MODERN ART: But is it Art?

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

This essay is a great example of why Peter was so controversial. He asks provocative questions, that challenge the reader. I do believe it is both important and yet surprisingly uncommon to ask these sorts of questions internally and deeply. To make these enquiries, to know one’s own truth, is to meet oneself at the end of it. Today we have pieces like The Joker, a banana duct taped to a wall that sold for six figures, should we really just laugh this off, or place it on the court of culture and question it to the same standards we question a Lucian Freud?

BUT IS IT ART?

by Peter Fuller, 1990

In my time as a critic, considerable prominence has been given to 'works of art' of a kind previously unseen. That is, works which apparently embody no imaginative, nor indeed physical, transformation of materials; no sense of belonging to any of the particular arts, such as painting, sculpture, drawing, engraving, etc.; no sense of tradition nor of skill. Such works possess no identifiable aesthetic qualities and offer, in my view at least, no opportunity for aesthetic experience or evaluation.

Marcel Duchamp's Fountain

The prototype for works of this kind was Marcel Duchamp's Fountain - a urinal signed 'R. Mutt', which he submitted to the 1917 Salon des Independants. Duchamp was the start of all the trouble and there is nothing I would wish to say in his defence. Even so, it must be stressed that, in its time, the urinal was a relatively isolated phenomenon, while an overwhelming proportion of the institutionally-approved art of our own time is of the same character.

Over the past twenty-two years I have been invited to attend to all manner of objects and events. They have ranged from a document entitled 'A Social Resource Project for Tennis Clubs' to folded blankets; a man seated in a bath of bull's blood; another who successfully amputated his sexual organs; used nappy liners and sanitary towels; a beach covered in polythene; thousands of old tyres arranged in the shape of a Polaris missile; a huge ceramic blow-up of a Pink Panther; a tray of cow brains and used fly-strips set in resin, and of course, the Tate Gallery's notorious Equivalent VIII - a stack of fire-bricks arranged by Carl Andre. All these things have been presented to me as 'Art'.

These are extreme cases, but many less bizarre works of recent years have no less tenuous affiliations with the recognisable arts of painting or sculpture. For example, I'd argue that there is little or no aesthetic content in much Pop art, Minimalism, New Expressionism, Neo-Geo or New Sculpture of the 1980s. A 'painting' these days tends to be identified with the mere presence of paint as a substance. A 'sculpture' can be anything. In a pamphlet accompanying the Hayward Gallery's despicable 1983 Sculpture Show, Norbert Lynton declared that 'sculpture is what sculptors do. No other definition is possible.' This is ludicrous. After all, sculptors get up in the morning, read the paper, take the dog for a walk, and so on. None of this is necessarily sculpture, although it's possible that it could all be designated as such. For Gilbert and George, life is sculpture.

This proliferation of anaesthetic art has been a problem. The temptation is simply to say, 'This is not art', and to pass on without hesitation to consider those things which appear more worthy of attention. That, after all, was the approach favoured by Bloomsbury. In his book, Art, Clive Bell's aesthetic hypothesis was that the essential quality of a work of art was 'Significant Form', which gave rise to aesthetic response and experience. Significant Form was 'the expression of a peculiar emotion felt for reality', and anything which did not possess Significant Form was not a work of art. For Bell, most of that which was presented as art was not art at all. 'I cannot believe,' he wrote, 'that more than one in a hundred of the works produced between 1450 and 1850 can be properly described as a work of art.'

Bell claimed that calling something a work of art, or not, was a 'momentous moral judgement'. He would have experienced no difficulty in dealing with the anaesthesia of late Modernism. He would simply have expressed the view that less than one in a thousand of the works produced between 1950 and 1986 were works of art.

It must be said, however, that Bell's concept of Significant Form (borrowed from Roger Fry), and his idea of aesthetic emotion, are rather unfashionable nowadays. More characteristic of current thinking is the view put forward by the aesthetic philosopher, B. R. Tilghmann, in his book But is it Art? Tilghmann is concerned with the inadequacy of traditional aesthetic theories to deal with the sort of phenomena I have been discussing, from Duchamp's urinal to Andre's bricks. Tilghmann argues that the very idea of a theory or definition of art is a confused one. This confusion, he believes, arises from the fact that the language of aesthetic theory has simply lost contact with the sort of everyday practice we engage in when we look appreciatively at urinals, piles of bricks, muddy smears or acts of castration. Instead of trying to stretch the old aesthetic theories to accommodate these new kinds of artistic practice, we should be elaborating new theories appropriate to the new sorts of practice.

These, then, are two opposing approaches to the problem of anaesthetic art objects: the Bell position, which dismisses those objects which do not give rise to aesthetic effect - anaesthetic objects - out of the category of 'Art' altogether; and the Tilghmann position, which includes everything which anyone ever designated 'Art' as art, but recommends a rejection of traditional concepts of what is and what is not aesthetic experience.

While most discussions of this issue tend to take up a position somewhere between these polarities, I'd like to argue that this whole line of reasoning should be refused.

From Baumgarten onwards, aesthetic response and experience were never regarded as being synonymous with what was called 'art'. The early philosophers of the aesthetic recognised that a great many natural phenomena - flowers, minerals, waterfalls, landscapes, forests and the song of the nightingale among them - also gave rise to aesthetic response; a disinterested response, unrelated to price, necessity or whatever. It may well be that this view depended upon a 'Natural Theology'. That is, the belief that the natural world was, in some sense or other, a revelation of the handiwork of God. As Friedrich Schlegel put it, 'As God is to His creation, so is the artist to his own.'

Natural Theology is no longer very popular, even among Christians. And this may have something to do with the fact that most aesthetic theories do not even pay lip service to the 'non-artistic' aspects of the aesthetic experience. My own belief, however, is that the aesthetic faculty has its roots in our continuities with - and ultimately helps establish our differences from - the remainder of the animal kingdom. It can be understood in terms of our specifically human natural history. This aesthetic potentiality, though threatened by the decline of religious belief and the growth of industrial, and latterly, electronic production, is not necessarily destroyed by it.

Rather than see aesthetic theory rewritten in such a way that it incorporates anaesthetic 'Art', I think we should be attending to the independence of 'the Aesthetic Dimension' from 'Art'. If this implies that we should not go along with Tilghmann, I think it also means that we should not go along with Bell's argument. There is, perhaps, something inherently wrongheaded in the view that most works of art are not 'really' works of art at all. (It is reminiscent of that Left argument which accounted for repression in Socialist countries by arguing that most of these countries weren't really Socialist.)

I think one can, indeed should, concede to the Post-Post- Structuralist contextualisers that art is a category constituted within ideology and maintained by institutions, especially the institutions of contemporary art. But the same does not apply to aesthetic experience and aesthetic values, which are orders of innate and inalienably human potentiality. Aesthetic experience of an imaginative order is a terrain which we can enjoy because we are the sort of creatures that we are. Some art embodies aesthetic values and gives rise to aesthetic experience of the highest order, but much art does so only minimally or not at all.

This statement may seem Lea platitude, but important consequences flow from it, since it implies a new - or, more accurately, an old - set of priorities. We must first of all recognise that the freedom to engage and develop innate aesthetic faculties is being impinged upon by present social and cultural policies. Here I am not launching into a defence of 'artistic freedom', a catch-cry which has been used to justify so many contributions to the spread of General Anaesthesia, and which so often proves to be little more than a rallying cry for philistines. On the contrary, I see my practical task as a critic, as one of fostering those circumstances in which the aesthetic potential can thrive, even if it means opposing certain kinds of 'art'.

One question which I have left in brackets is 'Why, in our own time, has there been such a preponderance of anaesthetic art?' For a start, I believe that post-second world war theories of art education must bear much of the blame.

About fifteen years ago, Dr Stuart MacDonald, an historian of art education, referred to what he called 'articidal tendencies' among art teachers. In my language that would be 'aestheticidal tendencies', but that sounds even worse. He was, I think, concerned with counteracting the continuing effects of the 'Basic Design' approach to art education, which was effectively debilitating the idea of Fine Art.

'Art educationalists,' he wrote, 'have been busy demolishing the subject which supports them . . . "Beauty" as a quality of an artefact was vaporised some years back. "Craft", with its connotation of old-fashioned hard work, has been given short shrift. "Artefact" is now being replaced by "museumart". Art education was deleted recently in favour of "visual education".' Dr MacDonald concluded that 'Art itself will go shortly', and he has since been proven right.

This is not to say that art itself has disappeared. Art remains in abundance, but aesthetic education, the nurturing of aesthetic intelligence and, inevitably, the creation of objects of aesthetic value, have all but gone. What is happening in our schools and colleges of art is a calamity of national proportions. Children in some schools receive lessons in 'Design Education' and 'Information Technology' but not in art. An education in art is becoming indistinguishable from an education in design, which is anything but disinterested.

