Art
Hanging matter
Evan Anthony
Did you know that there is a college in upstate New York that offers a course in picture hanging? I learned of it the other day from a student who actually took it; and I had the smile wiped off my face and saw its usefulness established almost immediately afterwards when I visited the Grabowski Gallery, 84 Sloane Avenue, prior to the press view, and saw Martin Fuller in the throesof his 'hanging'. Four walls do not a home make, necessarily, nor a gallery, for that matter. The Grabowski has good hanging space, but Fuller was having a difficult time hammering nails into the walls. It isn't the gallery's fault, though, that his canvases are occasionally askew, or warped, or that large canvases were being squeezed, like the feet of Cinderella's sisters, into spaces obviously too small.
There was an air of tattiness that, I'm afraid, the pictures themselves did not manage to dispel. They are crayon drawings and paintings. The paintings have that blurred image effect, some specifically streaked, to emphasise that effect, thus giving you the option to consider them odd, interesting, tentative — or blurred and streaked. The crayon drawings look like busy notebook sketches for paintings to come, some looking like sub-Kandinsky doodlings.
A happier preoccupation is Tom Phillips's with art gamesmanship. As though it weren't enough to produce one of the most viewable exhibitions of pictures and ideas to be shown at the Marlborough,
Phillips now has readied for inspection the result of a challenge
he accepted from himself. 'A Humument' is on show at the ICA, and you should make it your
business to see it. This is a tour de force exhibition of the pages of a Victorian novel, a three-penny job
(so we're told) which Phillips has metamorphosed into a heady collection of paintings and text.
He has used individual pages as the basis for designs, pictures, poems, essays, and story telling, in a structure so elaborate and gim micky that it is all the more remarkable that he has succeeded so well in producing one of the freshest and most original pieces of art-literary work you are likely to see. No one would claim that Edward Wakeford was a strikingly original painter, but in a merhorial exhibition at the Fieldborne Galleries, St John's Wood, it is easy to see that he was one of the most exuberant. I first met him ifter a very brief mention of his work at a Royal Academy Show. His manner was such that you could not think of him as anything but a man who loved his work. It is not mere sentimentality that now impels me to echo the feelings I had about his work when I first saw his paintings at the RA; they are witty, happy, exciting pictures, with an increasing appeal even after the initial impact of the bright dabs of colour lines has been absorbed.
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