ART
Legacies
EVAN ANTHONY
"Alistair, something has got to be done! I have tripped again over Parallels [William Turnbull's collection of ninefoot u-beams, placed parallel to one another on the floor], bumped my head against Boalbec [Isaac Witkin's precariously balanced steamertrunk arrangement], and Agrippa [manybosomed pyramid construction atop glassencased base] makes me feel absolutely inadequate."
"I'll move them into the pavilion."
"Fat chance! There isn't an inch of space left there, either."
"Whatever can I do? They can't go into the garden — they'd be sure to rust there."
"Silly. Send them to the Tate. They've got bags of room."
Taking no more of a liberty (I don't think) than the movie boys do with Tchaikovsky or Van Gogh, I have attempted to dramatize a scene in the life of Alistair McAlpine, the Tate's latest benefactor. I have used his very own words as my source : "In time it became apparent that if I was ever to realize my ambition of seeing these sculptures as one collection, and they were to come out of hibernation, the answer was to offer them to a large museum and of course the obvious choice for me was the Tate Gallery."
Lucky old Tate! The Alistair McAlpine Gift exhibition is on view, free to the public. (Lucky old public!) Before examining the work, let us consider the problem of housing a collection of sixty pieces of modern British sculpture. While there is no immediate difficulty — the Camden Council has kindly offered the Tate the use of an unused warehouse in Chenies Street, to which many of the sculptures will be moved and kept on show — any fool can see that sooner or later, someone who cares must organize .a Shelter-type group to find suitable lodgings for the preservation of nonrustproof, enormous British sculpture. (It's a project to vie in importance with the buying back of the Titian.) Looking the gift horse in the mouth, one realizes that the young British sculptors (graduates of the 1965 Whitechapel New Generation show) must have appealed mightily to McAlpine; he bought their work by the dozen. Linked together by a style developed under the spell of Anthony Caro, their teacher and mentor at St Martin's School of Art, their creations use such stuff as modern sculpture is made of : steel, perspex, fibreglass—with a bit of wood thrown in here and there. The work is abstract, in case you didn't guess, and there is nothing in the exhibition that would fit comfortably on anyone's mantelpiece or end-table — perhaps a large corner would just about do. But then, the pieces are not modelled, or carved — they are obviously intended to
sprawl, and sprawl they do. Phillip King's Call, a composition of four separate constructions, placed feet apart, is an incipient Stonehenge, though not that interesting.
Painted in bright colours, the collection makes a pretty summer show. Some of it seems superficial, some intellectually too dry, but it is, on the whole, an entertaining exhibition, not without imagination. I just wish that something in it impressed me as much as the amount of floor space it takes up.
I suppose thirty or forty years ago people were making the same sort of reactionary smart-aleck comments about non-objective art. Here I am. in 1971, looking at The
REUE"--717-1-11"-DS Non-Objective World: 1924-1939 exhibition at the Annely Juda Fine Art Gallery in Tottenham Mews, feeling a wave of nostalgia and accepting every damn line with pleased recognition. You see, these were the avantgarde apples when 1 was trying to be with it : Klee, Miro, Pevsner, Kandinsky, Schwitters — and seventy-five more — what a show! But let's be fair — it's much more than nostalgia. The canvases didn't take up a whole wall, but they were crammed with originality and experimentation. There at Ad Reinhardt's knee it was all explained to me that . . . oh, hell, go see for yourself —they knew how to be non-objective in those days!
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