However, it isn't simply education which is to blame for the general anaesthetisation of our culture. One must not forget how left-wing thinkers have long blamed everything on the market in art. This was, in essence, the teaching of my teacher, John Berger, who argued that there was a special relationship between oil painting and capitalism, and that pictures were 'first and foremost' portable capital assets. This led him to express hostility towards the very idea of 'true' aesthetic values, or of connoisseurship, which he saw as being merely derivatives of oil painting's functions in exchange and as property. Despite my respect for Berger I came to feel that there was something strangely circular in the argument that aesthetic discourse and connoisseurship were simply derivatives of the market. If they were, it was not at all clear what it was that the market could be said to be corrupting, distorting or infecting.

Indeed, there was a very real sense in which the left-wing aesthetic theories of the 1960s and 1970s provided the 'programme' for the right-wing governments of the 1980s; for that unholy alliance between philistines of the Left and the Right. For example, John Berger argued that photography had displaced painting as the uniquely modern, democratic art-form of the twentieth century. Margaret Thatcher's Government squeezed the Fine Arts courses and shifted everything towards design. Berger argued that museums were 'reactionary' middle-class institutions that should 'logically' be replaced by children's pinboards. Margaret Thatcher proceeded to pressurise every one of our art institutions in a way which the Director of the National Gallery likened to the destruction of the monasteries during the Reformation.

Berger led the assault on the idea of Fine Art values, which he dismissed as 'bourgeois' and anachronistic. Mrs Thatcher initiated a regime of stunning philistinism and destructiveness, which aimed to sweep away the last vestige in public arts policy of exactly those things to which the Marxists had objected. If the point is not to understand the world but to change it, then in England the palm must be awarded to Mrs Thatcher. She 'deconstructed' aesthetic values much more effectively than a thousand polytechnic Marxists and art school Post- Structuralists.

Nowadays, the philistine complicity of Left and Right is a fact of life for Britain's art institutions. Charles Saatchi, the advertising man (inventor of the slogan 'Labour isn't working', which did so much to bring Mrs Thatcher to power), has amassed a large collection of anaesthetic art, praised by many of the trendiest Left theorists of recent years. Meanwhile, Gilbert and George have become the salon artists of our times. Praised by Left critics for their hatred of unique objects, painting and 'elitist' aesthetic ideas, they are vociferous supporters of Mrs Thatcher.

Even though I believe that the left-wing thinkers have provided the best moral justification for the growth of institutional anaesthesia, there is also a ring-wing version of the 'corrupting market' theory, as put forward by Suzi Gablik in her slim and slight book, Has Modernism Failed? Here she suggests that the market somehow corrodes 'Higher Values' through the very nature of commercial activity. However, there remains strong empirical evidence against any such line of reasoning. Gablik does not mention Henry Moore, Graham Sutherland, Barbara Hepworth or Ben Nicholson, all of whom were enmeshed in the higher reaches of the art market but whose work embodies precisely those spiritual and aesthetic values which are so often absent from the work of those less commercially- successful artists of today's official, state-subsidised avant- garde. It also seems to me that the evidence of history is against Gablik's view. The market, in and of itself, did not corrupt the art of sixteenth-century Venice or seventeenth-century Holland. On the contrary, in these cases at least, intense activity in the picture markets seems to have been inextricably bound up with extraordinary efflorescences of aesthetic life.

But this observation must also be qualified, since I have no wish to draw any neat equations between the vitality of capitalism and aesthetics. While it is perfectly true that much anaesthetic art involves an element of subsidy, both historically and in our own time public subsidy has also been associated with high aesthetic achievement. One doesn't have to look back to the heyday of Athens or the Gothic period to find instances of such successful uses of public funds. Not so very long ago, the Arts Council and the British Council helped foster an exceptional generation of British artists, including Henry Moore and Graham Sutherland.

While some dealers may prefer to deal in works of quality, rather than in trash, if the art institutions foster a demand for trash, then most dealers will happily service that taste. From this, all one can conclude is that the market clearly does not cause good art (i.e. art of high aesthetic value) or bad art (anaesthetic art, art of low aesthetic value). The operations of the market are, in a certain sense, neutral; neither implying nor eliminating aesthetic values. On its own, the market is simply insufficient or incapable of creating that 'facilitating environment' in which good art can be created. If the Left is wrong to blame the market for destroying art, the Right is equally wrong to suppose that art can be preserved and invigorated by the market.

So what does create a facilitating environment for high aesthetic achievement? Beliefs, faith and even will - but in a very different sense to the way those qualities were manifested in the culture of Modernism or in that of fashionable Post- Modernism.

Modernism resembled the other great styles of the past in at least one important aspect; it aspired to universality, and sought to become 'the genuine and legitimate style of our century' - to use Nikolaus Pevsner's phrase. In this sense, the Modern movement had to be rooted in the Zeitgeist, to be expressive of what Pevsner called 'faith in science and technology, in social science and rational planning, and the romantic faith in speed and the roar of machines'.

Or, as the scientific populariser, C. H. Waddington put it, from a slightly different angle, the artist who wished to paint, or the architect who wished to build for a scientific and sceptical age, 'had to, whether he liked it or not, find out what was left when scepticism had done its worst'.

For a critic of American painting like Clement Greenberg in the late 1940s, 'Cubist and Post-Cubist painting and sculpture, ''modern'' furniture [as he called it], decoration and design,' were all part and parcel of the Modern Movement, which he described as 'Our Period Style'.

'The highest aesthetic sensibility,' Greenberg wrote, 'rests on the same basic assumptions as to the nature of reality as does the advanced thinking contemporaneous with it.' For Greenberg, as for Pevsner and Waddington, this 'advanced thinking' was a belligerent, scientific materialism, which, in terms of painting, meant an art of sensation and materials 'uninflated by illegitimate content - no religion or mysticism or political certainties'. Hence Greenberg's hostility to Neo- Romanticism and to the spiritual and humanist aspirations of a sculptor like Henry Moore, whom he accused of being 'half- baked'. (Even Jackson Pollock was reprimanded for his 'Gothickness'.) Hence, too, Greenberg's notorious talk about the ineluctable search for the material essence of the medium, and the pursuit of 'the minimum substance needed to body forth visibility'.

Greenberg's Modernism has had its day, but its passing entailed not merely the waning of a style of architecture or painting, it was bound up with the decline of those beliefs I have outlined above. It became sceptical of its own aspirations to triumph over nature, it began to recognise the limits of that rampant materialism embodied in Pevsner's 'faith in science and technology'. While we may make ever greater use of gadgets such as personal computers and car phones, who among us now believes that such things are initiating us into a brave new world? As for Modernist ideals of social planning, they are quite routinely despised, now that we can see the horrors to which they led. Modernism is, quite simply, no longer open to us as an option.

So what is Post-Modernism? The critic, Charles Jencks set out to answer this question in a pamphlet of that name, and numerous ancillary tomes on Post-Modernism in architecture and art. Jencks's What is Post-Modernism? essentially argues that Post-Modernism is the Counter-Reformation to Modernism. Jencks even contends that it involves 'a new Baroque'. This is disconcerting to those of us still trying to accommodate ourselves to the idea that Post-Modernism in painting simultaneously involves some kind of appeal to classicism, especially to Poussin, the opponent of the Counter-Reformation, par excellence. But matters become even more perplexing when Jencks declares that, unlike the real Counter-Reformation, Post- Modernism involves 'no new religion and faith to give it substance'. Where then is the parallel? A Counter-Reformation without faith? But this is precisely the point. Post-Modernism is the first of the world styles to have no spiritual content at all, not even the misguided faith of materialist Modernism. For what the Post-Modernists are saying is that the certainties of Modernism - its 'meta-narratives' in Jean-Frangois Lyotard's overused phrase - can only be replaced by self-conscious incredulity about everything. Jencks echoes Umberto Eco, who says that Post-Modern man cannot say to his beloved, 'I love you madly', but must express his passion in such terms as, 'As Barbara Cartland would say, "I love you madly'' '; or perhaps 'as Fuller said Jencks said Eco said Barbara Cartland would say "I love you madly".' Likewise, the Post-Modern sculptor cannot build a monument to his nation's dead, he can only build a structure which refers to what such a monument might look like if honouring the dead were what one did, any more, as it were.

Post-Modernism knows no commitments. It is the opposite of that which is engage. Post-Modernism takes up what Jencks himself once described as 'a situational position', in which 'no code is inherently better than any other'. The west front of Wells Cathedral, the Parthenon pediment, the plastic and neon signs of Caesar's Palace, Las Vegas, even the hidden intricacies of a Mies curtain wall: all these things are equally 'interesting'. We are left with a shifting pattern of strategies and substitutes, a shuffling of semiotic codes and devices varying ceaselessly according to audience and circumstances. This is authenticity dissolved. Historicity takes precedence over experience and knowingness is substituted for a genuine sense of tradition.

Speaking as an absolutist and a dogmatist, it has always seemed to me that this Post-Modernist stuff does not escape from the dilemma of all relativist, eclectic and pluralist positions; namely that they are constrained to exempt themselves from those strictures and limitations with which they wish to hem in every other position. For relativism is never able to turn back on itself, to view itself relatively. No relativist will ever proclaim his own position as being only an option, with no greater claims than rival dogmatisms. And so, by subsuming all other positions, relativism is doomed to re-establish itself on the pedestal of the very authoritarianism which it was its sole raison d'etre to challenge. In other words, for all its shifting pluralism, like Modernism before it, Post-Modernist radical eclecticism wants us to know that it is 'the genuine and legitimate style of our century'.

