Reductio ad absurdum ARTS
BRYAN ROBERTSON
When a number of artists banded together re- cently to deprecate, in a letter to The Times, the announcement of Moore's gift to the Tate of a substantial group of sculptures, they might have paused to consider other issues in the air today which constitute, for them, a more obvious threat. Whether Moore's vision is rele- vant or irrelevant to what concerns these and other artists right now is basically beside the point—also the fact—that he is certainly not their enemy. If his work is ignored as redun- dant, it is still obvious enough that what Moore has done over the years is to prepare the ground for these younger sculptors and clear the mental climate. The enthusiastic support for their letter from Sir Charles Wheeler, eX-PRA, was poetic justice. Instead of fussing over space alloca- tions and the permanency or otherwise of current works of art and aesthetics—and thus merely implying 'what's in this for us?'—they could have considered the latest phases in the time-honoured demolition process, continually at work in England, to undermine their work, kill it if postible, and certainly to confuse the most serious issues under a guise of benign toleration.
Let me describe some of the links in the chain. The end of the war saw the beginnings of a concerted movement to take the sting out of radical art, indirectly, by an attempt to make the left bank, as it were, acceptable and
palatable for the right bank. The Parisian bistro, for workers and artists, was used as a model for a whole spate of smart and expen- sive restaurants in which a well-educated and well-to-do section of the public was titillated by service from waiters with their sleeves rolled up, on bare table tops, with fishnets or blow lamps suspended from the ceiling, and with old recruiting bills or camp bad taste Edwardian posters decorating the walls. Nostal- gia played a small part in this, but essentially it was the debutante learning to make fudge at Rumpelmeyer's or Marie Antoinette working in the dairy.
All this was merely a painless ticket to Bohemia; but at the same time Buffet's svposedly agonised and bleak paintings of undernourished young lovers in the existentialist drabness of studios and bed- sitters were enthusiastically bought, in brightly burnished, very expensive, gold frames, by rich industrialists who thus condoned Bohemia, registered their sympathy for suffering, and supported modern art, all in one action. The gesture was as unreal as the work itself was bad—and commercial-art in quality.
The confusion was extended at the time of the so-called 'kitchen sink' wave of artists in London. Their work was supposedly realist, with a working-class bias that found favour with a public old enough to recall prewar com- mitments, political or social, and it appeared to coincide with a new wave of Jimmy Porter, Lucky Jim, intransigent heroes firmly rooted, or at least functioning, inside the limits of the provincial semi-detached.
In fact, all that Bratby was doing, as an ex- pressionist rather than a realist, was to paint whatever was to hand as 'subject-matter and this included flowers and landscapes : his concern was for direct painting and an extension of un- - contrived composition rather than sociology.: Jack Smith, as swift development very quickly disclosed, was always a visionary-expressionist, preoccupied with the recording of light and movement in space; withY, maturity, Middle- ditch was revealed as a kind of expressionist Redon, drawn to symbolism in vast canvases of flower heads or candle-flames, in close up, with butterflies or insects obsessively enlarged'. Greaves was presented to the public too quickly, when he was still establishing technical prowess in traditional views of rooftops and other Slade-type compositions : he also moved quickly through to his real, and very abstract, concerns. But by then, nobody was interested: the collective label had proved inaccurate and nobody cared to throw it away, admit their mistake, and redefine terms.
Another source of confusion presented itself about twelve years ago when a de Stael retro- spective was organised at the Whitechapel Gallery. Concurrently with the show, posters were displayed outside the adjoining tube station advertising cheap travel in a `London by night' excursion. The poster was entirely conceived and executed in a de Stael chunky, rectangular paint slab technique. De Stael had been dead less than a year; until the arrival of that poster, it took at least ten to fifteen years for the commercial-art boys to catch up with and exploit the discoveries of serious artists. We've arrived now at a stage when not only has the time lapse disappeared, but commer- cial art can feed fine art in a pop-art format. This is fine; the issue becomes dangerous when people find it impossible to tell the difference or even proclaim, as some do, that there is no longer any division whatever between in- dustrial or commercial design and what can still be termed easel painting. The difference is crucial.
