MODERN ART chronicles a life-long rivalry between two mavericks of the London art world instigated by the rebellious art critic Peter Fuller, as he cuts his path from the swinging sixties through the collapse of modern art in Thatcher-era Britain, escalating to a crescendo that reveals the purpose of beauty and the preciousness of life. This Award Winning screenplay was adapted from Peter’s writings by his son.In September 2020 MODERN ART won Best Adapted Screenplay at Burbank International Film Festival - an incredible honor to have Shane Black one of the most successful screenwriters of all time, present me with this award:
As well as Best Screenplay Award at Bristol Independent Film Festival - 1st Place at Page Turner Screenplay Awards: Adaptation and selected to participate in ScreenCraft Drama, Script Summit, and Scriptation Showcase. These new wins add to our list of 25 competition placements so far this year, with the majority being Finalist or higher. See the full list here: MODERN ART
Where Was The Art Of The Seventies?
by Peter Fuller, 1980
Future art historians will look back on the 1970s as the time when modernism breathed its last. Two experiences I had in the closing weeks of the decade underline this. The first was my visit to the Post- Impressionist exhibition at the Royal Academy. This made me recall how ‘modern art’ arrived belatedly in Britain when Roger Fry organized his famous exhibition, ‘Manet and the Post-Impressionists’ at the Grafton Gallery in 1910. Historically, Post-Impressionism was the ‘moment of becoming’ of modernism. But for me it was also that in a more personal sense. As an adolescent, I first became interested in modern art through reproductions of Post-Impressionist paintings. At Burlington House I found that, unlike myself, my first loves had not begun to age and wilt. I felt exhilarated. How good the Cezannes, Van Goghs, and Gauguins looked — especially that great Gauguin, Contesbarbares, which glows and beckons from the depths of its mysterious purple suffusions. I felt again all the excitement of my first discovery of the painting of that moment when modernism first discovered itself. I was overwhelmed by a sense of promise.
But I also found myself wondering. The Post-Impressionists did not share a common ‘style’, nor did they see themselves as belonging to a coherent movement. Even so, the best works in the exhibition had something significant in common. I tried to define what it was. As opposed to the official or salon artists of their day, I thought, these painters were asserting the right to imagine the world other than the way it was, or, as Roger Fry himself put it, they ‘do not seek to give what can, after all, be but a pale reflex of actual appearance, but to arouse the conviction of a new and definite reality.’
The promise with which a Cezanne, Gauguin, or Van Gogh is saturated springs from apparently technical, formal, or ‘aesthetic’ factors : the way in which colours are combined, or the material reworking of the picture space. For example, in the exhibition there is a magnificent late Cezanne — one of those in which he begins to offer a new view of man in nature. But Cezanne only realized this vision through the way in which he refused orthodox perspective, broke up the traditional picture space, and re-ordered it into an elaborate structuring of coloured planes. I am not, of course, saying that the formal or plastic qualities of a Cezanne are the only ones that count. Rather, in this Cezanne, content has become form. It makes no sense to separate the two.
Paul Cezanne
Cezanne seemed to exemplify what I think Marcuse meant when he wrote that the critical function of art, its contribution to the struggle for liberation, resided solely in aesthetic form. ‘The truth of art,’ Marcuse declared, ‘lies in its power to break the monopoly of established reality (i.e. of those who established it) to define what is real.’ For Marcuse, ‘The autonomy of art contains the categorical imperative : “things must change”.’ I am sure that it is because he expressed this imperative through the materiality of his painted forms that Cezanne exults me.
And now for the second of my fin de decade experiences. In December, I was invited to sit on a panel at an Artists’ Union meeting. Afterwards, in the pub, I found myself surrounded by conceptual artists, ‘political’ artists, and someone who kept on about art practice and the ‘new media’. Like myself, they were almost all of the left : but I could not help feeling intense discomfort. This was accentuated when a man wearing a hat and an ear-ring (presumably in homage to that low charlatan, Joseph Beuys) handed me a copy of his new ‘avant-garde’ magazine, P.S. I opened it. The lead article was head-lined, ‘Mutation through Auto Surgery’. It recounted the true story of an unfortunate man who, troubled by his sexual drives, had cut open his own belly with surgical instruments and almost succeeded in excising his adrenal glands.
The P.S. article was clarifying. It vividly demonstrated how the great promise in the origins of modernism had reduced itself to the pornography of despair. It made me recall how, over the last ten years as an art critic, I have been invited to attend to all manner of desperate phenomena ranging from a man seated in a bath of bull’s blood, to used sanitary towels, amateurish philosophic speculation, stretched gin bottles, an infant’s soiled nappy liners, brick stacks, and grey monochromes — not to mention expanses of unworked pigment and matter posing as painting or sculpture respectively — and to consider all this as ‘Art’. Whether I accepted such invitations, or refused them, the end result was the same : I was called a negative critic. But that P. S. article confirmed my feelings about the correlation between formlessness and hopelessness. The gross reduction and widespread renunciation of the expressive, material possibilities of painting, sculpture and drawing by many late modernist artists has involved the loss of the potentiality for aesthetic transformation which these media afford. To quote from Marcuse once more: ‘Renunciation of the aesthetic form is abdication of responsibility. It deprives art of the very form in which it can create that other reality within the established one — the cosmos of hope.’
I began writing about art as the 1960s were running out. It seemed then that every fatuous dilettante who had been thrown into prominence during the previous ten years was being deified in full-scale retrospectives or elaborate survey exhibitions in the major art institutions. At this time, the Tate gave retrospectives to Lichtenstein, Hamilton who went on to paint flower pictures besmirched with turds and Andrex toilet tissue because, he said, he had tried everything else — minimalism, Oldenburg and Warhol. At the Hayward I saw Caro, kinetics, *Pop Art Redefined’, Riley, i.e. ‘Op’ art, and Stella retrospectives. At the Whitechapel, Hockney, then the same age as I am today, was celebrated like an old master. There was ’60s sculpture at the ICA, and in Bristol you could have seen a full-scale retrospective for fairy painter, Peter Blake, whose ability as an artist is as concrete as his garden gnomes.
Contrast all this institutional celebration of new British and American art with what is happening, or rather not happening, ten years on. In the closing days of Norman Reid’s administration, it seemed that the Tate was becoming a hermetically sealed, brick bunker after the last stand in the battle of late modernism had been fought and lost : it was almost defunct as an exhibition space for immediately contemporary art. At the Hayward recently one has been able to see ‘Outside Art’, by amateurs, eccentrics and the insane, and a jamboree of nostalgia dredged up from the thirties. For whatever reason not one artist emerged and made any significant cultural impact within the last ten years. At the end of the seventies, the institutions have not been able to identify any current artists or tendencies they consider worth a second look, let alone worth full canonization.