Now I happen to believe, with John Ruskin, that the art and architecture of a nation are great only when they are 'as universal and as established as its language; and when provincial differences of style are nothing more than so many dialects'. I am not a Modernist because I don't believe in a style rooted in the values of triumphant, technist, scientific materialism, and I am not a Post-Modernist because I don't believe in the historical necessity of culture succumbing to a shabby, fairground eclecticism.

Perhaps to prove how all-encompassing Post-Modernism really is, at the end of What is Post-Modernism? Charles Jencks even mentions me. He writes: 'The atheist art critic, Peter Fuller, in his book Images of God: The Consolations of Lost Illusions, calls for the equivalent of a new spirituality based on an ''imaginative yet secular response to nature herself.” ' (This is a bit Post-Modernist - quoting Jencks quoting me.) He continues by arguing that, like himself, Fuller is seeking 'a shared symbolic order of the kind that a religion provides, but without the religion'. He asks, 'How is this to be achieved?'

To answer this question I would like to emphasise three points: the human imagination, the world of natural form and the idea of national traditions in art. In these, I believe, lies the framework for a 'facilitating environment' in which the aesthetic dimension of life can still flourish.

To begin with the imagination, I think it is very important to resist the idea that Post-Modernism is 'the language of freedom'. It would be more appropriate to see it as the language of corporate uniformity in fancy dress. A greater relativist than Jencks was Walter Pater, who, in the mid-nineteenth century, wrote vividly of the fragmentation of human experience into 'impressions' that seemingly did not add up into a coherent whole. Like the Post-Modernists he argued that one ought to take the best from Hellenic and Gothic or Christian traditions, and synthesise them. But, he added, 'what modern art has to do in the service of culture is so to rearrange the details of modern life, as to reflect it, that it may satisfy the spirit'. For Pater, unlike the Post-Modernists, 'a sense of freedom' was rooted not in stylistic eclecticism, but rather in the cultivation of what he called 'imaginative reason'.

To turn specifically to the case of British art, when Baudelaire wrote in the 1850s that British artists were 'representatives of the imagination and the most precious faculties of the human soul', I think that what he was referring to was the persistence in British cultural life of a Romantic tradition, whose twin characteristics were a belief in the human imagination and a close, empirical response to the world of natural form.

I believe that this tradition, a particular national version of a wider Romantic tradition, persisted in England and gave rise to some of our best art in the twentieth century - the work of such artists as Paul Nash, Henry Moore, Graham Sutherland, David Bomberg and Peter Lanyon - which was all created as much in resistance to the ideas of Modernism as in acceptance of them. Moore, who has often been acclaimed as the greatest sculptor of the twentieth century, far from showing any faith in science and technology, turned his back on what he called 'synthetic culture'. Using a claw chisel, he carved stone into symbols of the unity of man and nature, in what was an essentially anti- Modern vision. In the spirit of Pater, Moore conjoined elements of the classical and the Gothic, but his work could never be considered 'Post-Modern' in that it affirmed the human spirit and, however fractured, the human subject. This was not an art in quotation marks or parentheses.

In Britain, in the late twentieth century, this powerful humanist and Romantic tradition persists, and may even be undergoing a renaissance comparable to that which it underwent in the 1940s. The stimulus this time is not war, but the collapse of the Modern movement and the spiritual bankruptcy of Post-Modernism. Here are the lineaments not of a new heroism - a triumph over nature - but rather of a new imaginative relationship to it.

'There is,' wrote Clement Greenberg, 'nothing left in nature for plastic art to explore.' This has been the tacit assumption of Post-Modernism too. But all human needs are ultimately dependent upon nature, in which and through which we have our being. The best British artists of this century continually set out to explore and reaffirm the primacy of the natural world.

This is not nostalgic, or not necessarily so. Modernism incorporated within itself a view of science as somehow a reduction to the rectilinear, the upright - the exposure of the essential simplicity of phenomena. Yet recent science, one might even say 'Post-Modern science', is very much concerned with the way in which complexity springs out of the combination and recombination of simple elements. I'm thinking, for example, of the fractal geometry of Benoit B. Mandelbrot, and his fascinating doctrine of 'self-similarity', which seems to have so much in common with the insights of poets and philosophers throughout the ages, who thought to see the whole world reflected in a grain of sand. Now some artists in England, and elsewhere, are beginning to take on board the insights of this new science. This, I find far more exciting than more junky pilasters and shifting semiotic codes, intent on demonstrating the equivalence between Poussin and Disneyland. I'd like to think that true Post-Modernism will take on Post-Modern science and explore the immense imaginative possibilities and aesthetic potential which it proposes. This may even lead to an architecture which has more in common with the Gothic than the classical, although this is still merely speculation.

For the time being, I feel that, in Britain, the best chance of a national aesthetic revival lies in the improbable hands of Prince Charles, heir to the throne. The Prince has already-by virtue of his position, which is outside the political and economic arguments - challenged conventional Modernist and Post- Modernist wisdom in architecture. In his speeches he has criticised both the commercial imperatives of the free market and the utopian materialism of the Left, which have often suited each other so well. The Prince seems to echo Ruskin in his longing for an architecture which finds ways of 'enhancing the natural environment, of adding to the sum of human delight by appreciating that man is more, much more, than a mere mechanical object whose sole aim is to produce money'.

'Man,' he has said, 'is a far more complex creation. Above all he has a soul, and the soul is irrational and mysterious.' By his intervention in architecture, the Prince has helped change the fundamental terms of the leading debates. It is to be hoped that he may take a closer interest in the fine arts as well.

When one tries to sum up some of the elements that might sustain aesthetic life in the face of growing anaesthesia, I think the general principle that must be stressed is that the universal can be achieved only through a recognition of the particular. We must return to the 'sense of place' which international Modernism and contemporary Post-Modernism have done so much to devalue. This entails a return to nature and a reconsideration of national tradition for which there are a number of useful guides, from Pater to secular pantheism, from Post- Modern science to the Prince.

MODERN ART: Questions Of Taste

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

The arts across the world are under attack right now, the telling comments by the likes of Rishi Sunak that artists should ‘re-train’, clearly show the administration’s priorities when it comes to supporting the arts at this time. i know that my father would have had a great deal to say about this. So you can read selected essays by Peter Fuller here on my blog during down time! I will be posting regularly.

Questions of Taste

by Peter Fuller, 1983

Design likes to present itself as clean-cut, rational and efficient. Taste, however, is always awkward and elusive; it springs out of the vagaries of sensuous response and seems to lose itself in nebulous vapours of value. Questions of taste have thus tended to be regarded by designers as no more than messy intrusions into the rational resolution of ‘design problems’. Alternatively, others have attempted to eradicate the issue altogether by reducing ‘good taste’ to the efficient functioning of mechanisms.

But taste has conspicuously refused to allow itself to be stamped out - in either sense of that phrase. As the premises of the modern movement have been called into question, so taste has been protruding its awkward tongue again. For many of us, it is becoming more and more evident that pure ‘Functionalism’ is, and indeed always has been, a myth; taste enters deeply even into design decisions which purport to have eliminated it. But, more fundamentally, it is now, at least, beginning to be asked whether good taste and mechanism are in fact compatible, i.e. whether the Modernist ethic did not build into itself some fundamental thwarting or distorting of the potentialities of human taste.

A recent exhibition at the Boilerhouse, in the Victoria and Albert Museum, reflected both the revival of interest in questions of taste, and the confusion among designers concerning them. Stephen Bayley’s exhibition, called simply ‘Taste’, chronicled the history of the concept through ‘The Antique Ideal’; the impact of mechanisation in the nineteenth century and the reaction against it; ‘The Romance of the Machine’; contemporary pluralism; and the growing ‘Cult of Kitsch’ - or bad taste which acknowledges itself as such.

But Minale Tattersfield, who designed the exhibition, opted to exhibit those items which had gained approval in their own time on reproduction classical plinths, and those which had not on inverted dustbins. An exhibition which attempted to tell us that ‘Taste’ was a neglected issue of importance was thus, itself, in the worst possible taste. I believe this contradiction reflects a deep- rooted contemporary ambivalence about the nature and value of the concept of ‘Taste’, an ambivalence which is nowhere more manifest than in Stephen Bayley’s muddled commentary.

In the introduction to the little book produced to accompany the exhibition, Bayley committed himself to the view that taste is ‘really just another word for choice, whether that choice is to discriminate between flavours in the mouth or objects before the eye’. Thus Bayley claimed that taste did not have anything to do with values, beyond questions of personal whim. He claimed there really can be no such thing as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ taste: ‘These adjectives were added more than a hundred years after the concept was defined by people seeking to give the process of selection particular moral values which would help them justify a style which satisfied their image of themselves... or condemn one which affronted it.’ So, Bayley claimed, ‘Taste derives its force from data that is (sic) a part of culture rather than pure science.’ Taste, he argued, should be separated out from design ‘so that in future each can be better understood’.

