Yesterday, Certainly: Tomorrow, Perhaps
AT LEAST this can be simply said of the com- plicated and demanding exhibition ingeniously inserted into the Whitechapel Art Gallery and called 'This is Tomorrow'—that it contains a sequence of twelve small self-contained dis- plays produced in almost every case by a col- laborative architect-painter-sculptor team, al- though the exhibition as a whole challenges in one way or another the autonomy of these vocations and their traditional territories. There are also contributions, both in the cata- logue and on the floor, from a number of pub- licists, one of whom aspires ponderously to verse in the manner of E. E. Cummings. In spite of its title, the presence of Robby the Robot and references to cybernetics, the show has a strong whiff of the past rather than the future; it stands in rather the same relationship to the twentieth century that Roger Fry's 1911 exhibition did to the nineteenth, for most of the exhibits and the manifestos they illustrate represent ideas and attitudes which were hot in the Twenties and even earlier. Ten years after the Nineteen-Forties war it reflects what was most advanced immediately after the Nineteen-Tens war, namely the constructivist- Bauhaus-De Stijl positions and the various expressions of the spirit called Dadaist. The show is pervaded by nostalgia, like those cur- rent writings about a jazz which was originally on the boil more than three decades ago, and one of the portrait-group photographs in the catalogue seems to emulate those photo- graphic documents of the beginning of the modem movement;
In this respect, the exhibition is typical of the historical bias of our post-war period, for as Herbert Luthy has written in a recent essay on Brecht, 'We draw new life out of old graves and not only out of old ones but from fresh ones too—even out of the kind the Bible refers to as whited sepulchres.' I make this point simply in order to indicate that visitors should not expect, in international terms, a very advanced exhibition. It is thoroughly interest- ing and worth attention because the people concerned represent a concentration of energy and growth. even if some of them do not sug- gest a positive fruitfulness but rather some appendix in the body of contemporary art. The exhibition also suffers from being in essence a series of manifestos many of which are far less convincing than what the artists would produce on the job. Some of them seem to be most con- cerned to clear a little living space for them- selves or shout out their identity; some of the statements would serve as the passing currency of studio argument, but look unconvincing and defensive in print.
If collaboration is one of the exhibition's motives, a deep, wide fissure of antagonism divides it, as I have already implied by writing the words Constructivism and Dadaism into the same sentence. The fact that certain of the groups can exist at all under the same roof is a reminder of the Thirties here, when non- figurative artists and surrealists bedded to- -- gether in the pages of the London Bulletin; I wish that the Reith Lectures could have come a bit later so that Dr. Pevsner could have run his gauges of Englishness over this show. The 'dadaists,' whose contributions I will review in a second article, are provocative, exhibitionist, combative, opportunist-1 use the words descriptively—popularist. To them Plato is a dirty word—like peace to an aggressor-rand they are scared to be caught wearing any values or anxious, if they are, to call them fancy dress. By contrast the constructivists cultivate lucidity, refinement, tidiness, modesty, a cool, Platonist, forward-looking, undemonstrative moralistic attitude. Their apposition of the two makes the gallery into a mind-shaking sequence of fairgrounds and monasteries.
The constructivist philosophy, with its denial of representation in any degree and its measured impersonality, automatically removes many of the causes of discord between archi- tect, painter and sculptor. Since the periods when a single ideology united the three, they have been divided because painting and sculp- ture were representational arts and architecture was not, and in the last two centuries by the cult of individualism and romantic sincerity. The display by Erno Goldfinger, Victor Pasmore and Helen Philips, which aims to show how the painter and sculptor, in this case through colour, relief construction and a hang- ing wooden sculpture, can modulate and energise the space created by an architect, is the most mature, confident and persuasive example of the constructivist ideal of co-
partnership and one in which Pasmore's infinitely fragile and sensitive talent predomi' nates. The only display not to inckide an archi- tect shows work by Anthony Hill, John Ernest and Denis Williams, and this has an overtly historical character not only because it includes a useful account of the development of con- structivism but because the work, lacking per' sonality and force of form and imagery, is a series of projects and propositions. On the other hand the directional space which has been so modestly presented by Robert Adams, Frank Newby, Peter Carter and St. John Wilson, offers, through this architect-engineer- sculptor collaboration, one of the most arrest- ing images in the show. The future of eon- structivism must, I believe, depend upon this kind of partnership which we have hardlY begun to explore or organise, but one cannot help remembering that in a contracting society like ours, in a state of economic instability, flexibility of thinking and technological inventiveness arc essential to tomorrow's archi- tecture. In this respect the collaborations of John Weeks with Adrian Heath and with Kenneth and Mary 'Martin have a special interest.
Constructivism is a philosophy of art and an orthodoxy. To those like myself, who syrri' pathise with its intentions and many of its achievements without subscribing exclusively to its creeds, it must seem to disregard certain inescapable human and therefore artistic impulses, needs and cravings. It is such require' ments which other parts of this exhibition seek to consider; I hope to consider them next week.
BASIL TAYLOR
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