But, if there was a difference in climate between the ‘art world’ of the sixties and that of the seventies there was also, sadly, a continuity in the development of late modernist art itself. I want to focus on this by looking at the work of an American artist who is symptomatic of the ’60s: Andy Warhol. Warhol, you may remember, was a sometime commercial artist who surfaced in the reaction against an exhausted abstract expressionism. Between 1962 and 1964, he produced a series of 2,000 ‘art objects’ in his ‘Factory’. I say he produced: his ‘paintings’ however were made through repeated application of commercially manufactured silk- screens to canvas. Some paint was added later — usually by Warhol’s assistants. Subject matter was pilfered from commercial media, or what I call ‘the mega-visual tradition’; e.g. transposed news photographs, glamour shots of stars, can labels, dollar bills, etc.
How did the art institutions justify giving so much attention to this sort of thing? Well, when Warhol had his retrospective at the Tate in 1971, Richard Morphet, who is still on the staff there, argued at great length that Warhol’s work was just like ‘all major art’. In the catalogue, he went on, and on and on about the fact that these works contain some paint, i.e. about what he calls ‘the reality of paint itself as a deposit on the surface’ — as if this automatically put Warhol on a par with Titian. ‘A major effect of the experience of looking at (Warhol’s) paintings is an unusually immediate awareness of the two-dimensional facts of their painted surfaces.’ We may recall that the paint was put there by assistants. This did not stop Morphet acclaiming Warhol as ‘the sensitive master of a wide variety of surface incident’.
Although Morphet recognized ‘the immensely important operation’ in Warhol’s work of ‘passivity, detachment and chance’, he yet managed to detect (or so he thought) a flickering residue of artistic imagination in the way the things were made. About one work, Marilyn Monroe’s Lips of 1962, Morphet wrote:
To depict Marilyn’s lips 168 times in 49 square feet is a more remarkable innovation than may first appear. Requiring selection, masking, processing, enlargement, transposition and application, in conjunction with decisions on canvas size, placing, colour and handling, it means that the finished painting is a complex and calculated artefact, which is not only unique, but strikingly different from any that another individual might have produced.
Thus Morphet sought to rehabilitate this vacuous poseur for the ‘High Art’ tradition. (En passant, some years later Morphet distinguished himself again in a 5,000 word article in The Burlington defending Andre’s notorious brick stack: he praised its ‘limpid clarity’ and called it a positive statement of ‘general relevance to modern society’.)
But what did left critics say about Warhol? Were they exposing the mystification that surrounded his work? With a few exceptions, unfortunately not. Let me explain. During the sixties attacks on the ‘unique’ or ‘privileged’ art object and the ‘traditional media’ (i.e. painting and sculpture) became the vogue. For example, in 1968 the French critic, Michel Ragon — I could have picked on scores of others — wrote, ‘the artist is a man of the past because he is prejudiced in favour of the unique work, of the artificial scarcity of his product so as to increase the price; he leans toward outmoded techniques.’ Ragon called the artist ‘an avatar of the artisan class’, and claimed that soon, ‘he will be the only artisan in a world that will finally have achieved its industrial revolution.’ Artists were, he felt, counter-revolutionaries and ‘antitechnologists’. The future, however, belonged to automation ‘which alone can reduce the hours of work and thus release the worker from his oppressed condition giving him access to culture and genuine leisure’. So, out with all ‘objects of aesthetic consumption’, not just the ‘armchair’ art of Matisse, but even Guernica too, and in with an art which escaped ‘from the limitations of the easel painting, from being a mere wall adornment’.
This sort of talk informed the left apologetics for Warhol. For example, in 1970, Rainer Crone, a Marxist, published a monograph describing Warhol as ‘the most important living artist in North America’ and praising — a phrase to remember — his ‘anaesthetic revolutionary practice’. Crone wrote that ‘Warhol was the first to create something more than traditional “fine art” for the edification of a few.’ He claimed that he did it ‘by combining the easel painting with a realistic prefabricated visual content, thus providing us with a new critical understanding of the easel painting.’ Crone saw Warhol’s creativity as limited to the selection of subjects but praised his ‘suppression of personalized expression’ in favour of what he calls, ‘a socially meaningful conception of the artwork’.
Thus the art institutions were saying, ‘Warhol is all right because this is art. Look, real paint! Even a dash of imagination.’ And a vociferous sector of the art-left was saying, ‘Warhol is all right because this isn’t like art at all.’ I accept neither of these arguments. Warhol was a vandal. The key renunciation he made was that of his expressive relationship to his materials, by which I mean both the paint itself and his representational conventions. The way in which his ‘paintings’ were made precluded the possibility of there being any realized, expressive correlation between the imaginative vision of the artist and the concrete working of his forms in paint. His pictures might just as well have been made by anyone else, and indeed they often were. (Ironically, given Crone’s claims, although Warhol thus shattered the possibility of aesthetic authenticity, market authenticity remained unaffected. A ‘genuine’ Warhol, whatever that means, fetches much more than a ‘fake’.) But Warhol’s real crime is that he threw away what Marcuse called the power of art to break the monopoly of established reality. In his hands, or rather out of them, painting came close to being a mere reflection of the prevailing ideology and the dominant mode of production.
His assault upon ‘personalized expression’ was not the initiation of a new revolutionary practice : he was rather the harbinger of what I set out by calling the pornography of despair. Anyone who doubts this should look, if he can stand it, at the magazine Interview, which Warhol has been publishing in the 1970s. In its chic-right punkishness, it surpasses even P. S. for sheer nastiness. But I have dwelt so long on Warhol and the responses to him because they epitomize the dual tragedy of the art of the last two decades. Mainstream, late modernist, institutional art was relinquishing its specific material practices — the skills of painting, sculpture, and drawing — and thereby, it would seem, the capacity to create imaginative, ideologically- transcendent forms. Instead of resisting and exposing this progressive impoverishment, the art-left was forever seeking rationalizations for it.
The destruction of imaginative expression is even more manifest in abstract art than in representational. Elsewhere, I have written about the heroic but largely unsuccessful attempts of the classical generation of abstract expressionists to find a new means of painterly expression, rooted in the body of the artist as subject rather than in perceived anatomy (as in Renaissance art) or in the anatomy of perception (as in, say, Impressionism). The search for a way through from Abstract Expressionism’s magnificent failure was occluded by the rise of anaesthetic dogmas and practices.