Just a few pages later on, however, Bayley took a different tack. Unexpectedly, he began to argue there was a transcultural and transhistorical consensus about those qualities of an object which led to good design. (These he itemised as intelligibility in form; an appropriate choice of materials to the function; and an intelligent equation between construction and purpose, so that the available technology is exploited to the full.) Bayley then went on to say that those ‘principles of design’ were in fact ‘the Rules of Taste’. In an interview, he once said his own taste was ‘just Le Corbusier, really’: and his universals turn out to be suspiciously close to the sort of thing Le Corbusier might have said about his own style, though they would appear to eliminate numerous works in other styles.

And so, in effect, there are two Stephen Bayleys: one who believes that the issue of taste is as unimportant, and as unresolv- able, as individual whim or fancy; and the other, who, like every good Modernist, wants to assimilate taste to the inhuman author­ity of the machine. This confusion about taste in the heart and mind of the Director of the Boilerhouse project is at least fashion­able in that it is symptomatic of a confusion which prevails among the ‘cultured’ urban middle-classes at large. With the weakening of Modernist dogmatism - at least outside the bunker of the Boilerhouse - it is the tendency to trivialise taste, however, which is uppermost. Again and again aesthetic taste is reduced to the lowest level of consumer preference; almost always, it is assumed to be a mere sense preference and usually the paradigm is taste in food. Such attitudes are inevitably commonly associated with the cult of Kitsch.

For example, among the extracts reproduced in Bayley’s book is one from an American writer, John Pile, who wrote an influen­tial article, ‘In Praise of Tasteless Products’. Taste, according to Pile, means, ‘simply “preference” - what one likes or dislikes’. He notes that taste is the name of one of the five senses which lead ‘one person to prefer chocolate and another to prefer strawberry’. The very concept, he claims, ‘suggests an element of arbitrariness or even a lack of sense, that is, irrationality’. Taste, Pile concludes, ‘is a somewhat superficial matter, subject to alteration on a rather casual basis’.

Similarly, for John Blake, Deputy Director of the British Design Council, ‘the notion that qualitative judgements can be made about a person’s taste makes little sense if the word is used correctly.’ In an article entitled ‘Don’t Forget that Bad Taste is Popular’, Blake defends that pariah of all ‘good design’: the electric fire, embellished with imitation coal. For Blake, the designer has no right to reject such things if the market indicates that people want them. ‘A person’s taste’, writes Blake, ‘is charac­teristic of the person, like his height, the shape of his nose or the colour of his hair.’ He adds, ‘I have a taste for Golden Delicious apples, but my son prefers Cox’s. Does that mean that my taste is therefore superior to his, or vice versa?’

As we shall see, perhaps it does. But, for the moment, let us leave on one side the fact that in matters of taste it would be advisable to trust neither an American (who comes from an anaesthetized culture) nor someone who prefers Golden Delicious apples to Cox’s. My argument runs deeper than that. I believe that modern technological development, in conjunction with a market economy, has demeaned and diminished the great human faculty of taste. Bayley, Pile, Blake and Co. passively reflect in their theories a tragic corrosion brought about by current productive and social processes. Unlike them, I am not interested in rubber- stamping what is happening; rather, I am concerned about seek­ing ways of reversing these developments so that taste, with its sensuous and evaluative dimensions, can flourish once again.

But what sort of faculty is (or was) taste? In Keywords, Raymond Williams explains that ‘taste’ dates back to the thir­teenth century, when it was used in an exclusively sensual sense - although the senses it embraced included those of touch and feeling, as well as those received through the mouth. Gradually, however, the associations of ‘taste’ with sense contracted until they became exclusively oral; while its metaphorical usages ex­tended, at first to take in the whole field of human understanding. By the seventeenth century, taste had acquired its associations with aesthetic discrimination.

‘Taste’ was like having a new sense or faculty added to the human soul, as Lord Shaftesbury put it. For Edmund Burke, ‘what is called Taste ... is not a simple idea, but is partly made up of a perception of the primary pleasures of sense, of the secondary pleasures of the imagination, and of the reasoning faculty, con­cerning the various relations of these, and concerning the human passions, manners, and actions.’

Immanuel Kant, too, insisted again and again that true taste went far beyond the fancy to which Bayley, Pile and Blake would have us reduce it. Kant once argued that, as regards the pleasant, everyone is content that his judgment, based on private feeling, should be limited to his own person. The example he gives is that if a man says, ‘Canary wine is pleasant’, he can logically be cor­rected and reminded that he ought to say, ‘It is pleasant to me .’ And this, according to Kant, is the case not only as regards the taste of the tongue, the palate, and the throat, but for whatever is pleasant to anyone’s eyes and ears. Some people find the colour violet soft and lovely; others feel it washed out and dead; one man likes the tone of wind instruments; another that of strings. Kant argues that to try in such matters to reprove as incorrect another man’s judgment which is different from our own, as if such judgments could be logically opposed, ‘would be folly’. And so he insists, as regards the pleasant, ‘the fundamental proposition is valid: everyone has his own taste (the taste of sense).’ Thus, one might say, Bayley, Pile, Blake and Kant would all agree that it is a matter of no consequence if a man prefers lemon to orange squash, pork to beef, Brooke Bond to Lipton’s tea, or, I suppose, Golden Delicious to Cox’s.

But Kant immediately goes on to say that the case is quite different with the beautiful, as distinct from the pleasant. For Kant, it would be simply ‘laughable’ if a man who imagined anything to his own taste tried to justify himself by saying, ‘This object (the house we see, the coat that person wears, the concert we hear, the poem submitted to our judgment) is beautiful for me.''

Kant argues a man must not call a thing beautiful just because it pleases him. All sorts of things have charm and pleasantness, ‘and no one troubles himself at that’. But, claims Kant, if a man says that something or other is beautiful, ‘he supposes in others the same satisfaction; he judges not merely for himself, but for everyone, and speaks of beauty as if it were a property of things.’ Thus Kant concludes that in questions of the beautiful, we cannot say that each man has his own particular taste: ‘For this would be as much as to say that there is no taste whatever, i.e. no aesthetical judgment which can make a rightful claim upon everyone’s assent.’

Kant, of course, regarded such a position as simply a logical reductio ad absurdum-, but it is just this reductio ad absurdum which Bayley, Pile, Blake and Co. wish to serve up to us as the very latest thinking on taste. It does not even occur to them that there may be a category of the beautiful which seeks to make claims beyond those of the vagaries of personal fancy; for them, all ‘aesthetical judgments’ are not only subjective, but arbitrary. The only escape from such extreme relativism is Bayley’s last-minute appeal to the ‘objectivity’ of ‘principles of design’ rooted in talk about efficiency, practical function, technological sophistication and so on.

But my argument against Kant works in the opposite direction from theirs: for I believe that he conceded the relativity of even sensual taste much too quickly. For although tastes vary, it is not true to say that everyone has his or her own taste, in any absolute way, even in matters of sense. For human senses are rooted in biological being, and emerged out of biological functions; though variable, they are far from being infinitely so. Even at the level of sensuous experience, discriminative judgments about taste are not only possible, but commonplace. It is not just that we readily acknowledge one man has a better ear, or eye, than another. Judgments about sense experience imply an underlying consensus of qualitative assumptions. For example, a man who judged excrement to have a more pleasant smell than roses would, almost universally, be held to have an aberrant or perverse taste.

The problem is complicated, however, because this consensus is not simply ‘given’ to us: rather it can only be reached through culturally and socially determined habits, and these can obscure even more than they reveal. For example, we can easily imagine a society in which the odour of filth is widely preferred to the aroma of roses, and no doubt the social anthropologists can tell us of one. But what of individuals who prefer, say, rayon to silk; fibreglass to elm-wood; the dullness of paste to the lustre and brilliance of true diamonds; insipid white sliced bread to the best wholemeals; cheap and nasty Spanish plonk to vintage Chateau Margaux; factory-made Axminsters to hand-woven carpets; or tasteless Golden Delicious to Cox’s apples?

I am suggesting that modern productive, economic, and cultu­ral systems, in the West, are conspiring to create a situation not so very different from that of our hypothetical example in which the odour of excrement was widely preferred to that of roses. In our society it may well be that a majority prefers, say, white, sliced, plimsoll bread to wholemeal. Bayley, Pile, Blake and Co. advocate uncritical collusion with this distortion and suppression of the full development of human sense and evaluative responses. But the judgment of true taste will inevitably be made ‘against the grain’, and equally inevitably run the risk of being condemned as elitist.

In aesthetically healthy societies a continuity between the re­sponses of sense and fully aesthetic responses can be assumed. The rupturing of this continuity is, I believe, one of the most conspi­cuous symptoms of this crisis of taste in our time. This continuity still survives, of course, in numerous sub-cultural activities: for example in the sub-culture of fine wines. The production of these wines has only the remotest root in the function of quenching human thirst; they constitute the higher reaches of sensual re­sponse, where taste reigns supreme. In the connoisseurship of them, questions parallel to those Kant raised about true aesthetic response, as opposed to merely pleasant sensations, soon bubble towards the neck of the bottle. For, when he pronounces, the connoisseur certainly wants to say that such and such a wine is (or is not) good ‘for me’; but that is not all he wants to say.

