MODERN ART: Fine Art After Modernism / March 15, 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

FINE ART AFTER MODERNISM

by Peter Fuller, 1978

The London art community is very like a gymnasium. Every time you enter into discourse with your colleagues you first have to take a look around and see what posture everyone is adopting today. The collapse of the central, modernist consensus has led to exceptional enthusiasm among those who were once its High Priests for the volte-facing horse. For example, one critic, really quite recently, argued — and I quote — ‘the ongoing momentum of art itself’ is ‘the principal instigator of any decisive shift in awareness’. He dismissed all but a handful of ultra avant-gardists gathered around an obscure Paddington gallery as ‘obsolescent practitioners of our own time’. He assured us that the future would ‘overlook’ all but this minority he had identified.1 Thus he adopted the classical modernist position. Today, this same critic has spoken of his blinding experience on the road to Wigan; he is now urging upon us the joys and necessities of collaboration without compromise. I have never been of an athletic disposition : the sight of the vaulting-horse filled me with terror as a child, and it still does. Unfortunately, this means that those of you who have been following the overheated polemics and debates which have been going on within the art community, and in the art press, may therefore find many of my arguments, some of my examples, and especially my overall position, familiar. I can only apologize for my rheumatic fidelity to a position which expresses the truth as I perceive it. I hope you will bear with me.

When I was asked to come to this conference to discuss the artist’s ‘individual’ and ‘social’ responsibilities under the rubric, ‘Art: Duties and Freedoms’, I sensed, perhaps wrongly, the subtending presence in the very terms of the debate of that common, but I believe erroneous, assumption that the artist’s individual freedoms and social responsibilities stand in some sort of irreconcilable and potentially paralysing opposition which is somehow destined to reproduce itself in one historical situation after another.

In fact, there are many historical situations in .which this opposition cannot take us very far. For example, an artist who works under the ‘Socialist Realist’ system in, say, the USSR can fulfill his social responsibilities only by an apparently individualist defiance of his ‘social duty’, at least as that is externally defined by the official artists’ organizations, the Party, and the State. Not every artist who defies the ‘Socialist Realist’ system is necessarily exercising social responsibility; but for those who attempt through their art to bear witness to the truth as they see it, individualistic defiance constitutes social responsibility. Take Ernst Neizvestny : in all of the USSR there was probably no artist with a comparable individualistic, narcissistic energy. But Neizvestny rejected his so-called ‘social duties’ and harnessed his narcissism for the creation of new and monumental sculptural forms which function not only as a great visual shout for the exploited, the suffering and the oppressed everywhere, but also imply within the way that they have been made that there is hope for a changed and a better future.2

The situation for Fine Artists in Britain is very different, but here too the simple opposition of individual freedoms and social responsibilities does not work. The post-war Welfare State has invested the artist with no official ‘social duty’ which he can choose to transform into genuine social responsibility; in return for state patronage and support our artists are not required to depict cars coming off the production line at British Leyland, Party Conferences, or ‘glorious’ moments from Britain’s imperial past. Indeed, they are not required to do anything at all. The Fine Art tradition has thus become marginalized and peripheralized, and Fine Artists find they have been granted every freedom except the only one without which the others count as nothing : the freedom to act socially. It is only a mild exaggeration to say that now no one wants Fine Artists, except Fine Artists, and that neither they nor anyone else have the slightest idea what they should be doing, or for whom they should be doing it. Thus, far from there being an awkward tension between ‘social duty’ on the one hand and individual freedom on the other, it is possible to say that a major infringement of the freedom of the artist at the moment is his lack of a genuine social function. This, as I see it, is the paradox of the position of the Fine Artist after modernism. But how has this situation arisen?

Raymond Williams has pointed out how in the closing decades of the eighteenth and the opening decades of the nineteenth centuries the word ‘art’ changed its meaning.3 When written with a capital ‘A’ it came to stand not for just any human skill (as previously) but only for certain ‘imaginative’ or ‘creative’ skills; moreover, ‘Art’ (with a capital ‘A’) came also to signify a special kind of truth, ‘imaginative truth’, and artist, a special kind of person, that is a genius or purveyor of this truth. Subtending this etymological change was the emergence of a historically new phenomenon for Britain, a professional Fine Art tradition.

Given the state of national economic and political development, the arrival of this tradition was exceptionally tardy: the causes of this belatedness (which inflected the course of the subsequent development of British art) are to be sought in that peculiar lacuna in the national visual tradition which extends from the beginning of the 16th century until the emergence of Hogarth in the 18th. The medieval crafts had been eroded by baronial wars and technological advance and had fallen into terminal decay in the later 15th century; they were effectively extinguished by the mid 1530s. Although, as Engels remarked, a new class of ‘upstart landlords . . . with habits and tendencies far more bourgeois than feudal’ was coming into being at this time, a prevalent iconoclastic puritanism, associated with the dissolution of the monasteries and the formation of a national church, was among those factors which inhibited the development of a secular painting peculiar to this new class. At the level of the visual, Britain thus lacked a ‘Renaissance’: no ‘humanistic’ world-view emerged within a flourishing tradition of ecclesiastical representation, to transcend and supersede it, as happened, for example, in the Italian city states. In Britain the prior medieval tradition was literally erased during the Reformation.

Subsequently, the courts required only portraiture: competent practitioners above the artisanal level tended to be imported. Henry VII patronized a Flemish artist, Mabuse;

Henry VIII, Holbein. Successive monarchs employed immigrant painters: Scrots, Eworth, Gheeraerts, Van Somer, Mytens, Van Dyck and Lely. These artists brought with them a heterogeneous assortment of European modes. Although some took on individual pupils and apprentices, in no sense did this amount to a national visual tradition. The principal exception accentuates the predicament: Nicholas Hilliard arguably emerged out of the subtending artisanal tradition to produce a peculiarly English world-view of Queen Elizabeth and her courtiers. But Hilliard’s pictorial conception was that of a miniaturist who looked back towards the representational modes of medieval manuscript illumination. The retardate character of English painting can be gauged when one recalls that Hilliard — the most illustrious figure not only of Elizabethan painting but among all indigenous artists during the long visual lacuna — was born some seventy years after Titian. (Historical materialism has as yet no way of assessing how far this peculiar stunting of visual expression can be correlated with the precocious efflorescence of literature in the same period.)

The agrarian capitalists who consolidated their power in the 17th century created a demand for two limited but indigenous genres of painting, country-house conversation pieces, and sporting paintings — particularly of horses; but visual practice was suspended in a vacuum between aristocratic patronage and an open market. ‘Art’ and artists had yet to come into being. Horace Walpole believed this was ‘the period in which the arts were sunk to their lowest ebb in Britain’. Change came with Hogarth: he was conscious of the need to found a national visual tradition, and to oppose debased European imports. By making use of mass sale engravings, he forged a new economic (and aesthetic) base for image-making which opened a potential space (allowing for satire) between himself and the ruling class. This enabled him to refer to areas of experience — poverty, oppression, sexuality, work, criminality, cruelty and politicking — previously excluded from painting. Uniquely, he depicted the whole social range from the Royal family to the derelicts of gin lane. His real subject — rare enough in any branch of British cultural activity — was English society in its totality. But his project was only briefly possible. Although largely freed from agrarian class patronage, he opposed himself to the professionalization of painting, especially to the establishment of a national academy. He thus came into being between two traditions and was able to achieve something in terms of scope and audience which had never been before in English painting, and would never be again.