In 1962, in an essay called ‘After Abstract Expressionism’ Clement Greenberg, the most powerful critic of the sixties, wrote, ‘it has been established . . . that the irreducibility of pictorial art consists in but two constitutive conventions or norms: flatness and the delimitation of flatness.’ He held that ‘the observance of merely these two norms is enough to create an object which can be experienced as a picture.’ Thus, he claimed, ‘a stretched or tacked-up canvas already exists as a picture — though not necessarily a successful one.’ He maintained that this reduction expanded rather than contracted the possibilities of the pictorial: all sorts of ‘visual incidents and items’ that used to belong wholly to the realm of the aesthetically meaningless now lent themselves to being experienced pictorially.
Greenberg has been much criticized of late for his aesthetic conservatism. However, my quarrel with Greenberg is that he conceded far too much to a pseudo-historicist art ‘radicalism’. It is true that Greenberg always insisted on the importance of ‘aesthetic consistency’ which, he argued, showed itself ‘only in results and never in methods or means’. Nonetheless, in practice he preferred painters who were in the process of renouncing their constitutive expressive means: Pollock, who dripped paint off sticks, rather than De Kooning, and later painters who used spray guns (Olitski), stained the canvas (Frankenthaler), or poured pigment out of buckets (Louis). All these artists had a residue of aesthetic transformation of materials in their practice (as Greenberg had in his theories); but they were well on the way to the dumb automatism of Warhol and minimalism.
Indeed, Greenberg showed comparable indifference to the imaginative, expressive work of the artist. He had little respect for the latter’s creative integrity and would enter deeply into the lives and studies of his proteges effectively to instruct them as to what the next step in the art-historical process would be. If recent painting has an author or subject for Greenberg it is much more the art-historical process itself, rather than the individual artist, who emerges in his theory as the mere effect of a subject outside himself — art history. Greenberg describes, though he claims never to have prescribed, modernism as engaged upon a quest for the ‘essence’ of painting which he sees in purely physicalist terms as ‘the ineluctable flatness of the support’. I believe that his diminution of the importance of the imaginative, material process of expression was a significant factor in the reduction of art towards ideology. The difference between an Olitski and a Pink Camay soap advertisement is discernible, though hardly significant.
Greenberg believed himself to be defending the potentialities of painting as a medium: but his physicalist definition, while it allows in the category of the pictorial, cricket-pitches, table-tops, carpets and tiles, excludes the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel (which is not flat). Thus, despite all his protestations, I would insist that Greenberg helped to open the floodgates for what was to come, i.e. the dissolution of the medium within the modernist tradition. For myself, as you will see, I insist that any definition of a picture must contain reference to the fact that it is not just a thing (although of course it is necessarily that) but consists of materials, including pictorial conventions, which have been expressively worked by an imaginative human subject.
The central contradiction in Greenberg’s project was that he clung to a conception of the autonomy of aesthetic experience which was at odds with his modernist, stylistic historicizing. Many of his followers rejected the aesthetic element in his work and kept the rest. William Rubin of MOMA was behind the fabrication of Frank Stella, a fully ‘automatist’ painter, at least in the 1960s. ‘I always get into arguments with people who want to retain the “old values” in painting’, Stella told Rubin, ‘the “humanistic” values that they always find on the canvas.’ Meanwhile, Stella professed himself committed to the presumably inhuman possibilities of ‘modular repetition’, i.e. stripes. Sort of Warhol without the faces.
Meanwhile back in London, Caro was importing parallel ideas into sculpture. His ‘radical abstraction’ dehumanized the medium by rejecting all anthropomorphic reference. He also ‘dematerialized’ it by deploying steel elements, painted so they appeared weightless, as lines and surfaces in space rather than as masses or volumes. Caro abandoned traditional expressive techniques of sculpture in favour of the placement of preconstituted elements joined by welds. As Warhol had ‘picked-up’ images and techniques from the mass media, so Caro, working in three dimensions, turned to industrial production for I-beams, tank-tops, and other prefabricated components. Elsewhere, I have shown how Caro’s work belongs to the culture of the early 1960s : he emerged in 1963, the year of Harold Wilson’s ‘white-heat of the technological revolution’ speech, and of the publication of Honest to God, which attacked the anthropomorphic conception of the deity, and sought to render him ‘radically abstract’ by bringing him off his pedestal and constituting him as ‘the ground of our being’. Caro’s Warholesque ‘suppression of personalized expression’ made it hard for him to resist the ideology with which he was saturated.
Anthony Caro
But Caro is not as dumb as Warhol. I doubt whether in the long run he will be remembered as having made a serious contribution to sculpture, but his best pieces, like Orangerie, seem aesthetically successful in a way which differs from that possible through mimetic sculpture. Michael Fried is surely right to suggest that in such works Caro has so transformed his materials that they are expressive of certain experiences of being in the body — like the best abstract painting. These, then, are Caro’s ‘humanist’ rather than his ‘formalist’ sculptures. But the achievements and failures of Caro’s practice are one thing : his pedagogy is another. His influence has been disastrous upon two generations of sculptors.
Take those of Caro’s pupils and followers known as Stockwell Depot sculptors. Peter Hide, the most prominent, simply welds together chunks of matter (steel), comparing what he does with the ‘freedom’ of growth. Where then are the resistances, conventional and material, with which Hide struggles to create form? Hide has abandoned expression in theory and practice. I do not think that, in any meaningful sense, he can be said to be making sculpture at all. From Hide, it is but a short step to heaping up stuff in its natural conformations and calling that sculpture too. And that, of course, is what Barry Flanagan, another of Caro’s pupils, did throughout the 1970s in his exhibitions of sand, wood, hessian, rope, sticks, etc. in heaps, piles, stacks and bundles.
Caro has claimed it is not his fault if people take his view that ‘sculpture can be anything’ so literally as to call walking and breathing sculpture. But this is as if Greenberg was trying to claim that he could not be held responsible if people chose to call merely stretched or tacked-up canvases pictures. Caro’s reductionist position on expression, combined with his emphasis upon ‘the onward of art’, was inevitably the immediate precursor of the view that only the material existence of the sculpture as object mattered. And if, of course, sculpture and painting are just ‘stuff’ in the world, then why bother with the stuff at all? Why not walking, breathing, or cutting out your adrenal glands? Physicalists like Greenberg and Caro are inevitably fathers of the total idealists, the conceptualists who abandon the medium altogether.
Flanagan was also a prominent exhibitor in a large-scale exhibition, held at the ICA in 1969, called, ‘When Attitudes Become Form’, and sub-titled ‘Live in your head’. Interestingly, he chose to exhibit, among other things, pieces of unstretched canvas propped up against the wall with sticks. This was the coming-out party for the ‘non-art’ names of the 1970s : it was the first time I saw work by Andre, Beuys — the felt, fat, dead hares, and political parties man — Bochner, Burgin, Dibbets, Haacke, Kosuth, Serra (walls of black pitch) and so forth.