Our connoisseur will certainly be prepared to admit his person­al fancies, and even, perhaps, the idiosyncratic or sentimental tinges and flushes to his taste. He may well have a general preference for clarets rather than burgundies, and a particular liking for that distinctive, though hardly superb, wine he first drank on his wedding day. But, he will tell us, his fancies do not prevent him from discriminating between a bad claret and a good burgundy; nor from recognising that there are, in fact, better vintages of his wedding day wine than the one he personally prefers. When he makes statements of this kind, our connoisseur is acknowledging that he, too, is not merely judging for himself, but for everyone. He regards quality more as if it was a property of the wine itself rather than an arbitrary response of the taste buds.

Furthermore, he is aware that he exercises his taste in the context of an evolving tradition of the manufacture of and response to fine wines. Of course, this tradition is inflected by a plethora of local and regional preferences and prejudices; but such variations do not exclude the possibility of an authoritative consensus of evaluative responses. Indeed, most disputes between connoisseurs concern the fine tuning of the hierarchy of the vintage years. Connoisseurs assume that the tradition has arrived at judgments which are something more than individual whim or local prejudice. Anyone who consistently inverted the consensus, e.g. who regularly preferred vin ordinare to the supreme vintages of the greatest premier cru wines could safely be assumed to have a bad or aberrant taste in wines.

Even taste of the senses, therefore, can take us far beyond the arbitrariness of pleasant ‘for me’ responses; and as soon as we move into the various branches of craft manufacture, of, say, tapestry-making, furniture design, jewellery and pottery, we real­ise just how inadequate such responses are. For example, if a man said that a mass-produced Woolworth’s bowl, embellished with floral transfers, was as ‘good’ as a great Bernard Leach pot, I could not simply assent that he was entitled to his taste; rather I would assume that some sad occlusion of his aesthetic faculties had taken place. In the case of the fine arts, Bayley, Pile and Blake notwith­standing, it is quite impossible to evade the universalising claims of judgments of taste. It may be that there are those who believe David Wynne’s Boy on a Dolphin is a greater sculpture than Michelangelo’s last Pieta. But it is nothing better than vulgar philistinism to concede that this judgment is as good as any other, even if it happens to be a majority judgment.

The concept of taste then was an attempt to describe the way in which human affective, imaginative, symbolic, aesthetic and eva­luative responses are rooted in, and emerge out of, data given to us through the senses. The idea of taste acknowledges the fact that, in our species, the senses are not simply a means of acquiring practical or immediately functional information for the purposes of survival. Nor is it just that we come to enjoy certain sensuous experiences for their own sake; the senses also enter into that terrain of imaginative transformation and evaluative response which seems unique to man.

Elsewhere, I have tried to explain this phenomenon, upon which the capacity for culture depends, in terms of the long period of dependency of the human infant upon the mother. For us, the senses play into a world of illusion and imaginative creation before they become a means of acquiring knowledge about the outside world. Even after he has come to accept the existence of an autonomous, external reality he did not create, man is compen­sated through his cultural life; there, at least, things can be imbued with value, and tasted through this faculty added to the human soul.

Predictably, the concept of taste only required conceptualisa­tion and philosophical analysis at that moment in history when it became problematic. So long as men and women could ‘Taste and see how good the Lord is’, so long, in other words, as sensuous experience continued to flow uninterruptedly into cultural life, evaluative response and symbolic belief, the idea of taste (as something over and above sensuous experience) was simply redundant. It is not surprising, therefore, to discover that almost from the moment it was first used, ‘taste’ was already a concept fraught with difficulties.

The eighteenth century, for example, was preoccupied with the idea of ‘true’ educated taste, rooted in the recovery of the Golden Age of the classical past, as against popular taste - or the lack of it. The assumption was that this rift could be healed through educa­tion. But even before the end of the century, educated ‘Taste’ had acquired a capital ‘T’ and become suspect. Wordsworth and others railed against the reduction of taste to empty manners. In his history of Victorian Taste John Steegman argues that about 1830, taste ‘underwent a change more violent than any it had undergone for a hundred and fifty years previously.’ This change, he says, was not merely one of direction. ‘It lay rather in abandon­ing the signposts of authority for the fancies of the individual.’ Throughout the later nineteenth century, lone prophets like Rus­kin, Eastlake and Morris denounced the decay of taste into ‘Taste’ or manners among the elite, and its general absence elsewhere in society. But they were bereft of authority. By the twentieth century, all the great critical voices had fallen silent. Even high aesthetic taste was widely assumed to be a ‘for me’ response. The thin relativism of Bayley, Pile and Blake became the order of the day. Commentators began to argue there was ‘no aesthetical judg­ment which can make a rightful claim upon everyone’s assent.’ Even a knowing middle class turned enthusiastically to Kitsch.

The causes of this destruction of taste are various and complex. The puncturing of the illusions of religious faith certainly made it harder and-harder to sustain belief in a continuity between the evidence of the senses and affective or evaluative response. Values came to be characterised as being ‘subjective’ and therefore, by implication, arbitrary; that area of experience which had once united them with physical and social reality began to disappear.

Mechanism began to replace organism, not only as the assumed model for all production and creativity, but as the paradigm for cultural activity itself. Modernism celebrated this elevation of the machine, decrying the ornamental and aesthetic aspects of work in favour of at least a look of standardisation and efficiency. The prevalent taste became the affirmation of those elements in con­temporary productive life inimical to the development of taste; hence the attempt to identify the universals of taste with the principles of functional design.

Meanwhile, the growth of a market economy based on the principles of economic competition tended to lead to the triumph of exchange values over the judgments of taste. Indeed, the intensification of the market led to the eradication of many of the traditional and qualitative preconditions for the exercise of taste. The market in fact encourages the homogenisation of sensuous experience: it gives us Golden Delicious rather than more than two hundred local varieties. Simultaneously, however, through advertising and ideology, the market proclaims the value of choice. But a preference for Coke rather than Pepsi really has no qualitative significance; there can be no such thing as a connois­seur of cola. At the same time, political democratisation has somehow become co.nflated into a cultural rejection of any kind of discrimination or preference: taste has become bereft of authority and has sunk back into the solipsistic narcissisms of the sub­cultures, or the trivialising relativisms of individual fancy.

And yet, and yet. . . despite nerves and doubt about the status of taste, most of us still try to exercise it. And most of us demonstrate by our actions that we believe it to be something more than a ‘for me’ response. Indeed, proof against the assertions of Bayley, Pile, Blake and Co. is readily to be found in everyday life. Today, it is possible to question with relative impunity the politics, ethics, actions and even religious convictions of most of the men and women one encounters. There is widespread under­standing that all such areas and issues offer legitimate scope for radical divergences and oppositions. No such generosity prevails over questions of taste. Rare indeed are the circumstances under which it is acceptable ‘decently’ to challenge an individual’s taste in, say, clothing, interior design, or works of art.

Indeed, I find that because, as an art critic, I offer preferential judgments of taste, by profession, I am exposed to intemperately energetic responses of a kind that simply do not arise in other areas of human discourse. Whatever these responses may or may not indicate about the nature of taste, they do not suggest that there is a general agreement that it is a ‘somewhat superficial matter’, of no greater significance than whether a man has black or brown hair, or prefers Scotch to gin.

Rather, this continuing agitation about taste suggests that it is a significant human responsive faculty, whose roots reach back into natural, rather than cultural or social history. But taste requires a facilitating cultural environment if it is to thrive — and it is denied this in a society which, as it were, chooses mechanism and competition, rather than organism and co-operation, as its mod­els in productive life. Elsewhere, I have argued the case for the regulation of automated industrial production; and for restraint and control of such effects of market competition as advertising and market-orientated styling. I have suggested that, even in the absence of a religion, nature itself can provide that ‘shared symbolic order’ which allows for the restitution of a continuity between sense experience and affective life. But even such drastic (and improbable) developments as these would not, in them­selves, be sufficient to ensure a widespread revival of the faculty of taste. For, if it is to emerge out of narcissism and individualism, taste requires rooting in a cultural tradition; taste cannot trans­mute itself into anything other than passing fashion if its conven­tions, however arbitrary in themselves, are lacking in authority. There is, of course, no possibility that the church, or the court, can ever again be guardians of more than sub-cultural tastes. The history of Modernism has demonstrated that it is folly to believe that the functioning of machines can provide a substitute for such lost authority. We therefore have no choice but to turn to the idea of new human agencies.

One of the most interesting texts in Bayley’s little book is a private memorandum by Sherban Cantacuzino, Secretary of the Royal Fine Art Commission, which deals with this possibility. Cantacuzino, too, cites Kant’s view that although aesthetic judg­ment is grounded in a feeling of pleasure personal to every individual, this pleasure aspires to be universally valid. Thus he seeks a greater authority for the Commission - an authority rooted in democratic representation, rather than public participa­tion. ‘The Commission,’ he writes, ‘as a body passing aesthetic judgment, must feel compelled and also entitled to, as it were, legislate its pleasures for all rational beings.’

