MODERN ART: DONALD WINNICOTT / March 8, 2020 by Laurence Fuller

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

DONALD WINNICOTT

by Peter Fuller, 1980

Laurence Fuller in front of Henry Moore’s “Mother & Child” at The Getty Museum

Donald Winnicott once wrote that he could see what ‘a big part’ has been played in his work ‘by the urge to find and to appreciate the ordinary good mother.’ Before he died in 1971, he had interviewed an estimated 60,000 mothers with their children. His concern was with ‘the mother’s relation to her baby just before birth, and in the first weeks and months after the birth.’ He said that he was trying to draw attention to the immense contribution which the ‘ordinary good mother’ makes to the individual and to society ‘simply through being devoted to her infant.’

Winnicott was among the most innovative and insightful members of that fertile yet contentious school of psychoanalysis which began to flower in Britain in the wake of Melanie Klein’s discoveries in the 1930s. For about twenty-five years, his work has been well-known internationally in psychoanalytic, paediatric and psychiatric social work circles. In Britain, he has enjoyed a popular following for his radio talks, articles, and books on motherhood and child care. But his findings about the earliest phases of human development have not yet received the broader cultural consideration and application which they deserve.

For example, in his latter years, Winnicott turned away from clinical matters to concentrate upon the nature and location of cultural experience. This was the theme of his last book, Playing and Reality (1971). In my own researches into aesthetics, illusion, and the psychology of creativity, I have found the later Winnicott consistently clarifying and original. And yet I am always surprised at how few writers in this terrain cite Winnicott or realize the relevance of his work to theirs.

In part, this is the result of prejudice. Winnicott often denied he was an ‘intellectual.’ He insisted that ‘a writer on human nature needs to be constantly drawn towards simple English and away from the jargon of the psychologist.’ As his colleague, Masud Khan, once pointed out, Winnicott also manifested ‘a militant incapacity to accept dogma.’ He would not have needed to be reminded of The Poverty Theory. His radical materialism led him to stress that ‘mind is ... no more than a special case of the functioning of psyche-soma.’ None of this endears him to intellectuals. Paradoxically, his scepticism about intellectualism was one factor which helped him to become perhaps the best psychoanalytic theorist of infancy to have emerged anywhere since the last war.

‘The word infant implies “not talking” (infans),' he once wrote, ‘and it is not unuseful to think of infancy as the phase prior to word presentation and the use of word symbols.’ He stressed that the infant depended on maternal care based on ‘maternal empathy’ and not on words, and he found a way of doing and writing psychoanalysis which respected ‘the delicacy of what is preverbal, unverbalized, and unverbalizable except perhaps in poetry.’

Drawing on his reservoir of clinical experience, Winnicott demonstrated how innate ‘maturational processes’, can only develop satisfactorily through a ‘facilitating environment’ which, in the first instance, is the mother. Through the mother’s care, he maintained, ‘each infant is able to have a personal existence, and so begins to build up what might be called a continuity of being. On the basis of this continuity of being, the inherited potential gradually develops into an individual infant.’ But if maternal care was not ‘good enough’ then ‘the infant does not really come into existence, since there is no continuity of being; instead the personality becomes built on the basis of reactions to environmental impingement.’ It manifests a ‘false self.’

Winnicott was thus concerned with ‘the whole vast theme of the individual travelling from dependence towards independence,’ with the potential of becoming a fully human subject. By contrast, the currently fashionable Parisian psychoanalysis of Lacan and his acolytes conceives of only a ‘de-centred,’ disembodied ghost of a subject, constructed entirely through the impingements of the ‘signifying chain’ of a historically specific ideology.

This is roughly what Winnicott explains through the pathology of the ‘false self.’ I am sure that as the tenuous structures of such structuralism begin to look increasingly shaky, the relative strength and fullness of Winnicott’s contribution will become more and more apparent.

Winnicott, born in 1896, came from a wealthy, middle class background. His father was a Nonconformist sweet manufacturer who became Lord Mayor of Plymouth. After training as a doctor, he gravitated towards paediatrics: in 1923, he was appointed to the Paddington Green Children’s Hospital, where he remained for 40 years. That same year, however, he entered into a personal psychoanalysis with James Strachey, a prominent Freudian. This analysis lasted ten years.

Inevitably, Winnicott soon saw the significance of psychoanalysis for his work with children. ‘I am a paediatrician who has swung to psychiatry,’ he was to say later, ‘and a psychiatrist who has clung to paediatrics.’ His first book, Disorders of Childhood (1931), upset the paediatric establishment with its emphasis on the importance of emotional factors in infantile arthritis. ‘By being a paediatrician with a knack for getting mothers to tell me about the early history of their children’s disorders,’ he wrote, ‘I was soon in the position of being astounded by the insight psychoanalysis gave into the lives of children.’ But it was not a one-way process. Paediatrics made him increasingly aware of ‘a certain deficiency in psychoanalytic theory.’

At this time, Winnicott complained, ‘everything had the Oedipus complex at its core.’ Psychoanalysts traced the origins of their patients’ neuroses to the anxieties belonging to instinctual life at the four or five year period in the child’s relationship to the two parents. Winnicott, however, saw that infants and even babies could become acutely emotionally disturbed. ‘Paranoid hypersensitive children could even have started to be in that pattern in the first weeks or even days of life.’ Winnicott’s findings were disturbing to ‘orthodox’ analysts who ‘saw only castration anxiety and the Oedipus conflict.’

Although he was the only analyst in paediatrics in Britain, he was not the only one questioning Freudian orthodoxy by pushing back psychoanalytic insights into the earliest phases of life. Winnicott tells how Strachey ‘broke into’ their analysis to let him know about Melanie Klein who was then pioneering psychoanalytic work with children in Britain. Winnicott went to see her and began working in collaboration with her, but this was not easy for him. For all her brilliance, Klein tended to be a sectarian: Winnicott soon found he did not qualify ‘to be one of her group of chosen Kleinians.’ ‘This did not matter to me,’ he wrote, ‘because I have never been able to follow anyone else, not even Freud.’

Winnicott learned from Klein about technique, especially the use of play in the therapeutic process. He came to see the child’s manipulation of set toys and other forms of ‘circumscribed playing’ (for example, with a shiny spatula kept on the desk in his clinic) as ‘glimpses into the child’s inner world.’ Like Klein, he stressed that the child conceived of himself as having an inside that is part of the self, and an outside that is ‘not-me’ and repudiated—though this theory he later extended. Winnicott also valued Klein’s concepts of ‘introjection’ and ‘projection’: these she held to be mental mechanisms, of critical importance in early infancy, which developed in relation to the infant’s experience of bodily processes of eating and defecating respectively.

Klein emphasized the intense ambivalence—or opposition of love and hate—in the infant’s earliest relationship to the mother’s breast. She spoke of the defensive ‘splitting’ of the idea of the breast into ‘good’ and ‘bad,’ and attributed to the infant various psychic manoeuvres to keep these widely separated. All this led her to write of the ‘paranoid-schizoid’ position of earliest life, which, she maintained, was only superseded by the achievement and working through of a ‘depressive position’ in which the infant came to accept that the loved and hated breast was but part of one and the same feelingful person, out there in the world, separate from himself.

Winnicott, too, stressed the importance of the achievement of what he called ‘the capacity for concern.’ But he remained sceptical about Klein’s use of the model of madness to describe ordinary developmental processes. Although he reluctantly retained the term ‘depressive position,’ he rejected the ‘paranoid-schizoid’ model of early life. ‘Ordinary healthy children are not neurotic (though they can be) and ordinary babies are not mad,’ he wrote.

Indeed, the differences between these two thinkers are as important as their similarities. Klein, like Freud, rooted her psychology in a theory of instinct. She saw development as essentially determined by the operation of innate forces, the Life and Death instincts. Winnicott, rightly, rejected the concept of the Death instinct altogether. He stressed that a satisfactory state of being necessarily preceded a satisfactory use of instinct. This state of being he saw as being dependent on the relationship between the mother and the child. ‘Klein claimed to have paid full attention to the environmental factor,’ he wrote, ‘but it is my opinion that she was temperamentally incapable of this.’

Unlike many analysts who focused on the infant-mother relationship, however, Winnicott did not reject the idea of ‘primary narcissism,’ although he described it in very different terms from Freud. For Winnicott, in the beginning ‘the environment is holding the individual, and at the same time the individual knows of no environment and is at one with it.’ (This, of course, is the condition so often reproduced in mystical and ‘sublime’ aesthetic experiences.)

Freud had described the baby as an autoerotic isolate, forever seeking the experience of pleasure through the diminution of instinctual tension within a hypothetical ‘psychic apparatus.’ But Winnicott described the infant as being enveloped within and conditional upon the holding environment (or mother) of whose support he becomes gradually aware. ‘I would say that initially there is a condition which could be described at one and the same time as of absolute independence and absolute dependence,’ he writes.

Winnicott’s most brilliant theoretical work describes the way in which this primary state changes to one in which objective perception is possible for the individual. He rejected the idea that a ‘one-body relationship’ precedes the ‘two-body object relationship’; but this led him to ask what there was for the becoming individual before the first ‘two-body object relationship.’ He struggled for a long time with this problem and then, one day, he found himself bursting out at a meeting of the Psychoanalytic Society, ‘There is no such thing as a baby.’

‘I was alarmed to hear myself utter these words,’ he writes, ‘and tried to justify myself by pointing out that if you show me a baby you certainly show me also someone caring for the baby, or at least a pram with someone’s eyes and ears glued to it. One sees a “nursing couple”.’ Later, he put it this way: before object relations, ‘the unit is not the individual, the unit is an environment-individual set-up. By good-enough child care, technique, holding and general management the shell becomes gradually taken over and the kernel (which has looked all the time like a human baby to us) can begin to be an individual.’

Winnicott thought that the infant made his first simple contact with external reality through ‘moments of illusion’ which the mother provided: these moments helped him to begin to create an external world, and at the same time to acquire the concept of a limiting membrane and inside for himself. He defined illusion as ‘a bit of experience which the infant can take as either his hallucination or a thing belonging to external reality.’ For example, such a ‘moment of illusion’ might occur when the mother offered her breast at exactly the moment when the child wanted it. Then the infant’s hallucinating and the world’s presenting could be taken by him as identical, which, of course, they never in fact are.

In this way, Winnicott says, the infant acquires the illusion that there is an external reality that corresponds to his capacity to create. But, for this to happen, someone has to be bringing the world to the baby in an understandable form, and in a limited way, suitable to the baby’s needs. Winnicott saw this as the mother’s task, just as later she had to take the baby through the equally important process of ‘disillusion’—a product of weaning, and the gradual withdrawal of the identification with the baby which is part of the initial mothering.

Winnicott argued that it was only on such a foundation that the individual could subsequently develop objectivity or a ‘scientific attitude.’ He thought that all failure in objectivity, at whatever date, could be related to failure in this stage of development. Clearly, his conception of illusion had taken him beyond Klein’s sharp distinction between ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ worlds. This is what led him to his famous theory of ‘transitional objects and transitional phenomena.’ He began to describe what he called ‘the third part of the life of a human being, a part that we cannot ignore, an intermediate area of experiencing, to which inner reality and external life both contribute.’

Thus Winnicott drew attention to ‘the first possession’— those rags, blankets, cloths, teddy bears and other ‘transitional objects’ to which young children become attached. (‘In considering the place of these phenomena in the life of the child one must recognize the central position of Winnie the Pooh,’ he wrote.) He saw that the use of these objects belonged to an intermediate area between the subjective and that which is objectively perceived. The transitional object never comes under magical or ‘omnipotent’ control like an internal object or fantasy; but nor is it outside the infant’s control like the real mother (or world.)

It presents a paradox which cannot be resolved but must be accepted: the point of the object is not so much its symbolic value as its actuality. Winnicott often associated the infant’s relation to transitional objects with the insoluble disputes within Christianity about the ontological and/or symbolic status of the eucharist. The use of the transitional object, he said, symbolized the union of two now separate things, baby and mother, and it did so ‘at the point in time and space of the initiation of their state of separateness.’

In this way he came to posit what he called ‘a potential space’ between the baby and the mother, which was the arena of ‘creative play.’ Play, for Winnicott, was itself a ‘transitional phenomenon.’ Its precariousness belongs to the fact that it is ‘always on the theoretical line between the subjective and that which is objectively perceived.’ This ‘potential space’ he defined as ‘the hypothetical area that exists (but cannot exist) between the baby and the object (mother or part of mother) during the phase of the repudiation of the object as not-me, that is, at the end of being merged in with the object.’

Thus the ‘potential space’ arises at that moment when, after a state of being merged in with the mother, the baby arrives at the point of separating out the mother from the self, and the mother simultaneously lowers the degree of her adaptation to the baby’s needs. At this moment, Winnicott says, the infant seeks to avoid separation ‘by the filling in of the potential space with creative playing, with the use of symbols, and with all that eventually adds up to a cultural life.’

He pointed out that the task of reality acceptance is never completed: ‘no human being is free from the strain of relating inner and outer reality.’ The relief from this strain, he maintained, is provided by the continuance of an intermediate area which is not challenged: the potential space, originally between baby and mother, is ideally reproduced between child and family, and between individual and society or the world.

In every instance, however, it is dependence on experience which leads to trust. Winnicott saw the potential space as the location of cultural experience. ‘This intermediate area,’ he wrote ‘is in direct continuity with the play area of the small child who is “lost” in play.’ He felt it was retained ‘in the intense experiencing that belongs to the arts and to religion and to imaginative living, and to creative scientific work.’

I have ignored important themes in Winnicott’s work, such as the way in which he distinguished between psycho-neurosis and psychosis; his writing on the psychology of the psychopath; and his use of a technique of ‘psychoanalysis on demand’ which led some of his colleagues to complain that he induced ‘regression’ in his patients by adapting himself too readily to their needs. But I have done so because Winnicott’s description of the earliest infant-mother relationship, illusion, transitional phenomena and the potential space is undoubtedly his most significant contribution.

It would be foolish to pretend that Winnicott arrives at an adequate theory of culture. He does, however, begin to indicate a biology of the imagination, and of cultural activity, and to locate their roots in the period of the separating of the self out from that of the mother, which is peculiar to the human species.

His concept of the ‘potential space’ also begins to point towards a way of avoiding both ‘subjectivist’ accounts of cultural experience on the one hand, and ‘ideological’ explanations on the other. It is true that Winnicott considered that the ‘potential space’ can be looked upon ‘as sacred to the individual in that it is here that the individual experiences creative living.’ But he also saw that in many cultural activities, ‘the interplay between originality and the acceptance of tradition as the basis for inventiveness seems to be just one more example, and a very exciting one, of the interplay between separateness and union.’

Winnicott recognized that if the mother impinged too deeply into, or ‘challenged,’ the ambiguous character of the infant’s emergent potential space, then the latter’s potentiality for creative living would be seriously impaired. A similar occlusion of imaginative and creative potentialities may take place on a historic level when through, say, the proliferation of advertising, or of ‘socialist realist’ restrictions on artistic production the ‘potential space’ of the adult is diminished, or denied.

1980

MODERN ART: The Virtues Of Traditional Sensibility / March 8, 2020 by Laurence Fuller

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.

John Berger and Peter’s relationship was fascinating spanned decades and was built on the foundations of true art criticism lived out in an emotional and personal dynamic. Their correspondences remain the most passionate, compelling, engage and moving letters I have ever read. This essay Seeing Berger for obvious reasons signaled a change in their relationship as the son took aim at the father.

Seeing Berger: The Virtues Of Traditional Sensibility

by Peter Fuller, 1987

It is often said that the principal obstacle to the advancement of art in Britain is to be found in the ‘provincial’ and insular disposition of the middle classes who, by this account, are held to be incapable of responding to new and original works of art. A contrast is sometimes drawn between the British, and the Germans and Americans, who are regarded as exemplary in their enthusiasm for contemporary art; if only the British would develop similar ‘avante-garde’ tastes - or so the argument goes - then the problems of contemporary art, in this country, would be definitively resolved.

This view is commonly associated with the disbelief that British culture is of an essentially literary disposition, and is therefore necessarily opposed to that which is visual. Worse still, the British are held to be inherently conservative and therefore incapable of responding appropriately to modernity, post-modernity, or any of the other delights of ‘progressive’ culture. Those charged with the stewardship of contemporary art in this country are convinced that it is their public duty to ‘educate’, or, failing that, to bamboozle, this recalcitrant, literary, anti-visual populace towards more ‘advanced’ forms of artistic pleasure. This, for example, is the raison d’etre of the ‘Turner Prize’, which is not now, and never has been, an award for the individual who has done the most for art in Britain in the previous twelve months, but is rather an attempt to cajole the British into attending to those forms of art, and anti-art, preferred by the ‘international’ art community.

The argument I wish to put forward here, however, is the reverse of this received wisdom. Over a century ago, John Ruskin observed that the British schools of painting were in danger of losing their national character in their endeavour to become ‘sentimentally German, dramatically Parisian, or decoratively Asiatic’. The locations from which the destructive influences emanate may have shifted somewhat; but the problem has only become accentuated in the second half of our century. The majority of ordinary, middle-class people in Britain care about the arts, just as they care about the state of our national culture. And it is precisely because they care that they refuse the American, German, and Italian art which the official institutions are forever trying to foist upon them.

The distaste which so many in Britain feel for the outpourings of American, and latterly European, Late Modern and post-modern art is not a sign of philistinism, but rather of intuitive and informed resistance; this may constitute one of this nation’s greatest cultural strengths. Nor should it be seen simply as a negative phenomenon; for this resilience is not just designed to exclude. It is all protective of certain definite values - a positive aesthetic - whose roots lie deep in our unique national history. The institutions of contemporary art, in this country, should be nurturing this traditional sensibility, and not forever seeking to affront, to bully, or to insult it. Nor do I regard this as a nostalgic, or anachronistic position. For, as the world becomes daily more disillusioned with modernism, and post-modernity simply flounders, the insular perspectives of the indigenous, British tradition acquire an increasingly universal aspect.

Those who believe that British culture is inherently ‘anti- visual’ are rarely inclined to ask when, or why, this supposed warp in our aesthetic sensibilities came about. Certainly, the more that we come to learn about Anglo-Saxon culture, the more we recognise that this was one of the great unsung ‘Golden Ages’ of European art. And even if Anglo-Saxon carving eventually declined from the glories of the Easby Cross, in the years before the Norman conquest, manuscript illumination achieved an unrivalled level. The Normans were constrained to borrow the Anglo-Saxon style to embroider, so to speak, their victory in the Bayeux Tapestry.

We should be sceptical concerning the aesthetic advances brought about by the Conquest. The latest research indicates the degree to which, if anything, the Conquest impeded the acceptance of the Romanesque style. The craftsmen and masons who made the great English Romanesque churches were Anglo-Saxons, drawing heavily upon indigenous tradition. Certainly, England drew from European culture; but it also contributed substantially to it. As George Zarnecki has put it, ‘Not only were Romanesque buildings in England amongst the largest and most daring in Europe, but they were also amongst the most influential and led directly towards the development of Gothic.’ Gothic was the greatest of the European achievements in art: more than a style, it celebrated and affirmed a vision of the unity between the spiritual, human and natural worlds - a unity under God. Of the British contribution to the Gothic, there is surely no need to say more here. For, so strong were English architectural and craft traditions, that we developed unique and vigorous indigenous varieties of Gothic, which were immediately expressive of the faith, customs, and cultural environment of these islands. If any warp, or hindrance, arose in the visual development of the English, it must have occurred some time after the building of King’s College Chapel in Cambridge, and the chapel of Henry VII at Westminster Abbey.

But to grasp the truth of the argument that some such warp took place, one has only to stand in the magnificent Lady Chapel at Ely cathedral today. Of the thousands of early 14th century carvings which once adorned the Chapel, only one now survives under the centre canopy of the second window on the north side. The rest were pulverized in 1539, at the time of the Reformation. This was only the first of those waves of rude iconoclasm which were to beset English culture. Towards the mid 17th century, William Dowsing and his gang strutted around Suffolk, demolishing as many ‘superstitious images’, and as much craftsmanship as they could lay their hands on. If we wish to understand how British culture could produce a Shakespeare, but not a Rembrandt, this is as close as we are likely to get.

And yet here we have to be careful: because the combined resources of the Reformation, Oliver Cromwell, and William Dowsing did not destroy the desire of men and women to give expression to their highest sentiments in visual or aesthetic terms. It is perfectly true that, in Britain, there was no high flowering of ecclesiastical art in the 16th and 17th centuries, and therefore no later secular tradition of noble, symbolic figuration deriving from it. Nonetheless, these very inhibitions in the British tradition almost inevitably also had positive effects: for what is excluded from one channel tends to surge abundantly through any other that is open to it - and, in Britain, that meant landscape painting, and indeed the whole world of natural form.

Of course, other nations had their traditions of topographic and also of idealised landscapes - on both of which the British were to draw. But only in this country did landscape painting come to be the vehicle for the noblest contemporary sentiments, and for the pursuit of the deepest spiritual truths. In the beginning, landscape served proprietorial and social interests: 17th century paintings of the great country houses, and the genre of sporting pictures, confirm this. But this quickly changed; nowhere does John Berger’s thesis that there was a ‘special relationship’ between oil-painting and capitalism seem thinner than in the case of British landscape. For the movement of tradition was consistently away from pedestrian, ‘interested’ depictions, towards a ‘Higher Landscape’ of quite a different order. As Ruskin so vividly put it - and this was perhaps his greatest insight - ‘the English School of Landscape, culminating in Turner, is in reality nothing else than a healthy effort to fill the void which destruction of Gothic architecture has left.’ If the Lady Chapel at Ely had not been smashed, or Dowsing had never rampaged through Suffolk, we may never have had a Constable, or a Turner.

In this country, then, humble ‘landscape’ was almost compelled to become the vehicle for the conveyance of high sentiment in art. The Academy, and especially its first President, Joshua Reynolds, resisted this, and endeavoured, belatedly, to introduce ‘History Painting’, in the continental Grand Manner, i.e. he tried to make pictures of the human figure, especially the English upper classes, convey the highest spiritual truths. As Reynolds lived at a time when kings, and the aristocracy, were conspicuously corrupt, an element of absurdity inevitably stamps even his greatest work. And the difficulties he encountered have ever since bedevilled the figurative painting which seeks to go beyond the depiction of mere appearances. Any attempt to idealise, say, the present Royal Family - or the working classes, let alone a specific working man - strikes us as sentimental, and hollow. Figure painting must content itself with appearances, or, at best, purely psychological insights. Alternatively, in the paintings of, say, a Francis Bacon, denigration and defamation replace idealisation.

For a long time, it seemed as if something similar would inevitably happen in landscape painting, too. Landscape could only convey higher values (or so it seemed) so long as the painter believed in ‘Natural Theology’ - that is, that nature was God’s handiwork, and revealed his glory. For Ruskin, Turner was a great ‘realist’ because his vision was so finely attuned to the way in which ‘the simplest forms of nature are strangely animated by the sense of the Divine presence’. Modern criticism seizes upon Constable’s description of himself as a ‘natural painter’, and fetishizes the sketches through which he recorded his momentary impressions of the passage of light, and changes in the weather. But Kenneth Clark was one of the first to question this 20th century ‘reading’ of Constable as a naturalist, ‘a man whose only aim was to reproduce in paint the effects of nature’. For Constable was a precursor of Impressionism only in the narrowest of technical senses; he approached nature in a spirit of humble truth solely because, in this way, he felt he could reveal spiritual truths about God’s world. In the desolate vision of his later years a bleaker view emerges. In his last painting, The Cenotaph, he painted trees in Autumn for the first time. The touch, as Clark commented, is ‘dry and cold, though with a sort of uninhabited grandeur’. Constable’s painting precurses not the vulgar hedonism of Impressionism, but the bleak desolate depictions of a nature from which God had departed.

Elsewhere, I have endeavoured to show how the breakdown of natural theology in the 1850s had catastrophic effects on English landscape painting; the Pre-Raphaelite landscape aesthetic was a desperate struggle to come to terms with that break-down. What matters from the point of view of the argument presented here is the difference between say, Holman Hunt’s paradisiac, iridescent idylls at the beginning of the decade, and the bleak depictions of a godless wasteland that he, and others, began to produce as the implications of the discoveries in geology, and biology, weighted in upon them. Ruskin himself admitted to hearing the clink of the geologists’ hammers at the end of every bible sentence. If a stone was a stone was a stone was a stone, the English landscape tradition which had attempted to fill the void left by the destruction of Gothic architecture had, indeed, culminated in Turner. In some desperation, Holman Hunt set off for the Holy Land itself; but there he found not God immanent within the material and natural world he had created, but rather the ominous, alien emptiness of the Dead Sea: he returned not with a celebration of incarnate God, but with a terrible image of The Scapegoat, which portrays the world as a god-forsaken wasteland. Hunt’s intractable and awkward picture heralds the draining away of the Sea of Faith, and the exposure of the naked shingles of the world. In 1858, William Dyce painted his great study, Pegwell Bay, Kent - a Recollection of 5th October 1858 which shows women and children hunting for fossils on the bleak beach while Donati’s comet, a symbol of impending doom, passes overhead. Fossils, of course, provided part of the growing proof that nature was not the handiwork of God. Before Dyce’s picture was finished, Charles Darwin had published The Origin of Species, and the old natural theology, and the natural aesthetic which depended upon it, seemed to lie in ruins.

Peter Fuller visiting John Berger in France

European Modernism is sometimes said to have begun with a French development from English Romanticism; in fact, Impressionism marked the abandonment of the attempt to find spiritual values in natural form. This is why it is nonsense to proclaim Constable as a ‘precursor’ of Impressionism; when Constable’s faith in natural theology (if not in God) wavered, he began to elaborate a terrible vision of a bleak and ominous natural world. The Impressionists averted their eyes from all this, as they averted them from the spiritual tragedy enacted upon Dover Beach, and in Pegwell Bay. Insofar as the French Impressionists were concerned merely with optical effects, and the physiology of sight - and this is less far than some historians make out - there is a vulgarity and shallowness in their preoccupations. We ought, perhaps to replace the idea that Constable was a ‘pioneer’ Impressionist, with the more accurate view that Impressionism reduced his spiritual romanticism.

There is no need to retell the history of European Modernism here: much of it, of course,-especially Cezanne-was far more complex and conservative than its tendentious protagonists believe. Nonetheless, it remains true, that the thrust of the Modernist movements was away from any attempt to perceive spiritual values in the world of nature. Impressionism led inevitably, as Ruskin had perceived it would, to the celebration of aesthetic effects and sensations, in and for their own sake. Blinkered and prejudiced as Holman Hunt’s perspective may have been, we should not forget the truth in his observation that ‘the threat to modern art, menacing nothing less than its extinction, lies in “Impressionism”’. Hunt’s objection was that such art was ‘soulless’, and destitute of any ‘spirit of vitality and poetry in nature’. As Kenneth Clark himself was to put it forty years later, French Impressionism touched ‘only the surface of our spirits’, and ‘did not address itself to the imagination’. Despite Impressionism’s superficial celebration of sensuous effects of light, the movement heralded a retreat into the sense experience of the human subject, and a flight from any imaginative or spiritual response to nature, which was to be such a characteristic of successive modernist movements. By the beginning of the 20th century, mechanical production was replacing growth as the ‘model’ for the artist’s creativity.

But, before the second world war, at least, these Modernist credos never quite took hold in England. An older tradition, with its idea that nature could be seen, and depicted, as the true ‘locus’ of human values, had persisted as an undercurrent throughout late 19th century painting. (I would point, for example, to John Everett Millais’s extraordinary picture, Chill November, of 1870, where the poignant ‘negative’ image of nature, implicit in the late Constable, in Hunt, and in Dyce, is further developed.) The great achievement of the most visionary British artists of the 20th century was to build upon this national aesthetic, and to take it further, by endowing it with modern forms, which none-the-less had little to do with the preoccupations of 20th century European Modernism.

This process can be clearly seen in the great paintings of the first world war, especially those of Paul Nash. The English Romantic tradition was paradoxically revitalised through the emergence of the terrible reality of a ‘natural’ landscape - that of the Western Front - closer to hell than to the Garden of Eden. Indeed, Nash wrote about the godforsaken vista of death in terms immediately comparable to those Hunt had used on the shores of the Dead Sea. Both bring to mind John Ruskin’s terrible vision of a failure of nature, of ‘blanched Sun, - blighted grass, and blinded man’ - somehow brought about by the blasphemous and bellicose actions of man himself. Paul Nash admitted the world was a ‘darkling plane’, evacuated by God, where the ignorant armies clashed by night, but he tried to find a way through and beyond spiritual nihilism - to wreak a redemption through form.

The odious celebration of war, and mechanism, made explicit in, say, Marinetti’s glorification of the destructive effects of war, undoubtedly encouraged many British artists to defect from Modernism, and to reconsider the aesthetics of Ruskin - one of Marinetti’s pet hates. David Bomberg, a sometime Vorticist, was perhaps the first Post-Modernist. He spent much of his later life searching, through drawing, for what he called, ‘the spirit in the mass’. As Roy Oxlade - who was among his pupils - has put it, ‘it also became increasingly clear to him that the self-destructive impulses latent in materialistic and sophisticate societies could be avoided only by reappraising man’s relationship with nature’. But Bomberg was not the only artist to follow this kind of direction; in sculpture, Henry Moore also confronted the fragmentation of the figure, and the desolation of the environment brought about through Modernity and, specifically, through war. (For Moore, modern man was but a Fallen Warrior.) He, too, accepted injuriousness almost as the ‘natural’ condition; there is about his early carvings a Grampian intractability, which invokes Arnold’s imagery of ‘naked shingles’ and ‘ignorant armies’; but in his great mothers and children, and reclining figures, Moore struggled to realise a new vision which did not deny environmental catastrophe, but endeavoured to reach beyond it to some new spiritual unity, expressed through fully sculptural transformations of the figure. As John Read once put it, ‘This blending of human and natural form, this ability to see figures in the landscape, and a landscape in the figures, is Moore’s greatest contribution to sculpture.’ It is something for which there is no equivalent in European Modernism. Moore’s sculpture, one might say, was nothing other than an attempt to fill the void which the destruction of the English landscape tradition had left.