During the later eighteenth century, the outlines of the professional Fine Art tradition became increasingly discernible. It was characterized by the establishment of an open market in pictures. (This had the effect of turning the artist effectively into a primitive capitalist rather than a skilled craftsman.) The old system based upon apprenticeship and direct patronage broke up and was eventually almost entirely displaced. All sorts of related developments accompanied this change: art schools began to appear; professional organizations and institutions including a Royal Academy, were established; exhibitions open to the public, salons, journals dealing with modern art, professors of painting, and very soon museums too began to appear for the first time. None of these had existed previously. When we talk about the problems, duties, and freedoms of artists, even today, we are not talking about a transhistorical category, but about the achievements, difficulties, and potentialities — if any — of those who are working within a professional apparatus which came into being in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and which now appears to be threatened.

The emergence of the professional Fine Art tradition was associated with, indeed was a direct product of, the transformation of the economic structure in Britain by the emergence of industrial capitalism. It would be simple if we could say that professional Fine Artists emerged and expressed the point of view of the industrial bourgeoisie; but you have only to look at the pictures themselves to realize that this cannot be the whole story. In his discourses Reynolds may have yearned for a new ‘history’ painting which we might interpret as the metaphorical vision of a class conscious that it was forging its own history; but what he produced in practice consisted largely of portraits of My Lords and Ladies embellished with flourishes of the aristocratic, European Grand Manner. Similarly, in the early nineteenth century John Constable expressed the desire to develop landscape painting as a branch of ‘Natural Philosophy’. He made impressive advances in the precise representation of the empirical world in the richness of its momentary changes and the processes of its natural becoming. But even he seems to have been held back and inhibited in his work; the economic necessity of continuing to produce ‘country house portraits’ also seems to have involved him in the internal retention of the point of view of the rural landlord. Despite the sketches there is a peculiar identity between his known political views and the nostalgic, noonday stasis of many of his larger pictures, especially perhaps The Cornfield. Similarly, the main difference between the Royal Academy and the European salons lay precisely in the fact that it was a Royal Academy, whose finances were guaranteed by the monarch himself. Thus, although it is true to say that the new Fine Art tradition was a product of the industrial revolution, we cannot simply identify the practice of its painters with the vision of an emergent, industrial middle class.

The causes of this peculiar disjuncture lie deep in the history of the social formation in Britain: here I can do no more than indicate them schematically. Perry Anderson and Tom Nairn have pointed to the way in which capitalism was established throughout the countryside in Britain by the destruction of the peasantry, the imposition of enclosures and the development of intensive farming long before the industrial revolution.4 They have suggested that no major conflict arose between the prior agrarian class and the rising industrial bourgeoisie because these classes shared a mode of production in common: capitalism. Thus there was no real social, political, or cultural revolution associated with the coming into being of an industrial bourgeoisie. Although the latter effected the titanic achievement of an industrial revolution, socially, politically, and culturally — after surmounting the tensions which came to a head in the 1830s — they fused with the old formerly aristocratic, agrarian elements to form a new hegemonic ruling bloc with a highly idiosyncratic ideology. Thus that selfsame bourgeoisie which unleashed the transforming process of the industrial revolution, conserved the Crown, Black Rod, a House of Lords, innumerable other ‘ornamental drones’ and goodness knows what other clutter from feudal and aristocratic times: it developed no new world view peculiar to itself. Now it was precisely for the benefit of, and hence through the spectacles of, this highly eccentric ruling bloc that professional Fine Artists were required to represent the world. I believe that this why so much Victorian painting seems to us to combine heterogeneous elements, to possess, albeit unwittingly, an almost surrealist quality. I also believe that the famous flat or linear aspect of British art in part arises because the flattened forms characteristic of feudalism (e.g. in stained glass windows, altar pieces, and manuscript illumination) were never thoroughly challenged and overthrown by an indigenous bourgeois realism which emphasized the tangibility and three- dimensional materiality of things. The rise of the bourgeoisie in Britain culminated in Burne-Jones’s angels, and the flat ethereality of Pre-Raphaelitism, not in the concrete sensuousness of Courbet’s apples, rocks and flesh.

It is characteristic of ruling classes — even bourgeois ruling classes shot through with feudal and aristocratic residues and encumbrances — that they like to represent everything which is peculiar to themselves, their own historically specific values, as if they were universal and eternal. John Berger has demonstrated how the representational conventions of the professional Fine Art tradition, conventions of pose, chiaroscuro, perspective, anatomy, etc., came to be taught not as the conventions which they were, but as the way of depicting ‘The Truth’.5 The same was also true of the emergent ideology of art itself. Many artists, and the new practitioners of art history too, began to propagate the view that there was a continuum of ‘Art’ (with a capital ‘A’) extending back in an unbroken chain to the Stone Age. Thus they identified the images produced by the Fine Art professionals of nineteenth-century capitalism as the apotheosis or consummation of an evolutionary tradition of ‘Art’ almost magically constituted in theory without reference to lived history, with its ruptures and divisions.

This sort of thinking, exemplified in the lay-out of museums and public art galleries, helped to create what can best be called the historicist funnel of ‘Art History’. Art historians accepted as legitimate objects of study, even if they sometimes labelled them as primitive, a very wide range of images from, say, a decorated Greek mirror to a Roman mosaic, or a Christian altar-piece. Such things had served disparate functions within disparate past cultures. All that they had in common was that they were images made by men and women. On the other hand, from existing bourgeois societies art historians accepted only the particular products of the professional Fine Art traditions. Everything else was excluded.

This kind of distortion of history should not blind us to the fact that, say, in most feudal societies there was nothing which even approximated to ‘Art’ (with a capital ‘A’) and certainly no tradition of professional, trained Fine Artists who produced free-standing works for an open-market, nor any ideology which associated the creation of visual images with ‘specialness’, or the expression of individual, ‘imaginative truth’. Thus it was not ‘Art’ (with a capital ‘A’) that formed an unbroken continuum stretching back into the earliest social formations but rather the production of images of one sort or another which took very different forms in different cultures; in Western, medieval, feudal societies such images were often realized through manuscript illumination, stained-glass windows, tapestries, wall paintings, and so on: never through free-standing oil paintings on canvas.