Many people understandably have a revulsion against any suggestion of social control in matters of taste or aesthetics; and yet the greatest achievements in this terrain, along with some of the worst, were effected under conditions where such controls applied. In our society, in their absence, the market and advancing technology, are having unmitigatedly detrimental effects on the aesthetic life of society. It is not the fact of institutional regulation, so much as its content, that should concern us: and I am arguing for an institution which, as it were, exercises a positive discrimina­tion in favour of the aesthetic dimension. Unlike Cantacuzino, I do not believe this institution should necessarily be the Royal Fine Art Commission: rather, it might be some new agency, drawn from the Design, Crafts and Arts Councils, as well as from the Commission. But, unlike these bodies, it would have powers of direct patronage, and, as Cantacuzino puts it, ‘feel compelled and also entitled to . . . legislate its pleasures for all rational beings’. Indeed, I believe that such a rooting of taste in the authority of an effective institution of state would not be a limitation on aesthetic life so much as a sine qua non of its continued survival. For what is certain is that left to their own considerable devices, the develop­ment of technology and the expansion of the market will succeed in holding the faculty of taste in a state of limbo, if not in suppressing it altogether. But some kind of effective cultural conservationism, in the face of the philistinism even of ‘experts’ like Bayley, Pile and Blake, seems to me to be as much an obligation of good Government as the protection of our forests and national parks from the intrusions of technological develop­ment; or the provision of adequate educational and health facili­ties, free from distorting effects of market pressures.

1983

MODERN ART: Where Was The Art Of The Seventies?

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.

MODERN ART: Plus Ca Change

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

Plus Ca Change

by Peter Fuller, 1982

Times change. And so do values: at least in the international ‘art world’. Let’s go back ten years to ‘The New Art’ at the Hayward Gallery in 1972. Remember? Art Language, Victor Burgin, Hamish Fulton, Gilbert and George, John Stezaker and the rest of them, all ticker-taping down from the walls and ceilings. Words, numbers, diagrams, photo-texts, and flickering electronic equip­ment. The Hayward bristled with surveillance, documentation and research. A visit to ‘The New Art’ exhibition was rather like getting your fingerprints taken at a large police station, or ap­plying for a visa, in person, at the American Embassy.

Not a smear or whiff of paint in sight, of course. Not even a daub of it on the sole of a trendy shoe. ‘We’ knew so much better than that. As Donald Karshan wrote introducing a major exhibi­tion of conceptual art in New York, ‘We begin to understand that painting and sculpture are simply unreal in the coming age of computers and instant travel.’ Quite so! Those were the days when Tate officials were openly explaining that art had become a sub-cultural game for a specific in-group, and the gallery was avidly acquiring twigs, blankets, maps, bricks and videotapes of effete young men getting drunk on Gordon’s Gin and Arts Council grants: almost anything, in fact, so long as it wasn’t actually painted.

Victor Burgin, a ubiquitous Bouguereau and salon semioticist of those far-off days, called painting ‘the anachronistic daubing of woven fabrics with coloured mud’. And Anne Seymour, herself then on the Tate staff, introduced the catalogue to ‘The New Art’ with jibes at all those silly-billies who thought ‘reality’ could be summed up in a picture of ‘a nude lady of uncertain age sitting on a kitchen chair’. Art, she said, could just as well be ‘a Balinese “monkey dance”, a piano tuner, running seven miles a day for seven days, or seeing your feet at eye level’. Through conceptual-ism, and so forth, the artist was free to work in ‘philosophy, photography, landscape, etc.’ - anything, in fact, that took his fancy, so long as he didn’t sully his hands with that nasty, foul-smelling, pigmented stuff which certain consenting cultural renegades squeezed out of little tubes in private. All this Miss Seymour thought quite wonderful: the artist was no longer ‘tied to a host of aesthetic discomforts which he personally does not appreciate’. (In those days, you didn’t even have to watch your ‘he’s’ and ‘she’s’.)

William Coldstream, Seated Nude 1972

All that is terribly old hat now. Ms Seymour has long since left the Tate, and is now firmly installed at Anthony D’Offay’s in Dering Street, from where she is delivering little homilies about the unique existential and metaphysical value of painting. ‘Paint­ing’, she writes in a recent introduction to the work of an Italian called Chia, ‘is an attempt to make a physical thing which both questions and affirms its existence. The metaphysical problem in painting is to paint something as normal as possible, but to perceive it in a special way, which shows it as it is, and imbues it with a sense of the existential complications that reality involves.’ Aesthetic discomforts, it would seem, are back in fashion. Nor, I am sure, would it be fair to suggest that Seymour’s conversion had anything to do with the fact that, with artists like William Coldstream on his books, Mr D’Offay knew a good deal about what was still to be gained from pictures of nude ladies of uncertain age seated on kitchen chairs. As Helena Kontova, editor of Flash Art, who makes it her business to know about such things, has written, there is a ‘great wave of painting’, which is flowing simply everywhere, even ‘into areas that, until very recently, were considered improbable and even totally antagonis­tic’.

Markus Lupertz, Dithyrambs & Centaurs

I first picked up whiffs of the tidal slick that was heading in our direction from certain puzzling exhibitions at the Lisson and Whitechapel Galleries. The Nicholases Serota and Logsdail had once run establishments so clinical that you could have carried out a surgical operation on the floors: and then, quite suddenly, it began to look as if surgical operations had been carried out there. Slurpily lugubrious Lupertzs and suchlike, squelching their en­trails at you from every side. But I only became aware of the scale of what was afoot when I saw ‘The New Spirit in Painting’ exhibition at the Royal Academy, early in 1981. The object of this show, or so the organisers said, was to demonstrate that ‘Great Painting’ was still being made today: every one of the 150 large pictures had been made within the previous decade.

In the catalogue, Hugh Casson, pra, who should have known better, likened ‘The New Spirit’ to Roger Fry’s famous exhibitions at the Grafton Gallery at the beginning of the century. These introduced Post-Impressionist painting to Britain and changed the course of taste, and subsequent history of art, in this country. The paintings of Cezanne, Gauguin and Van Gogh, however, met with resistance here; but the ‘New Spirit’ was immediately endorsed not just by the Royal Academy but by every modern art museum in the Western world. It is worth reminding ourselves of exactly what was on offer in that show.

Francis Bacon, Study for Portrait, 1977

First, there were works by the Grand Old Men of classical modernism, and assorted neo-legendary dinosaurs who had hung on into the 1970s but who ‘belonged’ to earlier decades: Bacon, Balthus, De Kooning, Helion, Matta, Picasso. Then there were pictures by a number of ‘eccentrics’ (mostly British) who, though well-established, had not previously held more than fringe posi­tions in The Story of Modern Art: Auerbach, Freud, Kitaj, Hockney, Hodgkin. Next came a string of artists (mostly Amer­ican) who exemplified the old reductionist spirit of Late Modern­ism, with its coda of mechanical and automatic painting: Brice Marden, Warhol and Frank Stella, now born again with all the glitter and tinsel of a new expressionism. Finally, came the ‘new blood’; the names that in a couple of years have risen from obscurity to become the common currency of the ‘art scene’. From Germany: Baselitz, Fetting, Hodicke, Kiefer, Koberling, Liipertz, Penck and Polke; from Italy: Calzolari, Chia and Paladino; and from America: Schnabel. And they, and their absent colleagues, like Clemente, Salome and Salle, are what it is all about.

Lucian Freud, Self Portrait

When I went to Sydney, last spring, I realised that this ‘great wave of painting’ had even swept through the outback: the Biennale was littered with gaudy pictures, the size of cricket- pitches, reeking of wet linseed oil, by all the masters and mistres­ses of the New Expressionism. New Imagism, Nuovi Nuovi, La Transavantguardia, Bad Painting, etc.: it conies under a score or more of different names. There is even an indigenous antipodean version - with stars like Davida Allen, whose epic smudges (bearing titles like Eschatological Dog) are to be seen in every Australian provincial art museum. But it isn’t just Australia. At all the art fairs, Kunst hassles and state-backed culture binges, ‘The New Spirit’ is being peddled for all it is worth which, despite worldwide recession, remains quite a bit. Busy little art bureau­crats are jetting around the capitals of the world assisting in their usual tight-lipped way in the birth of a new style; new critics are popping up prepared to mouth a new art rhetoric and endorse a new repertoire of ‘approved’ artists.