The most talented artists here seem to have recognised instinctively that they were, first and foremost, British, heirs to a rare sensibility and a unique tradition. If they approached Modernity, it was in order to enrich that tradition to which they belonged - not to desert it for another. Of course, there were exceptions: in the 1930s, in particular, some of the most talented became seduced and deflected. But beneath the surface, a Neo-Romantic vision persisted; it was characterised by the conservationist desire to elaborate an imaginative and aesthetic response to nature, regardless. We are now beginning to understand more about how this specifically English current burst through the charred ground, with unprecedented force, with the departure from these shores of the international avant-garde, on the outbreak of the Second World War.

David Bomberg, Late Summer — David Bomberg, *Late Summer*

At this time, a Renaissance occurred in British art which had, at its core, the attempt to make spiritual and aesthetic sense of ‘The Waste-Land’. Neo-Romanticism, given renewed impetus by a second global conflagration, flowered as never before. Art, in Britain, in the 1940s, was more vigorous than anywhere else in the world - America not excluded. One only has to consider the great war-drawings of Moore, his Northampton Madonna, Sutherland’s extraordinary pictures of the gnarled Pembrokeshire landscape, Piper’s drawings of the Welsh mountains, those fine Hepworths and Nicholsons imbued with their excited rediscovery of natural forms, Bomberg’s bomb-store paintings, the last, visionary, Paul Nash paintings ... the list is endless. And it testifies to how rich, various, and vigorous the British Romantic tradition was as the so-called ‘Century of Change’ approached its mid-point. It must also be said that this modern rendering of a nation’s traditional sensibility met with an unprecedented and unexpectedly enthusiastic response from the public - despite its preoccupation with the demands and vicissitudes of global conflict. When the work of contemporary British artists was shown in the National Gallery, in war time, the crowds were so great that the police had to be called to control them; the sale of prints, under the auspices of CEMA, the war-time Committee for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts, soared; and the most popular series of art books on living British artists ever made, the Penguin Modern Painters series, was successfully launched.

This great ‘moment’ in our national cultural history found its most vigorous critical expression in the writings, and indeed the practical patronage, of Kenneth Clark - who gave every assistance to Henry Moore, John Piper, and Graham Sutherland (among others). Britain emerged from the war years with a justified cultural pride. During the late 1940s and early 1950s, the British Council sponsored numerous superlative exhibitions of British art, throughout the world. Everyone, it seemed, wanted to see, and to learn from, our Neo-Romantic Renaissance.

And then, suddenly, it was all over. This great national achievement was swamped first by the figurative nihilism of Francis Bacon; but later by a more general enthusiasm for tawdry social realism - fashionably embodied in the rhetoric of John Berger’s column for The New Statesman. Berger characteristically scorned Moore’s ‘Piltdown Sculpture’, and Hepworth’s ‘vacuity’; he ignored Sutherland, preferring Bratby, Middleditch, and Jack Smith. After their success at the Venice Biennale, in 1956, Berger seemed to abandon British art altogether. But the damage had been done. The destruction of our indigenous, traditional sensibility continued with the import of wave upon wave of American fashions; and through the shoddiness and commercialism of Pop Art, epitomised in the empty obsessionalism of Richard Hamilton. An infatuation with the mass media led to growing institutional neglect of traditional painting and sculpture, and to a lack of any imaginative response to the world of natural form. An imported technicism, more shallow and inhuman than that of Marinetti, was reinforced by the spurious ‘internationalism’ of the post Second World War commercial art world. Kenneth Clark, and those who thought and felt like him, increasingly withdrew from patronage of contemporary art, and a new phalanx of international art world bureaucrats enthusiastically peddled this unpalatable mixture of anti-art and anaesthetics, often under the cloak of vanguardism, or even political radicalism, to a dwindling public.

Beneath the surface, and at the edges of official taste, the Neo-Romantic sensibility survived, and even grew. For example, some of us feel we are just beginning to understand the way in which this vision was transplanted, through Russell Drysdale, to the Antipodes, and how it grew and flourished there in the immediate post-war years in the work of Sidney Nolan, Arthur Boyd, and later Fred Williams. For these painters what Ruskin had dreaded - ‘the glare of the Antipodes’ - became the core of their imaginative reinterpretations of nature. The desert emerges in their work as an appropriate image of ‘The Waste-Land’, the natural wilderness which man is constrained to inhabit in the late 20th century.

But, like the best landscape painting which has been produced in recent years here, at home, the antipodean achievement has been woefully ignored and neglected. I believe that one day, perhaps very soon, the true nature of British Neo- Romanticism will be rediscovered. For when one begins to look for it, one discovers the Neo-Romantic tradition has continued to thrive and to develop, unsung and misunderstood as ever.

We have to find the courage to admit the mistakes of the last thirty years. If the institutional patrons in this country would only focus upon what we as a nation have always done best, they would soon find their galleries filled with an enthusiastic audience once again. In other words, if the Turner Prize were only given to those who are truly his heirs, then the need for its existence - which is to ‘promote’ modern art - would quickly disappear. After all, a nation which gave rise to Dyce and Sutherland, and whose tradition fostered artists of the calibre of Nolan and Boyd, has no need to import the anaesthetic quagmires, and charred atrocities of Anselm Kiefer. His work seems to me an adolescent response to the dilemmas of Dover Beach, and Pegwell Bay. The best Neo- Romantic artists have seen beyond such tawdry nihilism, and, through their ‘redemptions through form’ realised glimpses of that ecological and spiritual harmony with nature which we must achieve in reality if, as a species, we are to survive. Europe and America, it seems have much to learn from us.

(The Salisbury Review July 1987)

MODERN ART: Lee Grandjean & Glynn Williams / March 7, 2020 by Laurence Fuller

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.

LEE GRANDJEAN & GLYNN WILLIAMS

by Peter Fuller, 1981

Laurence Fuller standing by Glynn William’s sculpture of Peter Fuller’s gravestone

It was fortunate that at the time of the Whitechapel Gallery’s important survey of British sculpture in the twentieth century Lee Grandjean and Glynn Williams were exhibiting at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park at Bretton Hall, Wakefield. I believe the formal garden outside Bretton Hall housed two of the most promising sculptures seen in Britain for twenty years.

These are Grandjean’s Woman and Children: Flame, 1981 and Williams’s Squatting, Holding, Looking, 1981. They are intensely unfashionable: they are carved, rather than ‘constructed’, and they have been made out of elm and hard, white Ancaster stone respectively. Moreover they make unequivocal use of one of sculpture’s most ‘traditional’ images: a mother and her children. Though they are certainly flawed pieces, I am confident that they point towards the emergence of sculpture from the stultifying decadence of the last quarter of a century.

Many of those concerned about British sculpture have been watching what has been going on in and around Wimbledon School of Art (where Glynn Williams heads the sculpture department) for some time. In recent years, the ‘Wimbledon sculptors’ have elaborated through their sculptures a thoroughgoing critique of the reductionist tendencies in recent Modernism. They rejected the historicist assumption that sculpture could only develop by the progressive renunciation of everything specifically sculptural.

These Wimbledon sculptors raised again the issue of imagination in sculpture by accepting, as Grandjean has recently put it, ‘that the freedom, the hope of sculpture is that it can order a new reality through the transformation of material’. They also demonstrated the continuing expressive potentialities of traditional techniques (especially carving) and materials (like wood and stone). Consistently, they pointed to the necessarily limited ‘language’ of sculpture, given by a tradition established in the earliest human civilizations, and reminded us that sculpture is a practice whose ‘problematic’ has not changed fundamentally since the Sumerian times.

In a cultural climate seemingly addicted to transience and changes of style, this was salutary. Yet there has often been something ambiguous in the work coming out of Wimbledon. For all their yearning for true expression, the sculptures themselves have sometimes looked like the stirring of roots and limbs in some primordial sludge. But whatever its faults, this new exhibition has clarity: it concerns itself frontally with the question of explicit subject matter, and the necessary relation of all good sculpture to the human body.

Of course, there has been plenty of sound and fury in British sculpture in recent years; but, by and large, it has signified nothing. Elsewhere (see New Society, September 24 1981) I have argued that, since the early 1960s, the sculptural tradition has been betrayed by those who ought to have been tending it. Henry Moore was right when he said, in 1962, ‘We’re getting to a state in which everything is allowed and everybody is about as good as everybody else. When anything and everything is allowed both artists and public are going to get bored’. Moore added, ‘Someone will have to take up the challenge of what has been done before. You’ve got to be ready to break the rules but not to throw them all over unthinkingly’. He explained that great art comes from great human beings who are never satisfied ‘with change that’s made for change’s sake’.

Since Anthony Caro’s change of style at the beginning of the 1960s, we have seen enough of unthinking rejection of sculpture’s fundamental elements. But Grandjean and Williams are at last facing up to ‘the challenge of what has been done before’, just as Moore himself did when, in the 1920s, he steeped himself in the ‘primitive’ sculpture in the British Museum.

Why has it taken so long for anyone else to respond to that challenge? In part, it is because in all that passed for sculpture—from Caro’s Twenty-Four Hours to the antics of his pupils, Gilbert, George & Co.—Moore’s sculptural standards were simply lost sight of. With the passage of a few more years, the tragi-comedy of British ‘sculpture’ since the early 1960s will be quietly forgotten. A great many St Martin’s- inspired ‘constructions’ in industrial steel are already under wraps awaiting the Last Judgement.

But why did we have to go through this sorry episode? I have tried to give some of the reasons elsewhere. (See especially my article, ‘Where Was the Art of the Seventies?’ in Beyond the Crisis in Art, 1980.) However, there is one factor to which I have hitherto given insufficient attention: the achievement of Henry Moore himself.

Mother & Child, Henry Moore — *Mother & Child*, Henry Moore

Through his best sculptures, Moore has made a major contribution to Western culture. His achievement was the greater in that it was realized in times hardly propitious for good sculpture. Such quality does not always serve as an inspiration to others. As a young sculptor, Moore saw Michelangelo’s work for the first time in Italy. ‘I saw he had such ability’, Moore explained later, ‘that beside him any sculptor must feel as a miler would knowing someone had once run a three-minute mile’. But at least Moore could console himself with the thought that Michelangelo had worked four centuries ago.

What happened in the early 1960s was, in one sense at least, the indignant revolt of the Lilliputians. Between 1951 and 1953, Moore employed as an assistant a figurative sculptor of moderate ability: Anthony Caro. Anyone who has studied, say, Caro’s Woman Waking Up of 1956, now in the Arts Council Collection, will realize something of Caro’s predicament in the 1950s. Caro was already in his thirties, but he had not even begun to achieve Moore’s expressive mastery over the human figure. The shadow of Moore must have stretched endlessly in front. But instead of stuggling on, Caro decided (in the words of Michael Fried, one of his many American protagonists) to make sculptures which rejected ‘almost everything that Moore’s stand for’.

What did Moore stand for? He was a sculptor of such range and ability that it is possible to say that he stood for sculpture itself. ‘Rodin’, Moore has said, ‘of course knew what sculpture is: he once said that sculpture is the science of the bump and the hollow’. The twin roots of this art form are carving and modelling: to use Adrian Stoke’s terminology, I believe that Moore is a fine carver ‘in the modelling mode’.

Few men have had a better grasp on the formal aspect of sculpture than Moore. Certainly, no one living today can touch him for what he calls ‘complete cylindrical realization’ or ‘full spatial richness’ which, at the formal level, remains the greatest expressive potentiality of good sculpture. And yet Moore was far too big an artist ever to be content with displays of skill, or formal ingenuity, for their own sake. Purely abstract sculpture, he explained in 1960, seemed to him an activity that would be better fulfilled in some other art. For Moore, the human figure was always at the root of his sculptural transformation; when he extended beyond it, it was into the rich world of natural forms, such as bones, shells, pebbles.

He saw this ‘humanist-organicist’ dimension as being a necessary component of good sculpture. He once said that a ‘synthetic culture’ (i.e. one that cut itself off from such ‘natural’ roots) was, at best, ‘false and impermanent’. That is why he emphasized drawing from life and from nature as necessary activities for sculptors. And in all this he showed himself to be in full continuity with, as Matthew Arnold might have said, the best that has been thought and done in sculpture.

But for Moore all this—the mastery of sculptural techniques, the manipulation of forms in space, the attendance to the wealth of natural forms—was only the means to an end. ‘I do not think’, he once said, ‘any real or deeply moving art can be purely for art’s sake’. The bringing of a work to its final conclusion, for Moore, necessarily ‘involves one’s whole psychological make-up and whatever one can draw upon and make use of from the sum total of one’s human and form experience’.

Henry Moore, Mother & Child — Henry Moore, *Mother & Child*

I do not want to project Moore beyond criticism. I believe there was truth in John Berger’s once notorious essay of the late 1950s on Moore in which he pointed out that in some of his work there was a tendency for the artist’s imagination to disappear, and the material to take over. But I think Moore himself recognized this. Throughout the 1950s (perhaps perceiving what was likely to happen within the sculptural tradition) Moore stressed that in the past he had overexaggerated the argument from ‘truth to materials’. ‘Rigid adherence to the doctrine’, he said, ‘results in the domination of the sculpture by the material. The sculptor ought to be the master of his material. Only, not a cruel master’. Nonetheless, a question mark must still hang over Moore’s later works, which can show a slackness in carving, and repetitiveness of imagination, that would have been inconceivable in the prewar years. At times, too, Moore has tended towards overproduction. And he has also been tempted towards a more than occasional over inflation of scale.

Although some of Moore’s sculptures descend towards the condition of objects, his work as a whole offers a vision of enduring aspects of human experience. But, precisely because he is no woolly idealist, Moore fully realized that he had to hold fast to those elements of experience which, relatively speaking, remain constant. Hence his emphasis upon the human figure in its natural landscape. ‘For me’, Moore said in 1962, ‘sculpture is based on and remains close to the human figure ... If it were only a matter of making a pleasurable relationship between forms, sculpture would lose, for me, its fundamental importance. It would become too easy’.

I have written often enough about Caro’s ‘false’ revolution in sculpture, about his rejection of carving, modelling, mass, volume, imagination, natural form, ‘tactile values’ and, indeed, ‘image’ of any kind, in short, of everything that characterizes sculpture as an art form and makes it worthwhile. But as Moore himself said in 1961 (just a year after his former assistant’s dramatic change of style), ‘a second-rater can’t turn himself into a first rater by changing his medium or his style. He’d still have the same sensitivity, the same vision of form, the same human quality, and those are things that make him good or bad, first-rate or second-rate’.

All that came after, was taking what Moore himself called the ‘easy’ option: the arrangement of ‘pleasant shapes and colours in a pleasing combination’. And yet, and yet ... As I have argued before, Caro must be acclaimed as the King among the Pygmies. His work is transparently superior to that of his legion of followers. Why is this? Fried said that Caro’s sculptures rejected almost everything that Moore’s stand for. That diminutive residue of Moore in Caro’s work is, I believe, responsible for such sculptural qualities as it has. In the ‘Abstract’ section of the first part of the Whitechapel’s British sculpture show, there was a tiny sculpture by Moore (who was, unfortunately, not particularly well represented in the exhibition) from the Tate Gallery. This work hovers on the threshold of full abstraction: it consists of a number of disparate yet related elements which nonetheless evoke the sense of a single reclining figure. It is a slight though not unattractive piece in which the image does seem to be tantalizingly close to disappearing into the material altogether. Look carefully at this little work and then consider again, say, Caro’s much vaunted Pompadour of 1963. Of course, the materials, techniques and style have changed completely. Pompadour has none of Moore’s sense of tactile quality, or of full ‘cylindrical’ realization. It appears to flaunt the ‘synthetic culture’ of 1960s. And yet the comparison renders Caro’s secret self-evident: there is something about Pompadour which we cannot dismiss as being ‘false and impermanent’; and that something had already been realized by Moore. It is the capacity to take the human body, abstract it, and split it up into bits, in sculpture, without losing it altogether, so that the finished work has a sense of aesthetic unity deriving from this relationship to the whole body.

Anthony Caro, Pompadour, 1963, Kroller-Muller Musem, Otterlo

Caro has described how Clement Greenberg helped him find his new stylistic clothes. (Greenberg, incidentally, showed a regrettable lapse of taste in his blindness to Moore’s greatness.) But such content as Caro’s new work had derived from something which he isolated in Moore’s work, flattened out, and wrote large.

Unfortunately Caro neglected to advise his students to study Moore. Many thus failed to notice the origins of Caro’s residual sculptural qualities, and assumed they had something

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to do with the drastic, reductive ‘innovations’ of style which he had initiated. Many younger sculptors reproduced the trappings of Caro’s style. They thus produced sculptures which were nothing more than exercises in style, inferior, by far, to Caro’s. Others assumed that they could ‘progress’ in sculpture by treating Caro as he himself had treated Moore: i.e. by throwing out the little that was truly sculptural that he had retained in his work. Hence all the foolishness and anti-art activities so prevalent among Caro’s students at St Martin’s (and elsewhere) in the late 1960s and 1970s.

The result of all this was a period of unparalleled decadence in British sculpture. If Caro had had the humility to recognize Moore’s greatness, he could have done much more to ensure the continuity of the sculptural tradition. Instead, we reached an absurd situation in which, though Moore’s reputation was forever growing, it actually became necessary to defend him in art schools. But the poor quality of all that has been produced by those who rejected what Moore stood for speaks for itself. And this, I believe, is the significance of what has been going on in and around Wimbledon School of Art.

I am not suggesting that Lee Grandjean and Glynn Williams are necessarily of the calibre of Moore. That is not the point. But Grandjean and Williams have seen that there can be no evasion of what Moore stood for if good sculpture is to survive.

Henry Moore, Four-piece Composition (Reclining Figure), 1934, Tate Gallery, London

In his catalogue statement, Grandjean said that an important part in what gives a work of art enduring value concerns the nature of its relationship to elements of experience which do not change, or rather which change at such a slow rate that they may effectively be regarded as constants. Of all the arts, sculpture relies most heavily upon such elements. Its roots are to be found in the physical and tactile qualities of materials, the effects of gravity, the world of natural form, and the enduring skills and representations of the human body itself.

It cannot, of course, just be a question of a return to traditional techniques, materials and imagery. The quality of sculptural imagination is also involved: Grandjean rightly affirmed the full tradition of sculpture; he spoke of the continuing need for ‘the most rigorous formal criticism’. But he also affirmed, ‘the challenge of something to say, to tell. Of sculpture facing the world instead of itself’. In short, he affirmed what Moore stood for Grandjean showed three recent works: two are reclining figures, and the third, and most achieved, Woman and Children: Flame 1981, is an upright based upon the forms of a mother with two children. (Moore’s recurrent themes, one recalls, were the reclining figure and mother-and-child.) But Grandjean demonstrates that recuperation of the fully sculptural does not necessarily mean retrogression. Though a mother-child study, Flame, evokes a mood closer to the Laocoon than to Moore’s serene Northampton Madonna. But at the formal level, too, Grandjean is original: the way in which he has made his works is fully his own; indeed, it implies a critical dialogue with Moore. At first glance his reclining figures appear to be ‘constructed’ in wood. In fact they have been carved from a single trunk of elm. Grandjean seems to be retaining something of the ‘look’ of construction because he wants to make use of ‘part-to-part’ relationships in articulating his figures while enjoying all the advantages of full carving. In short, he wants to create living spaces within the figures without resorting to the device of punching a hole from one side to the other. For all that, these remain tentative beginnings: I believe that the contradiction between the ‘construction’ he has come from and the full carving he is practising will have to be more fully resolved in the future. Grandjean also needs to eschew a certain ‘symbolical’ vagueness in his forms; before one can work through and beyond the particularities of figure sculpture, one needs to have mastered them entirely. This is only possible through continuous study of the body and of natural form.

Williams, too, shares Grandjean’s interest in part-to-part relationships within the figure. (Again, this seems to be the positive legacy of his erstwhile, and otherwise wasteful, involvement in the sculptural betrayal of the last twenty years.) Yet, formally, Williams’s solution is more convincing. He at least had the advantage of a ‘traditional’ training in sculpture.

(As early as the 1940s, Moore spoke of the value of ‘an academic grounding’ as the basis for later achievement in sculpture.) Williams is also a virtuoso carver who can make the working of stone seem seductively easy. But he has drawn upon Gothic and African traditions (without in any way imitating them) so that he can ‘structure’ his figures in a way which has not previously been seen in British figurative work. It is interesting to contrast his sculpture, Lifting, Carrying, Protecting of 1981, of a man shouldering his son with Moore’s massive Mother and Child of 1925, shown in his first one-man show, but now in Manchester City Art Gallery. In Williams’s work, each part is allowed an independent life, but because all the parts are closely related, the whole has sculptural unity. Williams’s weakness is currently the inverse of Grandjean’s. His mastery of the rudiments of the figure is such that he can convincingly handle it sculpturally, rather than anatomically. Yet, at the moment, his images are little more than vividly expressive of human activities. They do not fully engage our emotions.

Interestingly, Williams regrets the passing of ‘given Subject Matter’ which was so well-known and well-worked that ‘to make fresh sculpture the only thing left to use was the activity inside the image’. And this, indeed, is a central problem for sculptors working outside the framework of a religious iconography, which connects them immediately with shared, affective and symbolic beliefs. Such subject matter as the mother and child, however, endures. The problem is to evade ambiguous ‘Surrealism’ (or the indulgence of private fantasy) on the one hand; and a pedestrian academic commitment to given appearances on the other. Moore, however, demonstrated that there was a third route: good sculpture could offer us a transformed vision of ourselves in our world, and in nature. Grandjean and Williams have not yet fully succeeded; but the great promise implicit in their exhibition was that (even if on a more modest scale) this may be done again, done differently, and yet done well.

1981

MODERN ART: The Arts Council Collection / March 6, 2020 by Laurence Fuller

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.

THE ARTS COUNCIL COLLECTION

by Peter Fuller, 1980

Leon Kossoff, Seated Nude, Arts Council Collection

In 1942, CEMA, the war-time Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts, bought works for a touring exhibition of modern British painting. When the Arts Council was set up in 1946, these acquisitions formed the nucleus of its collection, which now comprises some 5,000 items. (A catalogue is available.) Initially, purchasing was carried out with chronological exhibitions (e.g. ‘New Painting 58-61 ’ in mind.) During the 1970s, however, the Council invited individuals to purchase around a theme, (e.g. Boshier’s ‘Lives’, Fuchs’s ‘Languages’, Causey’s ‘Nature as Material’).

The Council’s policy of appointing different purchasers each year is, I am convinced, a good one. It is a way in which the individual judgement necessary to aesthetic discrimination could be preserved without permitting an undemocratic accretion of power within the purchasing institution. Nonetheless, I think that recent acquisitions have suffered through the choice of purchasers, and the brief which they have been given. The qualities of a work are constituted neither by its position in art history, nor by its style, nor yet its subject matter. The thematic selections of recent years indicate that the Council has failed to appoint purchasers with a true critical intelligence in painting and sculpture. This fatal refusal of the ‘aesthetic dimension’ is accentuated by the decision in the early 1970s to start adding photographs to the collection, and cataloguing them as if they could be equated with paintings and sculpture, on the grounds that they are also ‘images’.

If some works which ought never to have been purchased found their way into the collection on ‘stylistic’ or ‘thematic’ grounds, others, which ought to be represented, have been excluded for similar reasons. A policy which permits the acquisition of inconsequential, anaesthetic items by Nigel Hall, Stephen Willats and Victor Burgin, and which yet excludes anything by painters of the stature of John Ward, Peter Greenham, and Bernard Dunstan, cannot be regarded as perfect. Nonetheless, despite the self-evident lacunae, I think that the Council’s collection gives an insight into post-war British art as good as any, and I want to use the recent exhibition of a selection of some 400 items from it, at the Hayward Gallery, as an opportunity for some self-critical stock-taking. It is now more than three years since I published ‘The Crisis in British Art’ (see Art Monthly, nos 8 & 9). That article began by asking the question, ‘What has gone wrong with the visual arts in Britain in the 1970s?’ I was worried (with good reason) about the absence of significant art in the decade within which I was growing up as a critic. I tried to analyse the decadence of the 1970s in the light of what had happened since the second world war. And so I was concerned with exactly the terrain covered by the Arts Council collection.

In 1977, I argued that, for historical reasons, the British Fine Art tradition emerged belatedly and remained weak. In the twentieth century, it was threatened by the growth of what I call a ‘mega-visual tradition’; i.e. all the means and processes for producing and reproducing images, from modern advertising to television, which proliferate under monopoly capitalism. Thus the artist lost his cultural centrality and social function, and the great traditional media—painting, sculpture and drawing—fell into decline. I felt that British art was further vitiated by American hegemony in the 1960s, and thinned out by the recession of the 1970s.

In general, this analysis still seems sound. The collection reveals just how few works of stature or quality were originated in the 1970s. Nonetheless, I can now see that my criticisms were, to some extent, contaminated by the disease they sought to expose. Today, I hardly need reminding that the qualities of a good painting are not constituted wholly within ideology. But, three years ago, I failed to grasp fully the implications of the fact that painting, sculpture and drawing differ from mechanical media in that they are (before anything else) material processes involving, although differentially, imaginative and physical human work and biological processes. This weakness in my theory of course corresponded to a weakness in the prevailing art practice: at that time, one encountered little good, new painting or sculpture that transcended ideology.

Even then, of course, I retained and expressed a notion of what painting and sculpture might be. But a residue of ‘leftist’ modernist idealism caused me to underestimate the concrete, aesthetic achievements of an indigenous, oppositional tradition of painting which had consistently set its face against the prevailing decadence. This is one reason why I missed the point of Ron Kitaj’s purchase exhibition for the Arts Council collection in 1976, ‘The Human Clay’. I accused Kitaj of trying to ‘re-invoke the visual conventions of an earlier historical moment’: I failed to recognize that in all historical moments, men and women are made of ‘Human Clay’. Kitaj was attempting to root aesthetics in that ‘relative constant’ of human experience, the body, with its not unlimited potentialities, as a means of escaping from the ideological vicissitudes of late modernism. Today, I still do not accept Kitaj’s antiabstractionist bias. (As I have shown elsewhere, the expressiveness of abstract art can be rooted in somatic experience too.) Although ‘The Human Clay’ was certainly uneven, I recognize that my earlier polemic against his position was over- historicist, and I retract it.

Indeed, in the year’s since 1977,1 have come to put a higher and higher estimate on the work of a number of artists whom Kitaj has also championed. (What a pity, incidentally, that the only painting by Kitaj himself in the Arts Council collection is such a feeble work. He is a very uneven painter: Screenplay is of little merit. Whoever selected it must lack a good eye.) Auerbach’s Hayward exhibition, in 1978; Kossoff’s show at Fischer Fine Art in 1979; Creffield’s 1980 shows; and the exhibition of late Bombergs at the Whitechapel impressed upon me just how solid the achievements of these artists are. My 1977 article failed to discuss them at all: this was an omission for which I can plead nothing better than inexcusable ignorance.

David Bomberg, Self-Portrait, 1937, Arts Council Collection, London

But the exceptional qualities of the late Bomberg paintings were brought home to me vividly at the Hayward again. I have tried to analyse the peculiar power of these works elsewhere. (See Beyond the Crisis in Art). Here, I can proffer only value judgements. Bomberg’s Self Portrait (David) of 1937 struck me as easily the best painting in the unimpressive ‘Thirties’ exhibition at the Hayward in 1979. How good it was to see it again! His tautly sensuous painting, Trendrine, Cornwall, of 1947, was not only in my view the finest single work on show from the Arts Council’s collection: it also demonstrated just how much better a painter Bomberg was than either Pollock or De Kooning in the mid-1940s. In the late Bomberg, we encounter a truly major artist of a still-unsung indigenous tradition: but the scale of his achievement has hitherto been obscured through a perverse infatuation of the British art world with American late modernist modes.

Indeed, the Arts Council collection confirms that the impact of ‘The New American Painting’, first shown at the Tate in 1959, was like a dose of anaesthesia rather than an innovation. (Berger, incidentally, was the only critic of the day who had a good enough eye to perceive this.) By this time, Abstract Expressionism in America had already gone through its metamorphosis from living struggle into dead ideology. And so it came about that a stars-and-stripes spangled screen was drawn over the authentic example offered by the late Bomberg, his finest pupils, and other lesser but equally dogged British practitioners.

You could see this clearly at the Hayward. All you had to do was to compare two consecutive sections of the collection. One contained works made by British artists immediately before the invasion; the other displayed works by younger painters and sculptors influenced by it. Now I should be clear about what I am saying here. Evidently, not everything in the earlier section was of even quality. Kossoff’s Building Site, Victoria Street of 1961 seemed to me a muddy and confused painting in terms of touch, colour, space and composition. What a contrast with the adjacent Seated Nude which he painted just two years later! Similarly, I was not convinced by Auerbach’s Primrose Hill of 1959—though his drawing Head of Brigid, of 1973/4 (hung in the drawing section) was truly consummate, the work of someone who had really mastered that difficult medium.

Frank Auerbach, Head Of Catherine Lampert — Frank Auerbach, *Head Of Catherine Lampert*

But the point about the works in this section was that in them one could feel the struggle, often pursued through radical aesthetic means (no one had ever previously applied paint like Auerbach and Kossoff), towards a genuine expression: sometimes this coalesced into a convincing picture. (For example, within its own terms, I found it hard to fault Sheila Fell’s landscape with figure, Woman in the Snow, of 1955). Sometimes the artist failed. But in almost all of this work, I felt the urgency of an authentic imaginative quest and perceived the concrete evidence of it in the material handling of paint substance and pictorial conventions. Even the failures were often interesting. Thus, although Kossoff’s Building Site did not work, with the advantages of hindsight I could perceive in it rudiments of his masterpieces of the 1970s, his paintings and drawings of a children’s swimming bath and of the outside of Kilburn underground station.

