ARTS The legacy of Duchamp
BRYAN ROBERTSON
Contrary to what may be the general belief, it is uncommonly agreeable for a critic to recant and admit error when he discovers that what he once thought was either neg- ligible or over-rated is, in fact, rather good. This is precisely my position over Richard Hamilton: an artist whom I've always con- sidered intelligent but cerebral, a theorist rather than a maker of new and telling images. His admirable exhibition at the Tate, which opened this week, is an eye- opener and full of intriguing disclosures: it is therefore a pleasure to say at once that I was wrong, for Hamilton is an interesting, sometimes engrossing artist.
But before exploring the show, it must also be stressed that this artist is a prime example of the negative effects of the English system, in which a man such as Hamilton has had to devote an excessive amount of time to teaching. The result is a certain frugality in the work, both numeric- ally speaking and in elements of depth, or the theoretical attack on individual subjects. It may well be that Hamilton chooses, by temperament, to deploy his resources in a deliberately thinned out and sparse manner. But my own feeling is that his gift for in- tellectual give-and-take, for sustaining a running commentary on some of the issues of modern art, would have been more creatively employed, from the artists' own standpoint, in America. In England, we turn artists of this kind into pedagogues and milk them dry in the teaching machine. Hamil- ton's students at Newcastle have included Ian Stephenson, Matt Rugg, and that Scarlet Pimpernel of the English art and intellectual milieu, Mark Lancaster. He has affected a large number of other students, but one cannot help feeling that his energy might have been retained for his own painting, collages and print-making.
But, as it is a particularly nasty English habit to usher a man in for what he is not, and has not done, rather than saluting the actual achievement, let me try to recount some of the rewards of Hamilton's present show. First, it is unusually well installed: the Tate at last seems to have solved the vexed problem of a temporary structure that keeps a light, white and airy character inside what looks otherwise like a dull stone temple consecrated to some nameless but essen- tially irrelevant god. All these undertones are now banished, pretty well. Next, Hamilton has been sensible and allowed Richard Morphet (who organized the show, and contributes a warehouse-full of in- formation to the elegant but rather talky catalogue) to begin with an arresting and exceedingly impressive group of early works executed in 1949—illustrations to Joyce's Ulysses: Leopold Bloom in isolation, seated in wrinkled old bags and jacket, balding head and blank, introverted stare; PoIdy lying in the bath, seen from above, penis afloat, presumably regarding some highly suggestive pink taps at the foot of the bath; and finally in multifarious guises and postures, including the stocks, in the Night- town trial sequence when he is accused of a wide range of antics. These three works bring one's critical faculties smartly to attention: they are masterly drawings, not
dissimilar to the more straightforward and less familiarly cartoon-like or satirical, rather tender and classically pure, early pencil-and-wash drawings of that neglected mine of invention, George Grosz.
The next revelation (after some excellent canvasses which pinpoint their intersections of implicitly related and interdependent structures—rather like invisible triangles with just the corners painted, and the spaces be- tween not always logically drawn together) comes with what passes for a large painting in Hamilton's body of work, which is mostly modest in scale. This is called d'Orientation (1952) and it seems to me to be one of the most original and distinguished works made by any English artist in the last twenty-five years. It is very hard to describe: the panel that it is painted on is covered with a near- matt creamy underpaint and the flickering points, lines and sparely indicated contours (of mysterious presences) are few and far between—not much to bite on, but the paint- ing well repays prolonged study.
As you progress round the show, some of this early magic slightly evaporates. It is as if the label 'father of English pop art', which has been hung on Richard Hamilton rather too often, has entered his consciousness; there seems to be an excessive concern with the world of advertising, mass media (all of it intrinsically boring stuff, not to be re- deemed by Botticelli himself, let alone Hamilton—or even Rauschenbere. now that the fragile tenderness of his Dante drawings has deserted him), cosmetics, photographer's studios and equipment, and commercial printing processes. The image of Marilyn Monroe is not the copyright of Andy Warhol, but he has said the last word on a very limited subject and I do not believe that Hamilton's comments on her life style, its gestures and images, add much to War- hol's exhaustive series of multi-coloured and black and silver masks. It is always lethal for artists to become too aware of com- mercial art, let alone to enter the stakes and do witty things with it The whole affair is like trying to make love to a boa con- strictor—superhuman efforts will not stop the inexorable pressure from something essentially unbeatable. Warhol has survived because he is by temperament a most loving and precious mortician.
But, as a whole, the show is a remark- able record of a highly intelligent awareness at work. The trouble, again, is that the awareness is too much of art and not enough of life, so that something geti her- metically embalmed halfway through. I don't think it's the creative flair or genius —Hamilton has both. It is, rather, an ex- cessive identification with process at the expense of image and, as Duchamp's inter-
preter and right-hand man, Hamilton has inherited a fatal alienation. He need not continue to claim it. For the whole purpose of an artist, even in this absurd day and age, is to make masterpieces of painting or sculp- ture which, in their own material processes, now have vastly extended possibilities. Duchamp explored process, image and arte- fact with the ruthless dissecting instincts of a cynical surgeon. But surgeons heal or transform: Duchamp left the exposition of an aesthetic operation to speak for itself, without stitching up the wounds. It was not enough; his gesture was deadly for art and there are signs that Hamilton is too willing to continue the dismemberment.
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