Hayward Gallery
Identity problem
John Spurting on the brutal character of the South Bank gallery
There is not much sense of power in Art and Power at the Hayward, unless it is the power of this gallery — like Procrustes fit- ting his guests to a bed by stretching or lop- ping them — to impose its own brutal character on every exhibition it contains. Yet perhaps this is just as it should be, since the exhibition is about totalitarian art and architecture in the Thirties. Fascists, Nazis and Soviets all in their several ways tried to stamp out Modernism, while the Hayward, however awkward and unlovely — thuggish, sullen child of beautiful and Clever parents — derives from Modernism. Thus the pre-war loser in the battle for artistic hegemony asserts its post-war tri- umph, parading the trophies of fallen Power and its subservient artists.
However, Modernism is itself these days a fallen idol and the four post-modernist selectors of Art and Power point out in their catalogue introduction that: 'Totalitarian culture embraced some aspects of the Modernist movement while it anathema- tised others. Modernism in its turn had authoritarian tendencies which may have provided a fertile seedbed for the subse- quent development of totalitarian art and architecture.'
The very title of the exhibition comes from a book published in 1934 by Gottfried Benn, who sympathised for a time with the Nazis, yet defended Modernism and was backed at least temporarily by Goebbels and Himmier. The Nazis, indeed, were torn between their admiration and need for modern technology and their desire to attach to themselves distorted images of the past — the grandeur that was Rome, the glory that was Greece and the folk that Was Germany. From the other side, Mies van der Rohe and Gropius, those apostles of Modernism, both submitted competition Projects in 1933 for the Nazis' new Reichs- hank in Berlin.
Muddy waters and soft ground encircle this 23rd Council of Europe exhibition and It Is not surprising that Britain, the one European country that fought against and never succumbed to totalitarianism, was chosen to stage it. Fifty years after the crushing of Fascism/Nazism and barely six since the collapse of the Soviet empire, we cannot be at all confident that all ghosts are laid, all monsters scotched.
It is wonderful to see how carefully the organisers of Art and Power have sown strong anti-power images by humane, avant-garde artists such as Beckmann, Bar- lach, Kollwitz, Miro, Picasso and Gonzalez amongst the Hitler nudes, the Socialist- Realist haygirls, the Aryan athletes and the grandiose designs for domineering build- ings and cities, so that the older generation should not be offended nor the younger generation pick up any wrong ideas. Power, in other words — the power of the still ner- vous heirs to the winners — is being exer- cised discreetly and dispassionately, but firmly and pedagogically, in order to docu- ment the attempt by totalitarian power to make art its tool, but by no means to let the stuff function in the theatrical, directly emotional way it was meant to. It is the Hayward Gallery that gives the game away. Nothing in this setting can quite escape looking like state propaganda, however benevolent, however committed to free- dom, fair play and the sunny side of the
argument.
Designed and built by the LCC and named after its then leader, Sir Isaac Hay-
ward, the gallery opened in 1968, that year of abortive socialist revolution. It passed next to the GLC and when that was abol- ished, in 1985, to the Arts Council, which at the same time set up a subordinate South Bank Board to run the three adja- cent concert halls. Finally, by some acci- dental/on purpose Anglo-Byzantine process, the South Bank Board rose free of its creator and took over the Hayward, together with its dependent enterprises, the National Touring Exhibitions and the Arts Council collection of post-war British art. But the Arts Council still pays: the whole Hayward caboodle is financed through the South Bank Centre on behalf of the Arts Council. Thus Henry Meyric Hughes, who has been in charge of the Hayward for the past three years, is an employee of the South Bank Centre under the cautious title `Director of Exhibitions' and works from an office in the Festival Hall.
The Hayward's main problem, apart from its looks, is its lack of space: the base- ment is a car-park, the ground floor is used for storing part of the Arts Council collec- tion (the rest being on loan to other gal- leries, on tour, or stored elsewhere in south London). There is no room for educational or catering facilities, scarcely any office space and, worst of all, no storage for incoming and outgoing exhibitions, so that the gallery has to go dark for a month between shows, causing the public to forget its existence or at least to wonder if it hasn't meanwhile been secretly sold to a foreign bank or scheduled for demolition.
The physical problem, therefore, creates a problem of identity and, in a vicious cir- cle, causes people to wonder why it needs to exist at all. The fact that in spite of everything in its disfavour the Hayward has been the venue over the years for so many memorable and diverse shows — Matisse, Rothko, Islamic carpets, Indian art, Ameri- can Indian art, Dada and Surrealism, Pis- sarro, Dufy, Renoir, Lutyens, Piranesi, to name but a few — is no doubt largely due to Meyric Hughes's predecessor, Joanna Drew. She answered to the Arts Council in its better days but it answered also, smartly enough, to her.
In an interview in the RA magazine when he took over the Hayward, Meyric Hughes said that his 'preference and priori- ty would be for a new building'. He now pins his hopes on an expanded one, if and when the funds arrive (from the Lottery) to realise Sir Richard Rogers's project for a glass canopy over most of the concrete wasteland between the Festival Hall and Waterloo Bridge.
Meyric Hughes is even prepared now to discover some virtues in the Hayward as it stands: 'few places are as good for showing sculpture' and 'it forces us to think afresh for each show, encouraging collaborative work with artists and designers'. But there is more conviction in the way he rebuts the accusation that the Hayward lacks an iden- tity: 'What we have is a reputation, good or bad, a team, an expertise.' If he sounds a little like a general defending the absence of any real army on the grounds that a rapid reaction force is an exciting substi- tute, that is perhaps modern Britain as we know it.
At any rate, financially squeezed, shot- gun-married to three concert halls, lacking a permanent collection of desirable master- pieces as reciprocal loans for foreign favours, his options are few: 'We have to live by our wits — we can't lend a Matisse in return.' He believes, therefore, that major exhibitions at the Hayward frequent- ly need to be based on concepts and con- ceptual installations, that they should ask questions rather than answer them, should re-assess old ideas in the light of contem- porary ones — as the recent Landscapes from France did by bringing Salon and Impressionist paintings together again and, as in Art and Power, 'deal with issues that are hot'. The prospects for 1996 are Art and Film, Claes Oldenburg and — part of a grand affiance with four other major London galleries — The Twentieth Century.
Meyric Hughes puts no faith in ready- made shows, which are 'expensive, as well as out of our control', so the continuing importance of the Hayward — expanded or not — as an internationally successful venue depends partly on the boldness and quality of his ideas and partly on how, in the knotty circumstances of the South Bank Centre, he plays the peculiar British ver- sion of art and power.
The current exhibition of the same name Do you think I like being treated as a number either, even though that number is "one"?' suggests that, even if he is drawn to 'hot issues', he will be as cautious in exposing them as his gallery is uncompromising.
Art and Power will be reviewed next week.