Arts
Artist and politician
Gavin Stamp
William Morris Today (ICA) William Morris Today (ICA)
The William Morris Today Exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (until 29 April) concludes with an audio- visual simulation of News from Nowhere: a trip up the Thames in 2136 AD in post- industrial, post-revolutionary England. Clever photo-montages show Trafalgar Square full of apricot trees (but still with the National Gallery, which Morris would have removed), the Houses of Parliament as a dung market and an altogether idyllic, ruralist world run by the Crafts Council. Is this still the future? Unfortunately, when I tried to make this nostalgic journey one of the slide projectors was not working and nobody at the ICA could repair it. Morris, with his dislike of machines, might have been amused.
I do not think he would have been amus- ed or edified by a computer analysis of the shape of the Red House, the home built for him in 1859 by Philip Webb. This pointless flickering TV screen is typical of an exhibi- tion which manages to encompass both straightforward designs by Morris and the utterly silly and pretentious. Any normal person's hackles will surely rise at the sight of stills from a Nicaraguan propaganda film or a photograph of Professor E.P. Thompson addressing a CND rally. Yet this often annoying and unorthodox exhibition does succeed in being a tribute to the sheer bigness and diversity of Morris: painter, poet, designer, typographer, weaver, decorator, preservationist, reformer, socialist, revolutionary. I have no doubt that if Morris were alive today he would support CND.
In the 150th anniversary year of Morris's birth — a birthday shared, ironically, with that of the RIBA, which Morris despised — the exhibition organisers have attempted to rescue Morris from the mythmakers: both from the myth created by Pevsner that he was somehow a pioneer of 'Good Modern Design' and also from the cosy alternative, that he was really just a splendid Romantic Mediaevalist. Another exhibition of Morris wallpapers and fabrics would have been in- tolerable. Whether we like it or not, Morris was much more than that. The ICA presents him as a political figure: rightly so, as over a decade of his crowded, productive life was spent in political agitation and he called himself a communist — before that word was debased by the vicious practices of Lenin and his successors. For Morris, art and politics were inseparable: 'I have only one subject to lecture on: the relation of Art to Labour.'
Morris's credentials as a revolutionarY were Impeccable. He helped found the Socialist League in 1884, edited and sub" sidised the magazine Commonweal and lec.- tured and campaigned continuously until his health broke down in 1891. He was pre- sent in Trafalgar Square in 'Bloody Sun' day' in 1887 when a demonstration was viciously suppressed by the police. He was opposed to the Fabians and believed the the society he hated could only be changed by violence. But he was no orthodox com- munist; he mistrusted state socialism therefore, the Labour Party) and becanr disillusioned with many left-wing Poittl- clans. Morris experts now agonise over whether he was a Marxist. He certainly claimed to have managed to read Capital. I cannot see that it matters: he was so much a greater man than Marx. Morris did not foment hatred and class war, he did not preach that human beings are inescapably locked In historical processes by class, he did nOt regard men as purely economic animalsi rather, he had an altogether nobler view (),, human nature, seeing the best in men an' seeking a society in which individuals can seek self-fulfilment instead of being crushed by the drudgery of repetitive work. morns also left a positive, concrete legacy; he created objects of beauty and designed par- ters which still give pleasure to many Pecfr pie, quite regardless of class. The exhibition is polemical; it begs manY questions about Morris's relevance todaY. Are his ideas still potent? I think they are' Morris's bust sits in a niche in pride of place in the Hall of the Art-Workers' Guild, 3 body founded under Morris's influence ex- actly a century ago to bridge the gap bet- ween the so called 'fine' and applied arts; and to encourage architects to use sculptor. r and other artists and craftsmen on the.i buildings. After decades of a triechantst!c; earnestly undecorative architecture, .th, ideals of the Guild seem to be coming latu their own again. A portrait of Morris hangs in the offi,cest of the Society for the Protection of Anclent Buildings, which he founded in 1877. Tba cause has grown in strength and power' even if those who would vulgarise ourchut's ches and wreck our towns are as active as they ever were. After making allowance, for his blinkered inability to comprehert: Classicism, Morris's writings on archite _ ture and preservation are as fresh and as , necessary as they were when written, all_ut conservation questions are among the Mos serious which humanity now faces..