The work ranged from loosely folded pieces of cloth, to documentation about earthworks, mathematical calculations, cartography, pseudo-sociological surveys. All the tiresome ballyhoo of ‘Post-Object’, ‘Idea Art’, ‘Art Povera’ and ‘Conceptual Art’. For example, one artist had sent a plastic box by post to an undeliverable address. When this was returned he wrapped it again, and sent it to another such address. And so on, and so forth. On the wall was a sheet of paper stating that the last package he got back, ‘all registered mail receipts, and a map join with this statement to form the system of documentation that completes this work.’ This sort of untransformed, petit-bourgeois, bureaucratic practice was acclaimed as somehow ‘radical’. In the catalogue, Flarald Szeemann claimed, ‘the medium no longer seems important . . . The activity of the artist has become the dominant theme and content.’ These artists, he said, aspired ‘to freedom from the object’; while Charles Flarrison wrote of ‘a rejection of the notion of form as a specific and other identity to be imposed upon material’.
By 1970, Donald Karshan was introducing a major exhibition of conceptual art in New York with the words: In this end of the twentieth century we now know that art does indeed exist as an idea. And we know that quality exists in the thinking of the artist, not in the object he employs — if he employs an object at all. We begin to understand that painting and sculpture are simply unreal in the coming age of computers and instant travel.
Meanwhile, in a 1971 essay, ‘The Education of the Un-Artist’, Allan Kaprow praised those who ‘operate outside the pale of the art establishment, that is, in their heads or in the daily or natural domain.’ Unfortunately, however, the ‘Un-Artist’ proliferated within the art institutions as well. In Britain, conceptual art became the seventies orthodoxy, that which was proclaimed in Studio International and Arts Council galleries. A big promotion of all this was ‘The New Art’ at the Hayward in 1972. The Tate, rising to the occasion yet again, wheeled out another of its resident, anaesthetic clowns, Anne Seymour, who wrote in the catalogue that all these conceptualists had in common an ability to ‘look reality in the eye’. But, she added:
. . . reality doesn’t have to be a nude lady of uncertain age sitting on a kitchen chair. It can also be a Balinese ‘monkey dance’, a piano tuner, running seven miles a day for seven days, or seeing your feet at eye level. It can mean that the artist can work in areas in which he is interested — philosophy, photography, landscape, etc., without being tied to a host of aesthetic discomforts which he personally does not appreciate. The artist, in other words, need not bother about form or aesthetic transformation. He can just do his own thing. And that’s official. By such logic one might as well recommend that National Health doctors should be freed from the ‘discomforts’ of a medical training they don’t appreciate . . .
One such new style British ‘artist’ was Victor Burgin, one of the few who emerged to make a name and a career for himself in the 1970s. Burgin is not an eccentric, or an outsider. His slick and empty work has been included in two out of three official Hayward Annuals: he even gets in on the photography shows. The abysmal Burgin is, in fact, a salon artist, a ubiquitous Bouguereau of our time.
But Burgin helps us to answer the question, ‘Where was the art of the 1970s?’ In 1969, he stapled a ‘path’ to the floor of a London gallery. The ‘path’ consisted of 21 ‘modular units’ (of course) each of which was a full-size photograph of the section of floor to which it was attached. Burgin justified this with a theory of ‘Situational Aesthetics’ arguing that recent attitudes to materials in art were based on awareness of ‘the interdependence of all substances within the ecosystem of earth’. The artist, Burgin claimed, was ceasing to see himself as a ‘creator of new material forms’, and might as well subtract materials from the environment as put them there. ‘As art is being seen increasingly in terms of behaviour,’ Burgin wrote, ‘so materials are being seen in terms simply of quantity rather than quality.’ Naturally, holding such views, Burgin heaped scorn on painting and sculpture which he described as ‘the anachronistic daubing of woven fabrics with coloured mud’, and the ‘chipping apart of rocks and the sticking together of pipes’, respectively: these material practices he described as ‘arbitrary and fetishistic restrictions’ imposed ‘in the name of timeless aesthetic values’.
Burgin’s piece can thus be seen as the negative of, say, an Andre tile or brick piece : the latter is just untransformed stuff, legitimized by ideology. Burgin’s photographs declared the presence of the absence of the stuff. Late modernist art thenceforth became either nothing at all — I knew of seven painters working in London in the 1970s who made nothing but grey monochromes — or ideology, tout court, divorced from even the semblance of material practice. The late modernism of the 1970s thus disappears into an anaesthetic black-hole, or, to use a less conceptually suspicious analogy, up its own arse.
You may remember Burgin’s 1977 piece at the Hayward Annual. He decked a room with examples of the same printed poster which showed a chic advertising photograph of a glamorous model and a jet-set man. Not even Warhol ever stole from the prevailing ideology of the mega-visual tradition quite as blatantly as that. So how did they justify putting this on a gallery wall. The photograph was sandwiched between the slogans, ‘What does possession mean to you?’ and ‘7% of our population own 84% of our wealth’. Here we have Warhol, less the residual materiality of the paint and that ever-so-imperceptible trace of imagination, plus an added extra ingredient. Political content! For some of the art-left — but not, I hasten to add, for me — that made Burgin a pillar of virtue.
Burgin was just a ring-leader of a tendency that dominated the official, so-called ‘avant-garde’ in Britain in the seventies. A surfeit of space and attention was given to such practitioners as Art Language for interminable verbal obfuscations about matters on which a first-year philosophy student could put them right; Gilbert and George — tedious poseurs, yet the Tate bought a video tape of them getting drunk; Stephen Willatts, author of sub-sociological schemes, like ‘The Artist as Instigator of Changes in Social Cognition and Behaviour’ and — you’ll enjoy this one — ‘The Social Resource Project for Tennis Clubs’; Mary Kelly, with her saddeningly forensic presentation of faecal stains on her child’s nappy liners and hocus-pocus rationalizations about her obsessional neurotic condition copied from Lacan’s theories about the ‘de-centred subject’. But the list is interminable. It includes APG, Hilliard, McClean, Simon Read, Stezaker, and Tremlett. All are in effect delivering up anaesthetic pieces of structured ideology.
If you think I have exaggerated the importance of this tendency, you have obviously, like many, been just too bored to attend to the art of the 1970s. Over the last ten years, such artists have consistently been promoted as the ‘avant-garde’, the way forward for art in Britain. After numerous Arts Council and British Council sponsored shows, the Musee d’Art Moderne in Paris organized a survey looking back over the British art of the 1970s, ‘Un Certain Art Anglais,’. .. and there they all were again. If I have been a negative critic, I have had good reason for being so.
