Art I
Prize hybrid
John McEwen
The work in Tony Carter's latest exhibition (Anthony Stokes till 21 April) confirms his uniquely unclassifiable status among contemporary British artists, which is a worthy distinction in itself. Carter is a sort of highpriest of transmogrification. He takes commonplace objects and subtly transforms them, so that they become emblems of the ritual of the change that has taken place. There is always an exquisite attention to detail and each piece takes months, often years, to complete. The arduousness of his method is most easily appreciated in "Elysium" — for newsprint distortions'. Here a pasted-up newsprint photograph and its caption are presented pictorially. The snippet of caption has been untreated, the photograph transformed by duplication of the image through overpainting with a mixture of synthetic filler and oil paint.
To indicate the process Carter has left the bottom right-hand corner of the original uncovered. The photograph is of a treelined road in Bangladesh with a bullock-cart and a few people ambling along; the cap tion, strangely poeticised by the writer, of the the slow-pace-of-life-returning school.
The very nature of 'News' is distortion, so it is a neat reversal of the norm to distort this quite unnewsworthy photograph into a magical counterpart of its oddly poetic, and equally unsensational, caption, by a process whose pace is equally sympathetic to the spirit of the original. All Carter's pieces aspire to similar refinements of physical and conceptual balance, and not all of them succeed. Problems with presentation can make the work look precious, if not kitsch, as in 'Season Song', and his more obviously still-life tableaux continue to be mounted on plinths all-too reminiscent of Colefax Fowler. But this cannot detract from the impressiveness of the work as a whole. Carter is a hybrid to be prized.
Phillip King's sensibility could hardly be more different. The principal piece of sculpture in his new exhibition (Rowan till 26 April) is a massive assemblage of 32 bits of slate, used-steel parts and sawn-up elm trunks stacked in the middle of the gallery to a height of seven feet. The basic structure of the work is of an arch, disguised and revealed by an ingenious interplay of external mass and internal void as the viewer circulates. Appropriately it is named 'Within'. For all its weighty sections and rugged mixture of materials it has a vaulted, aerial quality that comes as a pleasingly optimistic departure from the dark and grounded preoccupations of his last show. Two black, nuggety and over-industrial pieces of a much smaller size have been included to the disadvantage both of themselves and the installation.
It is ten years since the Piccadilly Gallery last showed the work of Eric Gill, so the new exhibition, mostly of his pencil drawings, represents quite a haul (till 21 April). Having said that, it is difficult to see any of the exhibits altering his present art-historical status as a brilliant designer of typefaces, who also drew and sculpted in a crafty way. His line is like an engraver's, contours accentuated with incisive blacks, breasts shaded with light nets of cross-hatching. His sexy drawings are too genteel to be erotic, for all their loving descriptions of the mons veneris. If you think of him being a Tertiary Novice of the order of St Dominic, even the sauciest of them — a full-length of Daisy Hawkins — becomes distasteful.
At the Science:* Museum Stanley Spencer's murals of shipbuilding on the Clyde during the War (till 28 August) are overshadowed by 'The Art of the Engineer', a Welsh Arts Council exhibition devoted to 'two hundred years in the development of drawings for the design of transport on land, sea and air' (till 29 April). The exhibition of Stanley Spencer's celebrations of the working-man is one symptom of the current, and recurring, fashion in the English art world for all things socio-political. Spencer's most consistent weakness was a tendency to sentimentalise and, for all the documentary accuracy of these rather squinny pictures, that is what has happened here. His toylike figures are sweet propagandist confections, just what the doctor, or in this case the War Artists Advisory Committee, ordered. As might be expected, sentimentality is the last word one would use in describing the diagrams of the engineering draughtsmen. More surprising IS to learn that presentation drawings were done as independent works of art, with no functional design purpose. Much of the collection is of scientific rather than artistic interest, but a presentation set of Brunel's 'Great Eastern' steamship and some early drawings of railway engines would stand in any company. The slick commerciality of today's artistic impressions of car interiors serve as yet one more example of our decline.
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