How different the ‘feel’ of this section was from that just up the ramp. Appropriately, Denny called one of his paintings of 1963 Bland. I grant he can match his colours as well as a competent interior designer, but he lacks touch and imagination. Rothko had many imitators: none possessed his acuteness of eye, mastery of painterly means, or, above all, his affective sensitivity and psychological courage. Denny is a plastic Rothko. But, weak and ineffectual as Denny’s work is, it is perhaps unfair to single him out. There was not one good, or even interesting, painting in this section by Cohen, Hoyland, Stephenson or anyone else. It served merely to illustrate the shabbiness and opportunism of ‘Situation’ artists. They were stylists, borrowing the ‘look’ of American art. But a duck-arse hairstyle did not turn Cliff Richard into Elvis Presley: these painters were never Pollocks, Rothkos, or De Koonings either. Twenty years on, the tattiness and inauthenticity of their plagiarism is clear for all to see.

One artist interestingly spans both sections: the sculptor, Anthony Caro. He was almost destroyed by trans-Atlantic influence as the contrast between his ‘before’ and ‘after’ sculptures demonstrates. Caro’s Woman Waking Up of 1956 is an arresting if not quite achieved little work. It shows a woman lying on her back. Her slightly arching upper torso is roughly parallel to a flat, supporting plane; her right hip, however, swivels over towards her left side. The body is structured expressively, rather than on the basis of anatomy or perception alone. The sculpture depicts that moment of dawning consciousness and muscular awareness in which one emerges from sleep. The mouth is a slouching slit. The head is small, stuffed into the shoulders: the arms seem to spring directly from the great, flattened breasts.

Sculpturally, there is quite a lot wrong with the figure. Its two halves pivot around the narrow waist but are not brought into a unity through a continuous movement. There is slack work in the handling of the right leg, feet and left arm. The expressive distortions—like the lop-sided swelling of the right side of the chest—are not always convincing. Nor does the figure work equally well all the way round: it is much better seen from over the back of the hips from where its formal weaknesses are less visible. There is also a rhetorical, even theatrical element in the piece which seems to be an attempt at compensating for its sculptural deficiencies. But when all this has been said, Woman Waking Up is clearly an authentic and sculpturally imaginative work, created by a sculptor of evident potential.

Anthony Caro, Slow Movement, 1965, Arts Council Collection, London

However, Caro’s Slow Movement, up the ramp, illustrates how that potential was squandered. Slow Movement is a placement, or arrangement, of three flat, painted steel elements, (a trapezoid, a triangle, and an angle iron.) The emergent sculptural imagination of the earlier piece has been stifled: the search for authentic expression using the haptic and volumetric skills peculiar to sculpture has just been abandoned. Certainly, a residue of Caro’s earlier project survives. (Compare the way the triangle meets the trapezoid with the figure’s pivotal waist.) This is why Caro is so much better than those who followed him: they had no real experience of the sculptural enterprise.

Anthony Caro, Woman Waking Up, 1956, Arts Council Collection, London

The tragedy of Caro is that an artist with so much incipient talent should have settled for so little and misled so many by doing so. Certainly, Slow Movement can be read as a more successful piece than Woman Waking Up\ but Slow Movement is a much slighter piece. In the end, of course, it is essentially a literary or mannerist exercise rather than a true sculpture. I am not just referring to its relinquishment of sculptural means, but also to the fact that it is so evidently based on ideological attitudes rather than a genuine expressive struggle—but this is the trouble with so much British art that became seduced by American modes in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Enough of Caro’s earlier project shows through in his best work of the last twenty years (see, for example, the 1975 piece also in the Arts Council collection) to indicate that he could still become a major sculptor if he summoned up the aesthetic and moral courage to break with the ideology which helped to render him a successful late modernist salon artist twenty years ago.

But it is unlikely that Caro will oblige. Like many artists and critics of his generation, he does not seem to understand what gives rise to quality in art. In 1964, David Thompson introduced an exhibition of ‘New Generation’ artists saying, ‘They are starting their careers in a boom-period for modern art. British art in particular has suddenly woken up out of a long provincial doze, is seriously entering the international lists and winning prestige for itself’. Even today that debasement of British art which occurred in the late 1950s and 1960s is still defended by those lacking in aesthetic sensibilities in these terms. But Caro, I would suggest, was more deeply asleep in Slow Movement than Woman Waking Up: meanwhile, in the midst of their so-called ‘provincial doze’, late Bomberg, Kossoff, Auerbach, Creffield, etc. were producing works of true quality and stature.

I do not want to suggest that ‘The Crisis of British Art’ simply originated in the imitation of American styles and theories. It also had much to do with the tendency of art to become seduced by the ideology of the mega-visual tradition, and thereby to relinquish the particular expressive capacities of the painter and sculptor. In many of my recent articles and lectures, I have tried to sketch out what I believe those particular expressive capacities to be. Evidently, I cannot rehearse all those arguments again here. Suffice to say that I emphasize that painting and sculpture are specific material practices. Good painting, for example, involves a peculiar combination of imaginative and physical work (on both materials and conventions, given by tradition.) When a painter is successful, this leads to the constitution of a new aesthetic whole. I have argued that, in the present social context, the true qualities (and indeed the radical potential) of a painting are literally expressed through these material practices. The point I am making can be vividly demonstrated if one considers the Arts Council’s selection of ‘Pop Art’.

David Hockney, We Two Boys Together Clinging — David Hockney, *We Two Boys Together Clinging*

A work like Hockney’s We Two Boys Together Clinging, of 1961, has real qualities. One can perceive the imaginative and physical work of the artist, his expressiveness, and identify this with the transformation of his physical and conventional materials. But contrast this with Patrick Caulfield’s Artist’s Studio of 1964. It is not just that Caulfield copied so much from Lichtenstein. Nor is it just that Caulfield’s world view is boring and bland: the way in which he realizes it in paint, through a mechanical filling in between the lines with luminous, matt colours, shows that he has no resistance to offer to the ideology of the mega-visual tradition. Like Robyn Denny, he has neither touch nor imagination. It is absurd that we should be asked to look with reverence in the Hayward Gallery at a painting as bad as Artist’s Studio. It is the sort of work one would not be surprised to see in a beach night-club in Benidorm, on the Costa Brava—and even there it would not merit a second glance.

But the collection confirms that the problem with the 1970s was not so much that they rejected the values of the previous decade, but rather developed in a disastrous continuity with them. Caro was the albeit reluctant father of those who abandoned sculptural means altogether; Hamilton sired Burgin, and the silliness of conceptualism. Just as Caro’s early work gives us some intimation of what might have been, so, too, does Hamilton’s sensitive drawing of himself, aged sixteen, hint at what he might have become. Instead, of course, Hamilton chose to relinquish the painter’s means and to toy with the images and techniques of the mega-visual tradition. His Portrait of Hugh Gaitskell as a Famous Monster of Filmland would long ago have been forgotten if it had been, say, an illustration accompanying an article in a colour magazine. Hamilton’s sensibility became merely reflective of the ‘media landscape’ which fascinated him: as an artist, he seems to have died in late adolescence. But there are not, of course, even flickerings of ‘what might have been’ in the wholly anaesthetic offering of Victor Burgin and his colleagues.

There is no doubt that, in the 1970s, the Arts Council acquired some unconscionable rubbish, which will soon be put under wraps for ever. Very little of the work Richard Cork bought in 1972/3 (under the rubric ‘Beyond Painting and Sculpture’) seemed worth any one’s while getting out for this selective exhibition. Yet it is only eight years since Cork bought these things. The trouble is that the Council does not seem to learn from its mistakes.

Rudi Fuchs was specially imported to purchase for the collection in 1977/8. The results of his efforts were shown in an exhibition last year, ‘Languages’, which consisted entirely of specimens of structured ideology: i.e. ‘conceptual’ and related works. In the catalogue, Fuchs wrote ‘Because a painting is Art before it is anything else (for example the image of a tree on a hill) it has become impossible to use painting objectively—as a neutral medium’. He then goes on to say that photographs and texts are ‘closer to the real thing they portray than a painting—provided of course, the photograph and the text are unadorned and plainly descriptive’. The straight photograph and plain text, he says, are ‘almost reality itself’. Predictably, he adds, ‘Look at this art as if it were television; read it as if it were a newspaper’.

On the evidence of this text, Fuchs lacks even an inkling of the nature of art and what is worth preserving in the experience of it. He actually wants ‘neutral media’. He does not understand the imaginative work of the artist, or the way in which he creates a transitional reality, neither objective nor subjective, through transforming his physical and conventional materials into a new and convincing whole. In short, Fuchs seems to lack even the most elementary insight into everything that I mean by aesthetic.

This is no small matter. ‘Renunciation of the aesthetic form’, wrote Marcuse, ‘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’. But Fuchs actively wishes to serve us up with an ‘art’ which can be looked at as if it were television, or read like a newspaper! If the Dutch want such a man to run one of their leading modern art museums, that seems largely a matter for the Dutch. But why was Fuchs invited to Britain to purchase for the Arts Council?

The Council still has not learned what a disaster it was in the early 1960s when art administrators started all that talk about waking up from ‘a long provincial doze’ and entering ‘the international lists’. The decision to invite Fuchs shows just how entrenched that sort of thinking still is. The historian, Edward Thompson, has recently argued that the true vandals of British laws, customs, and liberties in the 1970s were ‘not the raging revolutionaries of the “extreme Left” but Lord Hailsham, Mr Silkin, the judges in their ermine, the peers of the realm’, and so forth. Similarly, I am often convinced that the true vandals and philistines are habitues of 105 Piccadilly: it is for those of us who are dubbed the ‘extremists’, to uphold value and quality in art. Perhaps this is not surprising. As Marcuse pointed out, the aesthetic and subjective aspects of art constitute ‘an antagonistic force in capitalist society’.

1980

MODERN ART: Hayward Annual 1980 / March 5, 2020 by Laurence Fuller

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.

HAYWARD ANNUAL 1980

by Peter Fuller, 1980

I begin to feel like Diderot. The Annuals of 1977, 1978, 1979, 1980. For these are certainly the salons of our time. The first thing to be said about the 1980 Hayward Annual where John Hoyland was the selector, is how good it was to have an exhibition of painting (with a few sculptures thrown in). I am a critic of painting, drawing and sculpture. When I went into the Hayward, I responded, at once to the look, feel and smell of the show. (I even enjoyed the rich aroma of fresh oils streaming out of Michael Bennett’s Blue Lagoon.) Minimal, conceptual, theoretical art, and their derivatives have not made the slightest aesthetic contribution. Hoyland conceded nothing to the junk art that traces descent from Duchamp. In this sense, his selection was a relief and a pleasure. He deserves to be congratulated.

But as soon as this has been said, the questions crowd in. What sort of paintings did Hoyland choose? How good are they? How are we to assess his contribution aesthetically and culturally? Hoyland ‘situated’ his selection with an ‘introductory section’ which included work by painters from Matthew Smith to John Walker. But this section made sense. In general, Hoyland picked from those painters who emerged in Britain in the 1940s and 1950s—pre-‘Situation’ artists who were unaffected by the invasion of American Late Modernist anaesthetics. In many cases, they were represented by recent works, so the section as a whole amounted to the visual argument that there is a significant, neglected, British tradition which has been continuously producing genuinely expressive work over several decades.

I share this view and acknowledge that my earlier texts on British art gave insufficient weight to it. (See my self-criticisms in ‘The Arts Council Collection’, (p. 162). But I inflect my assessment of the achievements of this tradition differently from Hoyland. The striking fact, for me, about the paintings in the introductory section was not just that the best of them were so much better than anything that followed, but that they were so conservatively conceived. The artists belonging to this redeeming strand in British art tended to be respecters of traditional skills, like touch, composition, and—here’s the rub—drawing. The majority of them were even concerned with the painter’s traditional categories: i.e. figures (Smith, Auerbach, Hilton) and still lives (Scott). In fact, only one such category was entirely absent from Hoyland’s choice—history painting. Nonetheless, it is possible to say that, in some sense, landscape was the key for all these artists. Of course, that is evidently true of Lanyon and Hitchens. How lovely the former’s Untitled (Autumn), of 1964, looked in this context! But when Scott floats his still life shapes across cool blue expanses, or ochre fields; or when Hilton draws figures which ebb and flow without definite boundaries, like tidal rivers, one feels the strong affinities of their art, too, not just with ‘objects’ in the world, but with a notion of external environment, or place. Of course, none of these painters was intent upon verisimilitude of appearance or perceived space. Rather, they made use of perceptions and affective imaginings, which, through the material skills of painting itself, they sought to weld into new worlds, or aesthetic wholes. These can be ‘explained’ neither in terms of their connections with ‘inner’ nor ‘outer’ reality, nor yet in those of painterly forms alone, but only through the way in which all these elements are fused together. Successful examples, chosen by Hoyland, included Hitchens’ fine Folded Stream of the early 1940s, and Walker’s impressive Daintree I of 1980. (Walker’s painting gets better all the time: he is probably the best of the younger, British ‘non- figurative’ painters.)

Now Hoyland certainly selected some intriguing and beautiful works from this tradition, but his choice, both in terms of the sorts of works he picked from those he did include, and the painters whom he left out altogether, tended to imply that the radical or progressive aspect of their work was their abandonment of traditional skills, practices and genres. Thus Hoyland chose not to represent the late painting of Bomberg which is greater than anything achieved by Lanyon or Hitchens. But Bomberg remained doggedly committed to a sense of place, to the meeting point of ‘inner’ and ‘outer’, to seeking the ‘spirit in the mass’. Hoyland also selected from Hilton works which most closely approached ‘pure abstraction’, which had moved furthest from figure and landscape. Similarly, he picked Auerbach (who is indeed a good painter) but not Kossoff, who is better still. But Kossoff is one of the few living British artists in relation to whose work the category of history painting can meaningfully be raised. Unlike Hoyland, I do not think it was the fact that any of the artists in this tradition moved away from traditional skills and genres which made their work powerful and good; that strength rather derived from the way in which they transformed their materials, both physical and conventional (i.e. as given by the tradition of painting).

This may seem like hair-splitting; but the importance of this difference of emphasis is made manifest when one moves on to the main section of the 1980 Annual. Here, it seems, Hoyland pointed not just to a continuity with the past, but to the emergence of a new tradition, differing from the older one in the radicalness of its abstraction. Certainly, the distinction was not just one of age, since several of the painters in the main section are older than some of those in the introductory section. Now I think that many of the ‘main section’ artists are indeed trying to produce genuinely expressive, ‘non-figurative’ works. Moreover, I believe that, as artists like Rothko and Natkin have demonstrated, this can still be done. I would go further. Many (but not all) of those whom Hoyland chose were not like, say, so many of the abstractionists exhibited in ‘Style in the Seventies’, preoccupied with the ideology of art, that is with ‘style’ or ‘look’ for its own sake. They were clearly seeking a genuine expressiveness, which they failed to find. But why?

Let us look, for a moment, at the works in the main section for which there was something positive to be said. Among those which impressed me most was Albert Irvin’s Boadicea, with its consummate sense of colour and scale, and its vibrant expanses of red hanging above and behind a bar of green. Comparisons between music and painting are rarely just: but I feel that Irvin (at his best) expresses emotion through shape and colour in a way comparable with music. Nonetheless, he achieves his effects through an almost classical knowledge of painterly composition. (I do not understand, however, how a painter capable of Boadicea could have let pictures as bad as Severus and Orlando out of his studio.) Gillian Ayres has become a much more consistent painter than Irvin: I like her work better every time that I see it. Everything about her recent canvases, from their densely packed over-painterliness, to the surface touches of gilded tinting, suggests an attempt to quash the transience of life with an over-full hedonism, to turn even mere ‘images’, into the evasive, and affectively sensitive, flesh, for ever. I relish her opulent materiality, and appreciate the despair, the horror vacui, of which it is born. Again, I was intrigued (though not convinced) by Terry Setch’s hard, crowded, anaesthetic surfaces: these were resilient and un- conceding, almost to the point of ugliness. And yet they redeemed themselves in a way I cannot explain, this side of a critical threshold. But Irvin is fifty-six; Ayres fifty; Setch forty- four; what they have achieved (though limited) is rooted in traditional painterly pursuits. (I would not mind wagering that, at some point, all three were good draughtsmen, or women.) Above all, they know intuitively that to be significant and successful, a painting cannot be just ‘marks on the canvas’, but, through the materiality of its forms, must constitute a symbol, if not of perceived reality, then of our affective life.

But most of the rest of the main section was thin indeed. It saddens me that I can only re-affirm an earlier judgement on Geoff Rigden. He is an infantilist, someone who daubs and squelches gobbets of colour in the hope that they will evoke some emotion in others. It is necessary to remind such ‘artists’ that even Jackson Pollock was a technical master, and a great draughtsman, who lost neither his touch nor his control in his lavender mists. Similarly, I could see nothing at all worth looking at in those squeeged expanses of dredged colour, allowing for no illusion of space, shovelled up by Fred Pollock. One might have thought that a redeeming aspect of enfeebled painting of this low calibre would have been its sense of colour: but neither Rigden, Pollock, Fielding, James, Tonkin, nor Whishaw seem to have any natural or acquired sense of nuance in this respect. Yet it is hard to see what else could be claimed for their art, certainly not drawing: of the younger artists, only Mali Morris showed the slightest aptitude in this direction, and in her case it is more a question of competent design than of true draughtswomanship.

There were, of course, some works that were better than others. Clyde Hopkins is a painter of promise, his Untitled (A.F) of 1980 had something of that sense of the sublime which I have tried to analyse elsewhere. It reminded me of how good abstract painting of this kind can be, even though itself it fell short. But I felt Hopkins had made some attempt to work through and express his emotions, not just to allude to them. But, as Untitled/Sturm of 1979 indicates, he is a careless painter. The canvas size contradicts the scale of his imagery, over and over again: his painting falls apart at the periphery, so that the necessary sense of aesthetic wholeness eludes him. Jeffrey Dellow has certainly come on a bit since I saw his work last year at Stockwell: but then he had plenty of room for improvement. And I cannot get over a sense of rhetoric and inauthenticity, of over-weening careerist ambitions, based on the slenderest of material and imaginative skills, which pervades not only his large canvases but those of so many even worse painters in the exhibition.

Why was there such a marked generational gap in this exhibition? Well, in a recent interview, Hoyland himself kept on and on saying that you can only produce a really good painting when you are old. ‘We’re not expecting to find absolutes in all these paintings. You only find that in a few great artists at the end of their life. You’re not going to find it in a thirty-two-year-old . . . To get everything happening and coming at once, it seems only to happen with older artists, with much older artists . . .’ and so on, and so forth. Hoyland’s explanation may comfort him as he himself leaves middle-age behind, having never fully realized his indubitable potential as a painter, but it is not good enough. ‘A thirty-two-year-old’: the choice of age could not have been more unfortunate, since Seurat (who surely came nearer to producing ‘absolutes’ than most) was precisely thirty-two when he died. Hoyland must also have reflected on the fact that Auerbach, included in his exhibition, produced many truly major works long before he was thirty. I believe that we must look for explanations which are more profound than age alone. And they are not hard to come by.

Many of the younger artists failed because they were contaminated by post-situation’ ideology: that is by the belief that expressiveness can only be achieved through renunciation and reductionism. They err because they have been taught to eschew imagination, drawing, illusion, and the use of any expressive elements derived from perception. The earlier tradition in Britain, represented in the ‘introductory section’ never made these mistakes, (although Heron, of course, was among those who later betrayed it in a peculiarly British way).

Robert Natkin, Anticipation Of Night — Robert Natkin, *Anticipation Of Night*

Nor, for that matter, did painters like Rothko or Natkin in America, both of whose art is rooted in physiognomy. This could not be said however of the younger painters chosen by Hoyland. One of the sillier pronouncements recently from the Stockwell Depot (with which many of them are associated) was Gouk’s observation that ‘drawing is . . . the bane of British painting’. In so far as British painting has had strengths, drawing has been prominent among them. Bomberg was right: there is no good painting without drawing. The trouble is that Rigden, Fred Pollock, and Co. espouse a child-like notion of expression (as a natural activity), and cling to it as a model for adult art activity. But one reason why Hoyland himself (who, be it said, was modest enough not to find it necessary to exhibit any work of his own) is so much better than his South London proteges is that his expression is rooted in classical skills; one reason why he has never achieved as much as he might have done as a painter is that he was, in the prime of his development (but after he had learned to draw) seduced by the anaesthetic short-cuts seemingly offered by American mannerist abstraction.

Flowers, David Bomberg — *Flowers*, David Bomberg

I am not however referring to a merely ‘technical’ matter, one which could be put right by a few evening classes in drawing (though these would not go amiss). I believe that although these artists are in pursuit of ‘the aesthetic dimension’, they misunderstand what it is. In the catalogue, Timothy Hilton announces of Stockwell-style painting ‘This is aestheticism’. And Hoyland, too, implies something similar when, in the interview referred to earlier, he says that he does not think that figurative painting is ‘what painting is about’.

In such talk, aesthetics are reduced to the fashionable, institutional style of the moment: and yet it is in the nature of the realized aesthetic dimension that it is always at odds with the visual ideology of its time. Like Hilton, I would say that I, too, am committed to ‘aestheticism’ but my view of what this means is at once more generous and more radical than his. I believe that those old categories, the ‘beautiful’ and the ‘sublime’, as the two contrasting but related modes of the aesthetic, are still of great relevance to painting. (I have elaborated this at some length in the last chapter of my book, Art and Psychoanalysis.) I see good abstract painting as being an extreme manifestation of the ‘sublime’ mode, and I value it greatly. It is very much to my ‘taste’. But, having said this, I must add that one or other end of the aesthetic continuum tends to be in or out of fashion, as a result of the vicissitudes of style, culture and history. When an aesthetic mode is ‘in fashion’ it tends to be banalized and reduced into mannerisms. Think of all those white marble sculptures of Venus, shown in nineteenth century salons, whose makers sincerely believed they had produced works of transcendent ‘beauty’.

But the ‘aesthetic dimension’ cannot be validated by an appeal exclusively to either of its modes, nor yet by an appeal to style. The roots of aesthetics, I am convinced, lie in ‘relative constants’ of our experience, or rather in the way in which the artist expresses those constants through his original handling of the physical and conventional materials of his medium, and brings them into a new and convincing whole. (In this sense, of course, the painters in Hoyland’s introductory section were fully engaged in the aesthetic quest.) I think that works of great aesthetic strength could still be painted in either the ‘beautiful’ or the ‘sublime’ mode. But the sublime is now an institutional fashion, as the 1980 Hayward Annual confirms. Its essential characteristics (which are in fact rooted in ‘relative constants’ of human being) have been ascribed to a process of formal reductionism, which is assumed to have about it an inevitable historicist motion. (This is what I mean by post ‘Situation’ anaesthetics.)

All this makes it harder than ever (though it is not impossible) to make successful works in this mode. Many of the painters at the Hayward, however, were like those nineteenth century Venus-makers. They think they are producing ‘pure sublime’, whereas in fact they are slaves of fashion, mannerism and ideology. Hoyland himself has spoken of a lack of ‘whole-heartedness’ in much of this painting. To truly achieve the aesthetic dimension, these painters will have to dig deeper into their own bodily and affective experience, and to replenish their expressive skills in the richness of the older tradition.

1980

MODERN ART: Plus Ca Change / March 4, 2020 by Laurence Fuller

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.

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 — 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 — 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 — 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 — 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 — 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.

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 — 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

MODERN ART: Et In Arcadia Ego / February 20, 2020 by Laurence Fuller

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.

ET IN ARCADIA EGO

by Peter Fuller, 1981

The National Gallery of Scotland houses a group of seven implacable and yet compelling paintings: the second series of Sacraments Poussin painted for his patron, Paul Chantelou, between 1644 and 1648. Usually, these pictures hang together in magnificent, silent solemnity on the walls of a single room. I can think of no comparable experience in any British art gallery—except, perhaps the famous Rothko room at the Tate.

Of course, the comparison is based more on mood than appearance. Rothko’s paintings are wholly abstract: their effects depend solely upon undulating planes of purple and black. Poussin’s pictures involve monumental figures whose ‘passions’ are expressed through vivid yet intensely restrained bodily gestures and facial expressions. With the exception of Baptism, they carry out their dignified ceremonials against massive, architectonic stage sets. The paintings are also redolent with Poussin’s detailed knowledge of the artifacts and customs of the ancient world.

Rothko said of his own paintings that anyone who saw only the forms and colour harmonies was missing the point: though not a religious man, he was concerned with ‘basic emotions’; he insisted there was a deep ‘spiritual’ dimension to his work. Conversely, it has often (and rightly) been said of the Poussins that they contain ‘superb passages of abstract design.’ Both series certainly share a concern with high sentiment, with the evocation of a mood of humanist spirituality. Rothko and Poussin used and developed very particular kinds of pictorial conventions, peculiar to their respective moments of history; but through such timely means they both consciously created self-contained illusions which aspired to the condition of the timeless.

Poussin’s Sacraments may be superficially ‘religious’; but Poussin utterly rejected that florid, superstitious yearning for the miraculous manifested by the counter-Reformation artists who were working close by him in Rome. The Sacraments reflect his moral and stoical rationalism. They revolve around basic human themes, common to all cultures: the understanding of the origins and frailty of human life, the inevitability of death (so powerfully evoked in the painting which shows a Roman centurion receiving Extreme Unction from an early Christian priest), the union of man and woman, and spiritual regeneration. Poussin was fifty when he began these works, and they represent the breakthrough to the silent, decorously majestic style of his long-delayed maturity.

This was made clear in a remarkable special exhibition at Scotland’s National Gallery in which these Sacraments were temporarily rehung alongside their precursors, a cycle of pictures on the same subject begun in the mid-1630s. The earlier Sacraments are almost ‘intimist’ in comparison; they are technically and aesthetically uneven and full of incident and gesture which has not been ruthlessly subjected to the overall conception.

Poussin’s vision of man was certainly more fragmented at that time. Simultaneously with the first series of Sacraments, he was working on a series of Bacchanals for Cardinal Richelieu. The finest of these is probably The Triumph of Pan, specially cleaned for this show, and revealed in all its brilliance of hue and riot of carnal exuberance. This painting exudes a uniformly lush sensuality which could hardly be more different from the varied and carefully individuated, but always noble, sentiments expressed through the gestures and faces of the characters in the later Sacraments.

In Edinburgh, one can now also see early paintings Poussin made after his arrival in Rome in 1624. None is more beautiful and typical than Cephalus and Aurora (from London’s National Gallery) which shows all the nostalgic yearning, Titianesque touch, honey tones and milky mergence of forms, characteristic of the first formulation of Poussin’s arcadian utopia.

This Edinburgh exhibition is thus an introduction to Poussin, not a blockbuster retrospective. Many of his greatest paintings, and regrettably all his landscapes, are absent. But Poussin needs introducing here. There are many fine Poussins in our public collections; but apart from a small presentation in a provincial university thirty years ago, there has never before been a Poussin exhibition in Britain. Poussin has long attracted a daunting and voluminous scholarly literature; he has also always been celebrated among painters themselves. (Cezanne wanted to do Poussin over again—but from nature rather than the antique.) But he has never been greatly loved by the ever growing army of mass consumers for art.

Certainly, Poussin is an acquired taste. I know because, for years, I passed by his paintings with the contemptuous indifference of a Pharisee. But one day, quite suddenly, my interest was aroused and Poussin became, for me, something close to an addiction. Today I can think of no painter, dead or alive, whose works I enjoy more. And that seems to be a common pattern among those who admire him.

It is easy to see why Poussin resists casual glances. His greatest work, that of his maturity, is refined, sophisticated, highly artificial, academic and often heavy with esoteric references and classical allusions. He eschews the spontaneity, incompletion, sketchiness and immediacy which have been so elevated in post-romantic taste. (The late drawings made with a sick and shaking hand are, perhaps, an exception.) Furthermore, he makes nonsense of the contemporary critical cant that, to be great, a painting must, in every significant respect, be of its own time.

Poussin insists that, if you are to enjoy his paintings, you must enter a strange and forbidding world of his own creation, one without any easy sociological keys. Certainly, Poussin is rich in identifiable appurtenances; but they tell us next to nothing about the seventeenth century France from which he came, or the seventeenth century Rome in which he worked. And yet it is the completeness of this invented world which forms the basis of his fascination for those who yield to him.

In Poussin, opposites unite: the great sculptor, Bernini, once said of Poussin’s work, ‘O che grande favoleggiatore!’ (‘Oh what a great storyteller!’). But Roger Fry, the formalist critic, who did more than anyone to foster the contemporary contempt for narrative painting was also among Poussin’s most enthusiastic admirers. Fry believed that the aesthetic value of painting was solely a matter of emotional response to the disposition of colours, shapes and forms.

This is not as contradictory as it sounds. I have often drawn attention to the mandrake-like root of expression in painting. One branch of this is dependent upon the body as objectively perceived and depicted; the other is enmeshed in abstract and rhythmic qualities (such as touch, form, composition and so on) ultimately deriving from the subjective experience of the artist’s, and thus, by extension, the viewer’s own body. Poussin was a master of both these modes.

He followed Leonardo’s physiognomic theory of expression, according to which in painting the spectator’s emotion is primarily aroused through the expressivity of the characters depicted. Poussin developed this into his own concept of the affetti (ie the ‘passions’ or emotions) as made manifest through the interacting bodily gestures of the various characters portrayed.

Such ideas, of course, have much in common with certain theories about acting. Before painting a picture Poussin would set up a miniature stage upon which he experimented with tiny wax figures in various postures. Extreme Unction even includes the near edge of the floor in the extreme foreground as if one were looking into a stage set. All these techniques create an illusory space which emphasizes the separateness and otherness of the high drama depicted on the other side of the footlights.

