ARTS
Exhibitions
The brick-man cometh
Giles Auty
Carl Andre (Anthony d'Offay, till 15 April) John Stezaker (Salama-Caro, till 28 April) Trevor Bell (New Art Centre, till 8 April) Sometimes I can't help wondering what has become of certain avant-garde heroes of yesteryear. Have one or two of them grown bored, understandably, with paint- ing monochrome canvases and decided to grow onions, instead, in Billericay? Being in the front coach of the train tugging art into the future must prove a strain and occasion a few nervous glances back down the corridor.. This week, looking through the gallery listings, I managed to find three excellent examples of the aforesaid, in- teresting breed: Carl Andre, president of the sculptural flat-earth society and noto- rious principally as previous owner of firebricks bought by the Tate Gallery 17 years ago; John Stezaker, who, at that precise juncture, was about as far out of sight as one can go, in art terms, without becoming extra-terrestrial; and Trevor Bell, who as a young abstract expressionist painter gained prizes, exhibitions and fame way back in the Fifties.
What is the secret ingredient of avant- garde fame and how does one manage to keep hold of it? Andre and Bell, who are in their middle to late fifties now, have just kept on through subsequent vicissitudes of fashion, whereas Stezaker, who is barely 40, has changed artistic tack since, as a young conceptualist, he staggered the art world with his prosaic profundities: 'Thus both an explicit definition of art in terms of the argument and an explicit account of the art-status of the argument is availed. The consequences of so dealing with art and its entities is the possiblity of a multiplicity of art-values (rather than the strict art/not art dichotomy). Some • possibilities in this realm have already been alluded....' Ste- zaker had already entered the Tate Gal- lery's collections while still in his twenties, whereas Bell and Andre had to wait until their early to mid-thirties for this seal of art world recognition.
Carl Andre's exhibition of half a dozen 'Night Window', 1988, by John Stezaker simple arrangements of brick, block and sheet steel in rectilinear patterns is on view now at Anthony d'Offay (9 & 23 Dering Street, WI). With his biker's beard and homely bib-and-brace outfits, Andre and his art — seem like relics of a bygone age. His costly sculptures are popular now only in West Germany, where fear of any revival of 'fascist' values in art keeps would-be intellectuals in a state of perma- nent blue funk.
I lost touch with Stezaker's career some- where in the late Seventies, so rely on other informants for news of his next sally into fame, which occurred some six years ago at the Lisson Gallery. Thereat, the well-known collector C. Saatchi ordered the entire show but this was rejected two weeks later by D. Saatchi, the other half of the bulk-buying artnership, on the grounds that its context was sexist. As this could never have been said of Stezaker's earlier, impenetrable' prose tracts, some major avant-gardist convulsion must have hap- pened to him in the meantime, the con- sequences of which were clearly costly. The artist has kept his head down since that trauma but re-emerges from hiberna- tion next week into the spring sunshine of Salama-Caro Gallery (5/6 Cork Street, W1). The new work looks genuinely extra- terrestrial at last and has a real appear- ance, moreover, of space-age technology. Whether human agency had a hand in a series of jet-black rhomboids featuring silk-screen simulations of tree-bark, con- crete blocks and spheres with added motor tyre, galleon and dyspeptic eagle, I cannot say. I am afraid a catalogue introduction by Ian Jeffrey entitled 'A Beginning and End of Time' left me in an interstellar head- warp and reminded me of the verbal thick- ets so popular in art writing 20 years ago.
I first met Trevor Bell, now showing at New Art Centre (41 Sloane Street, SW1), when he was the enfant terrible of the St Ives School and about to take up his prestigious Gregory Fellowship. Though living in Florida now, he is still painting fresh, Cornish abstracts 30 years later. I am glad those charmed days by the sea also made some impression on him.
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