Back to the drawing board

Emma Tennant

THE ECLIPSE OF ART by Julian Spalding Layzell, £12.95, pp. 126, ISBN 3791328816 Julian Spalding has spent more than 30 years as a gallery curator and director. He has come to feel that art has lost its way and is now benighted, as by the total eclipse of the sun which he experienced in Cornwall in 1999. He describes how the darkening of the sky, the silence of the birds, and the sudden drop in temperature preceded the moment of total darkness, which passed over 'like the shadow of a huge bird of prey'. He uses this metaphor as the theme of his book, with chapters headed The Eclipse of Language', 'The Eclipse of Learning'. 'The Eclipse of Content', and 'The Eclipse of Judgement'. Then, as on that memorable summer day in 1999, a thin sliver of light appears on the horizon. The last chapter is called 'The Passing of the Eclipse'.

Like a good man or a beautiful view, a work of art is harder to describe than to recognise. Spalding quotes the great Professor Gombrich. who said that there was no such thing as art, only artists. Which begs the question, what makes an artist? Spalding says that they are those who 'celebrate our existence by making us more conscious of it'. He also says, rightly, that art is a language and that it must have something to say. A mere collection of objects, as presented by the enormously influential Joseph Beuys, is not a work of art. I would call it a Cabinet of Curiosities, like those collected by 17th-century travellers. Yet Beuys is given four galleries at Tate Modern; more than any other artist.

In his chapter on 'The Eclipse of Learning', Spalding describes how difficult it is nowadays for a young artist to find the right language with which to express his or her ideas. The loss of the old atelier system is noted, but even worse, and not mentioned, is the disappearance of the craft ladder which enabled aspiring artists of the past to realise their dreams. Hogarth engraved silver; Turner coloured lithographs: David Roberts painted stage scenery; Renoir decorated china. None of these possibilities is open to today's 'fine art' students. They are under great pres sure to be 'creative' and to 'express themselves', but they have not been taught the skills with which to do so. as it is no longer thought necessary to learn to draw, paint, carve or model. The divorce between art and craft is complete. No wonder there is so much angst and misery at these places. Spalding underestimates the depths of the slough of despond into which our art schools have sunk. As Professor Anthony Starr wrote, 'Introspection is the accomplice of self-distrust and the enemy of action.' Yet introspection is encouraged as never before.

The author rightly draws attention to the deadly seriousness of the contemporary art scene. There is no laughter in the gallery, even when the Tate pays £22,300 of our money — yours and mine — for a tin of the excrement of the late Italian 'artist' Piero Manzoni, 'canned and sealed according to industrial standards'. If you were sent such a tin through the post, you'd probably call the police, but once in the gallery it becomes, as if by magic, 'art'.

Art spoofs are nothing new. Back in 1883, a Parisian joker called Alphonse Allais exhibited a blank sheet of paper entitled 'Anaemic Young Girls at their First Communion in the Snow'. Spalding tells the story of the bestknown of all such pranks.

In 1917 Marcel Duchamp, then an unsuccessful French painter, joined a group of American artists who had formed a Society of Independents in New York, along the lines of the Paris Salon des Refuses. Duchamp bought an ordinary urinal from a builder's merchant, signed it with the assumed name R. Mutt, titled it 'Fountain', and submitted it to the committee. They rejected the piece, even though one of the directors, William Arensberg (who was a friend of Duchamp and in on the joke), defended 'Fountain', saying that 'a lovely form has been revealed, freed from its functional purpose, therefore a man clearly has made an aesthetic contribution'. After an enjoyable row, the urinal was returned to the builder's merchant. It may still be in service in an unknown bathroom in New York.

David Hockney, as always hitting the nail bang on the head, has said that 'it is a rather un-Duchampian thing to do to redo a Duchamp'. Nonetheless, Duchamp in 1964 commissioned eight replicas of his original urinal and in 2000, to celebrate the Millennium, the Tate bought one of them for a sum thought to be just under a million pounds. This time the joke is definitely on the tax-payer.

Duchamp has a lot to answer for. He wrote, 'Pm afraid I'm an agnostic in art. I just do not believe in it with all its mystical trimmings.' Nevertheless, the critic Robert Hughes thought that by the late 1960s Duchamp had the stature, among younger artists, that Picasso had enjoyed in the 1940s. He is the godfather of many an unmade bed and found object, not to mention a fair few rotting carcasses.

A cow and calf are cut in half And placed in separate cases. To call it art, however smart, Casts doubt on art's whole basis.

One good thing about most of this stuff is that it is impossible to conserve, and has as much built-in obsolescence as a contemporary kitchen gadget. Not so much 'ars longa, vita brevis' as 'vita brevis, ars brevissima'.

Art jokes went on until the second world war. It is, perhaps, no coincidence that Spalding dates the onset of the eclipse of art to 19 July 1937, the date of the opening of Hitler's Degenerate Art exhibition in Munich. In the summer of 1929, Lady Eleanor Smith wrote, in her Sunday Dispatch column, about a forthcoming exhibition:

BRUNO HAT. What will he almost a cocktail party is the Private View of the exhibition of paintings by Bruno Hat .... Bruno Hat is a painter of German extraction, and his work is mainly of the abstract type, seemingly derivative from Picasso and Chirico.

On 24 July, the day after the show, the Daily Express ran the story under the headline 'Amazing Hoax on Art Experts. Unknown Artist with False Moustache' and included a photograph of Hat, who was in fact a heavily disguised Tom Mitforci. The pictures were accompanied by a leaflet — Approach to Hat — described as 'a pompous parody of a highbrow artistic eulogy'. It is thought to have been written by Evelyn Waugh. Where are you now, Mr Waugh, when we need you? In the benighted 21st century, under the shadow of the eclipse, the psychobabble of the art world has gone way beyond parody.

There are, it is true, a few slivers of light appearing on the far horizon. Students are beginning to complain about the lack of instruction in art schools, and to see figurative work as a serious option, encouraged by competitions like the BP Portrait Award. The new Catalan director of Tate Modern, Vicente Todoli, has even said that he would welcome a debate about where art is going. Spalding's book makes many interesting points, and deserves to be widely read.

It is a long time since St Augustine wrote that a work of art should have harmony, integrity and radiance, but not so long since J. M. W. Turner said of art, 'It's a rummy business.' And never rummier than now.