All this may make you begin to feel a twinge or two of sympathy for the conceptualists, performance people, political and theoretical artists who constituted Un Certain Art Anglais and got all the exposure in the paintless ’seventies. Don’t worry. Old avant-gardists never die: they just clamber on to whatever new wave is going. Many of today’s new tendency painters were yesterday’s mixed media pranksters. Bruce McLean is an obvious example. But even Ms Mary Kelly is now playing with pigmented shit, rather than the real thing. Who knows - perhaps Burgin is mixing coloured muds. Nor is ‘the great tide of paint’ necessarily opposed to all the proliferating anti-aesthetic practices of the 1970s. Rather, it splatters them. As Helena Kontova puts it, ‘media such as performance, installation and photography’ are being ‘contaminated’, or ‘taken over by anilines, colour and painting’. She argues that ‘in the space of just a few years or a few months’, artists who had succeeded in frustrating their manual skill and creative abilities by adopting a ‘moral severity’ that often impoverished their work have now ‘abandoned the technicalities of installation and the mental and physical stress of performance’. (As if Leonardo, Poussin, Van Gogh, Bonnard and Rothko had always been taking some sort of mindless, amoral, easy option!)

Georg Baselitz, Schlafzimmer (Bedroom), 1975

If I had any money to spare, I would buy shares in Rowney and Winsor and Newton - and probably put a bit into Crown and Berger, too. But one question is rarely asked in all this manic splatter: Is any of it any good? Take Baselitz, a German, and, by all accounts, one of the best of the new tendency painters. His work is inept: expressionistic, though not expressionist, he has made a mannerism and a great deal of money by prostituting an indigenous German tradition. Baselitz’s painting lacks even an echo of authentic experience, let alone achieved technical skill, or ‘working-through’ of expressively original forms. Inflated in scale and price, overweening, ugly, bombastic, vapid, loose, and awash with the sentimentality of borrowed angst, Baselitz paints a sort of seamless Misery Me Gift-Wrap. He suffers from some stultifying occlusion of the imagination, lacks touch and sensitivity as a draughtsman, and possesses none but the most degraded ‘studio’ colour sense. He gives the impression he has neither looked at the world, nor into himself. Indeed, his works are so drab and lacking in any painterly competence that, despite their enormous size, one would scarcely notice them unless they were hung upside down - which many of them are. And yet this sort of drivel is being bought, arse over eyes, by collectors, dealers and museums throughout the Western world. It was not just painting which was deserted by the ‘art scene’ in the 1970s, but also, it would seem, the ability to see and evaluate it with any sensitivity.

Even so, Julian Schnabel, an American, whose one-man show runs at the Tate until September 5, is a painter so bad that he makes Baselitz look quite good. Firstly, his imagination is acned and adolescent: at best, it is John W. Hinckley Jnr stuff, sick, immature, sexually unsavoury, strung up on a few improbable, external, cultural hooks. Schnabel appears to have needed ‘New Tendency’ painting for much the same reasons that Sonny Liston needed prizefighting. But he seems ignorant of the most basic elements of his chosen art-form. Works like Starting to Sing: Florence Loeb (4), of 1981, indicate that he has not yet realised that working on a surface the size of a boxing ring will tend to expose, rather than to conceal, his inability to draw. Nor, of course, will heaping broken crockery into a bed of body-filler mounted on canvas disguise the fact that Schnabel has rather less touch than an incompetent washer-upper. As for his colour, pictures like The unexpected death of Blinky Palermo in the tropics have all the chromatic subtlety of ghost-train decor. I have gazed and gazed at those Schnabels I have come across, and I have been quite unable to find any qualities in them (except inordinate size) which are not also readily visible in the fantasy paintings of the average disturbed adolescent. It is now common knowledge that Schnabel was ‘manufactured’ in much the same way as Jasper Johns was ‘manufactured’ in 1958, as a way out of the vacuum created by an ailing Tenth Street Abstract Expressionism. (Even the cast has not changed entirely; the long arm of Leo Castelli was involved in both operations.) I have never been a great admirer of Johns: but at least he had some real qualities around which the hype could be built. Schnabel does not. But this naked emperor — ‘one of the most celebrated young artists working anywhere in the world today’ according to the Tate catalogue - dazzles the eyeless press which throngs around him. Thus in 1974, Richard Cork purchased art for the Arts Council collection under the rubric, ‘Beyond Painting and Sculpture’. He dismissed all but a handful of diehard conceptualists as ‘obsolescent practitioners of our own time’, and celebrated the deposition of ‘the hegemony of painted surfaces or sculptural presences’. As I have had occasion to remark before, there is a tide in the affairs of corks and they tend to bob wherever it leads, even if it means re-entering a sea of paint. Today, Cork perceives ‘a shimmering, opalescent beauty’ in Schnabel’s shattered tea-cup pictures which, he feels, have the ‘bitter-sweet ambiguity’ of ‘broken shells cast up on a sea-shore’. Cork has yet to realise that the oil on the beaches of the new romanticism is a sign not so much of hidden wealth as of poisonous pollution.

Julian Schnabel

Why is the new tendency painting so bad ? As it happens, there is much in the rhetoric which surrounds it that I find perfectly acceptable, even congenial. For example, the text in the catalogue of ‘The New Spirit in Painting’ affirmed ‘a new consciousness of the contemporary significance’ of this art form; it stressed the relationship between painting and ‘a certain subjective vision’ which included both ‘a search for self-realisation’ and awareness of ‘a wider historical stage’. It celebrated ‘joy in the senses’, and proclaimed: ‘This exhibition presents a position in art which conspicuously asserts traditional values, such as individual creativity, accountability, quality, which throw light on the condi­tion of contemporary art, and, by association, on the society in which it is produced. Thus for all its apparent conservatism the art on show here is, in the true sense, progressive. Consciously or instinctively, then, painters are turning back to traditional con­cerns.’ I suspect Christos Joachimides may have experienced the joy of corroboration when he first read similar sentiments in my own work. But such ideas float like brightly coloured pollen through the new cultural climate.

One reason why so many new tendency painters lack that great quality to which they purportedly aspire is quite simple: with the exception of Chia, those who today are so avidly turning to paint appear to have next to no knowledge or mastery of painting. Paint itself is not a magical or fetishistic substance whose mere applica­tion endows special qualities. Paint demands profound trans­formation through imaginative and physical working: those who were formed as artists in the wasteland of Late Modernism tend to lack any apprenticeship in the practice and its traditions. But this is not simply a matter of individual failings. We can best under­stand the plight of the transavantgardist by considering two of the most insistent themes of new tendency criticism: its anti- historicism, and its avowed biologism.

New expressionist literature tends to harp on what one writer has called ‘the crisis in the avant-garde’s Darwinistic and evolu­tionary mentality’. Such emphases, of course, are not in them­selves new. Elsewhere, I myself have tried to demonstrate how this mentality gave rise to the sterile reductions, in both art and criticism, of the 1960s and 1970s. Through his exhibition, ‘To­wards Another Picture’, and its accompanying polemic, Andrew Brighton, too, cast doubt on the very concept of a self-evolving continuum of ‘mainstream’ styles, and demonstrated that such a historicist approach was worse than useless as an instrument for determining what was, and what was not, of value in art.

But, of course, when the ‘evolutionary mentality’ has been rejected, the central problem still remains: if stylistic evolution, or art history, does not confer aesthetic value, then what does? Exhibitions like ‘Prophecy and Vision’ indicate that God is in fashion once again. I have repeatedly argued, however, that there are significant elements in the production of good art which spring from relatively constant biological roots: these involve both enduring representations (of birth, reproduction, love, death, etc.) and the very nature of the material practices involved. And here too it would seem that I have something in common with new tendency criticism which, having abandoned the trajectory of evolving styles, tends to be sprinkled with vague appeals to human biological destiny, and to the biological and sensuous aspects of art-making itself.

Thus Nicholas Serota claims that Liipertz is reinterpreting ‘universals such as the creation and awakening of life, the inter­action of natural forces, human emotions and ideologies and the experience of death’. (Ideologies universal? An original idea, anyway . . .) Seymour rhapsodises about the alleged ‘autobiogra­phy’ manifest in Chia’s work. And Achille Bonito Oliva (whose book La Transavanguardia Italiana is relentlessly plagiarised by all other operators in this field) litters his texts with references to ‘manuality’, ‘sensorial pleasure’, ‘the rhythm and pulsion of pure subjectivity’, and the ‘concentrating point of a biology of art’. He has even gone so far as to speak of art having its own ‘internal genetic code’ - though whether this is a literal or a metaphoric formulation remains unclear.

And yet if there are similarities, there are also sharp distinctions from the position I have been trying to articulate, and these, I believe, are vital to any understanding of the failure of this new tendency work. For I have always argued that if there is a continuity between human aesthetic experience and ‘natural’ (or biological) life, there is also a rupture: and this has much to do with man’s unique capacity for the elaboration of socially shared symbolic orders, for culture. Though culture itself is grounded in man’s highly specific psycho-biological nature, it is also the means through which human history transcends natural history. Indeed, the ‘biological’ elements in our aesthetic life require a ‘facilitating environment’, in the form of appropriate modes of work and materials, and a socially-given symbolic order such as that pro­vided by a religion, before they can be fully realised. They require, in effect, an enabling and yet resistant tradition, and this is dependent upon the survival of propitious historical circumst­ances. But the waning of religious belief dismantled the socially shared symbolic order; and the rise of industrial production deaestheticised work itself. This led to the disappearance of any true style with deep tendrils in communal life.