By and large, the professional Fine Art Tradition in Britain served the composite ruling class very well; artists went to art schools where they acquired the skilful use of certain pictorial conventions which they then put to work in representing the world to the ruling class from its point of view. These conventions were capable of fully expressing only the area of experience peculiar to that class. Some artists tried to extend them, to put them to uses — such as the depiction of working- class experience — for which they were not intended; such attempts in Britain, however, tended to be mechanical. Because the British lacked a progressive bourgeois vision they could produce a Ford Madox Brown but not a Daumier or a Millet. The peculiar ataraxy of the bourgeois aesthetic in nineteenth century England goes far beyond subject matter; after Constable the attempt to depict change to find visual equivalents for ‘moments of becoming’ in the natural and social worlds simply freezes. The Victorian world view, as expressed through Victorian paintings, is one of stasis. Even in the later nineteenth century no indigenous minority tendencies like the Impressionism of France, Cezanne’s dialectical vision, or the later manifestation of Cubism arose; all these aesthetics were characterized by a preoccupation with the depiction of change and becoming. Compare, say, a Rossetti painting with an Alma Tadema. These artists occupied polar opposites within the British Fine Art tradition and yet today we are more likely to be impressed by their similarities than by their minor differences, so narrow was the range of painting in this country in the last century. In the absence of a progressive bourgeois culture, artists fulfilled the ‘social duty’ demanded of them by the ruling class almost with servility and, despite the ideology of artistical ‘specialness’, without even that degree of imaginative distancing which led, on the continent, to the creation of Bohemia.6

Although the work of the professional Fine Artists thus dominated the visual tradition, as they re-constituted the world in images for the bourgeoisie, throughout the nineteenth century we can trace the gradual emergence of modes of reproducing and representing the world based on conventions distinct from those of the Fine Art tradition. Between 1795 and the turn of the century lithography, or chemical printing from stone, had been invented; within thirty years a colour process was in commercial use. By 1826 photography too had come into being.

Now it is sometimes suggested that it was simply the invention of these new techniques which led to the displacement of the Fine Art tradition. I cannot accept this. Professional Fine Artists, with their aesthetic conventions and their ideology of ‘Art’, remained the unquestioned, culturally central, hegemonizing component within the visual tradition until the last quarter of the nineteenth century. The professional Fine Art tradition was not displaced until the competitive, entrepreneurial capitalism (whose interests it had come into being to serve) was itself superseded in the late nineteenth century and the earliest years of the twentieth century, by the emergence of the monopoly capitalist system. Among the myriad of global changes associated with this monumental upheaval of the base was the emergence of a new kind of visual tradition, peculiar to the new social and economic order. This constituted a far more profound transformation of the way that images were produced and displayed even than that which had been brought about by the rise of the professional Fine Art practitioners in the eighteenth century. The complexity, diversity, and sheer ubiquity of the visual tradition under monopoly capitalism, involving new mechanical, electrical, cinematic, and most recently holographic means of reproducing all manner of static visual images, entitles us to refer to it as the first ‘Mega- Visual’ tradition in history — a tradition which of course soon included moving as well as static images.

Now the question which really confronts us when we talk about the duties and freedoms of Fine Artists today is what has happened to the old professional Fine Art tradition in this radically changed situation. I have previously used the example of Henry Tate, of Tate Gallery fame, to illustrate this change. The example is a good one and so I hope those of you who have heard or read of it before will forgive me for citing it again.

Henry Tate was born in 1819 and apprenticed to a grocer at the age of thirteen; by the time he was twenty our budding capitalist had his own grocery business; aged thirty he had a chain of shops; aged forty he became partner in a firm of sugar refiners and soon sold off the shops to buy out his partner. In the early 1870s, at the depth of the slump, he patented the revolutionary Boivin and Loiseau sugar refining process rejected by his larger competitors. He then scrapped his original capital investment in the old method, gambled all on the new plant, and won. Soon after he patented the sugar cube. His profits rocketed. As befitted a self-made, entrepreneurial millionaire he frequented the annual exhibitions at the Royal Academy where he bought great numbers of paintings by Hook, Millais, Orchardson, Riviere, Waterhouse and so on to decorate his Streatham home. He gave these to the nation as the kernel of the Tate Gallery, which opened in 1897; and two years later he died.7

Tate had made his very considerable fortune in bitter-sweet competition with other sugar refining families, the Macfies, Fairries, Walkers and Lyles, but within a matter of years of his death all these rival firms had been swallowed up into a new swollen amalgam: Tate and Lyle’s. The growth of such monopolies meant that the kind of individualist, capitalist trajectory which Tate had so successfully pursued in the nineteenth century was much rarer in the twentieth, and with the endangerment of that species of bourgeoisie began the withering, atrophy, and shunting out towards the margins of cultural life of the academic, professional Fine Art tradition which had so efficiently represented the world to the nineteenth century middle classes.

Of course, this is not to say that the new monopolists and their burgeoning corporate empires did not require artists to produce static visual images for them as every ruling class in every known culture had done in the past. On the contrary they had an insatiable, unprecedented greed for images. At first some of the most famous Fine Art professionals benefitted from this. For example, in 1886 Levers, the soap firm, spent a grand total of £50 on advertising; but the previous year their leading rivals, Pears, had taken on Thomas Barratt as a partner. Barratt passionately believed in the value of the new-fangled advertising methods and in 1886 he spent £2,200 in purchasing Millais’ Bubbles to promote his company’s product. To go back to Lever’s accounts we now see that in response, over the next twenty years, they spent a total of £2m, or £100,000 a year, on advertising.

This increase reflected a general trend in Britain and America. In their important study, Monopoly Capitalism, Baran and Sweezy report that, in America, in 1867 expenditure on advertising was about $55m; by 1890 this had reached $360m; and by 1929 it had shot up to $3,426m. The authors point out, ‘from being a relatively unimportant feature of the system [the sales effort] has advanced to the status of one of its decisive nerve centres. In its impact on the economy it is out-ranked only by militarism. In all other aspects of social existence its all pervasive influence is second to none.’8 This may be to exaggerate the relative importance of the sales effort; nonetheless there should be no need to emphasize its significance, or the important role which visual images play within it.

As early as 1889, M.H. Spielmann, writing in The Magazine of Art, was able to predict, ‘we may find that commerce of today will, pecuniarily speaking, fill . . . the empty seat of patronage which was once occupied by the Church’.9 Certainly, the development of monopoly capitalism led to the efflorescence of a new public art, but what Spielmann failed to foresee was that the old Fine Art professionals would get less and less of the new cake. The demands of the monopolists soon created an entirely new profession which established, much as the prior Fine Art profession had done in the late eighteenth century, its own professional organizations, institutes, training courses, journals, codes of practice, and ideology, which notably excluded both concepts of artistic ‘specialness’ and imaginative truth. Ir fact, it might be said that just as monkish manuscript illumination constituted the dominant form of the visual tradition in certain feudal societies, free-standing oil painting produced by Fine Art professionals constituted the dominant form in certain entrepreneurial capitalist societies; but under monopoly capitalism, wherever it established itself, the dominant form of the static visual tradition was advertising.

This is of very great importance. For example, there is a tendency among the more cavalier type of Marxist critics to endeavour by a deft sleight of hand to equate the crisis in the arts, i.e. the indubitable decadence of the professional Fine Art tradition, with the alleged crisis of monopoly capitalism itself. But if we attend to the visual tradition as a whole, and not just to the Fine Art tradition, however much it goes against the grain we are compelled to concede that far from being in a moribund condition monopoly capitalism must be diagnosed as being unnervingly alive. I have already mentioned holograms: it is no accident that their development and display has been sponsored by Guinness. Within a few years, perhaps sooner, we will have to endure the sight of forty foot bottles projected into the night sky over the Thames, and no doubt 100 foot three-dimensional images of British Leyland trucks will be roaming above the hills and valleys of Wales.10 You may not like this prospect: I personally view it with dismay. It does not however indicate the tottering visual bankruptcy of the existing order.