But Poussin also likened the way in which paintings work upon us to music: this can most easily be seen in those early works, like the Cephalus and Aurora, in which his figures are much less sharply individuated from each other, and everything flows and merges across a shallow, decorative space close to the canvas surface, so that mood is evoked through abstract elements. But the genius of Poussin’s pictures resides in the way in which he blends these two extremes of expression into a harmonious whole.

Poussin thus unites the objectively perceived and the subjectively experienced in a new way. Both his ‘theatrical’ representational devices and his ‘musical’ forms are symbolic. And this is the clue to the ‘new realities’ he constitutes through his pictures. Rothko tried to evoke a subjective pictorial utopia through formal means alone; but in Poussin’s paintings, ancient history provides an additional metaphor which speaks both of the objective world, and of those yearning remembrances of a lost psychological experience, expressed through his forms.

Poussin possessed a rarefied intellect; yet he was fascinated with the infant’s eye view. Thepwfh who hover in his skies, or crouch in the foreground of his pictures, are more than conventional devices. Indeed, he sought out obscure subjects—like the nurture of Jupiter by a goat—through which he could make the infant, who feels blissfully fused with all he surveys, the explicit focus of attention. In The Arcadian Shepherds, of 1627, three figures gaze at the words Et in Arcadia ego engraved upon a tomb. The most likely translation is, ‘I too lived in Arcadia.’Poussin recreates the lost paradise of childhood and combines it with the heights of adult experience. But like Rothko, with his black spaces, he does not let us forget that we who have fallen into hard reality will lose even that in death.

1981

MODERN ART: Seeing Berger / February 20, 2020 by Laurence Fuller

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.

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 lockdown! I will be posting regularly.John Berger and Peter’s relationship was fascinating spanned decades and was built on the foundations of true art criticism lived out in an emotional and personal dynamic. Their correspondences remain the most passionate, compelling, engage and moving letters I have ever read. This essay Seeing Berger for obvious reasons signaled a change in their relationship as the son took aim at the father.

SEEING BERGER
by Peter Fuller

In their recent polemic against Ways of Seeing, the authors of Art-Language write, ‘It might be argued that Ways of Seeing has already been dispensed with, that it is obvious to anyone worth talking to that it is a bad book.I can only suppose that I am not worth talking to. Ways of Seeing has had a decisive and continuing effect on my development as a critic. The book and programmes taken together had, I think, a greater influence than any other art critical project of the last decade.

Ways Of Seeing by Mike Dibb starring John Berger — *Ways Of Seeing* by Mike Dibb starring John Berger

Of course, I am not trying to project Berger beyond criticism. But before I outline my reservations concerning Ways of Seeing, I want to say something about the relationship of my work to Berger’s.2 Berger once wrote of Frederick Antal, the art historian: ‘More than any other man (he) taught me how to write about art.’3 What Berger said of Antal, I can say of him: more than any other man, he taught me how to write about art. It is as simple and as complex as that. I have never been Berger’s pupil in any formal sense nor did I study his work and extract from it any theory, formula, or ‘method’. Rather Berger taught me how to learn to know and to see for myself.

Today, the art world pullulates with self-acclaimed ‘political’ practitioners. It is not easy for us to imagine what things were like in 1951 when Berger began to write his weekly column in the New Statesman. This was the time of the Cold War, of anti-Marxist witch-hunts and hysteria. By bearing witness as a Marxist commentator on art, Berger invited vilification which he received in no uncertain measure. Stephen Spender, for one, unforgivably compared Berger’s first novel, A Painter of Our Time, with Goebbel’s Michael.4 Today, of course, Berger is criticised from his ‘left’ as much as from the right. Art-Language'?, incoherent and illiterate tirade against Berger sneers again and again at his ‘sensitivity’ (as if that were some sort of crime) and accuses him of ‘anti-working class poesy’, ‘immanently empty apologetics for the dominance of bourgeois pseudo-thought’, and so on, and so forth, through 123 barren pages. I respect Berger, however, because he has borne consistent testimony to a possible future other than a capitalist one, and to the fact that great art, authentic and uncompromised art, can contribute to our vision of that future by increasing ‘our awareness of our potentiality’.5 This testimony, however, is not always easily reconcilable with some of the central theses of Ways of Seeing.

Ways of Seeing is really the only one of Berger’s books in which he spells out anything approaching a ‘theory of art’, and also provides an overview of the Western tradition. The bulk of Berger’s contribution on art is neither aesthetics, nor art history, but practical criticism, i.e. his evaluative reflections upon his experience of specific works of art. What then are the central theses of Ways of Seeing! Well, firstly that European oil painting involved a way of seeing the world that was indissolubly bound up with private property. The painting, for Berger, is first and foremost a thing that can be owned and sold; post-Renaissance pictorial conventions and connoisseurship are derivatives of the oil painting’s status as property. Although traditional aesthetics have in fact been rendered obsolete by the rise of the new mechanical means of producing and reproducing imagery, he argues, they are still perpetuated because of the painting’s continuing function in exchange and as property.

Now it should be said straight away that, in part, the value of Ways of Seeing was polemical - and that it therefore suffers from the limitations of polemics. Berger was consciously offering an alternative conception of art history to that promoted by Kenneth Clark in his book and television series, Civilization. Berger raised a series of ‘uncivilized’ questions about the social and economic functions of art which Clark studiously evaded. Berger did not accept that Western art history could be legitimately portrayed as a succession of isolated men of genius. He showed that by attending to what has been called ‘the totality of the average’, the tradition of painting since the Renaissance could be revealed as being pervaded by class specific and ideological elements, deriving from bourgeois social and property relations.

Peter Fuller

In the early 1970s, these were original and contentious emphases, the more so since they were elaborated not within the enclaves of the art world or the left, but through an award-winning television series and an eminently readable, popular, paperback book. But within the art world at least, the raising of such questions became more commonplace as the decade wore on. The impact of Ways of Seeing itself certainly had something to do with this. Whatever the causes, much officially sponsored art practice, an influential school of art history, and a great deal of art criticism, tended to reduce art to ideology, tout court. Today, therefore, I think it is more important to defend a materialist version of the kernel of truth within ‘bourgeois’ aesthetics than to support the rabid left idealism purveyed by many of those who are either monstrous off-spring of Ways of Seeing, or at least products of the same cultural, common ancestors.

But before I engage in such a defence, I want to stress that one central argument of Ways of Seeing has been established beyond question: from the Renaissance until the late 19th century, some sort of ‘special relationship’ existed between art and property. This ‘special relationship’ becomes almost self-evident when one attends to the tradition as a whole, and not just to its exceptional works. No one has ever refuted this argument - and Berger may therefore be said to have delivered an historic blow to the self-conception of ‘civilized’ man. He has confirmed his own assertion: ‘We are accused of being obsessed by property. The truth is the other way round. It is the society and culture in question which is so obsessed. Yet to an obsessive his obsession always seems to be of the nature of things and so is not recognized for what it is.’6

As it happens, I think that some of the ways in which Berger describes and defines this ‘special relationship’ will require modification and revision. Berger is, of course, largely concerned with works painted before the beginning of this century; even so, I do not think he gives sufficient weight to what has been in recent years a real movement of works of art from the private to the public domain. Nonetheless, the problematic relationship persists. I came to realise just how strong it still is when, in 1975, I assisted Hugh Jenkins, then Minister of Arts, in his struggle to ensure that the proposed universal Wealth Tax was applied to works of art - with special arrangements for those works on public exhibition. Such a measure would have greatly increased access to what is often called (by those who wish to keep it to themselves), ‘The National Heritage’. In pursuing these goals, I was, of course, strongly influenced by Ways of Seeing. The sort of hysterical, irrational opposition which I encountered from the dealer-collector lobby, led by Hugh Leggatt, Denis Mahon, and Andrew Faulds, M.P., was quite unlike that provoked by any of the aesthetic battles in which I have been involved. These events confirmed for me the truth of the central argument of Ways of Seeing. Berger’s insights into the ‘special relationship’ between art and property should not be relinquished until that relationship has itself been dissolved through the historical process.

Having said this, however, I must add that I do not think this political-economic dimension provides the only, or even the most rewarding, avenue of approach to works of art of the past. And, indeed, it is not that ‘special relationship’ which forms the subject of this critique of Ways of Seeing. My own view is that art practice and aesthetics, even in the grand era of oil painting, were not mere derivatives or epiphenomena of the work of art’s function as property. Indeed, the greater the work of art, the less it seems to be reducible to the ideology of its own time. Paradoxically, I believe that Berger’s practice as a critic, both before and after Ways of Seeing, simply assumes this point - even though Ways of Seeing (despite the fact that it attempts an overview) offers no explanation of it. Thus Berger has written numerous essays, of great brilliance, on painters from Vermeer to Monet which have not assumed that the fundamental fact of the artist’s vision and practice was a relationship to property. This should, perhaps, have caused one to question some of the arguments of Ways of Seeing. But to make this point more clearly, we now have to turn to the text itself.

Early in the book, Berger discusses the way in which learned assumptions people hold about art concerning concepts like beauty, truth, genius, civilization, form, status, taste, etc., mystify the art of the past for them. Thus he puts the constituent elements of bourgeois aesthetics into the wastepaper basket. They mystify, he says, because ‘a privileged minority is striving to invent a history which can retrospectively justify the role of the ruling classes and such a justification can no longer make sense in modern terms.’7 Thus bourgeois aesthetics are no longer of value because, the argument goes, the original authority of oil paintings (which had to do with their uniqueness and particular location) has been shattered by the development of a new technology: the various mechanical means of reproduction. (This is what I call elsewhere the 'mega-visual tradition’.8) But before he explores the effects of the rise of photography and mechanical reproduction on the way we see oil paintings, Berger gives a specific example of this process of anachronistic mystification.

He cites the way a typical academic art-historical scholar discusses Hals’ last two major paintings which portray the Governors and Governesses, respectively, of an alms house for old paupers. Berger reminds us that these were official portraits made when Hals, over 80 years old, was destitute. Those who sat for him were administrators of the public charity upon which he depended.

I want to scrutinise Berger’s discussion here. Although the academic art historian recorded the facts of Hals’ situation, he also insisted that it would be incorrect to read into the paintings any criticism of the sitters. There is no evidence, the academic says, that Hals painted them in a spirit of bitterness. He then goes on to say that they are remarkable works of art and explains why. Basically, for the academic, it is compositional elements that count. He stresses such things as the ‘firm rhythmical arrangement’ of the figures and ‘the subdued diagonal pattern formed by their heads and hands’. Berger complains that the art historian’s method transfers emotion provoked by the image from the plane of lived experience to that of disinterested ‘art appreciation’. Insofar as the art historian refers to the relationship between Hals’ painting and experience beyond the experience of art, it is in terms of Hals’ enrichment of ‘our consciousness of our fellow men’ and the close view which he gives of ‘life’s vital forces’. This says Berger is mystification: ‘One is left with the unchanging “human condition”, and the painting considered as a marvellously made object.’

Against such a reading, Berger poses what he describes in a revealing phrase as ‘the evidence of the paintings themselves’, which, he argues, renders unequivocally clear the painter’s relationship to his sitters. What is that evidence for Berger? Through reproductions he isolates the faces of three of the sitters: their expressions are allowed to speak for themselves. The academic, too, was aware of the power of these expressions, but he denied what they said. Thus he wrote about the way in which 'the penetrating characterisations’ almost ‘seduce’ us into believing that we know the personality and even the habits of the men and women portrayed. But, Berger retorts, what is this ‘seduction’ but the paintings working upon us?

How do the paintings work upon us? Berger explains:

They work upon us because we accept the way Hals saw his sitters. We do not accept this innocently. We accept it in so far as it corresponds to our own observation of people, gestures, faces institutions. This is possible because we still live in a society of comparable social relations and moral values.

Thus Berger says Hals examines the Regent and Regentesses ‘through the eyes of a pauper who must nevertheless try to be objective, i.e. must try to surmount the way he sees as a pauper’. This rather than the juxtaposition of white and flesh tones, he says, is the ‘unforgettable contrast’ which provides the drama of these paintings.9

Here we have two opposed ways of accounting for essentially the same judgement, i.e. that these are powerful paintings which have a profound effect upon us if we attend to them. The bourgeois academic stresses the importance of formal, aesthetic and compositional elements and also the relationship between the work and culturally constant elements of human experience - ‘life’s vital forces’. Berger stresses historically specific ‘meaning’ and the fact that the painting has been constituted through particular signifying practices - observations of gesture, faces, institutions, etc., meaningful to us only because we share comparable social relations.

Regentesses of the Old Men’s Alms House, Frans Hals — *Regentesses of the Old Men’s Alms House,* Frans Hals

One reason why I am no longer prepared to decide as unequivocally in favour of Berger as I once was is that in order to refute the ‘mystifications’ of the academic’s bourgeois aesthetics he appeals convincingly to the authority of the paintings themselves, which he reveals through reproduction of photographic details. Yet it is precisely this authority which, he maintains, modern mechanical means of reproduction - like photographs of details in art books - have shattered. Berger seems aware of this contradiction. He argues that the authority of the Hals paintings is not absolute or trans-historical. These pictures are accessible to us only because we still live in a society of comparable social relations and moral values. Hals was the first portraitist to paint the new characters and expressions created by capitalism. We, of course, still live in a capitalist society and so the meaning of these works is accessible to us.

But there is a serious contradiction here, too, because Berger goes on to argue that ‘today we see the art of the past as nobody saw it before. We actually perceive it in a different way.’ Ways of Seeing claims that later capitalism, monopoly capitalism, has so transformed perception that it is quite unlike that to which the old bourgeois aesthetic and art practice appealed. But if this is the case, then it is no use also saying that we can appreciate Hals’ paintings because our socially conditioned ‘ways of seeing’ are very much the same as those of the artist.

Clearly there is something missing from Berger’s account. Similarly, although it is of course pervaded by ideology, I do not think the academic’s account is reducible to ideology: by treating it as such, Berger comes close to throwing out the baby with the bath-water. One of the strengths of what the academic says is his attendance to the material facts of the way in which the picture has been painted. Indeed, through such attendance the academic was propelled towards conclusions at odds with the ideological preconceptions he brought to the work. That, surely, is why he reports a feeling of ‘seduction’, of the paintings working upon him, and why he feels the need to engage in all the special pleading to ‘prove’ that one of the good bourgeois governors was not drunk.

Peter Fuller

Berger says that the paintings work upon us directly through Hals’ way of seeing. There were probably many beggars in 17th century Haarlem who, if invited to paint portraits of these governors and governesses, would have seen them much as Hals did. But one is entitled to doubt whether many, if any, could have painted them anything like as well. A way of seeing is not, of itself, a way of painting. This is not a trivial or insubstantial quibble, nor just a matter of words. Berger really has nothing to say about Hals’ way of painting at all. But the bourgeois academic, albeit in a mystified fashion, recognises painting as a material process.

Of course, the academic’s ideology inhibited him from a full response to what he experienced as the paintings’ ‘seduction’. He falls back on the beauty of the paintings as objects in a way which elides that which they signify. But he does not talk about these works in complete isolation from experience beyond the experience of art. He speaks about their power in relation to what he assumes to be an ahistorical human condition. Berger dismisses this position, but perhaps there is more in it that he allows. As we saw, Berger suggested the ‘expressions’ in Hals were accessible to us because we, too, lived in a capitalist society. How then are we to explain, say, our powerful responses to the sculpture of the Laocoon, or Griinewald’s crucified Jesus? There are many works of art which come from societies where quite different ‘social relations and moral values’ prevail but which nonetheless move us powerfully and are expressive for us.

I do not think it is enough just to brush aside talk about ‘life’s vital forces’, or whatever. We have rather to stand such idealism on its head and reveal its material basis. And the kernel of truth embedded within it is that, despite historical transformations and mediations, there is a resilient, underlying ‘human condition’ which is determined by our biological rather than our socio-economic being, by our place in nature rather than our place in history. As the Italian Marxist Sebastiano Timpanaro, has said, ‘cultural continuity’ through which, as Marx observed, we feel so near to the poetry of Homer, has been rendered possible, among other reasons, by the fact that man as a biological being has remained essentially unchanged from the beginnings of civilization to the present and those sentiments and representations which are closest to the biological facts of human existence have changed little.11

A significant component in the capacity of the Hals’ paintings to move us derives from the way in which they are expressive of such ‘relative constants’ as old age (manifested through loosening of the flesh, thinning of the lips, hollowing of the eye-sockets, etc.) and the physical manifestations of power, drunkenness, arrogance and disdain. Such things are not peculiar to the emergent capitalism of the 17th century Holland, nor, I suggest, will they be unknown under socialism. This observation does not negate Berger’s reading that Hals shows us the new characters created by capitalism.

Elsewhere in Ways of Seeing Berger seems to recognize the significance of this relatively constant underlying human condition when he writes that in non-European traditions, for example in Indian, Persian and Pre-Columbian art, female nakedness is ‘never supine’ as he considers it to be in the Western fine art tradition. Berger says that if, in the non-European traditions, ‘the theme of a work is sexual attraction, it is likely to show active sexual love as between two people, the woman as active as the man, the actions of each absorbing the other’. Now Berger of course comes from a society in which ‘social relations and moral values’ are quite distinct from those prevailing in, say, ancient Persia. However he is able to make this judgement on the ‘evidence’ of the three works of art he illustrates because (whatever he says in the section on Hals) he in fact assumes an underlying human condition, embracing definite characteristics and potentialities, in this case the potentiality for reciprocal sexual love, which is not culture-specific; moreover he also appears to recognize that widely diverse sets of artistic conventions, e.g. those of Persian miniature painting and Pre-Columbian sculpture, can nonetheless be expressive of this, same area of experience in ways which are immediately accessible, indeed transparent, to those who live in a modern capitalist society.

Mithuna Couple, 1340 — *Mithuna Couple*, 1340

The problem with Berger’s account of the Hals paintings is that he lacks a fully materialist theory of expression. I see expression as involving the imaginative and physical activity of a human subject who carries out transforming work upon specific materials (in which I include both historically given pictorial conventions and, of course, such physical materials as paint, supporting surface, etc.). Expression through painting is thus in itself a specific material process: indeed, it is only through this process that the artist’s way of seeing, and beyond that of course his whole imaginative conception of his world, is made concretely visible to us. We know nothing of his way of seeing apart from that process. Max Raphael grasped this when he wrote:

Art is an ever-renewed creative art, the active dialogue between spirit and matter; the work of art holds man’s creative powers in crystalline suspension from which it can again be transformed into living energies.

This is a long way from the kind of ‘signifying practices’ approach which Berger deploys in relation to the Hals paintings; indeed, it has more in common with the bourgeois academic’s emphasis on composition and ‘life’s vital forces’. But I do not think that Raphael’s formulation betrays his position as either Marxist, materialist or empiricist.

Enough of Hals paintings. It could be said, however, that the remainder of Ways of Seeing is a sustained assault on the validity of the bourgeois academic art historian’s approach and on the bourgeois aesthetics he espouses. Berger’s argument is that aesthetics based on attendance to ‘beautifully made objects’ and the ‘unchanging human condition’ are of no value because ways of seeing have been utterly changed by the development of mechanical means of producing and reproducing images. Thus he contrasts the way in which perspective tended to make the world converge on a human subject with that process of decentering seemingly initiated by the camera, which demonstrated how ‘What you saw depended upon where you were and when. What you saw was relative to your position in time and space.’14

The invention of the camera, Berger claims, ‘also changed the way in which men saw paintings painted long before the camera was invented’. The camera destroyed the way a painting belonged to a particular place. ‘When the camera reproduces a painting’, he writes, ‘it destroys the uniqueness of its image. As a result its meaning changes. Or, more exactly, its meaning multiplies and fragments into many meanings.’15

The academic art historians mystify because they act as if that change had not come about - even when they themselves make use of the new means of production and reproduction, for example through popular art books or television. Thus Berger calls them, ‘the clerks of the nostalgia of a ruling class in decline’, not before the proletariat, but before the new power of the corporation and the state. Berger turns a blow torch upon that tenuous but central category of bourgeois aesthetics: authenticity. This, he argues, is an obsolete category in an era of mass reproduction. ‘The art of the past no longer exists as it once did. Its authority is lost. In its place is a language of images.’ This is because, ‘In the age of pictorial reproduction the meaning of paintings is no longer attached to them; their meaning becomes transmittable: that is to say it becomes information of a sort, and, like all information, it is either put to use or ignored.’16

In this situation, Berger argues, it is no longer what a painting’s image shows that strikes one as unique; its first meaning is no longer to be found in what it says, but in what it is. And what is it? Certainly not for the Berger of Ways of Seeing a crystalline suspension of creative powers. Berger insists, ‘before they are anything else, (paintings) are themselves objects which can be bought and owned. Unique objects.’ Objects whose value depends upon rarity and is ‘affirmed and gauged’ by market price.17

And so, Berger says, the attempt to erect spiritual values upon works of art is quite bogus. It is a by-product of the high market price of the painting as unique object - nothing more. Thus he reduces the notion of ‘authenticity’ to that authentication, or identification on behalf of the market - the sort of thing carried out by Sotheby’s assistants. ‘If the image is no longer unique and exclusive, the art object, the thing, must be made mysteriously so.’18

So, for Berger, the art of the past does not exist any more as it once did: instead, there is on the one hand, the world of bourgeois aesthetics which mystifies its concern with art-as- property into a wholly bogus religiosity; and, on the other, this ‘language of images’ created by the new means of reproduction. What matters now, Berger argues, is ‘who uses that language’ and ‘for what purpose’.19

Now I hope you will see why I placed so much emphasis on the lacunae in Berger’s account of the power of the Hals paintings. His lack of a materialist theory of expression leads him to talk about meaning slipping in and out of paintings in the way that an image slips on (or off) a light-sensitive film. Indeed, Berger uses the word ‘image’ to refer both to paintings and to photographs: but this disguises the fact that they are very different sorts of thing.

Photography is much closer to being a mechanical record of a way of seeing than painting. The photographer can freeze a moment of vision with the suddenness with which the window cut off the shadow of Peter Pan. Photography is merely process, a true medium. The image slides into the camera as the spirit is supposed to slip into a medium during a spiritualist seance. But painting is not like this at all. It requires a prior imaginative conception, which is not given, but made real, through the exercise of human activity, i.e. transforming work upon materials, conventional and physical. A painting is constituted, not processed. A painting is thus the material embodiment of an artist’s expressive activity in a way which a photograph is not. The Victorian view that photography, whatever it is, is not an art is by no means as silly as the photographic apologists like to make out.

And so when we make a photographic reproduction of a painting, the nature of the original is not wholly assimilated into the copy; nor can we regard the original, as Berger seems to do, as just a drained residue from which all that is of value, other than commercial value, has been detached. The reproduction refers back to an absent original. Aspects of the worked human object remain visible through the passivity of the photographic process. In New York recently I saw an exhibition of Rockefeller’s technically ‘perfect’ reproductions of his painting collection. You could buy, for example, Picasso’s Girl with Mandolin for $850, a reproduction, that is, in Cibachrome.20 But the contradiction between the flat, synthetic smoothness of the surfaces, and those of originals, reminded me that chemical and mechanical processes in and of themselves are neither imaginative nor expressive, however well (or badly) they may be able to reproduce products of the creative activity of human subjects.

Of course, we can look at reproductions assuming that they are the same sort of thing as originals. The mega-visual tradition of monopoly capitalism conditions us towards this way of seeing; one can even view originals made long before the advent of monopoly capitalism in this way. Many late modernist artists actually produce paintings or other ‘works of art’ which are in fact like reproductions.21 But I would argue that this occlusion of aesthetic sensitivity is itself ideologically determined; it involves capitulation to a reductionist way of seeing peculiar to the culture of the prevailing economic order.

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres: La Grande Odalisque

In certain respects Ways of Seeing may be infected by this way of seeing. Through the concept of a ‘language of images’ the book effectively equates photographs and paintings. This is underlined by poor reproductions - much poorer than the average popular art book - in which few of those aspects of originals I have described are even remotely discernible. For example, Berger juxtaposes the expression on the face of an Ingres nude with a detail from a modern pin-up, glamour photo.23 On the page, the equation looks just. Now I am no great admirer of Ingres. Nonetheless, Ways of Seeing leaves out of account, visually and verbally, the radical differences between the two images. I would not dispute that Ingres’ paintings often contain elements of sexism. But the painstaking, imaginative and constitutive activity involved in the production of his odalisques cannot be reduced to the cynical, commercial voyeurism of glamour photography. Ingres did not pose his models and click the shutter. Even when the images are roughly equivalent, a painting, or drawing, of a naked woman implies a greater respect towards her, as a person, than a photograph. If Berger had juxtaposed his pin-up with the original, or even beside a good reproduction of Ingres, this would have been evident. Whatever our judgement on Ingres, we travesty him if we suggest that he was simply producing aids to masturbation.

Berger is unwittingly guilty of a kind of left idealism, a dissolution of painting into a chimerical world where images have no existence apart from an ideological existence. This is reflected in his view of the nature of the original after its meaning has been, according to his argument, stripped from it through the new means of mechanical reproduction. Berger sees the original as being only a social relation, i.e. a piece of property: spiritual or aesthetic values are, in his view, just a sort of golden halo, or monetary after-glow, wholly determined by a work’s property status. Thus he attacks the oil-painting medium as such for its inherent materialism, which he equates with bourgeois proprietorial values. He says that in Western oil-painting, ‘when metaphysical symbols are introduced... their symbolism is usually made unconvincing or unnatural by the unequivocal, static materialism of the painting method.’24 This he says is what makes the ‘average religious painting of the tradition appear hypocritical’. The claim of the theme is made empty by the way the subject is painted.

As an example, he reproduces three paintings of Mary Magdalene. He says that the point of her story is that she repented on her past and came to accept the mortality of flesh and the immortality of soul. But, for Berger, oil paint ‘contradicts the essence of this story’. The method of painting is incapable of making the renunciation she is meant to have made. Berger says, ‘She is painted as being, before she is anything else, a takeable and desirable woman. She is still the compliant object of the painting-method’s seduction.’251 have no wish to exonerate that sickly, Christian voyeurism which often enters into paintings of the Magdalene. However, Berger gives no weight whatever to the way the painting method demystifies the Magdalene story, it reveals, if you like, that her repentance was not what she took it to be, because immortality of the soul is not possible for us fleshy mortals whose being is limited by natural conditions, including the absolute finality of an inevitable death without resurrection. There was, if you like, a truthfulness inherent within the painting method which ruptured the religious ideology of the theme. More generally it might be said that oil painting played a significant part in the extrication of man’s selfconception from mystifying religious ideologies.

The Bathers, Gustave Courbet — The Bathers, *Gustave Courbet*

Take the case of Courbet. Perhaps to a greater degree than any other painter, he manifests the materialism and concrete sensuality of this medium. But it is worth reminding ourselves how abrasive Courbet’s paintings were to prevailing bourgeois ‘visual ideologies’. Similarly, although the fat, naked woman in The Bathers is so corporeal that one can almost feel the smothering weight of her flesh, she is neither takeable, nor desirable - nor was she intended to be either. Writing about Courbet outside Ways of Seeing, Berger has convincingly related the intense physicality of his paintings to his peasant perceptions. There is no simple or necessary correlation between materialism, oil painting, and bourgeois attitudes towards property.

The realism of Western oil-painting was, however, certainly one of the ways in which men and women began to conceive of themselves in their own image, rather than God’s. Ways of Seeing castigates the materialism of this new world view: but I see it as having been historically progressive, and not only in the sense that it formed part of the ideology of what was then a historically progressive class.27 However, I am certainly not advocating a mechanical realism, or vulgar verism, as such. I would suggest that, in its very sensuality, oil painting helped to initiate an unprecedented form of imaginative, creative, yet thoroughly secular art which (though initiated by the bourgeoisie) represents a genuine advance in the cultural structuring of feeling and expressive potentiality.

Ways of Seeing makes no mention of the great romantic painters, nor yet of post-impressionism, nor of any abstract painting. But now can Delacroix, oauguin, or Rothko be accommodated within its theses? It is not just that paintings like these are so manifestly not reducible to their reproductions: their spiritual and aesthetic values too are clearly not just penumbra of their value in exchange. Man had mingled his emotional and affective life in his religious projections: oil painting was part of the process of his return to himself, or his first finding of himself. With that first finding came the emergence of a secular spirituality, based on growing awareness of the nature of the human subject and imaginative experience. The identification of the category of the aesthetic as such in the 18th century was not an ideological lie, or a fraud: it was part of this process. In his essay on Surrealism, Walter Benjamin once remarked, ‘the true, creative overcoming of religious illumination certainly does not lie in narcotics. It resides in profane illumination, a materialistic, anthropological inspiration ,..28 Profane illumination! A materialistic, anthropological inspiration! These are resonant phrases. They accurately describe what I value in Gauguin, Bonnard, or Natkin. I would suggest that any adequate ‘demystification’ of bourgeois aesthetics, having completed its discussion in terms of ideology, property values, sexism, etc. must retain an emphasis upon this vital, positive residue of sensuous mystery. This remains accessible to us as viewers through that mingling of imaginative and physical expressive work upon the surface, that material transformation by a specific human subject, which decisively and concretely differentiates the work of art from mechanically produced images. To hark back to Max Raphael, you just cannot say that the photograph, as photograph, holds man’s creative powers in crystalline suspension.

It is perhaps predictable that Ways of Seeing has nothing to say about sculpture. But if we think about sculpture for a moment the point I am making becomes clearer. Sculpture just will not disappear without residue into that ‘language of images’; a photograph of a sculpture unequivocally refers back to an original other than itself. Nor can anyone pretend that an eight inch soap-stone maquette of a great Greek marble provides anything even approximating the experience to be derived from the work itself. Marble, clay, steel and bronze are even more inherently materialist than oil paint. Yet who would contend that sculpture is a peculiarly bourgeois practice? The value of sculpture derives from elements of human being and experience which are, as it were, below ideology. Sculpture relates to our existence in a physical world of concrete, three dimensional objects in space; and to the fact that we live within the natural constraints of that relative constant of human being - the body with its not unlimited potentialities. Although painting involves a greater ideological component than sculpture, the condition of painting is more like that of sculpture than, say, photography.