It would be wrong to imply that, even within late modernism itself, there was no fight back against conceptualism. By the middle of the decade painters and sculptors were protesting against their eclipse. However, developments in conceptualism had, as we have seen, been foreshadowed in much of the work of the late 1950s and 1960s. The defences of painting and sculpture thus tended to be made by those who had in fact been involved in the ‘physicalist’ reductions of them. For example, in 1974, Andrew Forge organized a major survey exhibition of British painting at the Hayward Gallery : he wrote, ‘What faces painting (and sculpture too) ... is a compound of antagonism and indifference.’ But he went on to define painting as ‘coloured flat surfaces’, with no reference to expressive or aesthetic transformation of materials. Predictably, many of the paintings by new artists exhibited in this Hayward exhibition, and elsewhere during the decade were just that: coloured, flat surfaces. They deserved all the inattention they got.
William Tucker
The following year, 1975, William Tucker attempted to do the same for sculpture at the Hayward. He subsequently explained that his exhibition, ‘The Condition of Sculpture’, was devised in the context of ‘a general hostility in the art world to sculpture as physical and substantial, as “thing”.’ But it was a tedious spectacle: room after room was filled with placements of welded I-beam, expanses of steel plate, with, in effect, ‘things’. Predictably, Tucker, too, produced a physicalist definition of sculpture: sweeping aside the fact that for all but the last few years of its history, longer than that of civilization itself, ‘sculpture has manifested itself in the form of human or animal imagery’, Tucker insisted that the image was not primary. ‘It is through the rendering of the human form,’ he wrote, ‘and of drapery . . . that we are made aware of the underlying condition of gravity.’ Thus he drew the ‘fundamental limits’ of sculpture below the expressive image, defining them as ‘subjection to gravity’ and ‘revelation through light’. These, he said, constituted sculpture’s ‘primary condition’ which holds not merely for our time and place but for any time and place. If these limits were attended to, Tucker said, sculpture would be seen to ‘advance and prosper’. But, again, his definition is not of a sculpture at all : it applies to any damn thing which exists in the world, and can be seen — a cup, a table, a corpse, a heap of sand, a human body, a few pieces of aluminium tubing, fitted together a la Nigel Hall. Tucker complained, ‘I have found it more or less impossible, to persuade students at St. Martin’s, up until a year or two ago to actually make anything at all. They have been so busy taking photographs, digging holes, or cavorting about in the nude.’ But, like Caro, he entirely failed to see how his own reductionist view of sculpture was the inevitable instigator of this. After all, I should think it is more fun cavorting in the nude than fitting those wretched sticks of piping together.
Now it is true that, in the latter part of the decade, there were significant stirrings in the traditional media. I will say something about these: but I have accused late modernism of relinquishing the expressive potentialities of painting and sculpture. I now want to explain what I mean by ‘expression’ and why it is worth preserving. Well, I mean something both physical and affective: facial expression provides a good analogy. An expression is a transformation of the visible musculature of the face in a way which reveals inward emotion; this may produce affective responses in others, who may be moved, or alternatively experience our expression as inauthentic. Expression is intimately involved with the emotional and bodily basis of human being: expressions of suffering, rage, and ecstasy are, for example, similar in every society. But historically variable social conventions powerfully inflect expression too. A Geisha girl may greet us: but she does not greet us as we greet each other. Similarly, expression in art involves a transformation of materials according to inner dictates in ways which are intended to have an effect upon others. Expression in art, too, has much to do with the culture within which it is realized; and yet when it is successful it does not seem to be culture-bound. It touches upon areas of experience that have a relative constancy about them. As a socialist, I defend painting and sculpture for their particular expressive potentialities which, I believe, enable them to participate in the construction of what Marcuse called ‘the cosmos of hope’ in a way that, say, a photograph just cannot. But expression cannot be realized without an imaginative human subject who acts upon and significantly transforms the materials (physical and conventional) cf a specific medium to produce a concrete work of art. Late modernism thus jettisoned the constituent elements of expression. I want to look at them more closely, to see how they combine together.
Take first the imaginative human subject, or artist. In some quarters, today, the very concept of a human subject is under attack. Now we live in a society which, like any other, is in large part determined by the underlying structure and movement of the economy which is determinative (though not in any simple or unmediated way) over wide areas of social, institutional, political, intellectual and cultural life. The way we think, structure our feelings, and relate to one another is thus in many respects historically specific, or ideological. Some commentators have gone on from this to say that ideology is everything. They claim it constitutes our ‘lived relation’ to the world : we do not so much think as ‘are thought’; we do not act, but ‘are acted’ by a structure outside ourselves whose effects we become. Much late modernist art reflects this sort of thinking. I have described how Warhol’s practice and Greenberg’s aesthetics gave but a nominal significance to the artist as creative subject. Similarly, conceptual artist, Marie Yates, echoes these fashionable views when she declares, ‘there is no practice except by and in ideology’, and claims that she has finally rid herself of ‘romantic idealism’ and come to acknowledge ‘the fiction of the unity of one’s work or the individual as origin of such’.
‘Bourgeois individualism’ was one thing: but this assault upon creative individuality is quite another. It belongs, I think, to the ideology of monopoly capitalism. Certainly, late modernism progressively shunted value in art away from the creative artist into the historicist process, dissolving it into the movement of a continuum of styles and technologies, a flux of ideologies. If it were true that the value of art was nothing but an ideologically specific phenomenon, then the great art of the past would appear as alien and opaque to us. We could not begin to enjoy it without a complete reconstruction of the conditions under which it was produced. But manifestly this is not the case. Through its authentic expression the greatest art of the past posits a human subject, and reveals a human practice, which tears through the veils of ideology to speak of ‘relatively constant’ elements in human experience. It affirms that we are not mere effects of an alien structure, that we can, as Sartre once put it, make something of that which has been made of us.
There is nothing mysterious about the individuality to which authentic art bears witness. We are certainly shaped by ideology; but we are also immersed in the natural and physical worlds. We exist as psycho-biological entities: as well as entering into social life, each of us lives out a biological destiny, comprised of such things as birth, growth, love, reproduction, ageing and death. Of course, we experience these things through social mediations : but these are not so transforming that it is impossible to speak of an ‘underlying human condition’ common to all who possess human being. This condition is constituted not just by basic physical characteristics that have remained effectively unchanged since the beginnings of human civilization, but also by such common sentiments as pain, fear, sorrow, hope, love, affection, and mourning for the loss of others. It also contains certain, as yet historically unrealized potentialities, such as the potentiality for social life itself. Great art, authentic art, makes use of its necessarily ideologically-determined pictorial conventions to dip down into this rich terrain of relative constancy and constant potentiality.
