ART
Innocence and Experience
Two shows in London make extraordinary, statements about the way people react to life right now. Two figurative artists: Peter Blake at the • Robert Fraser Gallery and Brett Whiteley recently at the New London. Blake is several things at once: a limner of great delicacy, re- [.. straint and imaginative insight of objects, people, e. situations and events that he feels either affec-, tionately or sympathetically involved with. Here he combines the strength of academic painting at its best, through many a bravura throw-away touch, with an unorthodox sense of the pressure and mood of stillness, of a person plucked out of the time-flux but still grinning; or' somebody else staring at you, the spectator, with no awareness of self as an identity—as if, a. person were reduced to a 'specimen.' In this admittedly complicated manner Blake's work is lit once warm, through the beautiful paint and his understanding of the drama of edges (of cuffs, lapels, collars, or an entire contour), and cool in the slightly dream-like trance which envelops his 0 painting and drawing. How he has ever been linked with pop-art beats me: only Indiana, Oldenburg and Warhol fill that bill: Blake simply paints what he enjoys, and his pleasure is shared by a lot of other people. There is a camp instinct occasionally at work, but this is marginal, mildly jokey, and best left. Blake works slowly (he should be relieved from teaching even if he's a good mentor: this talent needs all the energy that can sustain it) and his paintings are treasur- able. They are superbly amoral, in passing.
Whiteley has progressed from 'nudes' in bath- rooms to less agreeable fantasies around the idea of naked victims of murder and assault. His relish for the naked rather than the nude has always been clear, so have his splendid gifts, but earlier abstract paintings which commented on nakedness, sexuality, and the way all this could be absorbed within an explicit, though abstracted, context—this earlier work had far more inven- tion, imaginative integrity, and depth of thought; The new paintings touch perilously on the 'series concept of Nolan--which can be marvellous or can look like barnstorming or a rather kinky course of lectures, in the Victorian era, illustrated by hand-touched magic lantern slides. On the whole, as Mae West said (or should have done), this kind of thing should be left to Larry Rivers. As it is, traces of .that academic hipster are occasionally invoked, complete with words and objects on the paint (but that's Rauschetr berg), and an astute underscoring of the shriek' ingly obvious point by expressive references to Bacon. Whiteley is a very good artist; some of these new paintings are impressive; the show WO practically a sell-out, but it all seems a waste Of 3 talent and geared towards sensationalism. If You want real ferocity and terror, and great show manship and recognition of that final unspeak able act embalmed in a new, weird beauty, then
listen to Artaud's final recorded testameot* snarling and roaring, made just before he died. Whiteley's sense of the macabre is much Ivo; sophisticated, and the frisson is anyway best I to literature.
BRYAN ROBERTS
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