Henry Moore: Two Piece Reclining Figure No. 2.

I do not want to travesty Berger’s argument: there are moments in Ways of Seeing when he recognizes the disjunc- ture between oil painting and photography. For example, in the first chapter, he writes: ‘Original paintings are silent and still in a sense that information never is.’ He points out that, ‘the silence and stillness permeate the actual material, the paint, in which one follows the traces of the painter’s immediate gestures’, and then suggests that this ‘has the effect of closing the distance in time between the painting of the picture and one’s own act of looking at it.’ I agree. And yet, in Ways of Seeing, this critical observation is no more than an aside, which seems not to fit in with the main argument.

The question of the exceptions, or masterpieces, further illuminates the weakness of that argument. Berger’s central thesis is that: ‘A way of seeing the world, which was ultimately determined by new attitudes to property and exchange, found its visual expression in the oil painting, and could not have found it in any other visual form.’ The oil painting, for Berger, is ‘not so much a framed window open to the world as a safe let into the wall, a safe in which the visible has been deposited’. And yet, having said this, Berger argues that certain exceptional artists in exceptional circumstances broke free of the norms of the tradition and produced work that was diametrically opposed to its values: thus he does not - and this is important - reduce the best of Vermeer, Turner, Rubens, or Goya to ideology.

But what is the relationship of these ‘transcendent’ masterpieces to the tradition within which they arise? How do they make the decisive and transforming if oil painting is, as Berger claims, a by-product of the bourgeois way of seeing the world? It is no use looking to Ways of Seeing for an answer to these questions. In a 1978 article, Berger wrote that the ‘immense theoretical weakness’ of Ways of Seeing was that he had failed to make clear ‘what relation exists between what I call “the exception” (the genius) and the normative tradition’. He added, ‘It is at this point that work needs to be done.’

Two years later, this problem is still clearly haunting Berger. In a review he wrote in 1980 of a book about paintings of the rural poor, Berger asks ‘Poussin relayed an aristocratic arcadianism, yes, but why was he a greater painter than any considered here?’ I think that if we re-insert materialism in the sense that I have tried to understand it in this paper, we can at least begin to talk in terms of where to look for an answer. Acknowledgement of the ‘relative constancy’ of the bodily being and potentialities of human subjects and of the fact that painting and sculpture are specific material processes (including biological processes) involving imaginative and physical work on both conventional and substantial materials allows us to establish a more secure basis for a genuinely materialist theory of artistic expression.

But, in the light of such a theory, I am sure that the over-sharp distinction between transcendent masterpieces which leap beyond ideology, and examples of the normative tradition which remain blinkered by it will be seen to be much too dualistic. Again, Berger himself seems recently to have recognised this. In the 1978 article from which I have already quoted, Berger writes, ‘The refusal of comparative judgements about art ultimately derives from a lack of belief in the purpose of art.’32 He goes on to acknowledge that there are values in art which stand apart from ideology, and furthermore that these can be weighed by a process of preferential judgement, of qualifying ‘X as better than Y’. But once you admit this, of course, you are sneaking aesthetics in by the back-door, even if you first booted them noisily out of the front door. This process of judging X better than Y just cannot be confined to labelling which are the masterpieces, and which examples of the normative tradition. The everyday tasks of criticism involve discrimination between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ elements in ‘average’ works, and between often unexceptional paintings relatively evenly matched in terms of quality. There is an infinite gradation between inept hack work, say by a Stockwell sculptor like Peter Hide, and the masterpiece, by, say, Michelangelo. Comparative judgements, aesthetic judgements, can be made all the way along this incline. In effect, the making of such judgements is the continuing search for authenticity of expression: although it has often been corrupted by base commercial motives, and distorted by overt and covert commitments to specific visual ideologies, I nonetheless refuse to allow that this way of looking is - to use Berger’s phrase - ‘ultimately determined by new attitudes to property’. Indeed, its material basis seems to me to be of a kind which will, one hopes, endure beyond the abolition of property. The making of such judgements is integral to the nature of the experience which painting and sculpture have to offer in a secular society. It is precisely this experience which I am seeking to defend. I can see no reason why, as a socialist, I should prefer the mechanical visual media, with their very different potentialities and limitations.

But here we must pause. I am saying that painting and sculpture are expressive of areas of experience and potentiality which are long-lasting in human history. Nonetheless, there is no doubt that painting and sculpture are threatened today. In recent monopoly capitalism, the mega-visual tradition (of advertising, cinema, mass-reproduction, colour printing, etc.) proliferates: its media, processes and spectacles have tended to displace or to subsume the very different kinds of practice possible through painting and sculpture.331 do not think this is merely a technical question. The occlusion of painting and sculpture involves the eclipse of significant values. I am interested in conserving these traditional media and those values.

However, there are many commentators on the left who go to Ways of Seeing and condemn it for what they perceive as its residues of bourgeois aesthetics. That is why Art- Language derided Berger for his residual ‘sensitivity’. Other ‘left’ critics have criticised Ways of Seeing for refusing to carry through the logic of the ‘language of images’ approach to the point where the distinction between the photograph and the painting disappeared entirely into discussion of technique; and for retaining the residue of a qualitative distinction between the masterpiece and the rest, and so forth. In these sorts of reading, Berger is characterized as a sort of simple-minded, proto-structuralist, with unfortunate ‘unscientific’, anachronistic elements which have now been dispensed with in the streamlined, fully ‘scientific’ systems of Victor Burgin and Nicos Hadjinicolau.

And indeed there is a sense in which Hadjinicolau’s book, Art History and Class Struggle, can be read as a more rigorous (or perhaps ‘insensitive’) Ways of Seeing. Hadjinicolau claims to have dispensed with aesthetics and value judgements altogether and to have cast them into ‘oblivion’. He explains away aesthetic effect as being merely the mirroring between an artist’s visual ideology and the ideology of a viewer. He even goes so far as to argue that there is no such thing as an artist’s ‘style’ because pictures produced by one person are not centred upon him; at least, not in any sense which is significant for art history. For Hadjinicolau, ‘the essence of every picture lies in its visual ideology’. He sees his task as that of relating visual ideologies to the particular class sectors from which they sprang - no more and no less.34

I have commented on Hadjinicolau’s position elsewhere.35 Here it is only necessary to repeat that he, and those like him, think that they are radicals, hard-headed socialists producing a devastating critique of bourgeois art. In fact, however, they are merely theorising with a left gloss that way of seeing which is so characteristic of late monopoly capitalism. I have demonstrated that Hadjinicolau looks at paintings as if they were advertisements. In the advertisement, the artist’s style has indeed been eliminated since the image is corporately conceived and mechanically executed. It lacks any stamp of individuality. In advertisements, the imaginative faculty is prostituted and aesthetic effect reduced to a redundant contingency. The advertisement is constituted wholly within ideology; moreover, advertising is the form of static visual imagery, par excellence, of contemporary monopoly capitalism.

Understandably, when he saw Hadjinicolau’s book, Berger was troubled. In his review of it, he mentions that it took him more than six months to come to terms with his reactions to it.36 It was in this review that Berger found it necessary to point to the ‘immense theoretical weakness’ of Ways of Seeing, to reaffirm the value of making comparative judgements about paintings, and to quote Max Raphael’s empiricist theory of art. In Hadjinicolau’s theory, Berger wrote, ‘the real experience of looking at painting has been eliminated’:

When Hadjinicolau ... equates the visual ideology of Madame Recamier with that of a portrait by Girodet, one realises that the visual content to which he is referring goes on deeper than the mise-en-scene. The correspondence is at the level of clothes, furniture, hair-style, gesture, pose: at the level, if you wish, of manners and appearances!

... But no painting of value is about appearance: it is about a totality of which the visible is no more than a code. And in the face of such paintings the theory of visual ideology is helpless

It is true that, six years before, Berger argued that the power of those Hals paintings derived from the fact that Hals enabled us to know his subjects; nonetheless, Berger explained this by something very similar to Hadjinicolau’s reduction of aesthetic effect into ideological mirroring. He claimed that we were able to appreciate these paintings only because we lived in a society of 'comparable social relations and moral values’.

Berger now warns that the path pursued by Hadjinicolau and his colleagues appears ‘self-defeating and retrograde’, leading back to a reductionism not dissimilar in degree to Zhdanov’s and Stalin’s. He points out that Hadjinicolau’s theory has elements in common with advertising in that both ‘eliminate art as a potential model of freedom’. But did not Ways of Seeing itself greatly over-stress the continuity between the Western oil painting tradition and modern advertising? After all, advertising produces no exceptions, no Rembrandts, no masterpieces, no works of genius: no advertisement ever exulted anyone, or made them aware of any but their most trivial of potentialities. Advertising, and not original painting, is always inauthentic.

In the course of this review, Berger asks what it is about certain works of art which allows them to transcend the moment in which they were made, ‘to “receive” different interpretations and continue to offer a mystery’. He adds that Hadjinicolau would consider the last word - ‘mystery’ - unscientific, but says that he does not. The problem with Ways of Seeing, however, was that it dismissed bourgeois aesthetics as ‘mystification’ and expelled its concerns - i.e. the material process of painting and composition and the relationship of art to ‘life’s vital forces’ - from the terrain of permissible left discourse about art. But, when Berger gazed into the grey reductionism of Hadjinicolau, it was precisely these ‘mystifications’ which he sought to re-introduce. Thus, in this review, he approvingly cites Max Raphael’s view that the power of historically transcendent paintings should be sought in the process of production itself: the power of such paintings, as he put it, ‘lay in their painting’. Similarly, Berger writes of the ‘incomparable energy’ which comes from this process of working the materials. Works of art, he goes on to say, ‘exist in the same sense that a current exists: it cannot exist without substances and yet it is not itself a simple substance.’38 Clearly, that bourgeois academic was not so foolish in his concerns.

The point I have been stressing throughout is that it is not enough to refuse to engage with bourgeois aesthetics, to dismiss them as if they were ideological figments and nothing else. One has rather to do to them what Feuerbach did to Christianity: reveal their material basis in the imaginative activity of an embodied human subject who realizes his expression through transforming work which he exercises to greater or lesser effect upon definite conventional and physical materials; that is, through a so-called ‘medium’ which possesses an identifiable history and tradition. In this way, I think we can begin at least to talk coherently about what Berger refers to as the scientific ‘mystery’ of a great painting, or what Benjamin might have called its ‘profane illumination’, or ‘materialistic anthropological inspiration’. Such things, I would suggest, may be reproduced through, but cannot be reduced into, the proliferating means of mechanical reproduction.

Why did Berger not see this when he worked on Ways of Seeing? He was after all a painter himself. This makes it even harder to understand the reductionism of this text. In part, I think this derives from the symbiotic relationship between Ways of Seeing and Clark’s Civilization-, the whole Ways of Seeing project insists (and rightly so) on what Clark ignored. But it fails to take on board in a materialist fashion the positive theses of Civilization. One small example: Ways of Seeing makes no mention of the fact that, in Christopher Caudwell’s phrase, ‘great art ... has something universal, something timeless and enduring from age to age’.22 Yet, of course, this is something which Civilization stuffs down our throats on page after page. But there was a much more significant influence on Ways of Seeing than the negative effects of ‘the clerks of the nostalgia of a ruling class in decline’. I am referring, oT course, to Walter Benjamin whose picture is reproduced at the end of the first chapter of Ways of Seeing, and particularly to his well-known essay, ‘The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction’.

Benjamin was a fine critic and a great writer, but he was also a man of contradictions. His thought manifested what has been called a ‘two-track’ cast.39 Susan Sontag has pointed out how, in Benjamin’s work, ‘mystical and materialist motifs were distilled into separate writings, whose precise inter-relationship remained enigmatic, often exasperatingly so, to his secular and religious admirers alike’. Today, Benjamin is acclaimed as an ancestor by both talmudic mysticists and structuralists. As Sontag points out, it is not that there are two distinct phases in Benjamin’s work; when he became a Marxist and a historical materialist, there was no inward rupture with his earlier mysticism.

Similarly, in Benjamin’s attitudes to art there was a peculiar schizophrenia. In his ‘materialist’ writings, he welcomes the destruction of the aura of the work of art by modern technology. Yet, in fact, he was an aesthete, and a compulsive collector who frequented the great auction houses.

When we are considering any part of Benjamin’s work, I think we have to relate it to this uneven and eccentric whole. One way of talking about him is to say that his materialism was not sufficiently deep. Precisely because he knew that aesthetic (and religious) phenomena could not be explained in terms of economics and ideology alone, his writing tends to be pocketed with fascinating mystical enclaves, where that which is not explicable through historical materialism (as he understood it) continues to reside in its raw, numinous, mystical or aestheticist form. To adapt his own phrase, Benjamin developed his ‘profanity’ (through his Marxism); retained his religious ‘illumination’ but failed to progress to ‘profane illumination’. It is only if one’s materialism extends down to the biological level (and not just to the socioeconomic) that one can hope to approach an adequate account of the relatively ‘ahistorical’ aspects of the spiritual (i.e. aesthetic, religious, musical, and imaginative) life of man. Benjamin, however, over-relativized the somatic, for example when he exaggerates the effects of short-term ‘historical circumstances’ on ‘human sense perception’ and effectively ignores the relative constancy of the human perceptual apparatus. Because his materialism lacks a ‘ground floor’ in physical and biological reality, Benjamin (being ‘sensitive’ rather than ‘insensitive’) retains the old idealist categories of spirit in, as it were, sealed-off compartments.

The problem is that his followers in left aesthetics tend either to internalize this contradiction (as Berger does, for example, through the contrast between Ways of Seeing and the review of Art History and Class Struggle) or they go for the ‘profanity’ alone - that is for the ‘materialism’ which does not go deeper than the socio-economic level, and reject the rest altogether. Thus commentators like Victor Burgin copy (although they do not always acknowledge) Benjamin’s castigation of those who insist on the distinction between painting and photography as holding a ‘fetishistic and fundamentally anti-technical concept of art’. But really one can only understand the status of such comments in Benjamin if one realizes that, having written them, Benjamin turned once more to those first editions, baroque emblem books, and original antiques, which he acquired in great quantities, and which preoccupied him almost to the point of distraction. There was, of course, absolutely no question of Benjamin himself making do with photographic reproductions.

Benjamin began as an aesthetic philosopher who mourned the ‘passing of old traditions’, as they were displaced by modern technology and mass society. But later Benjamin came simply to identify aura, or the ‘aesthetic nimbus’ surrounding a work of art, with property. Mechanical reproduction, however, came to stand for him unequivocally on the side of proletarianisation. But clearly, Benjamin was also aware that something was lacking in these new media. He would suddenly revert to an old ‘aesthetist’ position, as if acknowledging that he had never been able to produce a true synthesis of the two.

Stanley Mitchell has pointed out how Benjamin’s attitude to the newspaper exemplifies this contradiction.44 In his well- known essay, ‘The Storyteller’, about the Russian writer, Leskov, Benjamin contrasts the self-containing powers of the story, that most ancient bearer of wisdom, with the mere giving-out of information that is par excellence the role of the newspaper. But, in his major article, ‘The Author as Producer’ - probably written before ‘The Storyteller’ - Benjamin describes the contemporary Soviet newspaper as ‘a vast melting-down process’ which ‘not only destroys the conventional separation between genres, between writer and poet, scholar and popularizer’ but ‘questions even the separation between author and reader’. The place ‘where the word is most debased’ - that is to say, the newspaper - becomes the very place where a ‘rescue operation can be mounted’ , Thus Benjamin saw ‘technical progress’ as the basis of the author’s ‘political progress’.46 He also liked to use the image of an ‘incandescent liquid mass’ into which the old bourgeois literary, musical and artistic forms were streaming, and out of which the new forms would be cast.

Well, the new forms which Benjamin anticipated have, of course, emerged. On the one hand, we have seen since the last war a profusion of mixed media objects and activities in such things as conceptualism, performance, environmental art, etc. All this has failed to produce a single work of stature, let alone a masterpiece. It can now be said with confidence that the claims made for such innovations were, at best, vastly exaggerated. More significantly, we have also seen the development of spectacular new devices for image-making in the mega-visual tradition. Think, say, of the hologram which allows for the creation of something quite unprecedented: a fully three-dimensional image in space.46 But the development of such techniques has not fulfilled Benjamin’s prophecy. It is not just that they have proved entirely consonant with, and readily exploitable by, a monopoly capitalist culture which seeks to distort and extinguish free imaginative and creative activity on the part of those who live within it. (Guinness, for example, was deeply involved in the funding of the development of holograms: no doubt one of the first commercial uses we will see of this technique will be 40 foot high, three-dimensional Guinness bottles suspended above the Thames.) Beyond that, the very process of making a hologram does not allow for the admission of a human imaginative or physically expressive element at any point. The representation is not worked; it is posed and processed. Hence the hologram remains a peculiarly dead phenomenon when compared with the painting. I am suggesting that if Benjamin had had a more thoroughly materialist theory of expression he would have foreseen this too. The ‘incomparable energy’ of the painting is bound up with the way it is I believe that, in this situation, it is the Benjamin who defended the storyteller, Leskov, who has most to teach us. Perhaps Berger now realizes this too. Ways of Seeing, you will recall, begins with a statement which says, ‘The form of the book is as much to do with our purpose as the arguments contained within it.’ That form used such techniques as al lvisual essays, unjustified type, ‘out-of-copyright’ text, arguments in images as well as words, etc. It was close to the form of certain books - The Medium is the Message, and War and Peace in the Global Village - which Marshall McLuhan published about the same time.48 Berger’s most recent book, however, is Pig Earth49 which consists of some faultlessly told stories about the life and experiences of peasants in France. Formally, these stories are not innovative: they draw upon the traditional skills of the ‘self-preserving, self-containing powers of the story’. But there are several stories in the book which I would describe as masterpieces. I do not think the aesthetic value or political significance (for reasons which are made clear in the ‘Historical Afterword’) of the collection is in doubt. Indeed, I think they confirm my conviction that there is no more significant writer working in English today than John Berger. And personally I do not look forward to the day in which the distinction between such greater writers and their public has been thoroughly dissolved into a press which is no more than an extended reader’s page (as Benjamin envisaged it). Nor do I look forward to the day when the museums which house the finest examples of the traditions of painting and sculpture have been replaced by pinboards of reproductions - which is what Ways of Seeing suggests should ‘logically’ happen.

Notes

1. Art-Language, Vol. 4 No. 3, October 1978.

2. This is something often commented upon by my polemical opponents: for example, Janet Daley has written of my alleged ‘unlimited adulation for John Berger’, ‘Letters’ Art Monthly, No. 12, November 1977 and Suzi Gablik has described me as ‘a disciple of John Berger’s’, ‘Art on the Capitalist Faultline’, Art in America, March 1980.

3. Selected Essays and Articles: the Look of Things, Harmond- sworth: Penguin Books, 1971, p.64. And see also, ‘In defence of art’, New Society, 28 September 1978, p.702.

4. For further discussion of the reception of A Painter see my article, ‘Berger’s Painter of Our Time', in Art Monthly, No. 4, February 1977, pp. 13-16. Here, I discuss the withdrawal of this book by its publishers, Seeker & Warburg, who were also publishers of the CIA backed magazine, Encounter, which ran a hostile attack upon A Painter. Berger often failed to get the support he deserved from those who published him: in the introduction to a new edition of Permanent Red - which consists largely of his New Statesman articles from the 1950’s - Berger writes of fighting for each article, ‘line by line, adjective by adjective, against constant editorial cavilling’, London: Writers & Readers, 1979, pp.8-9.

5. Permanent Red, p. 16.

6. Ways of Seeing, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1972. p. 109.

7. Ibid, p. 11.

8. ‘Fine Art after Modernism’, New Left Review, No. 119, January- February, 1980, pp.42-59.

9. Ways of Seeing, pp. 11-16.

10. ‘Timpanaro’s Materialist Challenge’, New Left Review, No. 109, May-June, 1978, pp.3-17.

Seeing Through Berger

11. On Materialism, London: New Left Books, 1975, p.52.

12. Ways of Seeing, p.53.

13. The Demands of Art, Princeton, 1968, p. 187.

14. Ways of Seeing, p. 18.

15. Ibid. p. 19.

16. Ibid. p.24.

17. Ibid. p.21.

18. Ibid. p.23.

19. Ibid. p.33.

20. The Nelson Rockefeller Collection, New York, 1978, Cat. No. 57.

21.1 have discussed this in my ‘Where was the art of the 1970’s?’ in Beyond the Crisis in Art, London: Writers & Readers, 1980.

22. This is not, of course, to posit aesthetics, as such, as a transhis- torical category, but rather to suggest that the aesthetic constitutes a historically specific structuring of relatively constant, of long- lasting, elements of affective experience. For example, it seems to me that prior to the 18th century, much of that which we designate as aesthetic experience was conflated with the numinous in religious experience. But this is not, of course, to say that the affective potentialities which inform the aesthetic are reducible to the ideology of religion, nor that they can be, or ought to be, swept away with secularization. Thus I disagree with Berger when he writes, ‘The spiritual value of an object, as distinct from a message or an example, can only be explained in terms of magic or religion. And since in modern society neither of these is a living force, the art object, the “work of art”, is enveloped in an atmosphere of entirely bogus religiosity.’ The material basis of the ‘spirituality’ of works of art is not so easily dissolved. I think that it may lie in their capacity to be expressive of ‘relative constants’ of psycho-biological experience, which, however they may be structured culturally, have roots below the ideological level.

23. Ways of Seeing, p.55.

24. Ibid. p.91.

25. Ibid. p.92.

26. In my article, ‘The Arnolfini Image’, New Society, 3, November 1977, p.249,1 examine one of the earliest of all oil-paintings in this light. It is perhaps worth stressing here that most culturally signifi

Seeing Through Berger 51

cant, post Second World War, late modernist paintings have not been painted in oils, but in fast-drying, more transparent, acrylic paints which allow for instantaneous, insubstantial, transparent and accidental effects - as in the painting of Morris Louis - which oils do not. Such works, however, (even though they may well reflect the prevailing idealism of monopoly capitalist ideology and epistemology) have proved, if anything, more, rather than less reducible to values which are merely reflections of market value. (Acrylic lays itself open to being used as a process - i.e. in pouring and staining techniques - rather than as a genuine aesthetic- expressive medium.) This is another reason why we should suspect Berger’s hostility to the materialism of oil paint, as such.

For example, Berger cites what he calls ‘the exceptional case’ of William Blake, who, according to Berger, ‘... when he came to make paintings .... very seldom used oil paint and, although he still relied upon the traditional conventions of drawing, he did everything he could to make his figures lose substance, to become transparent and indeterminate one from the other, to defy gravity, to be present but intangible, to glow without a definable surface, not to be reducible to objects.’ Berger claims that Blake’s wish ‘to transcend the “substantiality” of oil paint derived from a deep insight into the meaning and limitations of the tradition’: Ways of Seeing, p.93. Now as it happens I too enjoy the imaginative vision of Blake - although I perhaps do not think he was such a great painter as Berger suggests. Nonetheless, the way Blake painted, and the techniques he used, had much to do with that particular area of experience with which he was concerned. I think that essentially he was exploring inner or psychological space through religious imagery, much as a good abstract painter now explores it through the conventions of abstraction. (Cf. my comments on Robert Natkin’s painting in Art and Psychoanalysis, London: Writers and Readers, 1980.) Such explorations have, of course, no more resistance of being treated as pieces of property than have ‘materialist’ oil paintings. But if we set up Blake’s achievement as an epitome, or exemplar, we will certainly miss the progressive character of that escape from religious ideology, cosmology and iconography to which the main tradition of oil painting bore effective witness, at least in part because, as Berger points out, of its

Seeing Through Berger

‘materialism’.

27. Cf. Sebastiano Timpanaro: ‘The great realist art of the (19th) century (with its “verist” developments, which were not altogether a step backward) and the great science contemporary to it, with its Englightenment and humanitarian impetus, were not a mere “fraud”. Rather they possessed a positive force precisely because of the continued existence within the 19th century bourgeoisie of motifs related to the struggle against the right, and, at the same time, because of the continued existence of a measure of autonomy among progressive intellectuals in relation to the immediate class interests of the bourgeoisie.’ On Materialism, London: New Left Books, p. 125.

28. One Way Street, London: New Left Books, p.227.

29. Berger in fact introduces two photographs of sculpture - one Pre-Columbian, the other Indian - on p.53. It is noticeable that he compares these with Western oil paintings without commenting on the radical disjuncture between the two media. This is but another example of Ways of Seeing's disregard for the material process of making art.

30. Ways of Seeing, p. 109. My arguments at this point are informed by the perceptive and penetrating criticisms of Ways of Seeing made by Anthony Barnett as long ago as 1972. (See, ‘Oil Painting and its Class’, New Left Review, No. 80, July-August 1.973, pp.109- 11) This review is reproduced as an appendix to this pamphlet. It must, however, be pointed out that in a text of this brevity, Barnett had no space to elaborate a materialist theory of expression.

31. ‘In defence of art’, New Society, 28 September 1978, p.702.

32. Ibid. p.703.

33. For further discussion of these points see my article, ‘Fine Art after Modernism’, New Left Review, No. 119, January-February, 1980, pp.42-59.

34. Art History and Class Struggle, London: Pluto Press, 1978.

35. See note 21.

36. ‘In defence of art’, p.703.

37. Ibid. p.704.

38. Ibid. p.704.

39. One-Way Street, p.31.

40. Illuminations, London: Collins Fontana Books, 1973, p.224.

Seeing Through Berger

As Timpanaro comments, ‘I think that one can see how every failure to give proper recognition to man’s biological nature leads to a spiritualist resurgence, since one necessarily ends by ascribing to the “spirit” everything that one cannot explain in socioeconomic terms.’ On Materialism, p.65.

41. One-Way Street, p.241 Cf. Victor Burgin’s view, ‘Conceptualism ... disregarded the arbitrary and fetishistic restrictions which ‘Art’ placed on technology - the anachronistic daubing of woven fabrics with coloured mud, the chipping apart of rocks and the sticking together of pipes - all in the name of timeless aesthetic values.’ In ‘Socialist Formalism’, Two Essays on Art, Photography and Semiotics, London: Robert Self, 1976.

42. Any one who doubts this should read the ending to ‘Unpacking My Library’, in Illuminations, and also Hannah Arendt’s introduction to this volume.

43. See ‘Introduction’ by Stanley Mitchell to Understanding Brecht, London: New Left Review Editions, 1977, p.xvii.

44. Ibid. pp.xvi-xvii.

45. Understanding Brecht, p.90.

46. See my article, ‘The light fantastic’, New Society, 26 January 1978, p.200.

47. Interestingly, Dennis Gabor, the inventor of the hologram, did not believe that his invention had rendered art obsolete. On the contrary, in his essay, ‘Art and leisure in the age of technology’, he writes, ‘Modern technology has taken away from the common man the joy in the work of his skilful hands; we must give it back to him. ’ He argued that although machines should be used to ‘make the articles of primary necessity’, the rest should be made by hand. ‘We must revive the artistic crafts, to produce things such as hand-cut glass, hand-painted china, Brussels lace, inlaid furniture, individual bookbinding,’ etc. In Jean Creedy, ed., The Social Context of Art, London: Tavistock, 1970, pp.45-55.

48. Of course, I do not intend to suggest that the ideas and arguments of Berger are as ephemeral as those of these books, nor yet that new forms in book-making can never be effective, or convincing. Berger’s study, made with photographer, Jean Mohr, of European immigrant workers, A Seventh Man„Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1975, remains an exemplary achievement. The danger

Seeing Through Berger

arises when technical innovativeness is put forward as the only model of ‘political progress’ in literature or the arts.

49. London: Writers and Readers, 1979.

50. Ways of Seeing, p. 30.

MODERN ART wins at HRIFF2020 / February 19, 2020 by Laurence Fuller

“Great art makes great demands upon us”

MODERN ART: Salvador Dali & Psychoanalysis / February 19, 2020 by Laurence Fuller

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.

SALVADOR DALI & PSYCHOANALYSIS

by Peter Fuller, 1980

First, I suppose, credit where credit is due: Salvador Dali was among those who opened up a new area of experience to painting—that of the ‘internal world’, inner space and dreams. Despite the reservations I have about the way in which he did this it must be admitted that there are aspects of his project as a painter which are convincing for many of his viewers. We still hear a lot from those who think that the diminution of the audience for modern art can be correlated with its lack of social content. How, I wonder, do they explain the fact that, apart from Picasso, Dali, egotist and dreamer, is the only modern artist who has succeeded in exciting the popular imagination?

Moreover, Dali is a painter of considerable fanciful inventiveness and technical virtuosity. At a time when much that passes for painting is merely bland and slovenly abstraction, such qualities are too easily sniffed at. Dali himself once wrote, ‘To understand an aesthetic picture, training in appreciation is necessary, cultural and intellectual preparation. For Surrealism, the only requisite is a receptive and intuitive human being. Nonetheless, several of his paintings do show concern for compositional effectivity (though others admittedly do not). The Persistence of Memory and the Tate’s Metamorphosis of Narcissus are not bad pictures. For once, the Tate deserves praise for having acquired a work which, on the evidence of this exhibition at least, is among this artist’s best. These two paintings manifest an exemplary economy of scale and a capacity to weld heterogeneous imagery into a convincing unity.