But what of politics? The exhibition al
tempts to present Morris as a thinker of contemporary relevance and, by speaking at its opening, Neil Kinnock tried to recruit Morris to his exciting new Labour Party. Morris certainly would have loathed the present philistine and accountant-ridden Conservative government, dominated by what he once called 'ignorant purse-proud digesting machines', speaking of the Burghers of Bournemouth, and it would be Possible to see him as a sort of Benn figure: Wealthy, middle-class and tiresomely and comfortably radical. There is an account of how a 12-year-old servant girl was kept up until two in the morning tending the fire in kelMscott House while Morris and his friends talked socialism. I think it is clear, however, that Morris was more than a shallow and ambitious politician: indeed, he despised politicians. His whole life was one of passionate commitment to a succes- sion of good causes. It is greatly to the credit of the exhibition –• and the catalogue, which is really a separate group of essays — that it points out that Morris's socialism has not been followed. In most respects the Fabians have been proved right and he wrong. Far from socialism having put forward an alternative society to industrialisation, it has taken capitalist values on board and pursued them ruthlessly. State socialism — which Morris feared — has seldom shown much respect for the natural environment for Which he cared so much: the USSR is notorious for its ruthlessly materialistic at- titude to natural resources while East Ger- many, as statistics in the exhibition reveal and as any visitor can smell, is the most in- dustrially polluted country in Europe. _ Nor has socialism in Britain remembered the teachings of Morris. His message, ex- llounded in Useful Work versus Useless is that industrialisation is soul- destroying but that work itself is essential to human happiness and can be liberating !rid satisfying. Morris asked about produc- tion: 'first, will the thing produced by ,aseful to the world? second, will the mak- ing Of it give healthy and pleasurable oc- cupation to the makers?' The modern !-abour Party does not ask these questions; instead it campaigns for a 'right to ork which is merely a 'right to be paid'. Labour policy is merely concerned with sUbsidies and with industrial power, not With the quality of labour itself. The deepest irony is that the post- 21uustrial of News from Nowhere is being linealised. Not only are fish again swimming Once-polluted rivers, but almost ev erybody — as Morris predicted — enjoys great deal of leisure. Alas, what in the !,b0s economists identified as the problem Of 'leisure' is now described as the problem 'unentploymene. Millions of people are Mt condition envisaged by Morris in the i'lltariifesto he wrote for the Socialist League, that 'everyone will have abundant leisure or following intellectual and other pursuits
7.rigenial to his nature'. Poor m worris: perhaps his view of human natu as re s too optimistic, but should not the Labour Party be trying to find ways of making those paid by the state to enjoy enforced leisure use their time creatively instead of watching videos or sitting in pubs?
Even worse is the Labour Party's defence of union interests in industries which Morris hoped would disappear. He would surely have condemned our absurd system of overproducing coal to keep Mr Scargill's miners in employment, and generating superfluous electricity from unnecessary power stations, like the two monsters at Drax in Yorkshire, which are responsible for much of the acid rain which falls to blight the forests and rot the buildings of our Continental neighbours. But how is the leisured, calm world of News from Nowhere to be lit and heated? Morris hinted that there were quiet, clean and effi- cient machines: perhaps nuclear power is the key to the socialist Utopia? As I have suggested, Morris's socialism is inescapable, but today, perhaps, one does not have to be a socialist to revere the memory of that great and good man. One sentence of his endears him to me, and puts him in that vital tradition of English radicals which includes Cobbett and Pugin: 'Apart from the desire to produce beautiful things, the leading passion of my life has been and is hatred of modern civilisation.' I do not think he would like our civilisation today either; certianly it is a great irony that Morris's anniversary is being celebrated in a characteristic product of that civilisation, the ICA, an institution whose exclusive posturing, bogus populism and empty ugliness make it so very alien to 'art' as Morris understood it.
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