Perhaps more common is the argument that in some sense or other advertising does not really count; nowadays the old continuum theory is sometimes dressed up in smart, leftist fancy dress, significantly usually by those whose leftism is first and foremost an academic, art-historical method. We tend to hear a lot about the enduring ‘autonomy’ of art, and so on. But this position can be defended only through the kind of sophistry which accepts, say, the markings on a Boetian vase, or Lascaux cave paintings, decorated Greek mirrors, Cycladic dolls, Russian icons, or Italian altar-pieces as art, but which denies that billboards, colour supplements, or posters belong to this category while going on to assert that certain (but not all) piles of bricks and certain (but not all) grey monochromes do. I believe that it really only makes sense to talk about the visual tradition as a whole as constituting a relatively enduring and autonomous cultural component. There will always be images but under different social formations they will emerge in different forms and be put to different uses. There is nothing about the institutions or ideology of the professional Fine Art tradition which makes it more likely to endure and to continue to occupy the centre of the visual tradition than, say, the great medieval tradition of manuscript illumination.

Indeed if we look at the Fine Art tradition from the closing decades of the nineteenth century until the present day it is clear that not only has it become progressively less central culturally and socially but internally it has itself been ebbing away. In the late nineteenth century in Britain theologians developed a concept which can usefully be adapted to the Fine Art situation. They found themselves pondering a persistent problem in Christian dogma: Jesus was manifestly often wrong in his judgements and limited in his knowledge yet how could this be if he was really very god of very god, who was, of course, supposed to be omnipotent and omniscient. Charles Gore, a theologian of the Lux Mundi school, attempted to resolve this tricky problem by reviving the idea of kenosis, or divine self-emptying. He held that the knowledge possessed by ‘The Christ’ during his incarnate life was limited because in taking to himself human nature god had actually emptied himself of omniscience and omnipotence. Now it is just such a process of kenosis or selfemptying that characterizes the Fine Art tradition from the late 1880s onwards. Paintings and sculpture acquire an ever more drained out, vacuous character, as if artists were voluntarily relinquishing the skills and techniques which they had previously possessed. But those skills have not vanished altogether. They have been picked up by advertising artists.

W.P. Frith was one of several Victorian artists who complained that the new advertisers were pillaging and pirating his paintings for their own purposes: his picture, The New Frock, had been incorporated without his permission into an ad for Sunlight Soap. If we look at an image like his better known Derby Day we can see how easy it was for this displacement to occur. According to Frith himself, Derby Day was the culmination of fifteen months’ incessant labour. He employed a team to produce it, including 100 models, a photographer who took pictures on the race-course for him, and J. Herring, a specialist, who added the horses. Frith knew exactly whom he was aiming his picture at; when it was first shown at the Academy the crowds were so great that they had to put a special rail round it. Frith then issued a popular print which sold in tens of thousands. It is inconceivable that any professional Fine Artist today would invest so much time, labour, and skill in a single picture. Even if he did so, it is even less conceivable that a crowd of thousands would throng round at its first exhibition. However, the elaborate work on location, the use of numerous models, the hiring of specialist skills, and indeed the eventual mass audience itself are all typical of the way in which the modern advertising poster artist constitutes his images. Indeed, Frith’s image was so close to the conventions of the new tradition that quite recently it was simply taken by the Sunday Times’s advertising agency and blown up with a superimposed slogan to fill their bill-board slots.

Whatever judgement we may wish to reach on Frith’s project, we cannot deny that he was deploying definite skills which enabled him to relate effectively to an audience capable of responding without difficulty to what he was doing. The same is also true of the modern advertising artist. Like Frith’s, his skills too are identifiable and teachable. This is by no means so manifestly true of what the professional Fine Artist does today. A recent sociologist’s study reported that ‘half the tutors and approaching two-thirds of the students of certain art colleges agreed with the proposition that art cannot be taught.’ Understandably the authors then asked, ‘In what sense then are the tutors tutors, the students students, and the colleges colleges? What if any definitionally valid educational processes take place on Pre-Diploma courses?’ The authors reported that nearly all tutors ‘rejected former academic criteria and modalities in art’ — but none had any other conventions to put in their place.11 The kenosis within the professional Fine Art community has reached such an advanced stage that although the apparatus of a profession persists, no professionalism, or no aesthetic, survives to be taught; such a professionalism would be dependent on the social function which the Fine Artist does not have.

Why then has the professional Fine Art tradition not withered away altogether? Why has advertising not supplanted Fine Art in a more definitive sense? Even if we cannot attribute absolute transhistorical resilience to ‘Art’ (with a capital ‘A’), we can say that the Fine Art tradition has acquired a relative autonomy, through its institutional practitioners and intellectuals, which allows it to reproduce itself like the Livery Companies of the City of London, or the Christian Church, long after its social function has been minimalized and marginalized. Its survival has also been assisted by the disdain of the intelligentsia for the new profession of advertising. John Galbraith has pointed out that to ensure attention advertising material purveyed by billboards and television ‘must be raucous and dissonant’. Fie writes: ‘it is also of the utmost importance that’

advertisements ‘convey an impression, however meretricious, of the importance of the goods being sold. The market for soap,’ he continues, ‘can only be managed if the attention of consumers is captured for what, otherwise, is a rather incidental artifact. Accordingly, the smell of soap, the texture of its suds, the whiteness of textiles treated thereby and the resulting esteem and prestige in the neighbourhood are held to be of the highest moment. Housewives are imagined to discuss such matters with an intensity otherwise reserved for unwanted pregnancy and nuclear war. Similarly with cigarettes, laxatives, pain-killers, beer, automobiles, dentifrices, packaged foods and all other significant consumer products.’ But, Galbraith goes on, ‘The educational and scientific estate and the larger intellectual community tend to view this effort with disdain... Thus the paradox. The economy for its success requires organized public bamboozlement. At the same time it nurtures a growing class which feels itself superior to such bamboozlement and deplores it as intellectually corrupt.’12

Although the intellectuals knew that they deplored advertising and indeed all the mass arts, they were much less certain about what images they wanted the residual professional Fine Artists to produce, though they knew that they wished them to continue to be ‘real’ artists who took as their content and subject matter not soap-suds but all that was left after the kenosis, i.e. art itself. This is spelled out in the critical writings of the American modernist-formalist critics. Clement Greenberg, for example, has written: ‘Let painting confine itself to the disposition pure and simple of colour and line and not intrigue us by associations with things we can experience more authentically elsewhere.’13 Geldzahler, a sub-Greenbergian hatchet man of late modernism, has explained that art today ‘is an artists’ art; a critical examination of painting by painters, not necessarily for painters, but for experienced viewers.’ This ‘artists’ art’ was, he said, limited to ‘simple shapes and their relationships’. He thoroughly approved of the fact that ‘there is no anecdote, no allusion, except to other art, nothing outside art itself that might make the viewer more comfortable or give him something to talk about.’ Very soon, of course, even the intellectuals preferred the texture of soap-suds, or whatever, and so there were very few viewers either. This did not worry Geldzahler unduly: ‘There is something unpleasant in the realization that the true audience for the new art is so small and so specialized,’ he wrote. ‘Whether this situation is ideal or necessary is a matter for speculation. It is and has been the situation for several decades and is not likely soon to change.’14