The Persistence of Memory, Salvador Dali — *The Persistence of Memory,* Salvador Dali

But that is about the extent of the commendable residue I could salvage from my experience of the Tate’s Dali exhibition in 1980. The overwhelming impression which Dali’s work, as a whole, made upon me was of emotional shallowness and, above all, of inauthenticity. There are many advertisements which touch upon significant fears and wishes—concerning sexual enjoyment, good health, child-care, longevity, happiness, peace, etc., etc.—and which yet banalize them by associating them with the most petty decisions we make in our lives, such as whether to buy Omo rather than Daz, to drink Pepsi instead of Coke, or to commit attenuated suicide with or without a menthol taste in our mouths. These advertisements insult because of the enormity of the gap between the experiences and sentiments they allude to and that which they are in fact selling to us. Similarly, Dali evokes such things as our fears about bodily aging, fantasies infantile and adult about ourown bodies and those of others, and our capacities for imaginative and iconic symbolization in dreams: but he, too, insults because all these intimate impingements are deployed for but one purpose, that of impressing upon us what a smart-ass painter he is. A typical quotation from Dali: ‘In the city of Figueras, at 8.45 am, the eleventh of the month of May, in the year 1904, Salvador Dali, Domenech, Felipe, Jacinto, was born. Let all the church bells ring! Let the stooped peasant in his field straighten up his arched back . . .’, etc., and so forth, until, ‘Look, Salvador Dali is born!’ The trouble is, he means every word of it. Indeed, that is the repeated message of his paintings, ‘Look, Salvador Dali is born!’

To put the same criticism another way: the experiences and emotions which Dali alludes to are vicariously evoked; they are not earned through authentic expressive work upon materials and conventions. This can be demonstrated by considering two aspects of his work: his drawing and his touch.

Dali’s drawing is full of the stereo-typed spiralling of dead lines which describe conventionally elongated figures: these are executed with the numbing cleverness of the artiste, acrobat or clown, someone who has learned how to run through a set repertoire. In a painter, that leads to a jaded, prostituted look: Dali’s pencil exudes feigned sentiment. As for his touch, he often goes for a finished meticulousness which occludes all those nuances of gesture through which the affective value of a painting is realized. Although he blathers about his debt to Vermeer, you only have to compare the way in which the latter modulates light across the back wall of an interior with Dali’s ‘picturesque’ skies in his dreamscapes, to realize why the master of Delft still looks fresh after three centuries, whereas even Dali’s best work has a decidedly stuffy feel after less than twice as many decades. But you really get to see the extent to which Dali is faking it when he presents himself without make up on: i.e. in those paintings where he roughs up the surface a bit, for example, Palladian corridor with dramatic surprise, or The tunny fisher—a perfectly hideous 1966/7 work. Here, you can follow the stiff, insensitive, and repetitive movements of the artist’s hand which demonstrate that, far from being ‘the greatest living artist’ as advertisers of his wares claim, he is often as banal as a Bayswater Road sunset painter.

Metamorphosis of Narcissus, Salvador Dali — *Metamorphosis of Narcissus,* Salvador Dali

Julian Green, one of Dali’s earliest collectors, once said that Dali spoke of Freud as a Christian would speak of the apostles. Indeed, Dali’s reputation as a painter is rooted not so much in his material abilities—which are slight—as in his parasitic relationship to Freudian psychoanalysis. That relationship has queered the pitch f°r the potential contribution psychoanalysis has to make to the aesthetics of painting: here, I wish to raise certain questions about it.

How accurately did Dali depict or reflect Freud’s insights in his paintings? First, I should stress that there can be no question of seeming to equate the achievements of Dali with those of Freud. Whatever criticisms one may have of him, Freud was one of the few true giants of twentieth century

Salvador Dali, Portrait of Freud, 1938, Boymans-van Beuningen Museum Rotterdam culture, a man who has irrevocably transformed our perceptions of ourselves and each other. Dali, however, is dispensable. And yet there is a real sense in which Freud got what he deserved in Dali. I can clarify this by considering their brief encounter.

Freud had always sought to establish psychoanalysis as a science; he refused to have anything to do with the Surrealist movement. In 1938, however, Freud, frail and dying of cancer, left Austria in the wake of the Nazi invasion: he came to live in England. That July, his friend, Stefan Zweig, brought Dali to visit Freud. Dali, who thought that Freud’s cranium was reminiscent of a snail, made a drawing of him on the spot. Zweig says in his autobiography that he dared not show this to Freud ‘because clairvoyantly Dali had already incorporated death in the picture’. Dali’s perspicacity was, however, hardly remarkable since, as Zweig himself admits, at this time ‘the shadow of death’ showed ever more plainly on Freud’s face. In any event, Freud must have seen the sketch because the following day he wrote to Zweig concerning it. (The inconsistencies in Zweig’s account may relate to his own attempt to deny identification with the dying Freud; Zweig, also a refugee from the Nazis, delivered the oration at Freud’s funeral. Two and a half years later, he and his wife killed themselves. Zweig wrote in a suicide note that he lacked the powers to make a wholly new beginning.) Freud’s letter said, ‘I really owe you thanks for bringing yesterday’s visitor. For until now I have been inclined to regard the surrealists, who apparently have adopted me as their patron saint, as complete fools (let us say 95 per cent, as with alcohol). That young Spaniard, with his candid fanatical eyes and his undeniable technical mastery, has changed my estimate. It would be very interesting to investigate analytically how he came to create that picture’. To put this judgement in its context, it is now necessary to say something about Freud.

Freud had been educated as a neurologist under the great mechanist, Ernst Briicke, who was an associate of Helmholtz himself. The generation of Freud’s teachers believed in the measurability of all phenomena: ideologically, they were materialists and determinists, bitter opponents of vitalism and its derivatives. They would not, of course, have approved of psychoanalysis, but their influence upon Freud’s development cannot be overestimated. Only with the most extreme reluctance did he give up the hope of correlating psychological phenomena with the activity of neurones. Indeed, he never ceased to think of the mind as a ‘psychic apparatus’ within which different sorts of ‘energy’ circulated.

Freud retained a key distinction from Helmholtz: that between ‘freely mobile’ and ‘bound’ energy. He brought this into contact with what he regarded as the most significant of his own discoveries, the distinction between two types of mental functioning, the primary processes and the secondary processes.

For Freud, primary process thinking displayed condensation and displacement, e.g., as in dreams, where images tend to become fused and can readily replace and symbolize one another. Furthermore, it denied the categories of time and space, and was governed by the pleasure principle, Lustprinzip, —or the tendency to reduce the unpleasure of instinctual tension by hallucinatory wish-fulfilment. Freud thought that primary process thinking was characteristic of the Unconscious, or, as he termed it in later formulations, the Id: it made use of mobile energy. Secondary process thinking, however, he saw as obeying the laws of grammar and logic, observing the realities of time and space, and governed by a reality principle which sought to reduce the unpleasure of instinctual tension through adaptive behaviour. Secondary process thinking thus made use of bound energy.

Now Freud always tried to associate the primary processes with sickness and neurosis. This is one reason why he regarded natural mental functions—such as dreaming while asleep—as analogous to psychopathological symptoMs. Conversely, he associated the secondary processes not just with the ego, but also with health. Indeed, he sometimes likened a psychoanalytic cure to land reclamation, whereby the ego took over that which once had belonged to the Id. Inevitably, this led Freud into some peculiarly unsatisfactory formulations about those activities—especially artistic activities—in which the imaginative modes of mental functioning, characteristic of the primary processes, played a vital part. At first, he tended to link art with neurosis, but later on he simply despaired of making any contribution to aesthetics, saying that when confronted with the creative artist, psychoanalysis must lay down its arms.

Freud’s conception of the psyche was inflected not just by his cultural origins but also, inevitably, by his own psychological make-up. He was the founder of psychoanalysis, and as such was analysed by no one except himself. He was also an obsessional, and, like many obsessionals, tended towards a dissociation between the affective and the intellectual combined with a fear of the former insofar as it refused to submit itself to rational control and explanation. Indeed, it is a singular fact that although, as Marjorie Brierley has put it, ‘the process of analysis is not an intellectual process but an affective one’, Freud’s psychoanalytic metapsychology lacks any adequate theory of affects—with the exception of anxiety.

We have to conclude that Freud’s historic self-analysis (on which, of course, the first discoveries of psychoanalysis were based) was incomplete. As is well-known, Freud took precious little account of the infant-mother relationship. Although he, I think rightly, correlated oceanic feelings of mergence— characteristic of many mystical, religious, and aesthetic experiences—with the infant’s lack of differentiation between ego and the external world, he himself reported that he had never experienced such ‘oceanic feelings’. Clearly, he regarded them as regressive, tout court. And yet we know that Freud disliked music, and was singularly lacking in true aesthetic sensibility.

This is manifest in his attitude to painting. As he himself once wrote, ‘I have often observed that the subject-matter of works of art has a stronger attraction for me than their formal and technical qualities, though to the artist their value lies first and foremost in these latter.’ After spending an evening in an artist’s company, he wrote complaining to Jones, ‘Meaning is but little to these men; all they care for is line, shape, agreement of contours. They are given up to Lustprinzip’. And similarly, when one of his followers, Oscar Pfister, wrote a book on Expressionist art and sent it to Freud, Freud wrote back, ‘I must tell you that in private life I have no patience at all with lunatics. I only see the harm they can do and as far as these “artists” are concerned, I am in fact one of those philistines and stick-in-the-muds whom you pillory in your introduction, but after all, you yourself then say clearly and exhaustively why these people have no claim to the title of artist’.

Freud owned few pictures: what attracted him was invariably subject matter. (He had, for example, a particular interest in the theme of death). He did own engravings by Wilhelm von Kaulbach—an arid salon painter, comparable with Bouguereau or Meissonier. Indeed, it might be said that, insofar as he liked painting at all, Freud liked only those aspects of it which could be associated with the secondary rather than the primary processes. He was interested in that about painting which could be put into words without loss (i.e. ‘meaning’): he was indifferent to line, and colour as such—regarding them as symptomatic of disruptive ‘Lustprinzip'. He wanted paintings which conformed with nineteenth century spatial and temporal conventions, which were regulated by ‘reason’, and the ‘reality principle’. None of that ‘lunatic’ ‘oceanic feeling’ (or aesthetic experience) evoked by the ambiguities and fusions of modernism!

And yet, when all this has been said, it must be emphasized that Freud was in a highly paradoxical position. He was scientistic by inclination; and yet his chosen terrain was that of subjectivity itself. As Charles Rycroft has put it, ‘Since psychoanalysis aims at being a scientific psychology, psychoanalytical observation and theorizing is involved in the paradoxical activity of using secondary process thinking to observe, analyze, and conceptualize precisely that form of mental activity, the primary processes, which scientific thinking has always been at pains to exclude’. We can now see, I think, why Dali proved so acceptable to Freud.

Freud endeavoured to cope with this contradiction at the heart of psychoanalysis by talking about the human psyche as if it could be adequately explained using models derived from the nineteenth century natural sciences—hence his continued reliance on the Helmholtzian theory of two kinds of energy, and his belief in psychic determinism, etc. Dali is a painter who, though he draws on the contents of ‘the unconscious’, succeeds in subjecting them entirely to a nineteenth century world-view, to a sensibility compatible with the nineteenth century ‘reality principle’. (His work involves innovations in subject matter, but significantly not in form.) Dali has said that his favourite artist is Meissonier, and indeed, he regularly ‘Meissonises’ imaginative activity, by which I mean he brings it to heel through the conventions and devices of nineteenth century salon art. Furthermore, as I hope I demonstrated earlier, the way in which Dali paints is such that, although he deals with ‘the inner world’, he effectively suppresses all the dangerous affective connotations which might have been aroused by such a terrain—beyond those which are readily put into words. Dali’s conception of ‘inner space’ is really of a modified, mathematically coherent, perspectival vista. If post- Renaissance art purported to offer a ‘window on the world’, Dali purported to offer a window on the psyche, and that, of course, is exactly what Freud, the ‘scientific’ observer, wanted to look through.

It remains, however at best doubtful whether psychic processes are really analogous to those models through which Freud endeavoured to describe them. Charles Rycroft (whose writings have had a considerable influence upon much that I have argued here) has suggested that Freud’s theory of ‘energy’, upon which his psychological model depends, is in fact a theory of meaning in disguise. Indeed, in his view, psychoanalysis is not really like the natural sciences at all: he implies it might be something sui generis, that is ‘a theory of biological meaning’. Such a position implies a radical revision of psychoanalytical terminology. (This has already been attempted in Roy Schafer’s A New Language for Psychoanalysis, which endeavours to dispense with all concepts about human behaviour and feeling derived from the deterministic models appropriate to physics and chemistry.) Such a revision involves the relinquishment of some of Freud’s most cherished notions. Rycroft, for example, argues ‘concepts like the unconscious are unnecessary, redundant, scientistic, and hypos- tasizing—the last since the concept of the unconscious insinuates the idea that there really is some entity somewhere that instigates whatever we do unconsciously, some entity which is not the same entity as instigates whatever we do consciously’.

If Rycroft is right—as I am convinced that he is—then of course Dali’s ‘vistas’ on ‘the unconscious’ will soon seem even more dated than they do now. But Rycroft’s position also involves great gains: throughout his work, he emphasizes that the primary processes are not, as Freud perceived them, on the side of neurosis, sickness, and aspects of the self which require ‘reclamation’ or repression. He argues that they form an integral component in healthy and creative living and mental functioning, co-existing alongside the secondary processes from the earliest days of life. Characteristically, Rycroft’s most recent book, The Innocence of Dreams, describes dreams not as ‘abnormal psychical phenomena’, but rather as the form taken by the imagination during sleep. Similarly, instead of associating symbolism exclusively with the primary processes as ‘the language of the unconscious’, Rycroft has characterized it as ‘a general tendency or capacity of the mind, one which may be used by the primary or secondary process, neurotically or realistically, for defence or self-expression, to maintain fixation or to promote growth’.

The great advantage of such a position is that it dispenses with that form of psychoanalytic reductionism which regards non-verbal creativity as a reprehensible, ‘immature’, sick, or regressive phenomenon—or, at best, a kind of semi-civilized crust formed over undesirable impulses. It removes the notion that a concern with form is dismissable as Lustprinzip, and takes us ‘beyond the reality principle’ to re-instate the imagination in its rightful place. Furthermore, it opens the door to a psychoanalytic contribution to the understanding of all those areas—e.g. music, abstract and expressionist painting, ‘oceanic feeling’, etc.—where Freud’s own sensibility (and his theoretical constructs, too) are literally anaesthetized, i.e. lacking in an aesthetic dimension. (From this point of view, I think that it is also possible to explain why, despite what Dali claims, truly ‘aesthetic’ paintings, which reach down into relatively constant areas of human experience, are likely to outlive his anaesthetic, culture-trapped vision.) In my book, Art and Psychoanalysis, I have sketched the preliminaries for such a contribution, drawing heavily upon the work of the British object relations school of psychoanalysis, especially that of D. W. Winnicott, Marion Milner, and of course Charles Rycroft himself.

1980

MODERN ART: Hayward Annual 1979 / February 8, 2020 by Laurence Fuller

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.

HAYWARD ANNUAL 1979

by Peter Fuller, 1979

The Arts Council began to organize ‘Hayward Annuals’ in 1977: the series is intended to ‘present a cumulative picture of British art as it develops’. The selectors are changed annually. The Hayward Annual 1979 was really five separately chosen shows in one. It was the best of the annuals so far: it even contained a whispered promise.

I want to look back: the 1977 show was abysmal, the very nadir of British Late Modernism. The works shown were those of the exhausted painters of the 1960s and their epigones. Even at their zenith these artists could do no better than produce epiphenomena of economic affluence and US cultural hegemony. But to parade all this in the late 1970s was like dragging out the tattered props of last season’s carnival in a bleak mid-winter. The exhibition was not enhanced by the addition of a few more recent tacky conceptualists, although four of the exhibiting artists—Auerbach, Buckley, Hockney and Kitaj—each showed at least some interesting work.

The 1978 annual, selected by a group of women artists, was, if anything, even more inept. It was intended to ‘bring to the attention of the public the quality of the work of women artists in Britain in the context of a mixed show’. Some of Elizabeth Frink’s sculptures seemed to me to be good, though that was hardly a discovery. There was little else worth looking at.

It was in the face of the transparent decadence of British art in the 1970s (clearly reflected in the first two annuals) that a vigorous critical sociology of art developed. Writers such as Andrew Brighton and myself were compelled by history to develop in this way given the absence (at least within the cultural ‘mainstream’) of much art which was more than a sociological phenomenon. We were forced to give priority to the question of where art had gone and to examine the history and professional structures of the Fine Art tradition. We attended to the mediations through which a work acquired value for its particular public. Andrew Brighton emphasized the continuance of submerged traditions of popular painting which persisted outside the institutions and discourse of modernism. I focused upon the kenosis, or self-emptying, which manifested itself within the Late Modernist tradition itself. Critical sociology of art was valuable and necessary: it has not yet been completed, and yet it was not, in itself, criticism of art.

The sonorous Protestant theologian, Karl Barth, used to draw a sharp distinction between ‘religion’ (of which he was contemptuous) and ‘revelation’, the alleged manifestation of divine transcendence within the world through the person of ‘The Christ’, by which he purported to be awed. Now I am a philosophical materialist. I have no truck with religious ideas: what I am about to write is a metaphor, and only a metaphor. However it seems to me that over the last decade it is as if we had focused upon the ‘religion’ of art—its institutions and its ideology—not because we were blind to ‘revelation’ but because it was absent (or more or less absent) at this moment in art’s history.

The problems of left criticism have, as it were, been too easily shelved for us by the process of history itself. During the decade of an ‘absent generation’ and the cultural degeneracy of the Fine Art tradition the question of quality could be evaded: one grey monochrome is rarely better or worse than another. Indeed, in the 1960s and 1970s, the debate about value became debased: we saw how the eye of an ‘arbitrary’ taste could become locked into the socket of the art market, and the art institutions there become blinded with ideology and self- interest, while yet purporting to swivel only in response to quality. But these are not good enough reasons for indefinitely shirking the question of value ourselves.

In his book, Ways of Seeing, John Berger distinguished between masterpieces and the tradition within which they arose. However, he has recently made this self-criticism: ‘the immense theoretical weakness of my own book is that I do not make clear what relation exists between what I call “the exception” (the genius) and the normative tradition. It is at this point that work needs to be done’. I agree, but this ‘theoretical weakness’ (which is not so much Berger’s as that of left criticism itself) runs deeper than an explanation of the relationship of ‘genius’ to tradition. Works of art are much more uneven than that: there are often ‘moments of genius’ imbedded with the most pedestrian and conventional of works. But at these points, the crucial points, talk of‘sociology of art’, ‘visual ideology’ or historical reductionism of any kind rarely helps.

I believe neither that the problem of aesthetics is soluble into that of ideology, nor that it is insoluble. Trotsky, thinking about the aesthetic pleasure which can be derived from reading the Divine Comedy, ‘a medieval Italian book’, explained this by ‘the fact that in class society, in spite of all its changeability, there are certain common features.’ The elaboration of a materialist theory of aesthetics for the territory of the visual is a major task for the left in the future: such a theory will have to include, indeed to emphasize, these ‘biological’ elements of experience which remain, effectively, ‘common features’ from one culture and from one class to another. In the meantime, I cannot use the absence or crudeness of such a theory as an excuse for denying that certain improbable works (with which, ‘ideologically’, I might be quite out of sympathy) are now beginning to appear in the British art scene which have the capacity to move me. When that begins to happen, it becomes necessary to respond as a critic again, and to offer the kinds of judgement which, since Leibnitz, have been recognized as being based upon a knowledge which is clear but not distinct, that is to say not rational, and not scientific.

Let me hasten to add that the 1979 Hayward Annual seemed to me no more than a confused and contradictory symptom. Nothing has yet been won. It was rather as if an autistic child whom one had been attending had at last lifted his head only to utter some fragmented and indecipherable half-syllable. But even such a gesture as that excites a hope and conveys a promise out of all proportion to its significance as realized achievement. The exhibition, which I am not inclined to reduce entirely to sociology, was an exhibition where some works, at least, seemed to be breaking out of their informing ‘visual ideologies’. An exhibition where, perhaps, those ‘moments of becoming’ which I have been ridiculed for speaking of before may have been seen to be coming into being.

The five loosely labelled component categories of the exhibition are ‘painting from life’, ‘abstract painting’, ‘formal sculpture’, ‘artists using photographs’ and ‘mixed media events’. I want to deal briefly with each.

‘Painting from life’ consists of the work of six artists chosen by one of them (Paul Chowdhury). Now it is easy to be critical of the style which dominates this section. Chowdhury’s selection looks like an attempt to revive an ebbing current of English painting on the crest of the present swell towards ‘realism’, i.e. in this instance, pedantic naturalism. Most of these artists have links with the Slade’s tradition of ‘objective’ empiricism and particularly with that peculiarly obsessive manifestation of it embodied in the art and pedagogy of Sir William Coldstream. This tendency has its roots deep in the vicissitudes of the British national conjuncture, and in the peculiar complexion of the British ruling-class. Here I do not wish to engage in an analysis of the style: despite their affinities, these paintings are not a homogenous mass. Indeed the section is so uneven that one can only suspect that Chowdhury (who is certainly in the better half) sometimes allowed mere stylistic camaraderie to cloud his judgement.

Let me first clear the ground of that work which fails. At forty-seven, Euan Uglow is on his way to becoming an elder statesman of the continuing Slade tradition. This is hard to understand. His paintings here are much more frigidly formalist than anything to be seen in the adjacent ‘abstract painting’ room. In works like The Diagonal, Uglow decathects and depersonalizes the figures whom he paints. To a greater extent even than Pearlstein he degrades them by using them as excuses for compositional exercises. He is so divorced from his feelings that he has not yet proved able to exhibit a good painting. Uglow, at least, has the exactitude of a skilled mortician. By contrast, Norman Norris is a silly and sentimental artist who uses the trademarks of measured Slade drawing as decorative devices. In a catalogue statement he writes that he hopes to discover a better way of coping with the problem his drawing method has left him with. ‘For this to happen’, he adds, ‘my whole approach will have to change’. This, at least, is true. In the meantime, it would be far better if he was spared the embarrassment of further public exposure.

Patrick Symons studied with the Euston Road painters; he is the oldest painter in this section, and his optic is also the most resolutely conservative. But, despite its extreme conventionality, his painting is remarkable for the amateurish fussiness and uncertainty it exhibits even after all these years. A painting like Cellist Practising is all askew in its space: walls fail to meet, they float into each other and collide. Certain objects appear weightless. Such things cannot just be dismissed as incompetence: Symons is nothing if not a professional. I suspect that the distortions and lacunae within his work are themselves symptoms of the unease which he feels about his apparently complacent yet historically anachronistic mode of being- within and representing the world. Symons’ bizarre spatial disjunctures mean that he is to this tradition what a frankly psychotic artist like Richard Dadd was to Victorian academic art.

So much for the curios. There is really little comparison between them and work of the stature of Leon Kossoff’s: Kossoff is, as I have argued elsewhere, perhaps the finest of post Second World War British painters. He springs out of a specific conjuncture—that of post-war expressionism and a Bomberg-derived variant of English empiricism—a conjuncture which enabled him partially to resolve, or at least to evade, those contradictions which destroyed Jackson Pollock as both a man and a painter. (I have no doubt that Kossoff will prove a far more durable painter than Pollock.) But Kossoff transcended the conjuncture which formed him: his work never degenerated into mannerism. Outside Kilburn Underground for Rosalind, Indian Summer is, in my view, one of the best British paintings of this decade.

As for Volley and Chowdhury themselves, they are the youngest artists in this section: their work intrigues me. In Chowdhury, the lack of confidence in Slade epistemology is not just a repressed symptom. It openly becomes the subject matter of the paintings: if we do not represent the other in this way, Chowdhury implies, how are we to represent him or her at all? He exhibits eight striking images of the same model, Mimi. His vision is one in which, like Munch’s, the figure seems forever about to unlock and unleash itself and to permeate the whole picture space. (Chowdhury has realized how outline can be a prison of conventionality.) In his work subjectivity is visibly acknowledged: it flows like an intruder into the Slade tradition where it threatens (though it never succeeds) to swamp the measured empirical method. The only point of fixity, the only constant in these ‘variations on a theme’ is the repeated triangle of the woman’s sex. Both in affective tone and in their rigorous frontality these paintings reminded me of Rothko’s ‘absent presences’—though Chowdhury is not yet as good a painter as Rothko. In Chowdhury the fleshly presence of the figure is palpable, but its very solidity is of a kind which—particularly in Mimi Against a White Wall—seems to struggle against dissolution.

Volley is a ‘painterly’ painter: he is at the opposite extreme from Uglow. In his work the threat of loss is perhaps even more urgent than in Chowdhury’s. Over and over again, Volley paints himself, faceless and insubstantial, reflected in a mirror in his white studio. Looking at his paintings I was reminded of how Berger once compared Pollock to ‘a man brought up from birth in a white cell so that he has never seen anything except the growth of his own body’, a man who, despite his talent, ‘in desperation . . . made his theme the impossibility of finding a theme’. Volley, too, knows that cell, but the empirical residue to which he clings redeems him from utter solipsism. He is potentially a good painter.

The ‘abstract painters’ in this exhibition were chosen by James Faure Walker who also opted to exhibit his own work: again, the five painters chosen have much in common stylistically, though the range of levels is almost equally varied. These are all artists who have been, in some way or another, associated with the magazine A rtscribe, of which Faure Walker is editor. A rtscribe emerged some three years ago as a shabby art and satire magazine. It benefited from the mismanagement and bad editing of Studio International, once the leading British modern art journal, which has been progressively destroyed since the departure of Peter Townsend in 1975. (There have been no issues since November 1978.) Around issue seven, Art scribe mortgaged its soul to a leading London art dealer, which precipitated it into a premature and ill- deserved prominence.

Artscribe claimed that it was written by artists, for artists: it was, in fact, written by some artists for some other artists, often the same as those who wrote it, or were written about in it. Unfortunately, the regular Artscribe writers have been consistent only in their slovenliness and muddledness; the magazine has never come to terms with the decadence of the decade. It has, by and large, contented itself with cheery exhortations to painters and sculptors to ‘play up, play up and play the game’.

Despite denials to the contrary its stance has been consistently formalist. Recently, Ben Jones, an editor of Artscribe, organized an exhibition—revealingly called ‘Style in the 70s’—which he felt to be ‘confined to painting and sculpture that was uncompromisingly abstract—the vehicle for pure plastic expression both in intention and execution.’ Much of the critical writing in Artscribe has shown a meandering obsession with the mere contingencies of art, a narcissistic preoccupation with style and conventional gymnastics. This has been combined with an almost overweening ambition on the part of the editors to package and sell the work of themselves and their friends, the art of the generation that never was, the painters who were inculcated with the dogmas of Late Modernism when Late Modernism itself had dried up. Indeed, there are times when Artscribe reads like something produced by a group of English public school-boys who are upset because, after trying so hard and doing so well, they have not been awarded their house colours. It is noticeable that all the ‘ragging’ and pellet flicking of the first issues has gone: now readers are beleaguered with anal-straining responsibility, and upper sixth moralizing . . . but Artscribe has yet to notice that there are no more modernist colours. The school itself has tumbled to the ground.

Now this might be felt to be a wretched milieu within which to work and paint, and by and large, I suspect it is. ‘Style in the 70s’ is, as one might expect, a display of visual ideology. Oh yes, most of the artists are trying to break a few school rules, to arrest reductionism, to re-insert a touch of illusion here, to threaten ‘the integrity of the picture surface’ there—but most of it is style, ‘maximal not minimal’: its eye is on just one more room in the Tate. But—and this is important—it is necessarily style which refuses the old art-historicist momentum: there was no further reduction which could be perpetrated. The very uncertainty of its direction has ruptured the linear progress of modernism: within the resulting disjuncture, some artists— not many, but some—are looking for value in the relationship to experience rather than to what David Sweet, a leading Artscribe ideologist, once called ‘a plenary ideology developed inside the object tradition of Western Art’.

Take the five artists in the Hayward show; again, it is easy enough to clear the ground. Bill Henderson and Bruce Russell are mere opportunists, slick operators who are slipping back a bit of indeterminate illusionism into pedantic, dull formalist paintings. Faure Walker himself is certainly better than that. His paintings are pretty enough. He works with a confetti of coloured gestures seemingly dragged by some aesthetic- electric static force flat against the undersurface of an imaginary glass picture plane. The range of colours he is capable of articulating is disconcertingly narrow, and his adjustments of hue are often wooden and mechanical—as if he was working from a chart rather than allowing his eye to respond to his emotions. Nonetheless the results are vaguely— very vaguely—reminiscent of lily pools, Monet, roseate landscapes, Guston and autumnal evenings. Faure Walker is without the raucous inauthenticity of either a Russell or a Henderson.

The remaining two painters in this group—Jennifer Durrant and Gary Wragg—are much better. They are not formalists: just compare their work with Uglow’s, for example, to establish that. I do not get the feeling that, in their work, they are stylistic opportunists or tacticians. They have no truck with the punkish brashness of those who want to be acclaimed as the new trendies in abstraction. In fact, I do not see their work as being abstract in any but the most literal sense at all: they are concerned with producing powerful works which can speak vividly of lived experience.

Wragg’s large, crowded paintings present the viewer with a shifting swell of lines, marks, and patches of colour: his works are illusive and allusive. Looking, you become entangled in them and drawn through a wide range of affects in a single painting. ‘Step by step, stage by stage, I like the image of the expression—a sea of feeling’, he wrote in the catalogue. He seems to be going back to Abstract Expressionism not to pillage the style—though one is sometimes aware of echoes of De Kooning’s figures, ‘dislimned and indistinct as water is in water’—so much as in an attempt to find a way of expressing his feelings, hopes, fears and experiences through painting. His work is still often chaotic and disjunctured: he still has to find himself in that sea. But Morningnight of 1978 is almost a fully achieved painting. His energy and his commitment are not to contingencies of style, but to the real possibilities of painting. He is potentially a good artist.