Late modernism and its left apologists deny this : but the best Marxists have long recognized it. I have learned much from the work of Christopher Caudwell, a brilliant British writer who died in 1937, aged 29, fighting with the International Brigade in Spain. Caudwell saw that ‘great art — art which performs a wide and deep feat of integration — has something universal, something timeless and enduring from age to age.’ Caudwell tried to explain this, saying: ‘This timlessness we now see to be the timelessness of the instincts, the unchanging secret face of the genotype which persists beneath all the rich superstructure of civilization.’ Marcuse, too, saw that ‘art envisions a concrete universal humanity, Menschlichkeit, which no particular class can incorporate, not even the proletariat, Marx’s “universal class”. And Max Raphael, a great Marxist scholar, saw in paleolithic art ‘a symbol of our future freedom’: for him, the great art of the past was a constant reminder that ‘our present subjection to forces other than nature is purely transitory.’ Authentic expression then, by its very nature, protests against ideology, and refutes the view that the human subject is constituted wholly within ideology.
A vital element in both ‘artistic expression’ and this underlying human condition is imagination: this is our capacity to conceive of things other than the way they are. Like the potentiality for fully social life itself, the faculty of imagination is rooted in the long period of attachment and dependency which characterizes the infant-mother relationship in our species. The infant cannot adapt immediately to the world like a new-born foal: he lacks the motor-power even to seek out the mother’s breast at the moment he feels hungry. Imagination envelops the infant’s experience as ‘reality’ constrains that of the foal. In later life imagination manifests many ‘infantile’ features: a certain receptivity, a ‘negative capability’, a renunciation of rational mental process, and a putting of reality in brackets. But imaginative withdrawal also implies richer and more fully human action when one, as it were, returns to the world. Marx knew this very well. In Capital he describes imagination as that which distinguishes the labour of men from that of animals like bees, ants or beavers. A man is able to conceive of the goal of his labour before he embarks upon realizing it.
Under present modes of production, however this capacity to work freely upon materials according to our imagination is severely limited. The assembly line or office worker with his ‘modular units’ and mail receipts is engaged in something more like the work of an ant. In these circumstances imagination becomes split off from future action: it tends to be reduced to mere ‘fancy’, which can be locked into the ‘other realities’ offered by such ideological systems as advertising, science-fiction, or religion. The left has often (and rightly) protested against this last stage in the process : but it has rarely given full weight to the true power of creative imagination. Marx called imagination ‘that great faculty so largely contributing to the elevation of mankind’. But Marcuse is entirely correct to relate the reduction of art to ideology in much later Marxist aesthetics to what he calls ‘a devaluation of the entire realm of subjectivity, a devaluation not only of the subject as ego cogito, the rational subject, but also of inwardness, emotions and imagination.’ Regrettably, the art-left has been no exception. But authentic expression can challenge this eclipse and occlusion of the imagination.
The artist can resist the reduction of our dreams to commercial fantasies, and the banalization of our hopes for a better world into a preference for one brand of soft drink rather than another. He can offer a ‘moment of becoming’ in his work which, as it were, realizes an affective instance of that future as an imaginative image now. Caudwell once wrote:
The poem adapts the heart to a new purpose without changing the eternal desires of men’s hearts. It does so by projecting man into a world of phantasy which is superior to his present reality precisely because it is a world of superior reality — a world of more important reality not yet realized, whose realization demands the very poetry which phantastically anticipates it. Authentically imaginative painting and sculpture can do the same.
But, and this is important, imagination cannot be equated with expression : this would be to fall into the idealist error of Croce who identified art not with some physical, public object but rather with a spiritual act. He held that expression was synonymous with intuition; I am saying that expression can only be realized in and through material. In this respect it is more like work than reverie. Let me draw a parallel from imaginative writing. Raymond Williams has recently stressed the crucial difference between ‘the conception as it moves in the mind’ (whether of a character, the outline of an idea, the perception of a place, or the sense of an action) and what he calls its ‘quite material realization in the words’. Williams says that this realization in the words takes place through a complex process which writers themselves rarely fully understand: it is, he adds, a material process.
Unlike ideas, written ideas, written characters, written actions, etc., are not free. The writer has no choice but to engage with the resources of a specific language. Such resources, Williams argues, are at once ‘enabling and resistant’. Elsewhere, Williams stresses that the stuff upon which the writer works — language — has ‘a very deep material bond’ with the body. He says that communication theories which concentrate ‘on the passing of messages and information’ often miss this. ‘Many poems’, he writes, ‘many kinds of writing, indeed a lot of everyday speech communicate what is in effect life rhythm and the interaction of these life rhythms is probably a very important part of the material process of writing and reading.’ He adds, ‘from a materialist point of view this is at least the direction in which we should look for the foundation of categories that we could if we wish call aesthetic.’
I entirely agree with these observations: but^how much more true these points are of painting and sculpture. Here the matter upon which the artist works consists not just of historically determined pictorial conventions and techniques, like the ‘specific language’ of the writer; but also of definite, physically existent substances — paints, a supporting surface, marble, or bronze — in bodily struggle with which the artist’s expression is realized. Let me stick to painting for a moment. We can say that if we except late modernism, then in Western art at least both these elements of the painter’s materials have themselves involved a definite, and ‘very deep material bond’ with the body. For example, from the Renaissance until the late 19th century, the ‘language’ of paintings was based primarily on the artist’s grasp of perceived, or objective, anatomy: the bodies of others. It was supposed that expression was realized through the accuracy with which the expressiveness of the subject of the painting — Mona Lisa, Venus, Saturn, Griinewald’s Christ, Louis XIV or whatever — was made manifest. The model in Leonardo’s expressive theory was literally physiognomy.
In the late 19th century this began to change through a process by which the subject of the creative process, the artist, became increasingly the subject of the picture, too. American abstract expressionism — especially Pollock — can be seen as an attempt to base a whole system of material expression entirely on the realization of the artist’s ‘life rhythms’ in matter, i.e. paint. I have talked about the historical determinants of this development elsewhere : the point I want to make here is that we have a continuity of expressive practice which is rooted in the human body, whether that is conceived predominantly ‘objectively’ or ‘subjectively’. (We can learn something about expression with a scalpel; and something else by exploring its informing emotions on an analytic couch.) But once we become aware of this continuity, we realize how much ‘abstract expressionism’ there was in works produced according to the canons of classical expression; and how much objective anatomy there is in much abstract painting. I’m not just talking about De Kooning’s women: it makes perfect sense to me to talk of the physiognomy of Rothko.
The fact that a picture has been made by a human being with a body and range of emotions — ‘an underlying human condition’ — not dissimilar from our own is central to the experience of aesthetic effect. I could go on about this : here, I just want to say that in life even before we have words, we express and experience emotion through touch. A caress, kiss, punch, or smack are all physical gestures. The language of emotion — ‘touching’, ‘moving’, ‘uplifting’, ‘transporting’, etc. — reflects this. The affective communication in painting, too, flows from such things as the range of qualitative nuance in the painter’s touch, the imprint of which is visible in the way he has worked his materials. Since we possess similar bodies, and a similar emotional range, we can respond if he is successful in his expression, and we in our receptive attention. But, of course, it is not just a question of touch: scale, combinations of shapes and colours, the handling of line, and the affective evocations of certain forms of spatial organization even when conventionally determined — can also aspire to be imaginatively expressive of aspects of that rich communality of bodily existence, and its potentialities, which can never be wholly occluded by mere ideology however pervasive it may be.