In Britain, the position of the residual professional Fine Art tradition was worse even than in America. There was almost no basis for the acceptance of modernism among the intellectuals with the exception of those few who were themselves involved in the art community. Furthermore, in contrast to the US, the domestic picture market in modernist work failed to boom. Indeed, after the last war an impartial observer might well have come to the conclusion that the Fine Art tradition was about to contract into a residual organ, rooted in the Royal Academy, but with perhaps a ‘populist’ penumbra, serving the needs of a shrinking squirearchy and the continuing demands of clergy, army, Masters of Oxford and Cambridge Colleges, chairmen of the board, sporting men, etc. for portraits of themselves, their fantasies about the past, and animals, boats, and trains.15 But in 1954 Sir Alfred Munnings, sometime President of the Royal Academy and campaigner against ‘Modern Art’, wrote to The Daily Telegraph describing a day out at the Tate with Sir Robert Boothby when they roared with laughter at new English works which, he wrote, ‘today rival the wildest and drollest of French and other foreign cubists, formalists, and expressionists of the past’. The ‘drolleries’ were to flourish, and culturally, at least, to eclipse the residual academic works.

For just at the moment when the professional Fine Art tradition in Britain seemed destined to go the way of manuscript illumination, politics stepped in to save it. Although, unlike the CIA,16 MI5 did not choose to promote modernism throughout the world as a cultural instrument in the Cold War, the post-war Welfare State became heavily involved in the patronage of it. Keynes advocated increased intervention in the economy to ameliorate the worse effects of capitalism. One of the first institutions of the Welfare State to be set up after the declaration of peace was the Arts Council. So far as visual arts policy was concerned, the Arts Council committed itself to the exhibition and subsidy of the professional Fine Arts tradition alone; it commissioned nothing and imposed no constraints on artists of any kind. According to the Council, professional Fine Artists were supposed to be ‘free’ in an absolute, unconditional sense. The early Arts Council reports make clear that this policy was intended to show the world that in the so-called ‘Free World’ artists produce works of great beauty and imaginative strength, whereas the Soviet ‘Socialist Realist’ system produces only hollow, rhetorical, academic art officiel. Keynes himself wrote of ‘individual and free, undisciplined, unregimented, uncontrolled’ artists ushering in a new Golden Age of the arts which, he said, would recall ‘the great ages of a communal civilized life’.17 Moreover the Arts Council itself was no more than the cherry on the top of the state patronage cake. This included increased subsidies to museums and above all the rapid expansion of the art education system.

The injection of money into the Fine Art tradition on what has come to be called the ‘hands-off’, or totally unconditional basis, has proved an unmitigated failure. Far from producing the new Golden Age, the splendid efflorescence envisaged in the Keynesian dream, it has ushered in an unparalleled decadence. Piles of bricks, folded blankets, soiled nappies, grey monochromes, and what have you, can hardly demonstrate to those nasty Russians, or to anyone else for that matter, the creative power with which ‘freedom’ invests our artists in the West.

What went wrong? The real comparison was never between the residual Fine Art professionals in the West and the ‘Socialist Realists’ in the USSR, but between their respective visual traditions as a whole. Thus advertising artists served the interests of the ruling organizations in the West just as ‘Socialist Realists’ served the Party and the State in the USSR. The majority of artists under monopoly capitalism were thus hardly more ‘free’ than under the Soviet system. As servants of the great commercial corporations they were required to produce visual lies about cigarettes, beer, cars and soap suds, whereas Socialist Realists were required to produce parallel lies about the condition of the peasantry and the proletariat in the Soviet Union. Monopoly Capitalism thus had its art officiel, too, which, if anything, was more pervasive, banalizing, and destructive of genuine imaginative creativity than its equivalent in the USSR.

Meanwhile, it soon became apparent that whatever freedoms subsidized professional Fine Artists in Britain had been given, they had been deprived of the greatest freedom of all: the freedom to act socially. What were they supposed to be doing? For whom were they supposed to do it? They just had to be artists, and neither the Arts Council, nor the Tate, nor anyone else was prepared to tell them what that meant. Some sought to escape merely by imitating what the Mega- Visual professionals were doing: hence Pop Art. But it became more and more apparent that the subsidized Fine Art professionals were becoming like Red Indians herded into a reservation. Their state hand-outs meant that they could not die a decent death, nor were they likely to drift off and take up some other activity in the world beyond the art world corral. And yet, by the very fact that they were artists, they were insulated from lived experience, from social life beyond the art world compound. As people on reservations are wont to do, many committed incest: i.e. they did nothing but produce paintings about paintings, and train painters to produce yet more paintings about paintings, leading to an endless tide of vast, boring, thoroughly abstract pictures, expansive in nothing except their repetitive vacuity. Others of course went insane, and, abandoning their ‘traditional’ crafts altogether, raced round the reservation tearing off their clothes, gathering leaves and twigs, sitting in baths of bull’s blood, getting drunk, walking about with rods on their heads, insisting that their excrement, or sanitary towels, were ‘Art’ — either with or without the capital ‘A’.

Recently it has become quite clear that something has to be done; but there is little agreement about what. False solutions abound: in 1978, a crude ‘Social Functionalism’ was paraded at several exhibitions, most notably the justifiably slated ‘Art for Whom?’ show at the Serpentine. Richard Cork, a recent convert to this tendency, ended a polemical article with the sentence, ‘Art for society’s sake ought to become the new rallying-cry and never be lost sight of again.’18 The kind of work he appeared to favour was either the most deadening, dull, derivative, work carried out in a quasi-‘Socialist Realist’ style or the sort of modernist, non-visual art practice which packages bad sociology and even more dreadful Lacanian structuralism and presents them as art because they would not stand up for one moment when presented in any other way. Now it may be that those who are peddling this solution at the moment are no worse than naive. Time will show. But one would be foolish to forget that it was under just such banners as ‘Art for society’s sake’ that the National Socialists made bonfires of ‘decadent’, that was very often truthful, art. When ‘society’ is posited as an unqualified, homogeneous mass in this way we are forced to admit that we have had altogether too much of ‘Art for society’s sake’. But, in the end, it is probably not necessary to take this ‘Social Functionalist’ charade too seriously. To revert to our earlier metaphor it is rather as if some Red Indians within the reservation rebelled by dressing up in factory workers’ overalls, without, of course, ever leaving the confines of the corral. This sort of protest tends to fade out through its own ineptitude. Unlike the ‘Social Functionalists’ I believe that it is absurd superficially to politicize overt content and subject matter and then to shout, ‘Look, we are acting socially!’ But, despite everything I have said, I believe the professional Fine Art tradition is worth preserving. Why? Simply because it is here and only here that even the potentiality exists for the imaginative, truthful, depiction of experience through visual images, in the richness of its actuality and possible becoming. This is not an idealist assertion: despite all that I have said about the ideological character of the concept of ‘Art’, I consider that certain material practices — namely drawing, painting, and sculpture — preserved within the Fine Art traditions cannot themselves be reduced to ideology — least of all to bourgeois ideology. It is not just that these practices have a long history antedating that of ‘Art’ and artists: the material way in which representations are imaginatively constituted through them cannot be reproduced through even the most sophisticated ‘Mega-Visual’ techniques in static imagery. (The hologram, for example, can only reproduce a mechanically reflected image.) For these reasons despite its roots in emergent bourgeois institutions, despite the historical specificity of its conventions, despite the narrowness and limitations of its past achievement in Britain, and its virtually unmitigated decadence in the present, despite all this, I believe that the professional Fine Art tradition should be defended. For this to happen, the art community must change position rather than posture. From a new position one can act effectively in a different way; a new posture is just for show. Concretely, this means the pursuit of changes in the existing system of state patronage, changes in art education, and changes in the museum system. For example, it could involve the development of machinery for implementing group or community commissioning of artists (with a right of rejection of the end product); the introduction of mural techniques courses into the Pre-Diploma syllabus; and an overhaul of the currently disastrous procedures through which the Tate makes its acquisitions in modern art. The Arts Council itself may have much to learn from those small-scale, local traditions of image-making which, far from the failure at the centre of the modernist compound, have persisted in relation to small, disparate, often localized, but very definite and tangible publics.