Whatever else this may have been, it constituted a tremendous cultural loss. Donald Winnicott once pointed out that there could be no originality except on the basis of tradition. He thus unwit­tingly echoed John Ruskin, who wrote:

Originality in expression does not depend on invention of new words; nor originality in poetry on invention of new measures; nor, in painting, on invention of new colours, or new modes of using them. Originality depends on nothing of the kind. A man who has the gift, will take up any style that is going, the style of his day, and will work in that, and be great in that, and make everything that he does in it look as fresh as if every thought of it had just come down from heaven. I do not say that he will not take liberties with his materials, or with his rules: I do not say that strange changes will not sometimes be wrought by his efforts, or his fancies, in both. But those liberties will be like the liberties that a great speaker takes with the language, not a defiance of its rules for the sake of singular­ity; but inevitable, uncalculated, and brilliant consequences of an effort to express what the language, without such infraction, could not.

But what if culture became so warped it could sustain no widely- shared artistic language, nor give rise to a style that was any more deeply rooted than a passing fashion? What would happen to those men and women who had ‘the gift’ then? Ruskin knew this was the central problem facing architects and artists in the nineteenth century. As they thrashed around in an inevitable ‘Battle of the Styles’, he consistently advocated the continuance of a living Gothic tradition rooted in (Protestant) Christian belief. But he, too, saw that as secularisation shattered the shared symbolic order, and industrialisation squeezed the space for imaginative and creative work, aesthetic expression tended to be forced out of life: alternatively, it became reduced to the level of aesthesis — simple sensual, or biological, pleasure of which Ruskin tended to be contemptuous. Nonetheless, the space for a true aesthetic dimension - ‘theoria as opposed to “aesthesis” ’ - which, though rooted in the senses, reached up into moral (or symbolic) life could, Ruskin believed, be held open in the illusory world behind the picture plane. Thus, for him, The English school of landscape culminating in Turner is in reality nothing else than a healthy effort to fill the void which destruction of architecture has left.’

As long as Ruskin sustained belief, he thought that nature was the handiwork of God - and that Turner, through his scrupulous attention to that handiwork, had seen through the veil of appear­ances to the divine essence which lay behind them. But a religious view of nature became culturally increasingly untenable, and Modernism abandoned the search for a universal style which could affirm individual difference within collective spiritual unity. In architecture, the modern movement opted for functionalism; in art, after a period in which it was hoped that pure form itself could constitute a new symbolic order, it lapsed into that reductionist succession of fashions in which the aesthetic dimension was eventually betrayed altogether. In the sense that the transavant- garde has seen through this historicist evasion of the acute problem of the absence of a living style, its claim to be the first ‘post-modern’ movement seems tenable.

But Achille Bonito Oliva ‘solves’ this problem at the level of critical discourse (just as his chosen clan of artists do at the level of practice) by arguing that art need not enter into any moral or ‘theoretic’ dimension at all; however, unlike the pure formalist painters he does not defend aesthesis (or merely sensuous, retinal pleasure) so much as a miasma of competing and fragmented styles, a legion of broken symbolic orders which do not even seek to constitute a whole.

‘The myth of unity, a Unitarian vision backed up by an ideology which could explain any contradiction or antinomy, has been replaced’, he writes, ‘by a more healthy, open-minded position, ready to follow different directions. The myth of unity has been replaced by the possibility of fragmentation, of an experience characterised by movement and a personal approach.’ ‘Art’, according to Oliva, ‘is a continuous landslide of languages top­pling over the artist.’ He goes on to say that it is no accident that the artist ‘permanently resides in his own reserve, where physical and mental layers of experience accumulate’. Thus, he argues, ‘we now find ourselves faced by artists who choose to hitch-hike down many roads.’ But is this a ‘healthy’ situation, or a lapsing of art into a mire of subjectivity, a mixture not so much of ‘biological’ as of animal function, and a sort of semiotic side-salad, a solipsistic chaos of signs and signals, signifying nothing? These artists are as unable to enter into social life through their work as a child who has been taught to speak through a hundred languages rather than one (or two). Or, as Bonito Oliva puts it, ‘Art cannot be the practice of reconciliation because it always produces difference. Difference means the assertion of the fragment, negation of every homologation (sic) . . .’, etc. He regards this as a virtue. But if art both denies the pursuit of aesthesis, and refuses any moral or ‘theoretic’ aspect, if it, in effect, renounces the practice of recon­ciliation, it becomes stripped of the aesthetic dimension, and reduces itself to the application, through merely manual gestures, of substances to bits and pieces of broken symbolic orders. Not even in illusion can it create an ‘other reality’ which challenges the existing one: in as far as it has a style, it is punk bricolage. Marcuse argued that when art abandons its transcendent autonomy it succumbs to that reality it seeks to grasp and indict. ‘While the abandonment of the aesthetic form’, he wrote, ‘may well provide the most immediate, most direct mirror of a society in which subjects and objects are shattered, atomised, robbed of their words and images, the rejection of the aesthetic sublimation turns such works into bits and pieces of the very society whose “anti­art” they want to be.’ He went on to say that certain modernists held collage, the juxtaposition of media, the confusion of lan­guages and the renunciation of any aesthetic mimesis to be adequate responses to given reality, which they saw as disjointed and fragmented, and which certainly militated against any aesthe­tic formation. But, he stressed, this idea that social reality itself was fragmented was wrong. ‘We are experiencing, not the des­truction of every whole, every unit or unity, every meaning, but rather the rule and power of the whole, the superimposed ad­ministered unification . . . And in the intellectual culture of our society, it is the aesthetic form which, by virtue of its otherness, can stand up against this integration.’ It is precisely this possibility that the transavantgardists refuse.

Indeed, the ‘new expressionism’s’ inability to articulate, even within the illusory world of the picture, any coherent symbolic order indicates that it is much closer to the ‘Late Modernist’ problematic than its protagonists like to pretend. For the new tendencies make sense only in terms of reaction to the modernist art that went before. The pendulum has swung, certainly, but it has done so within that ever narrowing, and ever more restricting, funnel of modernist art history.

Julian Schnabel, Self Portrait

A ‘landslide of languages toppling over the artist’ is no com­pensation at all for the absence of a shared symbolic order, and an accompanying artistic language, or style. And it is precisely this great lacuna, common to the avantgarde and the transavantgarde alike, which eliminates the possibility of true aesthetic experience. To express nuance of feeling, language is necessary - and this is why, even in its ‘sensuality’, the new painting seems so coarse and vitiated. ‘It’s not expressionism, it is feelings that are important,’ writes Schnabel: and yet, of course, there is infinitely more subtlety of feeling in the way Vermeer modulates light across an illusory wall than in any of Schnabel’s wild outpourings.

In effect, an anally retentive conceptualism - stamped by mean­ness of mind, fear of feeling, obsession with control, systematiz­ation, over-ordering, dematerialisation, over-intellectualisation, etc. - has been replaced by its exact corollary, an anally expulsive expressionism, characterised by regressive splurging of sticky substances, lack of control, disorder, mindless splattering, com­pulsive inflation of scale, etc., etc. The proximity of the two phenomena will not surprise anyone with a modest degree of psychoanalytic knowledge. Elsewhere, I have tried to show how the anti-art of the 1960s and 1970s was reflective of the anaesthetic practices of contemporary culture, for example in its predilection for documentation, modular production, imagina­tive suppression, spectacle, etc. So, too, the new expressionism fails to offer any alternative to this anaesthetic reality, or the anti-art which it spawned. As Kontova herself puts it: ‘At the beginning of the ’seventies painting seemed to have been finally overridden, but with the arrival of postmodern, it made a trium-phant return to the art scene, displaying its great ability to assimilate the most diverse elements (such as some aspects of performance, installation or photography), to the point of formu­lating anti-painting, kitsch, neo-naif, neo-expressionism, and neo-baroque, to name but a few.’ Thus painting is prostituted: its capacity to offer ‘other realities within the existing one’, to participate in the cosmos of hope, is lost sight of entirely . . . Artists become like children who, instead of learning to play creatively, remain at the level of smearing the real, of smothering the nursery walls with their own excrement.

As for what painting can be: that is another story. But the roots of good painting remain in its traditions, its real skills, its accumu­lated knowledges, techniques and practices, for which the trans- avantgardists show only contempt, or ignorance. And, as for that absence of a shared symbolic order . . . Even if we have ceased to believe in God, nature can provide it for us: the answer lies not in the reproduction of appearances, but in an imaginative perception of natural form, in which its particularities are not denied, but grasped and transfigured. None of this, of course, precludes the somatic element, the part brought by the rhythms and activity of the artist’s own body - but it redeems it from infantilism. This is why the late Bomberg, Auerbach or Kossoff (so often invoked as old masters of the new expressionism) are infinitely more power­ful and convincing than the fashionable upstarts of the trans- avantgarde. Their practice is one of reconciliation, in illusion, between the self and the social and physical worlds. They offer something the new expressionists cannot: a redemption through form.

1982