I think Max Raphael had something like this in mind when he wrote, ‘art is an ever-renewed creative act, the active dialogue between spirit and matter; the work of art holds man’s creative powers in a crystalline suspension from which it can again be transformed into living energies.’
I have tried to demonstrate elsewhere that ‘Art’ is a historically specific concept, one which only came into being with the rise of the bourgeoisie. Art in this sense may indeed be disintegrating under late monopoly capitalism, which has given rise to a mega-visual tradition, characterized by mechanical means of producing and reproducing images. But, you see, the ‘arts’ with a small ‘a’ — including painting, sculpture, and drawing — are not just ideology. They are specific, material practices, with specific, material expressive potentialities — which have not been superseded by technological advance. The art of the 1960s devalued the imaginative, bodily and expressive potentialities of the artist as a creative, human subject. In focusing upon the physical existence of the art-work in isolation, the late modernism of the 1960s produced works that were alienated from men and women; those damn ‘modular units’, mere things. The art of the 1970s went further, abandoning tradition and stuff. Expression had been destroyed. Art revealed itself in the conceptualism of the 1970s as naked ideology.
The art-left, tragically, has endorsed this development. Ragon, you will remember, saw the artist as ‘a man of the past,’ an ‘avatar’, the only artisan in a world that was finally achieving its industrial revolution. Crone praised Warhol’s destruction of ‘personalized expression’. Burgin heaps scorn on the notion of ‘autonomous creativity’ as ‘fetishistic and anti-technical’. The art historian, Nicos Hadjinicolau, a theorist of a similar kind to Burgin, has even gone so far as to say there is no such thing as ‘an artist’s style’. ‘Pictures produced by one person,’ he writes, ‘are not centred on him. The fact that they may have been produced by the same artist does not link them together or at least not in any way that is important for art history.’ Thus, Hadjinicolau says he has ‘refused even the idea of aesthetic value in art history’. For him, ‘the essence of every picture lies in its visual ideology’.
Now these commentators think they are radicals, hard- headed socialists, producing a devastating critique of ‘bourgeois’ Fine Art. But I think what they are in fact doing merely theorises that ideologically-blinded way of looking characteristic of late monopoly capitalism. They talk about paintings as if these were advertisements : the static visual form, par excellence, of monopoly capitalism which has long since superseded entrepreneurial or ‘bourgeois’ capitalism. In the advertising image, ‘artist’s style’ has indeed been eliminated, since the image is corporately conceived and mechanically reproduced. The advertisement lacks any stamp of individuality. In it, the imaginative faculty is prostituted, and aesthetic effect reduced to a redundant contingency. The advertisement is constituted wholly within ideology: for I know that if it fills me with intimations of mortality, it is only to convince me to consume a low tar cigarette, or to purchase Elixir Vitamin Extra compound. Thus, the pity of it is that these so-called critiques of bourgeois art emerge again and again as ways of looking through monopoly capitalist spectacles.
But the expressive potentialities of these media — painting, drawing, and sculpture — (indeed of the arts, with a small ‘a’, in general) — were never the peculiar possession of the bourgeoisie. They have histories which long ante-date, and one hopes will long survive, the bourgeois era. William Morris, another Marxist thinker for whom I have the greatest respect, knew this very well. True, he criticized the Fine Art tradition much as I am now criticizing the Mega-Visual tradition : but he defended the arts, with a small ‘a’, as ‘Man’s expression of his joy in labour’. And, today, of course, it is the Fine Art tradition which has become the only possible conserver of the arts in this sense.‘The Commercialist,’ wrote Morris, ‘sees that in the great mass of civilized human labour there is no pretence to art, and thinks that this is natural, inevitable, and on the whole desirable. The Socialist, on the contrary, sees in this obvious lack of art a disease peculiar to modern civilization and hurtful to humanity.’ The pity of it is that many socialists — including many socialist artists and art critics — have declared themselves in this matter as being on the side of ‘The Commercialist’. But on this point, we can be clear and categorical. Let me quote just one more time from Marcuse: ‘Against all fetishism of the productive forces, against the continued enslavement of individuals by the objective conditions (which remain those of domination), art represents the ultimate goal of all revolutions : the freedom and happiness of the individual.’ The expressive potentialities of painting, sculpture and drawing need then to be defended, not just from those threats coming from without, but against the reductionists within — those vandals like Warhol, Caro, Burgin and their followers, whose activities have deprived us of realized moments of hope.
I said earlier that there were stirrings in British painting and sculpture in the latter part of the decade which indicated that some artists are struggling towards a revitalization of what I have been calling the material expressive process. This is not easy: at the moment there are no ‘given’ pictorial conventions which are valid for anything other than small, particular publics. The artist lacks immediate access to the ‘enabling’ yet ‘resistant’ resources of a given language. And then, of course, the artist is bedevilled by the not unrelated problem of the crisis in his social function. Neither prelates, princes, nor wealthy manufacturers presently have much need of painters or sculptors. The great corporations of monopoly capitalism have their own mega-visual media. The State is desperately uncertain about what it wants artists to do, for whom. These are problems I have discussed before and no . doubt will do so again. But I want to end by pointing towards some individuals and tendencies who, in their practice, are struggling to transcend these difficulties, to embed, to use Max Raphael’s phrase again, their creative power in ‘a crystalline suspension’ from which it can again be transformed into living energies.
In the late 1970s, this problem was approached, as one might expect, from both ends of the expressive continuum. Some artists attempted to revitalize abstract art, to move away from the ‘modular units’ of minimalism towards ways of working their forms and materials which were affectively significant, again. The first I saw of this sort of work was Stephen Buckley’s. Buckley’s early pictures were violent, technically and as images : he used techniques like tearing, stitching, scorching, and stuffing the picture surface, yet his works remained paintings. I felt that he was wrenching every possible device and convention of painting in such a way as to force it to be expressive again. I was impressed by those early works, — which I saw as ‘analogues of the body’ — and I do not retract what I said about them. But today, I am perhaps more aware of their weaknesses rather than their successes. Buckley was a bit like a bricoleur — a man who uses a table- top, a piece of sacking, an old hack-saw blade, or whatever to do a reasonable job patching things up. But the bricoleur, by his very nature, cannot create something new. He is trapped, as Levi-Strauss once said, by the ‘constitutive sets’ from which his elements came. The ‘constitutive set’ for Buckley was late modernism itself. There was no way it could give back to him the skills of drawing and touch, which he lacked. The non-painting techniques that he imported meant that, in the end, his works tended to lack that aesthetic unity which is essential to the capacity of art to evoke that other reality within the existing one.