Although I regard measures of this kind as necessary, I see them as also being relatively independent of the question of aesthetics. The process of modernist kenosis means that the professional Fine Art practitioner has no aesthetic, by which I mean, in this context, no identifiable skills and no set of usable representational conventions in the present. There are those, including many ‘Social Functionalists’, who simply wish to revive the old 19th century bourgeois aesthetic and mechanically to apply it to contemporary social and working- class subjects. Self-evidently, this is a disastrous course. However, in more general terms, it may be said that what the professional Fine Artist lacks, whether or not he is reinstated with a genuine social function, is that initial resistance at the level of the materiality of his practice which Raymond Williams has described as the necessary constraint before any freedom of expression is possible, for writers; deprived of 19th century pictorial conventions, the Fine Artist appears to have no language. One way out of this impasse may be to begin to emphasise again the specificities and potentialities of those material practices, drawing, painting and sculpture, which are not reducible to the ideology of ‘Art’. Indeed, not all bourgeois achievement within these practices is necessarily so reducible: the classical tradition and science of ‘expression’, for example, owed much to the scrutiny of certain material elements of existence, and biological processes, which, though mediated by specific social and historical conditions, are not utterly transformed by them.

The preservation of the Fine Art tradition, and of these material practices, seems to me a political imperative. If we look to the possible historical future, I am not prepared to put it more strongly than that, to a future of genuine socialism, one can foresee that the genuinely free artist will be in a culturally central position again. In such a society, the truthful, imaginative, creative depiction of experience through visual images would take the place of both the drab ‘Socialist Realism’ we see in the USSR today, and the banal spectacle of corporate advertising. These artists will be free to act socially not in any travestied sense, but in the fullest sense, to act socially, that is, within a socialist society. What will their works be like? We do not know. We cannot even be certain that we know what the experiences they will be endeavouring to represent will be like. Nevertheless, in the present the visual artist must dare to take his standards from this possible future. He must, and I say must simply because in effect he has no choice if he is to produce anything worthwhile, try to produce, a ‘moment of becoming’, or a visual equivalent of that future which realizes a glimpse of it as an image now. The artist who does this, through whatever ‘style’ or composite of styles in which he works, will embody exactly that socially responsible individualism which I set out by hinting at.

It has sometimes been said that when I talk about ‘moments of becoming’ I am talking about a mystical or quasi-religious experience. I cannot accept this view. I am not advocating some vague utopianism. On the contrary, I would argue that we can learn about our future potentialities only by attending more closely to our physical and material being in the present. (If the concept of transcendence means anything to me it is transcendence through history, not above history.) Like the Italian Marxist, Sebastiano Timpanaro, I believe there are elements of biological experience which remain relatively constant despite changes at the historical and socioeconomic levels.19 One such relatively constant component was effectively suppressed, or conspicuously ignored, for social reasons, by the Victorian Fine Art professional aesthetic: significantly, that was the experience of becoming itself. The new aesthetic which we can only hope to realize in momentary fashion, the new realism in effect, must contain an equivalent for that experience.

The physicist A.S. Eddington — who was, admittedly, an idealist ‘in the last instance’ — once contrasted the nature of the experience of colour with that of becoming. Eddington’s point was that the experience of colour is wholly subjective: what he calls ‘mind-spinning’, or mental sensation. Colour bears no resemblance to its underlying physical cause or its ‘scientific equivalent’ of electro-magnetic wave-length. Thus Eddington believed that when a subject experiences colour he does so at many removes from the world which provides the stimuli: ‘we may follow the influences of the physical world up to the door of the mind’, he writes, ‘then ring the doorbell and depart.’ But he goes on to say that the case of the experience of becoming is very different indeed. ‘We must regard’, he wrote, ‘the feeling of “becoming” as (in some respects at least) a true mental insight into the physical condition which determines it. If there is any experience in which this mystery of mental recognition can be interpreted as insight rather than image-building, it should be the experience of “becoming”; because in this case the elaborate nerve mechanism does not intervene.’ Thus Eddington concludes: ‘ “becoming” is a reality — or the nearest we can get to a description of reality. We are convinced that a dynamic character must be attributed to the external world. I do not see how the essence of “becoming” can be much different from what it appears to us to be.’20

I believe that imaginative image-building has to attempt to find a visual equivalent for becoming: indeed, the hope for a new ‘realism’ may depend upon this. Some of those artists who are attempting to use their freedom with social responsibility by taking their standards from the future may at least hope to make some progress by further exploration of this possibility.

MODERN ART: In Defence Of Art / March 14, 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 DEFENCE OF ART

by Peter Fuller, 1979

This paper is a revised, version of a contribution to a conference on ‘Art, Politics and Ideology’ held at Dartington Hall in November 1979. It is provocative and polemical in tone: in part this is the result of the circumstances under which it was delivered. The conference had been called by those who sought to reduce art to ideology. The art practitioner, Victor Burgin; the nappy-liner, Mary Kelly; and the structuralist-feminist art historian, Griselda Pollock were among those invited to give papers. This text was intended to oppose such reductionism from a left position. It asserts the dependence of art on 'relatively constant’ elements of human experience and potentiality.

In the museum at Baghdad there is a carved, white, marble head of a woman known as The Lady of Warka. The sculpture belongs to the predynastic period of Sumerian civilization: it was made some time between 3200 B.C. and 3000 B.C. when the great temple was constructed on the white-washed walls of the Anu Ziggurat at Uruk. The Lady of Warka belongs to an era before the Sumerians, indeed, as far as we know, before men and women anywhere had developed a written language.