The look of Durrant’s work is quite different. Her paintings are immediately decorative. They hark back—sometimes a little too fashionably—to Matisse. A formalist critic recently wrote of her work, that it has ‘no truck with pseudo-symbolism or half baked mysticism. The only magic involved comes from what is happening up front on the canvas, from what you see. There is nothing hidden or veiled, nor any allusions that you need to know about’. If that were true, then the paintings would be nothing but decoration, i.e. pleasures for the eye. I am certain, however, that these paintings are redolent with affective symbols—not just in their evocative iconography, but, more significantly, through all the paradoxes of exclusion, and engulfment with which their spatial organizations present us. Now there is an indulgent looseness about some of her works: she must become stricter with herself; paintings like Surprise Lake Painting, February-March 1979 seem weak and unresolved. However, I think that already in her best work she is a good painter: she is raising again the problem of a particular usage of the decorative, where it is employed as something which transcends itself to speak of other orders of experience —a usage which some thought had been left for dead on Rothko’s studio floor, with the artist himself.

Durrant and Wragg manifest a necessary openness. Like Chowdhury and Volley, they are conservative in the sense that they revive or preserve certain traditional conventions of painting. But they are all prepared to put them together in new ways in order to speak clearly of something beyond painting itself. Levi-Strauss once explained how the limitation of the bricoleur—who uses bits and pieces, remnants and fragments that come to hand—is that he can never transcend the constitutive set from which the elements he is using originally came. All these artists are, of necessity, bricoleurs: Levi Strauss has been shown to be wrong before, and I hope they will prove him so again.

Something similar is also happening in the best British sculpture: you can see it most clearly at the Hayward in Katherine Gili where the debased conventions of welded steel have taken on board a new (or rather an old) voluminousness, and seem to be struggling towards expressiveness: imagery is flooding back. Such work seems on the threshold of a real encounter with subject matter once more. Quite a new kind of figuration may yet burst out from this improbable source.

The other two sections in the Hayward Annual, ‘artists using photographs’ and ‘mixed media events’ seemed to me irrelevant to that flickering, that possible awakening within the Fine Art tradition. The ‘mixed media events’ were a waste of time and space. The fact that a pitiful pornographer like P. Orridge continues to receive patronage and exposure for his activities merely demonstrates the degree to which questions of value and quality which I began by raising have been travestied and betrayed during this decade by those in art institutions who have invoked them most frequently.

There is just a chance that we may be coming out of a long night. Immediately after the last war some artists—most notably Leon Kossoff and Frank Auerbach—produced powerful paintings in which they forced the ailing conventions of the medium in such a way that they endeavoured to speak meaningfully of their experience; as a result, they produced good works. Some younger artists—just a few—now seem to be going back to that point again, and endeavouring to set out from there once more. They cannot, of course, evade the problem of the historic crisis of the medium. Whether they will be able to make the decisive leap from subjective to historical vision also yet remains to be seen.

But if what one is now just beginning to see does indeed develop then, with a profound sense of relief, I will shift further away from ‘sociology of art’ (which is what work like P. Orridge demands, if it demands anything more than indifference) towards the experience offered by particular works, and the general problems of aesthetics which such experiences raise. I hope that I will not be alone on the left in doing so. The desire to displace the work by an account of the work (which I have never shared) can only have any legitimacy when the work itself is so debased and degenerate that there is no residue left within it strong enough to work upon the viewer or critic, when, in short, it is incapable of producing an aesthetic effect.

1979

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MODERN ART: Roger Scruton and Right Thinking / February 5, 2020 by Laurence Fuller

MODERN ART intertwines a life-long battle between four mavericks of the art world, escalating to a crescendo that reveals the purpose of beauty, and the preciousness of life. Based on the writings of Peter Fuller, adapted by his son.

Before the shut down MODERN ART had just won Best Screenplay (3rd Place) at Hollywood Reel Film Festival and had been accepted as Official Selection in competition or Finalist placement in Beverly Hills Film Festival, Manhattan Film Festival, Big Apple Screenplay Competition, Firenze FilmCorti International Festival (Italy), Film Arte Festival (Madrid), Drama Inc Screenplay Competition, and Twister Alley Film Festival. All of which have been postponed by at least a couple months to protect public health and safety. But the good news is they will be back on soon and in the meantime you can read selected essays by Peter Fuller here on my blog during down time!

Roger Scruton was one of Peter’s most engaging allies and oponants. They saw eye to eye on many things regarding art and not much else. He was a regular contributor to the early days of Moder Painters and after Peter passed he was a trustee of the Peter Fuller Memorial Foundation until it closed a few years ago.

Roger Scruton passed away earlier this year, January 12th 2020.

Roger Scruton and Right Thinking

by Peter Fuller

Roger Scruton is best known as a prolific polemicist of the British ‘New Right’. In the first issue of The Salisbury Review, a journal of ‘Higher Conservative’ thinking which he edits, Scruton wrote about ‘the importance of regaining the commanding heights of the moral and intellectual economy’ for conservatism.

It is hard to believe, however, that even he thinks that is what he is doing through, say, his occasional column in The Times. Apparently he intended no irony when, in the wake of the Falklands fiasco, he expressed the view that dying for one’s country was ‘the most vivid human example of the sacred, of the temporal order overcome by a transcendent meaning’. Could this metaphysical transfiguration of futile deaths amongst tundra and penguin shit have inspired Scruton’s condemnation (without ever having seen it) of The Day After - an American TV film on the effects of nuclear war — as ‘pornography’ ? Perhaps he felt that such a film should depict the blinding light of millions of transcendent meanings, rather than a vision of fire storms, radiation sickness, cinders and General Anaesthesia.

But those who know Scruton only through his hasty and intemperate journalism, in which he seems to be engaged in some personal stampede to speak the unspeakable, should not be put off from his books, which are different in both tone and content. Some of them show a searching after the truth, a distaste for conventional cant and a vigorous critical independence of mind which should commend them even to those who, like myself, are of very different political persuasions.

Over the last ten years, Scruton has published a number of works on aesthetics, including Art and Imagination and the exemplary The Aesthetics of Architecture of 1979. There can be little doubt that these explorations are among the most rewarding of their kind to have appeared in English in recent years. This new volume, The Aesthetic Understanding (Carcanet, 1983), is a collection of substantial and considered essays which provide an excellent introduction to the depth and breadth of his aesthetic concerns.

For Scruton, the primary question is not ‘What is Art?’ but ‘What is aesthetic experience, and what is its importance for human conduct?’ He is unaffected by any of the fashionable tendencies to deny, dissolve or reduce aesthetic experience; the tools he uses for his investigation are those of analytical philosophy, and the conclusions he arrives at are notable for their emphasis upon imagination.

‘In the light of a theory of imagination’, Scruton writes, ‘we can explain why aesthetic judgment aims at objectivity, why it is connected to the sensuous experience of its object, and why it is an inescapable feature of moral life.’ For him, aesthetic experience also has practical value: it represents the world as informed by the values of the observer. But his position is not one of unalloyed subjectivism: he insists, and rightly so, upon the dependence of aesthetic and moral life on the existence of a ‘common culture’, a system of shared beliefs and practices that tell a man how to see the situation that besets him.

I am with him here; but such emphases seem rare elsewhere in contemporary critical writing. Scruton understandably argues that Marxist, sociological, structuralist and semiotic schools of thought have contributed little or nothing to the answers to the questions that concern him. Such practitioners miss the point that there is a relative autonomy to aesthetic experience, that it can genuinely be distinguished from, say, scientific, moral or political understanding. Nonetheless he shows an exemplary concern for, and knowledge of, the material bases of each of the several arts and pursuits he discusses.

There is, for example, something refreshing, in the light of recent controversies, about his defence of the literary critic as a reader with taste, judgment and ‘a certain kind of responsiveness to literature’ who addresses his remarks to readers of literature who are not also professionals. (Nonetheless, the least convincing text in this volume for me was Scruton’s own excursion as a literary critic. His study of Beckett labours the none-too-original point that he was a ‘post-Romantic’ writer of genius whose vision was entirely integrated into his style.)

More original and intriguing is a selection of his texts on music, dealing, with illuminating clarity, with themes like representation in music, musical motion, and especially musical understanding. Scruton makes the point that anyone who is ingenious enough can interpret music as a language, code, or system of signs. But perhaps the relation between such semantic analyses and musical understanding itself ‘is no closer than the relation between the ability to ride a horse, and the semantic interpretation of piebald markings’. Scruton convincingly describes musical understanding as ‘a complex system of metaphor which is the true description of no material fact’. Characteristically, he stresses the imaginative activity involved in the hearing of music, through which sound is transfigured into figurative space.

Similarly, his essay on photography provides far and away the most authoritative exposition of the profound differences between photography and painting of which I know. Scruton argues that ‘representation’ is a complex pattern of intentional activity, the object of highly specialized responses. Photography, when it is true to itself, necessarily eliminates such intentional activity; the photograph is, as it were, too closely wedded to the appearances of given reality, especially in terms of its details, to represent anything at all.

Of course, he acknowledges that representations can be photographed; for example, when a photographer takes a picture of a woman posing as Venus. But a photograph of a representation is no more a representation than a picture of a man is a man. Scruton argues that painting is essentially a representational art - though he undoubtedly underestimates the decorative contribution to this art form - whereas photography is not. Insofar as there is representation in film, as opposed to photography, its origin is not photographic but theatrical. Scruton then successfully deploys the distinction between ‘fantasy’ and true imagination to argue that, to its detriment, the cinema has been indissolubly wedded to the former - and that this has something to do with the nature of the medium itself.

Scruton’s views on architecture will already be known to readers of his earlier books: he conclusively demonstrates the vacuity of the modernist ‘functionalist’ theory and practice, and revives the idea of the history of architecture as ‘the history not of engineering but of stones, in their expressive aspect’. There is no necessary, causal link between proposed functions and ultimate forms which can be extrapolated without considering the linking term of style. In any event, the functions of good buildings often change through historical use. Churches become museums; railway stations, as at the Angel, Islington, in London, shopping arcades. Scruton maintains that it is through aesthetic understanding that the eye is trained and that the architect is thereby able to envisage the effect of his building. Without this process of education, there is no way an architect can seriously know what he is doing when he begins to build.

This leads Scruton to a defence of the present possibilities for the classical tradition in architecture, whereas it has led me (for very similar reasons) to a belief in the enduring potentialities of a neo-Gothic style. Perhaps it is Scruton’s tendency to slide from belief in authority towards rigid authoritarianism which causes him to prefer the former to the latter: in any event, he not only ignores the achievements of, say, nineteenth-century Gothic, but seems unaware of the strong continuities between Classicism and the modernism he abhors.

This is admittedly a difference of taste; it is none the less important for that. But the real question, for me, is whether Scruton’s aesthetic position necessitates, or even implies, adherence to his political ideas. Scruton’s own view, at least at times, is that it does. Thus, in a private communication, he has welcomed the positions I have taken on aesthetics, but regretted that I have refused to adopt the politics which, for him, seem to stem from them.

But his own position involves him in a profound contradiction of which he seems blissfully unaware. For example, he is frequently at pains to dissociate himself from any espousal of the ideology of the ‘Free Market’ economy, which he perceives as a product of nineteenth-century Liberalism. This is understandable because competitive market capitalism has indeed shown itself to be singularly incompatible with those aesthetic and ethical values rooted in a conception of a common human nature, and a common culture, which he and I both seek to uphold. Nonetheless, his practical politics are invariably those of vigorous support for the most archaic revivalists of a nineteenth-century, free- market economy. Thus Scruton’s article about the Royal Academy Summer Show, published in The Times last June, was headed, improbably, ‘A Victory for Art at the Polls’.

Scruton should take a more careful look at the architecture of Peterhouse, which formed us both. He accuses Sir Leslie Martin, head of the Centre for Land Use and Built Form in Cambridge, and architect of the hideous ‘functionalist’ William Stone building in the grounds of the College, of what he calls ‘the Architecture of Leninism’. He fails to point out, however, that the Great Hall of Peterhouse is embellished by William Morris’s superb decorative restoration, affirming the values of tradition and aesthetic experience. Sir Leslie is a member of the British cultural establishment; William Morris was a revolutionary socialist.

I do not, for one moment, wish to imply that the left has provided a true haven for the ethical and aesthetic values eroded by the right. That would be palpably absurd. My point is rather that if Sir Leslie can epitomise ‘the Architecture of Leninism’, and Morris can affirm true aesthetic values and experience, then there is no necessary connection between Scruton’s sound aesthetic insights, and so-called ‘conservative’ political ideas.

Nonetheless E. P. Thompson pointed out that the true vandals of British laws, customs, and liberties in the 1970s were ‘not the raging revolutionaries of the extreme Left’, but the Tory establishment itself. It may well be that there is no hope for the maintenance of conditions favourable to those authentic and ethical experiences, rooted in a common culture, in which Scruton and I both believe. But if there is, I believe it will be found in a revised socialism rather than in the ravagings of a ‘Free Market’ capitalist economy. I cannot see the June 1983 elections as a ‘Victory for Art at the Polls’ and I do not think Roger Scruton could either, if he was as honest and critical in his politics as he is in his aesthetics.

1983

MODERN ART: A New Spirit In Painting? / February 4, 2020 by Laurence Fuller

Over at Burlington House, home of the Royal Academy, the trumpets sounded and A New Spirit in Painting was proclaimed. Hugh Casson, President of the Royal Academy, wrote that the massive exhibition of 145 large pictures was ‘a clear and cogent statement about the state of painting today.’ He even compared the show with Roger Fry’s famous Post-Impressionism exhibition at the Grafton Galleries, seventy years ago, when Cezanne, Van Gogh and Gauguin were introduced to a sceptical British public.

MODERN ART: The Journey - My Father In His Own Words / February 3, 2020 by Laurence Fuller

As it happens, I agree with Gilbert, one of the contributors to Oscar Wilde's famous dialogue, The Critic as Artist, who argues that higher criticism is 'the record of one's own soul'. He goes on to describe it as 'the only civilized form of autobiography, as it deals not with the events, but with the thoughts of one's life; not with life's physical accidents of deed or circumstance, but with the spiritual moods and imaginative passions of the mind'.

MODERN ART Screenplay Wins 3rd Place at HRIFF 2020 / January 23, 2020 by Laurence Fuller

Modern Art screenplay has just won 3rd Place at Hollywood Reel Film Festival: Screenplay Awards, participating February 2020 at LA Live.

Estante Cinema interview / January 23, 2020 by Laurence Fuller

This interview was initially published in Estante Cinema Jan 2020

EC: Your acting is impressive when you need to be angry or upset. Is there a feeling that is challenge to an actor?

LF: That sort of explosive big energy may have come from working in theatre, the high stakes in Shakespeare’s narratives, or maybe that’s just me sometimes. I always resented the idea of projecting in theatre, forcing my voice and body beyond what it naturally wanted to express. Instead, I had some very good directors I was working with early on in Australia who encouraged me to use even stronger choices in my emotional character work to make the performance naturally bigger and more expressive, from an authentic place.

The most challenging emotional range that takes time to develop as a person not just a performer, is a sort of empathic listening which forms the baseline of any great performance. It’s about understanding other people and one’s self which is an ongoing conversation with the universe.

The real challenge comes in honing the complexities of a one’s feelings for the camera, to tell a subtle and effective story of a character, to “explode” when needed and then to keep it small and precise the next moment. It takes a lifetime to develop that craft and it never really comes to an end.

EC: Tell me how was to act in a biblic movie. Are you religious? If yes, you certainly hadn't difficult to develop your character. Is my thought correct or you see from another perspective?

LF: I saw Apostle Peter & The Last Supper as a modern adaptation of the sort of classical pieces I was doing in England not long before that. It was a period piece and people of that time were very informed by their religious outlook. The Romans had their Gods and Christianity was only a growing movement at the time. These were the circumstances of Martinian’s life that inform where he’s coming from at the start of the film, when we meet him as the powerful cocky Roman general. Then he gets taken on a journey as Apostle Peter played by Robert Loggia tells him about another way of life. For me it was an honor to be on set opposite an Oscar Nominated actor, so I sort of let myself get swept away with the wisdom of this great actor’s facility with storytelling, that was really the key to this piece for me.

Am I religious? I believe a secular religious experience that’s akin to love and a humanitarian caring of our world is possible in a sort of higher cultural learning and understanding. To learn from the best of cinema, the best of art and film, to discipline oneself to take only the things made with the highest level skill and emotional content.

This is why during the Renaissance the church and the Monarchies would employ the most talented artists to express these high emotions and reach the masses in a way that no one else was capable of doing.

My personal message is a humanitarian one more than anything else, to take care of our earth and it’s creatures. Creativity is at its most vibrant when coming from a place of spiritual connection with ourselves and our world.

EC: I'd like to praise the film photograph. I was thrilled in the moment I saw Andrew and the boy sitting by the piano, where the surrounding were dark and only you and the kid was visible. This take showed me a unique moment which mattered to both characters. How was your participation in this short, besides the acting?

LF: My only contribution to this film was the acting. Zachary Risinger is a very talented young man so it was easy working with him, he picked up so much intuitively from the energy around him and went along with it all.

Henry's brother Max Quilici wrote the main theme to Echoes. The piece was so minimally and yet effectively done, I felt there was no way I could do this part without learning at least some of the piano in order to play this song. With the couple weeks preparation, never having laid hands on a piano before, I managed to learn how to play the first half of the song.

I came across a documentary preparing for the role called Pianomania, about a piano tuner for some of the world's best pianists. He was someone whose love for the piano extends beyond the performance, becomes almost an intellectual pursuit, like preparing for a role that one never acts. The language that he began to use to describe moments within a sound were complex, abstract and beautiful. The joy and the passion for the music then became a dedication to the development of someone else’s craft.

That has always been something that’s interested me, how much should we use art of the same medium to influence our work. I feel that art should be the language to express the fullness of life. But the conflict then comes when confronted with another’s work that we stand in admiration, that admiration must then come from an ideal within us that we wish to reach. Then the choice becomes wether to run forward towards that same goal, almost like an Oedipus trying to surpass the father, or wether to stand back and remain in a place of fixed and constant admiration allowing it to either influence one’s work in another medium, or is it enough to touch a place within a performance, to shape the artists work by pushing a sound, an aesthetic a feeling further than they could have by themselves. The position of a conductor to a musician, a director to an actor, or a parent to a child, shaping the raw materials of a human being in a particular direction, for the purpose of benefiting humanity.

EC: Echoes Of You received a beautiful production. Would you like to see a feature filme of it, or you think there are some works which deserves to be untouchable?

LF: Both Henry and I respectively have a few film projects in development that I’m excited about.

Henry showed me a short documentary he made about discovering his grandfather through a box of letters and journals he found in the attic. We discussed how eerily similar the project which fills my days is, a film about my father, the late art critic Peter Fuller and going through his journals almost every day from the TATE archive. I’ve made my way through a huge chunk of his writings public and private, to piece together a singular man of principles in his writings. And now his echoes speak to me. Some things are so special they take more than just one lifetime to complete. That's really what this piece is about, the Greek philosopher Hippocrates said "Life is short, but art is long". The screenplay just won 3rd place in its first script competition; Hollywood Reel Independent Film Festival Screenplay Awards 2020, participating this February:

http://www.laurencefuller.art/peter-fuller-art-critic

"Art, I believe; help thou mine unbelief"

Peter Fuller, one of the most influential Modern Art critics of all time, is making a name for himself in the art world of the 70s and 80s, disrupting the establishment with his radical ideas and passionate debates. It’s not long before his demons catch up to him, as he undergoes psychoanalysis to prepare for fatherhood and escape the shadow of his own evangelical father. Peter confides in his childhood friend Michael, as they develop a friendship with the Revolutionary art critic John Berger, which changes the course of all their lives and sends ripples throughout the art world, which are still being felt today. Artistic betrayals lived out on a grand scale, art deals in the many millions, new movements in art court an impassioned public. One of the last true Modern Art critics, Peter Fuller’s life was tragically cut short by a car crash in 1990, but his spirit lives on and his son survived the crash to tell this story.

EC: Tell me how come is to work with Quilici and what are his qualities (as a director; as a person)?

LF: I found Henry to be incredibly clear about what he wanted, everything very specific in emotional terms, he spoke very subjectively and compassionately, not the sort of move your head a little to the left which can leave actors feeling like meat puppets and end up with mechanical performances. He worked as many of the best directors do, from the inside out.

The first meeting with Henry Quilici happened at the end of last year shooting his USC short "Tweaker Speak” about a meth addict dealing with the demons of addiction as he tried to get his daughter back. A very different piece. I noticed the things Henry would say were very to the point, very clear, uncluttered by doubts or abstract theory, his notes always referred back to the story or to human experience.

A couple months later I was contacted by Henry and his producer Cam Burnett (a young filmmaker with similar sensibilities). When I first read the script and came to the end, I burst into tears, it had come to me soon after I had finished reading a passage by John Berger in his book “A Painter Of Our Time” which detailed the life of an artist, most often one of constant sacrifice for their work. Henry had captured that plight so beautifully with this story, I had to do it.

EC: A personal question, do you have a dream?

LF: I’m an actor, a published writer on art, screenwriter and film producer, in the art world I’ve worked at galleries, auction houses, as well as curated exhibitions, I’m a private collector and champion of major and emerging artists in my personal life and with my writing since I was young. As for acting I think about the amount of times that craft has saved my inner sanctity as a human being; I feel so grateful to have this as a part of my life. The craft when done properly is a deep well, it’s a personal poetry experienced within and expressed through the senses, the point of acting in itself is a sensual experience that is alive with the entirety of all a person is and can be. The act of doing it for its own sake, as a kind of spiritual development is rewarding enough, all the applause in the world, can’t compare to that alone. I try to incorporate all the arts into my process preparing for a role, the visual, the physical, the auditory, it’s about synergy with all of life and the journey to one’s own paradise.

I overcame trauma as a young boy, finding love for film and art and their creators. My father, the notorious art critic Peter Fuller died in a car accident when I was three. The arts saved my life. From a young age I learned that art must come from life, not art about art. The smallest moments in life are the greatest represented and remembered through the soul. One writes with every step a new chapter in the fortune, the legacy of each human life.

I believe that making art should be akin to act of love, wether it is love for a muse, the piece, or love for oneself, otherwise it doesn’t make much sense. My father, once talked about painting being like a skin between the internal and external world, he was talking about the work of the American Abstract painter Robert Natkin, but I think that idea translates to all the arts. And like the child has objects, toys, teddy bears which he/she transfers their emotional inner life to create their manifestations of the world they would want to see so too do we grow up as adults spiraling over the same behaviors with greater intensity, focus and realization. He also said that ‘Great art, makes great demands upon us’, the best artists lead by example in that sense, as their work comes from inside, it is an extension of their inner world, which like Kiefer or Enrique Martinez Celaya there develops an iconography, language and myth of its own.

With actors this is all read in the depths of their eyes, their face, their emotional life. The better the actor the more complex range of feelings and responses they have to their world and their relationships. Empathic people develop this naturally, it’s like holding a loved one tight when it becomes an electrical charge like a bolt of lightening or call that bellows from the depths of their humanity and just holding on is powerful enough to speak volumes.

The search for beauty is not always as pleasant as its end result. Quite often it is underpinned by a rugged brutality, stringent, uncompromising quest to prevail, exclusivity, a climb, a struggle, a ruthless clawing at the flimsy veins of existence, which pretend and shelter. One begins to claw, because of a feeling of not knowing, or of knowledge that there must be more. But getting there, spending one day in the company of beauty is worth’s lifetime in its absence.

So much Romantic literature is about the loss of the mother, today our relationship to the declining conditions of our world. My own mother has suffered from dyslexia her whole life so she’s not had a very good facility with the language of words, but an amazing talent with the language of images. She helped me to see the natural world for what it is, the Australian landscape in particular, we went on many treks through the forests of East Australia, some of the best memories I have.

At the time I was a kid and just thought that the moment was for the living and once it passed it would sit there like a leaf on the ground of myself, eventually to be assimilated back into the earth. Later I came to find, with the writings of dramatists like Lee Strasberg, that these could be the source of my talent:

“Imaginary objects are precisely that - objects which human beings deal with literally in life, and which the actors learn to recreate without the presence of the actual object... These would appear real and come alive on stage if the actor had been trained in stimulating the senses to actually respond to these objects. It should be emphasized that only the object is imaginary; the response is real.”

I found the work of Strasberg through learning about DeNiro and Day-Lewis around the age of 13, Strasberg lead me onto others like Boleslavsky, Adler, Stanislavsky et al, as did my drama teachers at Narrabundah College, a truly great place for fostering young artists of all mediums, their art departments and especially their theatre departments at the time were among the best in the country, Peter Wilkins and Ernie Glass, took me through the works of the 20th Century dramatists from Brecht to Stanislavski. At Bristol Old Vic Theatre School I would discover the classical in Shakespeare and his contemporaries.

“Equally important was the implicit recognition that not just the actor’s technical means - his voice, speech, bodily actions - could be trained. Boleslavsky contended that the actor’s internal means - what was still at that time called the “soul” could be trained.

The challenge is to find each character anew, I often feel a sense of loss picking up a new script for the first time, like carefully treading through a complex, dangerous, rich jungle at night, cold sweat dripping underneath the arm pits, as wild cats tear up dark trees of unknown growth. Branches intertwined cut the ferns from the moon. Courage withstands the night to find morning breaking upon the realization that people are ultimately well intended, though agendas may not be the same, nor do their obstacles lay in the same spot. The most interesting characters are inevitably guided by their desires, away from their fears which stand only as obstacles to overcome. Usually if a character is playing it safe in their life, there comes an epiphany of sorts to open up to the world. The arts are much the same, to feel fully is to live fully. I know I’m attracted to people with a positive attitude regardless of their circumstances, people who use their trauma to overcome, when there’s a beacon of light people are drawn to it.

Beauty is out there, in the modern world and in Los Angeles it can be harder to find. Don’t loose faith in humanity, in all three of the lead roles in features I’ve had there has been an underlying theme of a repressed soul who looses their faith, to ultimately find it again with even stronger conviction than before.

The feature I had out earlier this year “Paint It Red” was about the search for faith, but not in a religious sense, faith in the realization of one's own artistic vision, in this case the survival of a struggling artist in his quest to get out of poverty and survive a very fortunate and very threatening bit of good luck. At the same time the underlying themes and relationships deal with artistic integrity and ethics. I had a brilliant time exploring the life of a painter for a while. It inspired me to paint my own first painting, which was a long time coming.

I wrote this poem about working on that character; “Alone in the darkness of our own avoidance to the beast of feeling that lurks in the passionate night unseen, chained to the stumps of reason, practical, bland objects, unrelated interactions in the presence of other people which relate solely to food or to sex or to expending less effort. All these things make me want to smash those chains and for all those things to dissipate. All these perspex surfaces hiding the truth. Ciaran is running through the hills of a dream of the world he wished to create, sprinting up mountainsides to grab at a feeling for something real. He is a man of faith, who knew what he stood for and would demand it of life. And yet he knew that if he let any of it slip even for a moment, it would all fall apart and that dream he so carefully cherished and held onto would fall into the hands of another equally hungry LA dream chaser.”

In Apostle Peter & The Last Supper Snt. Martinian’s journey through faith is a lot more direct and obvious, being a faith based film, none-the-less it was a fascinating challenge to discover a man who went against the entire empire of Rome for the quiet feelings of his personal beliefs and became the first Roman Christian martyr.

As appose to the character of Frank in Road To The Well, who is going through a much more modern existential crisis where he is just numb, and then as with “Crime & Punishment” or “The Stranger”, is thrust into centre of a murder and his life changes forever.

In Echoes Of You my character eventually loves faith in himself and his artform (the piano) after holding on for his entire life and then something remarkable happens.

I find myself internally oscillating in an emotional and artistic sense between Anselm Kiefer, Enrique Martinez Celaya, Sima Jo, Nicola Hicks, Peter Howson. Once these artists reached me in a spiritual sense, they became guardians of paradise, standing at the gates, holding off the barrage which is Modernism.

Our fractured culture makes its attempt to intrude and rip up patches of our cultivated gardens. However paradise grows of its own accord as well in unpredictable directions which flourish by their own making.

The famous speech by Iago “put money in thy purse” from Shakespeare’s “Othello”, I must have heard hundreds of times when I was starting out auditioning for drama schools, it’s a favorite among monologue choices for actors. And yet right before the beginning of this piece they overlook an outstanding bit of poetry and a metaphor for the discipline to cherish your inner world, it starts off “Virtue, tis a fig! Tis inside ourselves that we are thus or thus, our bodies are our gardens which to our wills our gardeners.”

I don’t believe that artists are separate from the rest of humanity, the concept of the ivory tower, but the arts are inherently a humanitarian pursuit and that paradise is like a seed that you plant within your soul that grows out to your fingers, your voice and all that you manifest comes from a core that is the self. That art exists within a strong belief in love for oneself which stands as the guardian to the essential problem of who we are and what we stand for.

Laurence Fuller, photo cred; Brian Earle

An artist’s voice becomes is the individual’s creation, that is pulled from what has ultimately affected the individual on a daily basis. Leon Kossoff just died which I found tragic when I heard the news one of the best artist working today, a painter who through daily meditations on and assimilating history into his soul, realized his own voice. And built upon who he was, what he wanted to tell the world from that place. I believe if you give over all of yourself to your art with a commitment to achieve whatever the emotional qualities you are trying to create, even if it really costs you something in the end, if you keep showing up and delivering with an open heart your best work, more will come.

Dan Schneider Interviews Laurence Fuller On Acting / January 23, 2020 by Laurence Fuller

Film Busters Interview / January 23, 2020 by Laurence Fuller

This interview was originally published in Film Busters

We like to start off with the easy questions here at FilmBusters, so what is your all time favourite film and why?

You say this is a simple question, and in one moment I think of Julian Schnabel’s first film “Before Night Falls” and then his second in “Basquiat”, now his most recent in “Eternity’s Gate”. To be as passionate feelingful and devoted as his subjects Reinaldo Arenas, Basquiat and Van Gogh were and then to and then in these three biopics that make art out of these men’s lives, like a life in itself can be a work of art, taken in, reimagined and portrayed by a group of skilled crafts people, in honor of that humanity is such a beautiful thing.

