Arts
Round and round
John McEwen
The retrospective exhibition of Barry Flanagan's stone and bronze sculptures at the Whitechapel Art Gallery (till 20 February) started as this country's official representation at the Venice Biennale. For many the star show of the Biennale, it will surely prove a great success here. The im- mediate impact is one of elegance, elegance of idea as well as of appearance. Disparate though it may be in the first instance — the pieces ranging from descriptions of humanoid hares in bronze to lumps of ap- parently undescriptive marble — it soon reveals itself to have an utterly convincing but instinctual sculptural logic of its own. Good footballers are said to make 'the ball do the work'; similarly, good and true sculptor that he is, Flanagan makes the material do the work — or, more precisely, he imposes himself as a modeller or carver as little as he coherently can. For example, he will sometimes choose a lump of rock for its suggestion and draw our attention to it more or less by selection alone; or the natural fold of a lump of clay will first do duty as the scut of a hare in bronze and then be reproduced as an independent shape in stone, carved to appear as soft and pliable as it was in the original. In both cases he employs professional craftsmen to carry out the job, bronze casters and stone masons, his own involvement, characteristically, kept to a minimum. His method is always elusive (this giving an added meaning to his use of the elusive hare as a motif), his pleasure tactile — the objects invariably ap- pealing quite blatantly to our sense of touch. The hares, for example, obviously evolve from the roly-poly modelling first employed in the making of some humble coil pots; flanks and folds of marble, creviced with finger-enticing chambers, de- mand to be stroked and gripped. Many of these pieces are not without an ironically humorous side. The hares can dance a jig and so can he (b.1941), round the sculptural notions of his more earnest English predece- ssors. Some years ago he irreverently (but affectionately) placed a turdlike object to the rear of Henry Moore's monumental 'Sheep
Piece'. Having stone carved to appear soft, turns the Moorish edict of 'truth to materials' on its head no less irreverently, and that is by no means the sum of such teasing inversions. This, as in the case of the turd, can become self-defeatingly Squirrel Nutkinish. What might be called his `sur- ruralism' can also show uncertain taste, a piece or two, for all the spareness of the making, erring on the twee side; while sensuality for its own sake is shown to ap- peal less with size. Nor is Flanagan a carver, which is why he usually gets experts to do it for him, though his stones grooved with drawings (he has a beguilingly earthy and linear style) prove to be some of the most memorable objects on view. In the context of this exhibition that is no mean achieve- ment. New work in stone at Waddington Galleries, 34 Cork Street, WI (till 29 January) adds a PS.
Upstairs at the Whitechapel (till 20 February) there is an exhibition of a recent cycle of 12 large encaustic (oil/wax) on can- vas paintings, two related paintings and a smaller 'Self-Portrait (Crucifixion)' by one of the most lauded of the new international art stars, the 30-year-old Neapolitan, Francesco Clemente. Clemente first exhibited here at the Lisson Gallery in 1979, glimpses of his own body recorded without the benefit of a mirror, frugal and novel. Since then he has developed into a full-blooded expres- sionist, his sails no doubt caught by the pre- vailing art-trade winds, but lost none of his subtlety. In this genre of rather indigestible painting he seems as good and as promis- ing a new practitioner as any there is. At first, nothing could seem more at odds with Flanagan's delicacy than Clemente's rough-and-readiness, but diversity can nevertheless be immediately acknowledged — a happy freedom of scale, image and technique.
He was born in Naples and has divided his time as an artist between Rome, Madras and, most recently New York. To this breadth of geographical experience must be added the advantage (or possibly disadvantage) all his generation of artists have derived from the great proliferation of art advertisement that came in with the Six- ties. Exploiting previous styles is one of the hallmarks of the present expressionist mode and the only one that differentiates it. Ac- cordingly, out of Chagall, Kokoschka, the Mexican muralists and the example of Plundering Picasso — to name but the most obvious — emerges the conglomeration that is 'Clemente', but, crucially, there is also the influence of Indian art. The desub- Jectification, announced at the Lisson, con- tinues. The search for an imagery and style expressing timelessness rather than logical Progression deepens — hence his preference for 'cycles' (a further cycle of new paintings entitled 'The Midnight Sun' can be seen at Anthony d'Offay, 23 Dering Street, WI till 15 February) and imagery of 'the eternal round': a living face with teeth as miniature skulls; a ring of figures — in fact three aspects of the same figure — floating in a void, etc. In Buddhism there is no Time, no God. All is present, infinitely. Not dissimilarly, in America a phenomenology of Speed has evolved, a philosophy of Ac- tion. This is closer to a Buddhist way of thinking than the European one of time- based logic and progress towards a goal. The whole world swings towards an American induced state of equilibrium epitomised by the balance of power, instan- taneous communication, pan-culturism, industrial multinationalism. Significantly, Clemente has chosen to bypass Europe to- day as if to position himself at the balancing Point, midway between the old world and the new, of this equilibrium. The obstacles Preventing him achieving a similar vantage Point with regard to painting are much more difficult — he still has many ortho- doxies to overcome, but he has made a start. It distinguishes him as a true artist, free of the gimmickry that dogs most of the 'Ex- pressionism' currently touted. If the English painter Roger Hilton had Painted pictures the size of a bus he would have had a much more worthy international reputation in the expressionist area than some of today's young contenders, as can be seen by the exhibition of some of his Paintings, mostly on paper from the last two years of his life, at Waddington Galleries 2 Cork Street, WI (till 29 January). Done with poster paints after he was bed-ridden, they celebrate living with a genuinely childlike gusto and seem set for long remembrance.
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