Today, she is but a fragment. You can see that the nose has been broken. Perhaps this proud head once belonged to a body. The eyes were almost certainly encrusted with shells and lapis lazuli, and her brow adorned with jewels and ornaments in precious metals. But if — to use the sort of jargon I want to avoid — the ‘signifier’, or physical object through which the sculpture has been realized, has fragmented through time so, too, has the ‘signified’. We know something about Sumerian society, about the growth of large-scale, centralized agriculture among these peoples, and about their ‘enlightened’, authoritarian, theocratic political structures: but our knowledge is at best hazy, incomplete, and distorted. When we gaze into the hollow eyes of The Lady of Warka we are looking at an expression which has come down to us from the very moment of becoming of human civilization itself. What — to use another of those phrases — the ‘signifying practices’ of the artist who realized it in stone were, we cannot say. Is this a sculpture of a priestess, a goddess, a princess, or a courtesan? We do not know, and, probably, we never will.

The Lady of Warka, Sumerian sculpture, Museum of Baghdad

Despite this, The Lady of Warka is not opaque to us. Her great age may give her an authority she did not have in her own time, but she is neither merely a document, nor a relic. Even after the passage of millenia upon millenia, this sculpture has the capacity to move us directly. More than that, I find myself able to formulate the judgement that of all the Sumerian sculptures which have survived that I know, this one is among the best, if not the best. The Lady of Warka manifests an extreme restraint and economy in its handling of planes and yet, at the same time, the delicacy and softness of the modelling, especially around the cheeks, mouth and chin, is such that the work seems expressive of pride, power, and sorrowful pessimism.

Not all Sumerian sculpture was as good as this. The Lady of Warka belongs to a brief sculptural efflorescence which seems to have sprung up on the threshold of the founding of the great Sumerian dynasties. Of course, she did not emerge from nowhere. The style — including that planar restraint — is characteristic of that which can be seen in animal amulets of the period. But not only is The Lady of Warka superior to almost everything surviving from its own time: nothing comparable has survived from several centuries afterwards. The Lady of Warka is of such quality that we can still recognize it as good when set beside sculpture of any age.

But what am I doing when I look back through aeons of time into a marble face from a civilization than which none is more distant from our own and pronounce, ‘This is good.’ How is it possible that this remote work can move me and communicate actively to me? For bourgeois art historians this is hardly a problem. For example, Andre Parrot happily chirps that ‘despite mutilation’ ‘this mysterious, impenetrable face still remains the perfect synthesis of “eternal Woman”.’ He continues:

She is truly Eve, a Mesopotamian Eve, with lips closed but seeming to express a melancholy disenchantment, a certain disdain towards life — life which is never really fulfilled, since pain and sadness far exceed the satisfaction and joy experienced by man. Such is the message conveyed by the Woman of Warka, which ranks among the greatest sculptures of all time and whose unknown author is worthy of place beside Michelangelo.

Now those of us who, according to the deathless prose of the conference prospectus, are working within ‘a definite field — that of a radical left intervention’, know just how to treat such writing on art. Parrot speaks of ‘Eternal Woman’. He even says, ‘Across the millenia, woman has never changed.’ Nonsense!. There are only specific women in specific historical circumstances, and what they are like is determined — in the last instance, of course — by the mode of production and the resultant social relations prevailing in the particular historical moment in which they live or lived. And as for ‘Man’ in general, that’s even worse — a piece of pure bourgeois ideology, sexist of course, and — unspeakable horror — humanist. And what’s all this about ‘pain and sadness’ inevitably exceeding ‘satisfaction and joy’? Subjective individualism! Doesn’t poor, bird-brained Parrot know that ‘pain and sadness’ are historically specific phenomena? When the mode of production is transformed and Communism realized, men and women will abolish ‘pain and sadness’ and live, presumably forever, in ‘satisfaction and joy’. Parrot is just projecting his petty bourgeois ideology on to an isolated fragment from an entirely different ‘signifying system’. After all, we know so little about the lost kingdoms of Sumer: men and women might never have experienced such things as ‘pain’ or ‘sadness’ there. They quite possibly lived for ever, too!

Fine. That’s the easy bit. Exit poor, bedraggled Parrot in a flap with his beak between his wings. But I look back into the face of The Lady of Warka and she moves me still. Do we, on the left, in our ‘definite field’ have a better explanation of the pleasure which I and others derive from this work, of the experience of it as ‘good’? Marx himself was at least aware that here was a problem. He wondered how, if the Greek arts were bound up — as they manifestly were — ‘with certain forms of social development’, they could still afford us artistic pleasure and even, as he saw it, ‘count as a norm and as an unattainable model’. (Marx primarily had literary works in mind: later, I will say more about the problems created by the direct transposition of literary models into discussions of visual aesthetics. Here, I merely wish to signal the difficulty.) But Marx’s explanation of the historical transcendence of works of art is hopelessly unconvincing. He argues that the charm of Greek art lies in the fact that it belongs to ‘the historic childhood of humanity, its most beautiful unfolding’, and that we find pleasure in it much as a man finds joy in the naivete of a child. Marx must have known that this just would not do: the argument survives only in an unpublished draft. Apart from the fact that Greek art is anything but manifestly naive, what Marx says is absurdly general. It does not allow for discrimination between the art of one ancient civilization and another, nor between works of the same civilization. Not all the art of the past seems to me equally good: it does not give me the same amount of pleasure. Am I to suppose that such differentiations are entirely explicable in terms of quantitative variations in the ‘naivety’ effect? The pleasure I derive from The Lady of Warka evidently cannot be wholly accounted for by some vague reference to the joy of what Mary Kelly might call the ‘Post-Partum’ period of human civilization.

There is a long legacy of attempts by Marxists to do better than Marx on this question without lapsing into Parrot-like ‘bourgeois universalism’. One argument insists that what makes a work historically transcendent is the vividness or ‘realism’ of its portrayal of the specific historical moment of its production. I hereby offer a hundred pound reward to anyone who can produce what I judge to be a credible account of The Lady of Warka in these terms! Reference to planar reductionism and the flat, fertile expanses of Sumerian agriculture are not likely to be accepted! What about this sculpture speaks of Sumerian society in 3000 B.C., or thereabouts, rather than any other historical moment, at any other time, in any other place?

There is, however, another line of reasoning which says that although Marx acknowledged that the production of art was historically ‘bound up with certain forms of social development’, he failed to see that so, too, was the consumption of art. Thus Marx did not see that modern admiration for Greek art owed less to some trans-historical essence in the works themselves than to aesthetic ideologies or philosophies prevailing in modern societies and their corresponding institutions.

I am prepared to go a long way with this argument: the high status enjoyed by, say, the Mona Lisa seems to me largely, though not quite entirely, institutionally or ideologically determined. But that residue which I reserve in the phrase ‘not quite’ seems to me much bigger, and of far greater importance, in many other works of art, including The Lady of Warka, which is hardly over-celebrated by art ideologists. I object to the contemporary ideology explanation when it is put forward as a total account, in part because it assumes that the rest of us — i.e. those who do not subscribe to the theory — are all such dumb-bunnies. We may think we are moved by such and such a work, that it has a powerful effect upon us, but oh no! that’s just an illusion: that is simply the prevailing ideology, excreted by contemporary cultural institutions, creeping into us.