Still, Buckley remains for me much better than the chic- punk artists who followed in his wake — those who seized on this process of expressionist bricolage of modernist conventions and, within two years, turned it into a decadent mannerism. The majority of pictures in the ‘Style in the Seventies’ exhibition — the title is the give-away — were like those fashion models you see in glossy magazines with gold- plated razor-blade brooches and green and red hair, done by Vidal Sassoon, of course. But Artscribe is not so elegant as Vogue. Still, even within this unpromising milieu, some painters have emerged who do not seem to me to be all bad. Perhaps the best British abstract picture of the 1970s was painted by an artist who emerged in the 1960s — John Hoyland. But this was an exceptional work for this painter.
Within abstract art, I feel that what is happening in sculpture is presently more significant than painting. The work of the Wimbledon sculptors — Glynn Williams, Ken Turnell and Lee Grandjean — impresses me. They seem to be fighting out of the pall of formalism and dead matter which stood in for sculpture for so much of the 1970s. Turnell, in particular, may be on the verge of a new and vigorous way of handling the human figure.
In effect, his work connects with that of those artists who have been trying to work from the other end of the expressive continuum: that of immediately representational pictorial ‘languages’, their revival and replenishment. Early in the decade, ‘photo-realism’ posed a similar reduction within representational art to that which ‘modular units’ presented in abstraction. Photo-realists took a given image, a photograph, and merely transposed it from a mega-visual medium into paint, allowing precious little scope for imaginative conception, painterly handling, or aesthetic transformation. Their work is effectively without expression in the sense I have defined it. Around the middle of the decade, Kitaj, however, began to argue vociferously for the retention of the old representational conventions, rooted in human anatomy, as part of the ‘material’ upon and through which the artist works to realize his expression. I did not fully appreciate the significance of the ‘Human Clay’ exhibition when it was mounted at the Hayward in 1976 : this was in part because there is an element of militant antiabstractionism in Kitaj’s polemic, which draws lines which would exclude some of the most significant of post-war painters, like Rothko and Natkin. There are good non- representational artists; and there are presently some representational painters around whose cultish affectation has led them to produce works almost (but not quite) as bad as those in ‘Style of the Seventies’. Still, I am sure that in my 1976 reaction to Kitaj, there was more than a trace of that over-historicist, false radicalism of the art-left. I remember that I accused him of trying to revive 19th century bourgeois pictorial conventions. So I, too, was then slipping into that denial of the existent human subject which I have today criticized so much in others. I was talking as if 20th century man was not made of human clay too! The proof of a painting, in any event, is always in the looking. And I should say straight away that Kitaj has made what I regard as one of the very best British paintings of the last decade. I am talking about If not, not, which was shown in Bristol in the recent ‘Narrative Painting’ show. This is an extremely complex picture whose effect comes from numerous different elements — nuances of colour, blending of different modes of spatial and perspectival organization, the skilful drawing of the figures, even the literary allusions and references. But all these devices, and all this matter, has been brought under the artist’s imaginative control: he has imposed a convincing aesthetic unity upon his materials. He has created, in form, and in content, what Fry said the best Post-Impressionists achieved. This is not ‘a pale reflex of actual appearance’ — but it arouses the ‘conviction of a new and definite reality’. No doubt, some will say it is dreamy, escapist, or utopian. Christopher Caudwell once said :
. . . the illusion of dream has this biological value, that by experimenting ideally with possible realities and attitudes towards them it paves the way for such changes in reality. Dream prepares the way for action; man must first dream before he can do it. It is true that the realization of our dream is never the same as the dream; it looks different and it feels different. Yet it also has something in common with our desire, and its realization was only possible because dream went before and lured us on, as the harvest festival made possible the harvest.
The best painting — from Poussin to Cezanne — has often been a form of materially realized social dreaming. And we should not allow our social dreams to be monopolized and banalized by those who want to sell Vodka and bath salts . ..
I could go on about the art that I have found exceptional and worthwhile. I would like to have said something about Ken Kiff’s marvellous psychoanalytic paintings — so close to my own sensibilities. But I cannot end without saying how Kitaj’s polemics, and the parallel sociological research of my colleague Andrew Brighton, have raised the question as to whether the most significant painting of the 1970s was not made far away from the late modernist corral. The Royal Academy Summer show may be largely a wasteland: it is rather less of a wasteland than, say, the average mixed late modernist show. The painting of Peter Greenham and Richard Eurich is certainly, from my perspective, among the most considerable of the decade. Yet I wonder how many art students have even heard their names, let alone seen their pictures.
Certainly, the most exciting thing about the withering of late modernism in recent years has been the bringing into view again the work of a great, and I believe still much neglected tradition in British painting, founded by Bomberg in the latter part of his life. Bomberg, disillusioned with the modernism in whose birth he had participated, spent the latter part of his life searching for ‘the spirit in the mass’, or, as I would put it, finding the physical means to record his imaginative encounters with real objects, real persons. In effect, he sought to maximize both aspects of the expressive continuum: the ‘subjective’ physical handling of materials; the ‘objective’ empirical, perceptual observation of things in the world. The recent show of his late works at the Whitechapel was a revelation. And to think that we ignored this, while lapping up the garbage of late modernism that wafted over from America. I say ‘we’ ignored . . . Some of Bomberg’s disciples kept not only his methods, but his spirit, his imaginative grasp of the world alive. I am thinking particularly of Dennis Creffield, Frank Auerbach, and Leon Kossoff. Kossoff, in particular, painted some of the best works of the 1970s. I have written, at length, elsewhere about his great painting based on figures outside Kilburn underground station, which combines the most violent expressionism with the most cautious, restraining, empirical accuracy — almost Pollock and Coldstream in the same picture. It is one of the few real masterpieces of the decade ...
David Bomberg
But you can see why these things have been so little known and talked about, say in the art press, if you consider what David Sylvester wrote about those late Bombergs. He said:
. . . stylistically, Bomberg’s late work was backward-looking, added little or nothing to the language of art that had not been there 50 years before. If it is, as I believe, the finest English painting of its time, only its intrinsic qualities make it so : in terms of the history of art it’s a footnote.
I have tried to show that the over-historicizing of aesthetics is bound to lead to this kind of foolish judgement. Those of you who are still bound up in ‘the anachronistic daubing of woven fabrics with coloured mud’ should take courage. You may be producing only footnotes to art history : but there is a chance that your work is among the finest of its time. As for the art- historical text itself ... I should not worry too much about that : it leads only into the pornography of despair.