are no slogans. no explanatory captions by works of art and no lectures. Good art speaks for itself: exposure, and patience, is all. I tried lecturing at lunch-time and in the early evenings for over a year and gave it up because audiences were composed en- tirely, it seemed, of bored dowagers from Knightsbridge with time on their hands. Lec- tures, for the local public, are a dull relic from the Victorian period when the telly and movies hadn't been invented.
The policy formed itself. I wanted from the beginning to do something radical about English artists, who are too often judged, and merci- lessly, on the evidence of a small one-man show every few years; but whose work surveyed over a decade, for example. makes good sense and explains itself more readily. And sanctimonious as this sounds. I've always wanted to give a bit of dignity to English artists by providing them with grand occasions in their middle years, or younger, if they're worth it, that used to be reserved for Picasso or Braque—or might follow their own demise. And make catalogues which would be useful to everyone and be worthy of the seriousness of the occasion. As I've always believed that England's basic trouble has been an inability to come to terms with the twentieth century and it is surely crucial to understand now, not 1900 or 1935, I also wanted to bring Londoners up to date with modern art on a broad front. Commitment to a narrow section of modern art so often only means ruthless pro- motion and my own taste is wide—to the con- sternation of artists, who cannot believe that after hanging their own show and trying to help them through the angst-ridden months of a large retrospective you can hang with equal enthusi- asm work that's diametrically opposed to their viewpoint. But at least English artists have been presented on equal terms with their foreign con- temporaries. It's hard to realise the inferiority complex which once plagued English artists in their part-supposed but often very real isolation. We have not been told enough about the great- ness of the English tradition and its interaction, from the days of illuminated manuscript, with the Y.bntinental evolution. I'm glad the work of; the gallery is so well known abroad. I hope that Whitechapel has had an effect on English artists: we're in the middle of an extraordinary phase in English art and I'd like to believe that Whitechapel has provided some of the back- ground stimulus, as well as the celebrations.
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