ARTS

Art

Time to see some sense

Once a year the long-standing cold war which prevails in British art breaks out into

skirmishing. Blood is spilled as cheeks and knuckles get cut to the bone. Then sudden- ly, as though by agreement, pistols are returned to holsters in good time for Christmas. The two sides revert to an habitual stand-off accompanied merely by dark looks and feelings of frustration. The Turner Prize is over for another year.

At first the parading of the prize was looked on as a possible cause for popular celebration: the Tate's imperial court and palace guard marched past in their finery, challenged only by sporadic sniper fire fied populace. Meanwhile the pursuit of artistic ends which are too factional and narrow has also estranged a large section of the intelligent press. It is from this unpopular and insecure position that the Tate's management hopes to raise £100 million for the founding in London of a new museum of international modernist art — a yet more impregnable citadel from which to impose its artistic will on the nation even more completely.

Perhaps the most valuable aspect of the Turner Prize is that it demonstrates once a year to the people of this country the abso- lutely unfettered influence enjoyed by an existing oligarchy. But the prize is, in fact, merely the exposed tip of an iceberg; what lurks below the water-line is greyer, vaster and more threatening to the future of art than the uninitiated might suppose. To cite merely one recent and seemingly insignifi-

Ataud (Nina Muerta), by Antonio L6pez Garcia

cant instance, I was due to speak on 20 November in a public debate on the Turn- er Prize which took place at the Tate Gallery. At the last minute I was `disinvit- ed' by letter, the attempted excuse given me turning out to be economical with the truth. Why was it so necessary to suppress open debate? Is this a typical example of the paranoia of those who prefer power to reason? The Turner Prize itself masquer- ades similarly as an open event. Each year a British art critic is one of the five mem- bers of a decision-taking jury, yet it is plain that, if he had lived and continued to write his excellent column for the Sunday Tele- graph, the late Peter Fuller would never have been asked to serve. Nor more will I, of course. But is this simply because of the modern art establishment's known antipathy towards the right- wing press? Hardly so, because my pre- decessor here at The Spectator, and Peter Fuller's suc- cessor at the Sun-

day Telegraph, served on the jury of the very first Turner Prize. How- ever, with the kind of astringent views he is expressing now, I doubt whether John McEwen would get asked today. Our artis- tic controllers cannot bear dissent.

A friend described modernists in our museum service as 'the last Darwinists, fixed still in rigid notions of progressive evolution'. The risk here is that the evolu- tionary future modernists pursue is one of their own imagining. It is as though they see the future as a reel of film which has been shot but not yet screened. The future of living art ought to be a blank book, yet our cultural overseers in bodies such as the Tate, South Bank, Arts Council, British Council and regional Arts Boards try all the time to control and direct it.

In the 20 years in which I have been writing about art, the kind of views expressed in this column have not been represented at any level of genuine author- ity in British art. Is this because such views are so bizarre, unclear or dangerous or merely because they conflict radically with an all-pervading modernist orthodoxy? It is worth reflecting here that the officers of all

the bodies I have mentioned are employed to serve the interests of the nation at large. The chairman of the Arts Council, Lord Palumbo, was quoted recently (Independent on Sunday, 28 November, 1993) as com- mending the director of the Tate Gallery, Nicholas Serota, for 'his unflinching com- mitment to the shock of the new'. Here the linchpins of two major national institutions make their personal allegiances abundantly clear. But who, in the meantime, is similar- ly safeguarding the values of continuity and the great traditions in terms of living art? 1, for one, have an equally unflinching dedi- cation to the value of these, a devotion which is shared widely within and without the world of art. But views of my kind enjoy no such high-level representation. While it is easy to point out the major pub- licly subsidised venues in London which exist largely to serve Palumbo's and Sero- ta's preferences in terms of living art — the Tate, Hayward, Serpentine, Whitechapel and ICA — is there even one such sub- sidised space in London, or anywhere else in Britain for that matter, devoted to living art from the more traditional end of the spectrum? The answer is a resounding 'no'. It would be disingenuous to quote here the example of the non-funded Royal Acade- mys as Serota has done in answer to such criticism in the past. The Summer Eichkii- tion aside, the Royal Academy's exhibitions programme is firmly in the hands of Sero- ta'4 spiritual ally, Norman Rosenthal. What is clear from this is that if one accorded ecinal value in art to continuity and novelty — and there is no valid philosophical or artistic argument to do otherwise — then thd present imbalance of opportunity is one of 'staggering proportions. It is one which hag come about as a direct consequence of thel domination by modernists of virtually all significant posts, outside journalism, in living art in Britain. Indeed, it is by this means that modernists have come to set themselves up as our sole arbiters of artis- tic values.

What practical remedies exist? Before we dream of setting up at huge cost a museum in London of international mod- ernist art, we should,take simple first steps to 'set our domestic house in order. The first money we spend should be devoted to correcting part of this huge imbalance. One

of (London's major subsidised spaces ought to be turned over forthwith to showing the

work of the best artists from this country anFl elsewhere whose work celebrates and continues, rather than denies or derides the great continuous traditions of art. A feast

of excellent work awaits showing to a pub- lic,i which has been starved of such fare by those who claim to know what is good, but who make formal radicalism more or less

their sole determining criterion of quality.

An ideal choice for a first exhibition at such a new, re-aligned venue might be someone regarded widely as Spain's lead- ing living artist, the painter and sculptor Antonio Lopez Garcia, subject last year of a monumental museum retrospective in Madrid, but — typically — almost unknown in Britain and unseen here since his wonderful exhibition in 1986 at the Marlborough Galleries. But the new gallery's programme should concentrate strongly, too, on that great wealth of talent which exists in Britain among more tradi- tional artists, most of whom remain unknown and unseen at present outside our system of commercial galleries. Man- agement of the re-aligned gallery would need to be by a team dedicated openly to the ideals expressed in such work, whether in painting or sculpture. Since museums of modern art are tacitly if not openly com- mitted to modernist ideals, the new venue, the first of its kind, should have a fresh and distinguishing name: a Centre of Living Art; perhaps, yielding a convenient acronym which might appeal to a possible sponsor. With the kind of exhibitions I advocate, attendance figures would not be likely to present a problem. What would be shown would have at least an equal claim to being the significant art of our time, and if more people preferred to patronise this than such Hayward Gallery exhibitions of recent vintage as The British Art Show 1990, Gravity and Grace or Julian Opie, who could possibly object? As a further revolu- tionary gesture by the new centre, all exhi- bition catalogues and press releases issued would address artists' ideas through the use of reasoned argument and intelligible prose. However, existing publicly-funded galleries would be welcome to organise unpopular exhibitions and issue brain- numbing catalogues just as at present.

Following the likely success of the first Cola — Centre of Living Art — a similar venue could be opened in a major Scottish city, followed by others throughout the country or as dictated by genuine public demand. If those who ran our halls of living art were sufficiently far-sighted, liberal or open to suggestion, such a two-tier system would be unnecessary, of course. But, as an annual event such as the Turner Prize makes only too plain, what outsiders think of either the prize or their system worries them not at all. Modernists pride them- selves on a love of radicalism and experi- ment. Surely my proposal offers them both? But how would lovers of a purely cosmetic radicalism in art learn to cope with the real thing?

`How many times? "People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones"!'