Today marks a 30 Year memorial for Peter Fuller. In light of this and the current situation, I have made available a number of Peter’s major essays, some unpublished pieces from the archive that are of interest and a few previous Peter Fuller Memorial Lectures, now available for free online for people to read during quarantine. My late father might have said; a passionate engagement with the arts is one salvation for our inner sanctity, during such challenging times.
Peter was a rebel who questioned cultural values, never the value of culture, and if not to convert then to affirm in the other their own sense of truth. A great example of this was the passionate and at times heated correspondence between Peter and the sculptor Anthony Caro:
The noise of the towering machinery that rumbled in our ears these past decades, ground to a halt and is replaced by the silence of the streets, the courage to sleep and reawaken again anew. Can we really say this was time well spent if we do not in this century’s quietest moment, take the time to question But Is It Art?
MODERN ART intertwines a life-long battle between four mavericks of the art world, escalating to a crescendo that reveals the purpose of beauty, and the preciousness of life. Based on the writings of Peter Fuller, adapted by his son.
Before the shut down MODERN ART had just won Best Screenplay (3rd Place) at Hollywood Reel Film Festival and had been accepted as Official Selection in competition or Finalist placement in Beverly Hills Film Festival, Manhattan Film Festival, Big Apple Screenplay Competition, Firenze FilmCorti International Festival (Italy), Film Arte Festival (Madrid), Drama Inc Screenplay Competition, and Twister Alley Film Festival. All of which have been postponed by at least a couple months to protect public health and safety. But the good news is they will be back on soon and in the meantime you can read selected essays by Peter Fuller here on my blog during down time!
I have spoken before of my own brief yet powerful encounters with John Berger, my father’s mentor and surrogate father figure, one of the most influential art critics of all time, certainly for Peter’s generation. Controversial for his Marxist perspective. Recently I had the good fortune to speak to his son Yves Berger who shared with me some of his poetry and said of MODERN ART: “If the caracteres reveal a great depth and complexity within their mind and spirit, then the film would leave enough space for this mixture of knowledge and mystery to form what we call « destiny ».”
Their correspondences which I found in the TATE archive were among the most insightful and poignant I had ever read. It seems the convergence and Though they feature heavily in the MODERN ART screenplay, they remain unpublished, references are sprinkled throughout Peter’s controversial book Seeing Berger:
I’ve found many of my collaborators and mentors among the directors I’ve worked with in theatre and film, two of them responded to the MODERN ART screenplay recently:
Jim Lounsbury: “I remember sitting in Hollywood with you a number of years ago and you telling me about your desire to bring this film to life. You have lived and breathed art. Bled art. Dreamed art and, well… become it… It is a unique opportunity, to get to know your father this intimately… to become him in order to know him. I couldn’t imagine anything that would make me more proud as a father myself.
I feel honoured to be a part of this journey with you. Seeing those images from Possessions in your mood reel for the screenplay I realise now, more than ever, that I was a single step in your waltz. Well, maybe two, but It’s amazing how the images we captured with such youthful exuberance and optimism fit within an overall tone, and feel almost destined to sit alongside some of the greatest artists and filmmakers of our time. I’ve read the treatment and watched the interviews and very much look forward to reading the screenplay.
What better time to create and enjoy art? The world is wounded, and people are scared. More than ever we need to be challenged. To be reminded of our humanity. Of our truth.”
Hunter Lee-Hughes: “Laurence, the most fascinating thing about this script and film project is that you will be playing the role of your own father, who died when you were young. You are seeking a way to recreate the man so that you can have a relationship with him as an adult, something of which you were deprived. It's a profound loss that the movie attempts to rectify. No one really knows if this will help you in the end or not, but there's obviously a very deep desire to "go there" with the idea that something amazing may happen or may be resolved.”
This project started not out of a need for catharthis nor grief, it was an endeavor, a spiritual journey, to meet a man who stood for something, that was worth the fight it would take to cherish it. Who found this fight, ultimately returning home from the battlefields of cultural revolution, in a secular spiritual way, that his passing only brought more depth and substance too, the preciousness of life and the purpose of beauty.
We cannot attend exhibitions right now like Peter did with such fervency, the communal aspect of the arts are suffering, as with empty seats in our cinemas. We make this sacrifice for our elders, frequent chats with my grandmother remind me of this, as she tells me about tending her garden and her writing projects, the value of what we are protecting. But we can imagine Peter marching into the aesthetic battles of the exhibition halls.
Or it is possible to lie down on the couch and reflect on the psychological symbols of art which also male up the foundations of our own subconscious":
Peter was one of the loudest voices championing the London School, which just last lost Leon Kossoff.
This project has been an experiment with my own humanity. Yet at the same time I feel this is true of every artistic endeavors, self portrait or reflections of another. The spiral of life drives deeper into our souls with each stroke, each expression, each turn of phrase or release of emotion in a scene. This is the nature of adaptation and yet so many of my peers want to see me beneath the cloak of my father’s words. What is he doing back there?
Annabel Ludovici Gray who worked for Modern Painters asked me recently asked me but where are you in all this?
“You are very sensitive as your father was. I wonder if you will ever find peace or does making this film only fuel more questions, enquires and challenges ? Understandably you are caught up in the anniversaries of your father's death. I hope I am wrong, but it appears to me that it consumes so much of your living, and I do wonder if it is not allowing your own life's happiness to flourish. What about a family of your own, children? This film is your mission. It is your art, your self portrait and your interpretation of all that you have read, watched and of course your younger memory's understanding, and your mature imagination. It must be comforting to have all the books he wrote, but it isn't enough. Not to be able to engage and argue and interrogate your father's mind is a great frustration I am sure.”
A dear artist friend Sima Jo painted this recently, she showed it to me after walking around Enrique Martinez Celaya’s exhibition at Kohn Gallery with the art critic Lita Barrie. It reminds me of one of Peter’s quotes “Perhaps loss is the birth point of imagination”. If you believe as I do the past can provide a map to the future then Romantic nostalgia takes on a new dimension, of action, rebirth, renewal, and a path towards something great.
Distracting me from this journey never worked either, I only had a desire to meet him again in my own flesh. To meet my father and by doing so meet myself. To feel the martyr of my dreams place his hand on my shoulder and tell me at long last that I exist.
My mother recently painted this portrait of me, as she isolates, protecting herself with an underlying lung condition. A great painting is a mystery. A modern painting tells us as much about its creator as it’s subject and where they meet. This meeting place is shared, with you. The three of us conspire to tell a story in your mind and there it begins a new meeting place for others. An image in the language of our lives. A beginning.