Trouble at the Tate
By M. H.MIDDLF,TON THE iconoclast who registered his protest against the main award in the International Sculpture Competition at the Tate Gallery last Sunday comes of an ancient lineage. But whereas theology provided the excuse in the eighth century, and the Vendome Column came down in a cloud of politics, the destruction of Reg Butler's maquette for the " Unknown Political Prisoner " was a personal matter between individual and artist. It serves forcibly, however, to emphasise yet again the fact that is central to the whole problem of the arts today—the completeness of the divorce between popular and specialised taste, and the violent, if negative, passion that is aroused in the average man by his furious conviction that, in some obscure way, he is ".being got at."
There are still those, bless them, who believe that abstract art is part of international Communism's plan to disrupt the West. Without subscribing to such frivolous fancies, one may legitimately query the contemporary artist's preoccupation with aesthetic essences when it is conducted, not for private ends, but in public. It would be romantic self-delusion to imagine that any one of the twelve prizewinning works in the Institute of Contemporary Arts' competition will convey, explicitly, to the mass of the public those high ideals of personal liberty which were the theme of the competition. It is true that perhaps a dozen of the world's leading sculptors did not com- pete, but nevertheless, when a world-wide response of this magnitude-3,500 sculptors from fifty-seven countries—ends in so complete a breakdown of communication, one may well ask whether the visual arts, in their present stage of specialisa- tion, are capable of memorial and monumental statements that relate in any degree to the needs of society ?
That sounds a fine rounded question. But we must in honesty admit that society has no need of public painting and sculpture. Exceptionally, an act of violence takes place. More frequently, perhaps, it is imagined. But how often is any ideal substitute for the thing destroyed consciously desired ? Western civilisa- tion is built upon the verbalisation of thought, 'and contem- porary man sees through his eyes only known concepts that take their place in established trains of thought. It is unlikely that the mass of the public were at any time able to grasp, or to obtain pleasure from, those elements in painting and sculpture which were the most vital concern of the artist himself. In a less specialised and more humanist art, however, there were secondary tit-bits served up at the same time which were more to the public taste and, indeed, were often con- fused by the, public with the main dish. (It is the power to operate at any number of different levels, and to fulfil the needs of many generations, which makes a work of art great.) To such an extent has modern man's ability to receive direct visual stimulus through his eye atrophied, however, that pro- longed contemplation is a labour for which he has little desire.
There is a good deal of trash in the exhibition at the Tate. Courtesy demands that each country be represented, and there is no doubt that many of the British " runners-up," shown at the New Burlington Galleries some weeks ago, were preferable to many of the things now at the Tate. Probably a similar stricture could come from a number of capital cities. What does emerge very clearly from the present exhibition is the extent to which an international style has now become, not merely a possibility, but a reality throughout the Western world. From Iceland. Austria, the U.S.A. and Italy, Tutkey and South America have come the same menacing shapes, the same sharp, tearing skeins of metal. The symbol of political oppression that comes most readily to the artist's mind today, i it seems, is the figure of a man enmeshed in barbed wire, imprisoned behind the barricades, caged between blank walls or high metal grilles, pierced by jagged lances and racked on obscure torture-machines like nightmare Iron Maidens. " It's ugly," they say. thinking of the relaxed lassitude and grace of Michelangelo's dying slave. But the mechanised brutality of the twentieth century is uglier. The need for universality 4nd anonymity in the theme has led, in many of the examples, to the disappearance of the prisoner himself : his presence is implied or remembered— as in the French work where a hole in the shape of a man has been cut from a massive angled piece of stone, or in Butler's conception where only three " watchers " are left. This preoccupation with empty space is probably exercising the minds of the majority of creative sculptors in the world today. Perhaps we need a new word for their constructions. The word sculpture is associated in the public mind with solid mass, and hostility is aroused by its association with aims that have hitherto been regarded as the prerogative of architecture —the manipulation of space itself. (It is not without significance that both Butler and Chadwick, of the three British prize- winners, were trained as architects.) The move to " open up " sculpture began after the two move- ments of cubism and surrealism, and two individual artists, Bran- cusi and Giacometti, had between them served to break up the Renaissance conception of form and associative content. "Truth to material " was the cry, and to the sculptoes traditional range of materials were added concrete, strip and sheet metal, plastics and glass, string, wire and indeed anything which seemed likely to prove useful. The Russian constructivists used these new materials in their " open " sculptures and stage designs, to create virtual volumes, outlined only by line or transparent planes. Gonzalez and Picasso employed wrought iron in their semi-abstract figures. Alexander Calder reached the end of the road with his mobiles which, moving arbitrarily through the air, traced out in the memory of the beholder non-existent volumes in space in complex permutations.
This short historical detour is necessary in order to make it plain that the work at the Tate is not, technically speaking, an innovation. The usual time-lag of twenty years or so, during which innovation becomes common currency, has been operating. In 1905 the Fauvist movement was born; in 1926 Matthew Smith held his first exhibition. In 1914 Mondrian first reached the point of geometrical abstraction; in 1934 Ben Nicholson followed suit. In 1929 Picasso made his first wrought-iron constructions; in 1949 Reg Butler held his first exhibition. It would be tedious to elaborate. The point is simply that sculpture has now set itself a certain set of prob- lems, and will not be deflected from its course until it feels those problems have been fully solved. Furthermore, sculpture, by its very nature, moves more slowly than painting—it is more cumbersome, deliberate and conservative. There is a world trend towards a reintegration of those values and elements isolated during the past fifty years. New syntheses are being attempted, in which there is once again a measure of balance between form and content, formalisation and the objective reality of the phenomenal world. Sculpture, too, is slowly feeling its way towards that ideal point where architecture, science and industrial design meet the humanities, but it will not reach it for some little time yet.
So the question remains unanswered. There are some admirable abstract sculptures, constructions, artefacts—call them what you will—at the Tate, but can they seriously be considered suitable for public monuments ? There is invok- ing unreal about the thought. To fulfil its function of nvok- ing remembrance, such a monument must be placed where men will pass it and see it in great numbers, but the fabric of our cities, so often a legacy of the greed and cupidity of the industrial revolution, simply will not absorb such startlingly new images. Can one imagine an immense Pevsner construc- tion in Hyde Park that did not become a climbing-ground for children ? Such an abstract public " toy " exists in at least one Scandinavian park, but it has nothing to do with the Unknown Political Prisoner. It is surely important that such monuments should not go the way of the American war memorial that was used to stage dog-shows.
Previous page