And then I think of Nicholas Winding Refn’s stark retro exciting and provocative films, Tarantino’s satisfying rewriting of history. The Safdies contemporary take on the gritty New York style that was once Scorsese’s domain. Scorsese and the light he has shined on many important and exciting subjects from the Dalai Llama to the mafia and realized these visions with such mastery.

Arronosfky’s originality. Both Spielberg and Ron Howard’s respective ability to pluck the heart strings. PT Anderson’s commitment to a free and existentialist approach to creation that somehow through talent and showing up results in accidental masterpieces every damn time! And I resent you for putting me in the position where I have to decide and take on all the successes and failures of one film to the exclusion of all the others. Even within the context of all of them, I think of Barry Lyndon and I compare it to my feelings about 2001 Space Odyssey that there within the conversation between the two in my mind plays out a story of a rogue conman climbing the aristocracy through the side entrance finding his foot landing cleanly on each rung until a power struggle with his step son destroys him, and in 2001 an epic poem of a film that allows for a more visceral experience of time than any scientific theory could illuminate for me.

Or each character Philip Seymour Hoffman created from his early days as a journey man in one or two scenes here and there to his operatic intensity in Sydney Lumet’s “Before The Devil Knows Your Dead”, to his on screen battle of wills with Meryl Streep in “Doubt”. Then with almost prophetic finality in “The Master”, the epitaph to an artistic legacy redefining what it meant to be a screen actor, the Oedipal conflicts between the two, the fully realized social experiments which ended up being their characters. And between all these sorts, I feel a nostalgia for for Scorsese’s gangster films “Gangs Of New York”, “Goodfellas” and “Casino” which informed the masculine power struggles of my adolescence and ideas about American ambition, now I cannot wait to see “The Irishman”.

I had the pleasure of watching your new short film ‘Echoes of You’, which may I say was quite fantastic, with a sterling performance from yourself. Could you give us an overview of what “Echoes Of You” is about?

In one sense it’s about showing up to the task as an artist, fully committing to the fine art tradition in faith that it will make the world a better place for you having participated in it. In a more general sense it’s about teaching a man to fish. That conundrum we face when confronted by someone in need, that we ourselves are to be depleted if attending to everyone else, left empty. Yet just leading by example sometimes can be an exceptional gift. To be a positive role model. Leaders are put in this position all the time, people look to them for guidance when lost wading through the unknown complexities of modern living.

The interesting thing about being an actor, is you get to see people interpreting your behavior in all sorts of ways, sometimes spot on, sometimes you wonder what planet a person is on. Either way the receiving end of what we do is completely out of our control, when I was younger and out there auditioning for drama schools and I began to realize that it was actually a very liberating experience, you also just get used to the notion ‘ok well if you guys don’t to take me there’s dozens of other places out there who will recognize my talents’, and we are fortune to live in a world where there are many options. The competition for everything is much higher but so is access to a wide range of opportunities.

Most of my life I’ve been performing for ghosts, I suppose there’s something Romantic about that, I find them to be the most reliable guides. Often the living can’t separate their own agendas from what is great art, an all too human flaw, for which men and women should not be blamed, because I am human too and I have an agenda. I hope that it is right and will in the end do good for the world and make other people’s lives better for having experienced it, but it’s my agenda none the less. Ghosts don’t have an agenda, and their lives are subject to the machinations of history, history as dialectic, history as an open source of for the story of one’s own life and time to be directed and lived out as a piece of art in itself. You can see in the fullness of someone’s life who they really are, what they stood for, what they accomplished, what they left behind and what you chose to watch or take in from what they left.

In all of that is something about love, my character carries out the greatest act of love by showing this boy how to play this song he wrote in honor of his father. It was a gift from the heart, which the boy then had the emotional intelligence to see the benefit of, the will to carry out and transcend.

How was your experience working under Henry Quilici?

Obviously the extra weight was quite difficult, but I got used to working with another human being on top of me, eventually when it came time to shooting we decided that I should no longer be acting underneath another person, that this would essentially be inauthentic. However once Henry and I were standing on the level I could hear him better and see his face more clarity so I could receive his direction better.

There’s a huge difference when it comes to working with directors who are facilitating a group of artists to do their best work, and someone whose more interested in personal gain, same goes for the cast your working with and the whole team entirely. Some of the best experiences of my life have been on set. There’s a feeling of a family, when you come into an ensemble who are all in it to create something special. Henry was such a director and he brought out the best in all of us.

It’s an odd thing to exist as an entity, whose function as a work of art is to allow others, the director, the writer and producers to use as the raw materials for their creation, as well and contributing our own interpretations.

To make anything of worth you have to have that sort of conviction in your own ability to create what you know to be good work. As long as your constantly improving your artistic abilities everyday learning from the artists you respect what you create will be good work, as long as you know it to be good work, then does it even matter what anyone else thinks? Of course it’s nice to be recognized and have people celebrate my films, but for me that just serves as motivation to make more. “Echoes Of You” in particular, has turned out to be a very popular piece.

I would also however be really interested to make a film that vehemently splits a room. That people both love and hate on a large scale. I remember seeing the reviews for “A Single Man” the weekend that came out the front page of the two top newspapers in London on the counter, one read something like ‘“A Single Man” falls short’ one star, the other “A Single Man” a triumph!’. Later I was able to ask Christopher Isherwood’s (author of the original novel) widow Don Bachardy in that same livingroom the famous David Hockney portrait took place about their relationship and long marriage as each other’s muses, he told me it was passionate and always wrought with drama. I suppose that makes sense considering the response to the work.

Fine Art is in a constant dialog with history. Once it is a finished piece and put out into society then it is a drop in that river of either the fine art tradition which is a conversation that started as early as cave paintings to the stain glass windows of churches, to the Renaissance, to Romanticism, to Impressionism, post-Impressionism and then the Modern movement. Nothing is really outside of that narrative, if it is, then it is subversive and therefore still a part of the dialogue. Similarly it can be subversively traditional, like the rediscovery of a movement that happened in the past, yet may be considered passé today. But it still has to say something of value.

Laurence Fuller & Henry Quilici of Echoes Of You

I’ve done some films where I’ve been proud of the performances but the other aspects of production were maybe not to the same level. And maybe that is a big difference between film and theatre, that a great performance can save lesser production values of a piece of theatre, but a film has to have every department working to the highest standards or modern audiences will be turned off by it. The standards today for production are incredibly high, people expect the best, and competition has driven those standards higher and higher for everything. For a piece that’s intended for a general population for today’s audience, everything has to be brilliant. Which is great and also presents all sorts of challenges which didn’t used to be so vital.

So I knew with “Echoes Of You” that the script was brilliant, I’d met the director Henry through his colleague Cameron Burnett and worked with them both on another project. The first meeting with Henry Quilici happened at the end of last year shooting his USC short "Tweaker Speak” about a meth addict dealing with the demons of addiction as he tried to get his daughter back. A very different piece. I noticed the things Henry would say were very to the point, very clear, uncluttered by doubts or abstract theory, his notes always referred back to the story or to human experience.

Film strips of Peter Fuller

I found Henry to be incredibly clear about what he wanted, everything very specific in emotional terms, he spoke very subjectively and compassionately, not the sort of move your head a little to the left which can leave actors feeling like meat puppets and end up with mechanical performances. He worked as many of the best directors do, from the inside out.

In many ways I feel Echoes Of You is about time. Man and time have such strange relationship, as we exist in time but the way we experience it is never as it actually unfolds. As our internal clock passes with a tether to societies expectations of us, we too little consider the affect our actions are having on the people around us. The echoes of not just our voice in a cave, but our movements in the world each day. To show up each day sit down at the keys, explore the depths of our unconscious.

Echoes have are a vital component in the acting process, because what we end up becoming in a performance is an echo of that first reading of the script, and that feeling which bounces off the walls of our unconscious, the ever expanding and retracting self, is reshaped with every bump. Like throwing clay against a wall, picking it up and throwing it again against another. Time forms a totally new object, with the heart of the original idea, but with time and movement a new object entirely.

The time it takes for something truly special to emerge in our culture can be an arduous one, this is why it is so important for artists to have faith, to have the strength to step back and see a bit further into the future and into the past with all their actions.

For instance there is the intention to hit a piano key, the thought, the will to create music, the doing of it, the vibrations in wood and in the air which causes the sound and then there is the trace memory the sound makes into us. The next day the vibrations are gone but what is it that remains, what else can we call it but a feeling.

Pushing into these echoes of ourselves man finds again another feeling, another self, rewriting of ones own personal history reveals many selves splintered off into a kaleidoscope of you.

Even the best and brightest fall pray to doubts because of the time it can take from the conception of an idea to its real life manifestation. And yet there are moments that are eternal for us, moments which last in eternity as long as we last and when we give them to another they last forever in them. Those things we cherish that make the world better for our existing and their creation pushing forward a spiritual progress.

Screen Shot 2020-01-07 at 11.51.13 PM.JPG

The compassionate passing on to generations is important part of this story. If we chose to listen, the we can take the best of somebody with us on the hardest roads in life that stretch out before us. It can feel like whispers in the wind sometimes when we talk about something that has a deep and powerful resonance to us.

This piece made me think deeply about the affects of what I wish to leave behind. What marks in the sand I wish to make. We’re all scratching up the dirt at the moment, thousands of impressions made, often without thought for their affects.

What matters are not the constant floods of change which define our generation, but the development of the spirit, the inner world which we must cherish and rely on to provide us with hope.

In the week before shooting I read Viktor E Frenkel’s “Man’s Search For Meaning” in which he suggests the survivors of the concentration camps in Auschwitz of which he himself was a survivor, had something to live for, that they could cherish on the inside. That they had been touched by great works of art, literature, theatre and music and these memories of beauty, got them through.

Confronted with a boy who is living through possibly the worst conditions a child could be subjected to in our society, I think Andrew gave him all that he had, and aside from the odd sandwich and a place to crash, what he had to give was music, the stronger Andrew could instill this dream of music, the better chance that echoes had of speaking through all the overwhelming obstacles this boy had to encounter.

Henry I can see going on to work with Ron Howard, Brian Grazier, Spielberg, Ridley Scott and I don’t say that lightly, I think in time he has every chance to work as a filmmaker at that level. If I get the chance to be his Russel Crowe, once can only hope.

Your young co-star Zakary Risinger is quite the actor! How was your time working alongside him?

Zachary is an incredibly professional actor for being so young, of course these values have been instilled in him by his devoted mother, Heather Risinger, who was a pleasure to have on set. She told me recently that Zachary has since taken up learning the piano for real. I’m excited to see this young man’s career goes, I hear he’s already been cast in a number of TV shows and more interesting short films. He reminds me of the young Haley Joel Osment in that wisdom beyond his years.

The minimal use of spoken word in this film, means body language is key to putting across the emotional punch of the story. Did this make your job harder and was the lack of speech out of creative choice?

I knew for this piece specifically if it was structured for the effect of a beautiful karmic experience, that was designed to inspire compassion. That in itself is very difficult to accomplish, so it had to be real love, really beautiful and powerfully compassionate. It had to be the biggest moment in this man’s life. Bigger than winning an Oscar. Like being rekindled with the love of one’s life, seeing their child or anyone they have loved and felt really deserved it, become a success in the world. I knew I had to open up and be vulnerable in front of the camera, which is impossible to fake, the camera sees everything, it took digging deep and talking to the ghosts of my past.

That’s the only way to get through to people with this sort of message, is to speak the truth from the depths of your humanity and have faith that people will listen, because if it is authentic then, they will, they will. All the lead roles I’ve had so far in “Road To The Well”, “Apostle Peter & The Last Supper” and “Paint It Red” have been about a person losing their faith and then finding it again with stronger conviction in some other form later on, that is much the same with this piece too.

I saw this film as an opportunity to contribute to something beautiful. The biggest thing was finding the internal objects for what the piano meant to me and my journey. The struggle that I’ve been through as an artist, and the people in my life I’ve been doing this for. I saw the ghosts of my ancestors who I imagined knowing, what it would mean to them to see me on that stage, the underlying sense of loss knowing that I will never have that, I will never see their faces in that audience. But to live it out like Stanislavsky would say ‘as if’ for the rest of us living to enjoy.

The accent was one aspect to this performance, I’ve worked with an American accent a lot in LA it’s bread and butter. Speaking in my natural voice out here people say to me ‘you have an accent’, but everyone who speaks a language speaks with an accent and we learned that accent when we were young from the people around us. The same can be done in adulthood if need be.

Andrew is very masculine, and very feminine at the same time. That paradox is something I could identify with. I’m a heterosexual male, but I also feel left out of the discussion when it comes to rigid gender definitions, I feel misrepresented. In my daily practices of writing poetry and Martial Arts, I feel in touch with the extremities of both the masculine and feminine within myself. I wrote a poem about it which took me the better part of a year to finish, thirty pages of prose, representing the extreme forces of male and female within me battling it out for Elysium. In part I was inspired by three female artists in England right now who have depicted The Minotaur, there is this masculine sensual creature that has a physicality, a powerful frame, a capacity to rule as king of paradise and yet by that same token a beautiful emotional complexity as he sits reading through pages of poetry. There’s something amazing and compassionate about that to see the redeemable and positive qualities of this creatures contributions to the world when all else would see him as something frightening to destroy. Regardless of some of the more superficial representations of The Minotaur throughout art history, I feel there’s something a lot more genuine and passionate about these female’s extension of where Picasso left off, the myth of the minotaur. In the paradox of extremities of both the masculine and the feminine.

Is it true that you learnt to play the piano for the role?

Comme ci comme ca, yes I did but just the first half of the song, I only had less than a couple weeks before filming so I couldn’t go full Ryan Gosling in “La La Land”, though in my defense he had three months.

Henry's brother Max Quilici wrote the main theme to Echoes. The piece was so minimally and yet effectively done, I felt there was no way I could do this part without learning at least some of the piano in order to play this song.

I also came across a documentary preparing for the role called Pianomania, about a piano tuner for some of the world's best pianists. He was someone whose love for the piano extends beyond the performance, becomes almost an intellectual pursuit, like preparing for a role that one never acts. The language that he began to use to describe moments within a sound were complex, abstract and beautiful. The joy and the passion for the music then became a dedication to the development of someone else’s craft.

Did the research you have been doing on your father help you to grasp the resounding message of this film?

Yes, that informed a lot, my father was particularly concerned with the spiritual in art, the emotional content of a painting, the personal symbols and myths that each work in a body of work creates. That there essentially is a soul that was left in the mark of the artist. The mark he left behind was deep and far reaching and following that trail has led me to discover all sorts of interesting things about the world.

I’m coming to the end of the 4th draft of “The Peter Fuller Project” (working title) about my late father the art critic, Peter Fuller, it has been a personal pilgrimage of sorts to find my father. He was one of the most controversial figures in at 20th Century art world in Britain and had a growing reach out here in the US too, he wrote 15 books, started the magazine Modern Painters and was one of the most widely read writers on art during his time. His relationships with the top intellectuals and artists of his day were deep and provocative. Working on this project has been a lifelong passion, and studying my father’s writing as I developed into an artist in my own right has brought me a consolation I didn’t think was possible. My hope is when it comes time to making the film that I can connect with this character and therefore with the spirit of my father. He died when I was three and there are so many things I would have wanted him to witness in my journey, so many moments I wished he could have been there for and so many questions I wanted to ask him. Yet a lot of his ideas he did leave behind for me to discover for myself, so it’s like going on an epic riddle to discover who he was.

The story is primarily about the deep relationship he formed with the top art critic of his day, John Berger and the Oedipal struggle he had with his mentor to find his own voice, the subsequent ripple affect sent shock waves throughout the art world and the movement that was forming around him at the time which lead to a number of significant movements in art history and the founding of his magazine Modern Painters. There hasn’t been such a significant Master/Apprentice type relationship like that in the intellectual or arts circles in a long time and possibly the most significant in the field of art criticism, which is often too mystified or heady to create a narrative for the general public, but not in this case. I’m telling the story through a relationship with his best friend growing up who becomes a rival and am piecing this character together through the real people in his life and my own questions that would have wanted to ask him, as my way of putting myself in the script.

I also have a two poetry books and an art exhibition in the works, keep up with those projects here: http://laurencefuller.squarespace.com/blog

The emotional content of “Echoes Of You” could not have been more ideal to communicate to channel some of those parts of myself and the experience of finding my father through his letters, journals and articles. It will be interesting to see how these two intersect in time.

Just to round things off, who is your all time favourite Actor/Actress?

Five years ago, I was sat at a cafe on Sunset Blvd reading a script, when one of the greatest actors in history walks in, he wore a checkered shirt, was unshaved and probably hadn't showered that morning. I went to the bathroom to work up the courage to tell him how much his work had affected me and my life, when I got back he was gone. Two weeks later he died of an overdose. I was so heartbroken I had not expressed myself to one of my heroes when I had the chance, so I sat down and wrote this poem for Philip Seymour Hoffman;

Art is the belly button lint from when you forget to shower that morning

Art is your mismatched socks and uncombed hair.

It is the crack in your voice when you wake up in the morning

The courage to say I'm just as fucked up as you are, ain't that beautiful?

The hair that creeps up your wrist to the back of your hand as time ticks by

Art is the yearning to come to the deepest part of you and me, to the common inevitable loneliness we feel everyday. Without the pretense of perfection, just the stains on our shirt collar.

A George Grosz drawing of a homeless drunk with a cigarette hanging from his lips.

The grey that we swim through with cement on our lashes. Art is the light in our hearts.

The feeling that we miss and the new one that we gain from missing.

Rubble in the darkness, broken glass in the day. I'm lost either way, but dirty and broken I stand before life with hope for better days.

I don't know where I'm going but I remember everyday from where I came. How do you still love me, despite me?

I want to be someone else

I want to see something else

I want to touch my skin and feel scales, see with different eyes

Hear with ears that fucking listen properly

My beard is itching and my pants are down. My throat hurts and my back is all scratched and scarred, quick somebody get a camera.

I don't care that my eyes are red, they're suppose to be red I have responsibilities. Fuck it there's a drink in the fridge and art on the walls, let's talk.

I've developed 509 characters that will never be seen by anyone. I give everything I have to every performance. Even if they slap me in the face tell me I'm done, tell me I should have done it differently, tell me to get out the room and let the next one in. I hold my head up and do it again, to prove that I can. Not because I need a job, I have a job. But because this thing we're doing is important. Not that I'm important, but that years later that audience can be looking down a rough and broken road and see my face and the sacrifice I made for a dream. A moment between strangers and start piecing that road back together or walk over it despite all its bumps and potholes.

That's what you did for me. At 18 I sat in an empty London theatre, watching Capote, waiting to get into drama school along with 6,000 other hopefuls. An unreachable distance between that moment and my dream of being in films. I found hope in the courage of your performance to bare yourself completely in another's skin. I sent a text as the credits rolled "mesmerizing". I went home and spent what pounds I had left on PSH for the win. You won.

RIP Philip Seymour Hoffman (July 23 1967 - February 2nd 2014)

I love Philip Seymour because of his capacity for vulnerability. There is such strength in that. One of my favorite of his performances is Owning Mahoney. You get to see in this man, his intention was not a determination to win, he didn’t believe in himself enough for that, though he won it all, more money than most could dream of, he stayed at the table and negotiated himself out of every penny. If he’d really wanted to win he would have said thank you when he was handed exactly what he wanted no questions asked. Only an actor like Philip Seymour could have figured out and embodied the complexities of a character, though self-destructive, fascinating to watch.

Also I’ve always felt a great affinity with the work of Daniel Day-Lewis even to his Oedipus-like relationship to his father the Romantic Poet-Laurete Cecil Day-Lewis.

If it is a Method at all, it is a method to break the rules, a way out of stagnant thinking and rigid ways of being, into a lucidity, a more natural state. I’ve never felt more at peace than when inside of a character, never more at home than within a story, it exists as a sort of protection where I can be truly myself, and it is only Method Acting which I have found allows me this freedom. It was Daniel Day-Lewis who first showed me this was possible in cinema through his performances on screen.

I was 14 when Gangs Of New York came out, people have different opinions about the film as a whole, but what Day-Lewis did with Bill The Butcher, changed the course of my entire life. After I came out the cinema I immediately started reading the myths and stories about this man, remaining in character the shoot of the film and this illusive philosophy called The Method, which serious actors took on wholly and seemingly was only accessible to the greatest actors. I read every book I could find on the subject starting with Stanislavski's My Life In Art, finding a rich history of the craft which had preceeded me. I went back through all Scorsese’s movies and became obsessed with the collaboration between DeNiro and Scorsese.

Ironically I don’t think there’s more that can be said about Daniel Day-Lewis’ performances that can be read in the books of Stanislavsky, Strasberg, Adler or Sigmund Freud. But that his commitment to these ideals is a full one, which is really the rare thing, and that is an easy idea to put down in writing but the personal experience that he must inevitably go through over the course of a year in time, looks completely different than it does when it comes out in print.

There are two factors that play into this, one is the complete Mystification of what it means to be a "Method Actor". The other is that words can only take us so far in the discovery of a character, experience and experimentation are the real chariots which gallop us through the craft, which imagination can only design for us.

Day-Lewis does nothing to aid the confusion, as he so rarely speaks with any literal explanation of what he does in public. It seems he doesn’t consider it within the job description to expound on the craft of acting, or to detail an approach, and I think he’s right about that. He’s not an acting coach, he’s a leading man, would knowing the exact thoughts passing his mind in every frame of the film enhance your viewing of it? Probably not. The cinema after all is a projection of man’s dreams. Day-Lewis considers his audience after the fact, but in his devotion to the part, he considers them infinitely more than the actor who winks to his audience. He wishes to be subjective in the creation of the performance and then compassionate to his audience receiving that story. I understand his choice for ambiguity, I’m sure he’s also disappointed to see what is often a year of his life in preparation for a character reduced to a sentence or two in a tabloid headline. “Daniel Day-Lewis weaves 10,000 dresses in preparation for his latest film”. I've also found it to be troublesome to develop the necessary language, as so much is a preverbal.

At some point during my adolescence I found out that he attended BOVTS and so I set my sights on trying to get in, without expectation, as there were 5,000 applicants every year and only 12 places. I remember how exciting it was for me reading that letter of acceptance. Often during that time I would sit on the steps of the building and imagine what Day-Lewis' time here must have been like, the teachers often talked about him, about performances he gave which foreshadowed the greatness to come. The intensity he had about everything, he'd often stop by on his motor cycle to visit them. I tried to imagine what he had learned from his time there.

I was working with an acting teacher at BOVTS we were rehearsing one of the plays Bernard Shaw I think it was, restoration piece, during the break I asked him if he’d ever worked with Day-Lewis. He told me a story about a monologue Day-lewis was working on where he sat on top of a motorcycle flicking a lighter near the gas tank as he was threatening his father with his own suicide. He said the performance was so powerful he had chills, when he was finished he said ‘now go set the world alight’.

After Phantom Thread came out I wrote this poem inspired by his performance;

“Where is she in that crowd? Where does she run? What does it all mean when I watch that star light up the sky buzzing in the night, I can’t catch it and put it in my pocket can’t flit and flicker, hold on man, make dresses while you can, that’s all you can do, that’s what you were built for, I’ve cut silk shadows on the floor. Don’t get anxious and drop the balloons again.

She came in, to all that structure caused rupture to all the trodden footsteps left before, stomping on each one with dancing shoes tapping on my chest. I’ve slipped and lost my place, all those Gentry waiting for my grace and yet I’ve simply crumbled structures I built up, held cups slipped through my fingers, sudden stops in that mushroom soup. She would not come quietly with a purr but with the flamboyance of a roar. Took your medicine while you swam through all the memories, shook out those demons trapped and locked up down there, forgive them for rattling cages, they clutch the bars calling out and out it all seems different now. Strange romantics rumbling in you to stroke the cat once more. Not what you thought but what it is. Cat and bird or lion and eagle, both regal, maybe both at once, maybe spun like cotton and sowed to as a crest. Cut silk, pin the hem, wrap it all in fresh garments from places you’ve never been before, brush the dust up from the years gone by, your study making waves in the air with fabrics of new design.”

My favorite of Denzel Washington’s performances has to be “The Hurricane”, wrongly accused of crimes he did not commit, he spends his life fighting for justice. There is a man who fortifies himself in that prison cell, strengthens his mind and because he is strong in his convictions, he knows in his heart he did nothing to deserve the abuse inflicted upon him, with a young and passionate legal team who believed in him, they found the evidence needed to absolve him, he did not fall into Stockholm syndrome and he was able to counter his accusors with tort. Denzel’s performance is in that role really spoke to me; “From that moment on I would be a warrior scholar, I boxed, I went to school, I began reading… I gave up all the worthless luxuries that most inmates crave.. I made up my mind to turn my body into a weapon that would eventually set me free”. That sums up my feelings about artistic life, in some ways it will tie you to a way of life which demands your entire being, and an independence of spirit. To show the world who you are and what you have to offer. Most recently Denzel also delivered a beautiful yet largely overlooked performance as Roman J Israel, another piece about a man who looses his faith in only to find it again with stronger conviction later on.

Gary Oldman recently delivered an Oscar winning performance as Winston Churchill, beating out Daniel Day-Lewis the same year as “Phantom Thread” and though I loved every minute of his performance, it was big, bold, powerful, intelligent, masculine and yet at the same time vulnerable and childish. I loved his performance equally in “Tinker, Tailer, Soldier, Spy”

Joaquin Phoenix I loved him as the sly, manipulative, effeminate emperor in Gladiator and then when he started doing really experimental stuff with that strange documentary he did with Casey Affleck making all those quirky TV appearances, I was still with him, I got to see a press screening before there was much known about the movie and believed it was all real right up until it came out that it was a practical joke of sorts. Then in “Her” so emotionally resonant as he connects with this form of AI that surpasses him and rips his guts out. Then again in “The Master” he surprised all of us with this incredible come back opposite one of the all-time greats Philip Seymour Hoffman, the transformational character work he did on that for me solidified him as one of the best actors in cinema history and now I can’t wait to see what happens with “Joker”, apparently it’s brilliant too.

Speaking of which when I had the honor of being a part of The Heath Ledger Scholarship a few years ago, I wrote this poem for Heath;
“Forever a rebel in shackles, Chained to the screen as it flickers, 24 frames a heartbeat”

It has been a pleasure speaking with you Mr.Fuller! We really appreciate your time and hopefully we get the chance to speak to you again in the near future! You can watch 'Echoes of You' right here:

Miss Jackson Interview / January 23, 2020 by Laurence Fuller

One Movie Punch Interview / January 23, 2020 by Laurence Fuller

MODERN ART: DONALD WINNICOTT / March 8, 2020 by Laurence Fuller

MODERN ART: The Virtues Of Traditional Sensibility / March 8, 2020 by Laurence Fuller

Seeing Berger: The Virtues Of Traditional Sensibility

MODERN ART: Lee Grandjean & Glynn Williams / March 7, 2020 by Laurence Fuller

MODERN ART: The Arts Council Collection / March 6, 2020 by Laurence Fuller

MODERN ART: Hayward Annual 1980 / March 5, 2020 by Laurence Fuller

HAYWARD ANNUAL 1980

MODERN ART: Plus Ca Change / March 4, 2020 by Laurence Fuller

Plus Ca Change

MODERN ART: Et In Arcadia Ego / February 20, 2020 by Laurence Fuller

ET IN ARCADIA EGO

MODERN ART: Seeing Berger / February 20, 2020 by Laurence Fuller

SEEING BERGERby Peter Fuller

MODERN ART wins at HRIFF2020 / February 19, 2020 by Laurence Fuller

MODERN ART: Salvador Dali & Psychoanalysis / February 19, 2020 by Laurence Fuller

SALVADOR DALI & PSYCHOANALYSIS

MODERN ART: Hayward Annual 1979 / February 8, 2020 by Laurence Fuller

HAYWARD ANNUAL 1979

MODERN ART: Roger Scruton and Right Thinking / February 5, 2020 by Laurence Fuller

MODERN ART: A New Spirit In Painting? / February 4, 2020 by Laurence Fuller

MODERN ART: The Journey - My Father In His Own Words / February 3, 2020 by Laurence Fuller

MODERN ART Screenplay Wins 3rd Place at HRIFF 2020 / January 23, 2020 by Laurence Fuller

Estante Cinema interview / January 23, 2020 by Laurence Fuller

EC: Your acting is impressive when you need to be angry or upset. Is there a feeling that is challenge to an actor?

EC: Tell me how was to act in a biblic movie. Are you religious? If yes, you certainly hadn't difficult to develop your character. Is my thought correct or you see from another perspective?

EC: Echoes Of You received a beautiful production. Would you like to see a feature filme of it, or you think there are some works which deserves to be untouchable?

EC: Tell me how come is to work with Quilici and what are his qualities (as a director; as a person)?

EC: A personal question, do you have a dream?

Dan Schneider Interviews Laurence Fuller On Acting / January 23, 2020 by Laurence Fuller

Film Busters Interview / January 23, 2020 by Laurence Fuller

We like to start off with the easy questions here at FilmBusters, so what is your all time favourite film and why?

I had the pleasure of watching your new short film ‘Echoes of You’, which may I say was quite fantastic, with a sterling performance from yourself. Could you give us an overview of what “Echoes Of You” is about?

How was your experience working under Henry Quilici?

Your young co-star Zakary Risinger is quite the actor! How was your time working alongside him?

The minimal use of spoken word in this film, means body language is key to putting across the emotional punch of the story. Did this make your job harder and was the lack of speech out of creative choice?

Is it true that you learnt to play the piano for the role?

Did the research you have been doing on your father help you to grasp the resounding message of this film?

Just to round things off, who is your all time favourite Actor/Actress?

It has been a pleasure speaking with you Mr.Fuller! We really appreciate your time and hopefully we get the chance to speak to you again in the near future! You can watch 'Echoes of You' right here:

Miss Jackson Interview / January 23, 2020 by Laurence Fuller

One Movie Punch Interview / January 23, 2020 by Laurence Fuller

SEEING BERGER
by Peter Fuller