Les enfants du parody
Sir: The fifty thousand people who listened on 9 July to The Arts This Week on the Third Programme were presented by Mr Bryan Robertson with a most enthusiastic account of the Arts Council's Pop Art exhi- bition. Beginning with 'It's a tremendously worth-while exhibition' he went on to dis- cuss it in terms which may well have in- spired his listeners to hurry off to the Hay- ward Gallery.
Somewhere between Portland Place and Gower Street a funny thing must have happened to Mr Robertson, for when he re- opened the subject in your pages (19 July) he gave a very different account of the show. What had been 'tremendously worth- while' was written off in the first sentence as 'a lead balloon'. What had been 'a gener- ous cross-survey of everything that could conceivably be called pop art' turned out to have 'notable omissions'. 'A corporate feeling of non-event' was 'flooding inertly' across the scene which ten days earlier had been sustained by 'a very strong underlying delicate intellectual rationale which comes from John Russell and Suzi Gablik'. Lethargy was the mark of 'even the young- est visitor' before 'a bland art from which every possible sting had been removed'. What on 9 July had been 'enormously stimulating' was on 19 July a dead issue not worth reviving.
Mysterious! As it happens, the 'notable omissions' relate to artists who are specific- ally excluded by the terms of the show. The 'lethargy' is a subjective matter, as to which Mr Robertson's impression would be ridi- culed by those whose business it is to be at the Hayward every day. The blandness, the lack of sting, are suggestions baffling to those who on 9 July heard Mr Robertson single out Ed Kienholz as the star of the show: 'a tremendous polemicist, an extra- ordinary artist, a remarkable figure ... with a tremendous sense of moral outrage at the vileness of human beings'. Kienholz's Port- able War Memorial is still at the Hayward Gallery, but his sting must have been drawn, somewhere along the road, since this 'tre- mendous polemicist' did not rate a mention in your columns.
What did rate a mention in your columns was anything in the broad spectrum of Mr Robertson's interests that would build up an atmosphere of lethargy, morbidity, incom- pleteness. and failure. 'Fascist rough stuff', sadomasochism and 'the punishment rou- tine' may preoccupy Mr Robertson, but they have nothing to do with pop art. The fact that the F-III was withdrawn from the show counted more for Mr Robertson, on 19 July, than the facts about what is in the show: another and later 86 ft painting by the same artist which has not before been seen in Europe and was described by another critic as 'a major work worth cross- ing half London to see—a huge blissful mural by Rosenquist'. (So much for the 'punishment routine'!) The public has the right to ask of a critic that he should be capable of saying the same thing for two days together. Either Mr Robertson misled his listeners by en- couraging them to waste time and money on a dead issue that is being commemorated by a lead balloon, or he mislead his readers by giving them a travestied account of some- thing that is 'enormously stimulating' and `tremendously worth-while'. Which was it? And why was it?
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