But the entire situation is not exactly clari- fied by a present-day development, two sided, in which artists, accepting, the role of `the artist as performer' (e.g., Pollock carrying out a painting for the movie camera, Picasso draw- ing in the darkness, in space, with coloured lights) find themselves sold as a corporate idea of swinging London to America alongside Mary Quant, Vidal Sassoon, and the Stoma or the Beatles. I don't blame the artists: in England they are working in a society which will exhibit their work, publicise it, discuss it, travel it around in temporary exhibitions— do anything except actually buy it and keep it. Our livelier artists are almost entirely depen- dent on foreign sales for survival. A small number of them in England are making, with varying degrees of originality and talent, re- markable works of art whkh nobody wants. Trts is a frightful situation, continually alossed over, which has to be faced. I don't blame any artist for mixing in with a free- wheeling (and reassuringly affluent) fun sec- tion of the community rather than endure the incomprehension of the supposedly more serious art public that yields about five or six collectors, for the whole country, willing to accommodate their work and produce solid money for it.
I think it's great that some aspects of com- mercial art are now clearly tuned in to the latest developments in abstraction, and fine that the facades of shops in Carnaby Street or the King's Road are covered from rooftop to pavement in sophisticated, campy art nouveau designs. But I'm not amused when Bridget Riley has to spend an inordinate amount of money and time in attempting to stop the merchandising hi America on a huge scale of one of her paintings bought by a collector who happened also to be a fabric manufacturer—and I share her distaste for the shop-window display pirated from another painting. The lack of acknowledgment or re- muneration is the least of it: the principle at stake is the integrity and ethos of her work which,, if not betrayed, is certainly confused by these antics. Similarly, Allen Jones, a serious and gifted painter, is now lumped together with the clothes designers, the gear shops, the hippy brie-à-brae, the hairdressers, - and the pop groups: This artist doesn't care and strings • along with it: but more fool the public if it sees all this as one integrated activity.
Because serious art is being latched on to, and exploited for trivial ends, by a growing number of parasites who feed on artists be- cause they lack any ideas of their -own—and in seizing on those aspects of avant-garde art with more obviously decorative potentialities throw a dense cloud of cheap ambiguity over artists whose work has a totally different, and deeply serious, character. A situation emerges in which a Philip King sculpture, formally ex- ceedingly subtle and enigmatic in atmosphere, is considered at the same level as, say, one of the lighter jeu d'esprits of Joe Tilson.
am not dismissing Tilson's visual wit—or formal invention, on occasion—but it is crucial to have a clear sense of King's purpose, which has nothing whatever to do with fun and games fetishry, or Camaby Street, or anything else in that opportunist and shallow-brained world.
The new interest in audio-visual art and environmental schemes has led other artists, otherwise unemployed by society, to do jobs for night clubs anxious to combine the total euphoria of almost deafening noise with a psychedelic light and sound context. Fine— Matisse made a good mural for a Soho club back in the 'thirties; but artists' trivia, sur- prisingly difficult for them to do in reality, mustn't be allowed to obscure or prohibit their real work. Critics have a new responsi- bility these days—to keep the issues clear.
The real danger hovering over all this is the old emasculating process, peculiar to England, which has always sought to kill or at least subdue the most radical painting and sculpture. Cultural TV programmes, for instance, reduce everything to the same basic level with alarm- ing inaccuracy. Brief interviews with, say, Strav- insky and Olivier, are followed by chats with a boutique owner and. a pop singer. It's all one. And it isn't—and the sorting out will be a battle. Meanwhile, the - easy way out of differentiating between serious art (and assess- ing it properly) and the props and toys of a
fashion-conscious generation by mixing it all together is an evasion of a real problem — and symptomatic of many other issues, all of them negative and destructive.
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