I believe that by learning to look, and to see, one can — admittedly within certain limits — penetrate the veil of ideology in which the art of the past is immersed. The Mona Lisa may be a good painting or not; but because one emperor, once, had no clothes does not mean that all emperors, or empresses, everywhere and at all times are necessarily parading themselves naked. Indeed, the point of this excellent little story has always seemed to me to be that courageous, empirical fidelity to experience can, under certain circumstances at least, cut through ideology. Experience is not wholly determined by ideology: it is very often at odds with it, causing constant ruptures and fissures within the ideological ice-floes. And it seems to me that our experience of works of art, of any era, need be no exception to this if we learn to attend to the evidences of our eyes.

Let me give you another example. I often work in the British Museum Reading Room and, when I do so, I enjoy going to have a look at the Parthenon marbles at lunch-time. Now, evidently, these marbles have been torn out of their original physical, social, religious, political and ideological contexts. They have been shattered and eroded, wrenched from a position high on a Greek temple and stuck inside a (relatively) modern museum, where, since the beginning of the last century, they have been subjected to all sorts of imperial, nationalistic and other kinds of institutional and ideological hyping and cultural chauvinism. It would be simply foolish to pretend that all this did not mediate the experience of the works. Such mechanisms should be brought to light, analysed, discussed, and exposed: nonetheless, it is equally important to stress that they are not everything. We have no right to assume that the work itself only exists as a dissolved substance within its variable mediations, that it is inextricable from them.

Indeed, if you get to know the Parthenon frieze, you will begin to discover that some of the sculptors who worked on it were much better than others; you will be able to see this for yourself by using your eyes. Some were just not very good at expressing their experience of, say, doth in stone. They depicted folds in robes or drapery through rigid slots, dug into the marble like someone furrowing the surface of a cheese with a tea-spoon. Others worked their materials in such a way that their representations seem to have lightness, movement, and translucence: the stone breathes and floats for them. All the Parthenon craftsmen originally worked under identical ideological, social, and cultural conditions; the conditions under which their work is displayed in the British Museum may be very different, but they are nonetheless equally uniform. These differentials, however, remain, unaltered by the passage of time, and still discernible to attentive study of the work today.

Such distinctions are neither ‘merely technical’, nor trivial. They touch upon the difference between a good work, and a bad one, between a run-of-the-mill product of a particular tradition — which can be explained in terms of ideology and sociology — and a masterpiece, which cannot. John Berger, easily the best post-war art critic writing in English, recently made a self-criticism of his useful little book, Ways of Seeing. He wrote that ‘the immense theoretical weakness’ of that work was that he did not make clear what relation exists between what he calls ‘the exception’, or genius, and ‘the normative tradition’. This is a question which increasingly preoccupies me. The differences in quality of various sections of the Parthenon frieze can be intuited through empirical experience, through using our eyes: they are impervious to other kinds of analysis. I believe that the discernment of such differences is very much part of what is valuable in the pursuit and experience of art: they touch upon the point at which, in Ernst Fischer’s phrase, art makes manifest its capacity to protest against ideology.

But if neither of the principal groupings of Marxist explanations about pleasure in the art of the past stand up, must we return to Parrot and his bourgeois universalism? There is another way: one which involves the recognition of quality and aesthetic experience from within a materialist Marxist tradition. The great philosopher, Herbert Marcuse, was among those who struggled for this view: although I cannot accept all his aesthetic, let alone his political, formulations I have much more respect for him than for those neighing philistines inside the ‘post-structuralist’ corral who are intent upon submerging art into ideology and Consigning aesthetics to oblivion. Marcuse’s last essay, The Aesthetic Dimension, has recently been published in English. In it, he wrote: ‘Marxist aesthetics has yet to ask: What are the qualities of art which transcend the specific social content and form and give art universality?’ That is a question which, through the face of The Lady of Warka, I wish to keep in the forefront of a socialist concern with art. Marcuse has no inhibitions about saying that aesthetics must explain why Greek tragedy and the medieval epic — again his examples are primarily literary — can still be experienced as great or authentic (and for me that is the key word) today, even though they pertain to ancient slave society and feudalism respectively. ‘However correctly one has analysed a poem, play or novel in terms of its social content,’ he writes, ‘the questions as to whether the particular work is good, beautiful and true are still unanswered.’

Perhaps I should make one thing clear: I am not advocating that the social and ideological analysis of art should be abandoned as a futile pursuit. Far from it, I believe that an adequate map of the terrain, and also its economic and social determinants in terms of specific markets and publics for particular kinds of art-practice, is essential. If we do not have such a map how are we to know where ‘the good, true and beautiful’ may be lurking? Thus I readily acknowledge my indebtedness to my friends and colleagues, Andrew Brighton and Nicholas Pearson, whose excellent empirical research is showing us all just how inadequate was the map of contemporary art-practice with which we had been working. Just as a critic can rupture ideology by attending to his experience of the work, so, in the sphere of sociology (or history) of art the researcher can do so, in another way, by finding things out. Thus Brighton and Pearson are bringing our attention to vast tracts of art activity, and also of underlying art-market activity, which no one had bothered to investigate before. This sort of art research is very valuable indeed. There is another brand of so-called ‘left’ art history which, in the words of one of its practitioners, is so worried about not ‘sliding down the slippery unfenced slope of “the empiricism or the irrationality of that’s how it is and of chance” ’ that it never rises from its Polytechnic desk, or lifts its eyes beyond incestuously idealist ruminations about the nature of its own methodology, and its none-too-specific ‘interventions’. I would support Brighton and Pearson’s work over this sort of thing every time: nonetheless, I must insist, and I am sure they would agree, that the drawing up of the map may be a necessary prerequisite to the criticism of art, but it is not, in or of itself, identifiable with such criticism.

I will return to the nature of my critical practice and to the problem of identifying the material basis for aesthetic judgements; but first, I must be clear and explicit about the political position from which I am working. I therefore wish to make absolutely clear in what sense I am working within the Marxist tradition, and what sort of ‘Marxism’ I repudiate, indeed radically oppose myself to.

I want to talk in terms of excruciating simplicity: as I see it, Marx’s work emerged historically as a demand for justice for the oppressed, in particular for the proletariats in advanced, industrial countries. The early Marx had a vision which was in many respects idealist, utopian and humanist, of a form of society in which human potentialities could be fully realized. I am not interested in going back to that vision of the young Marx, retrieving it, and reviving its content as a diagram for the future: the now famous 1844 Manuscripts are a young man’s text, fragmented, disjointed, shot through with residues from Marx’s very early intellectual life and intimations of things he was to formulate more precisely, later on. There is much here that won’t stand up today. Nonetheless, I insist that the fact that Marx had such a felt, affective vision of what men and women could become, as against that which they were, tells us something essential about the nature of his project. Marx’s thought, at least as I understand it, developed continuously, with no ‘epistemological break’, out of his conviction that the world could be changed, that men and women could lead happier and more fully human lives in forms of social organization other than those under which they were living.

But Marx was no religious idealist: he knew that this better world had to be realized through the historical process, or not at all. With Engels, he thus developed a method, historical materialism, whose aim was the comprehension of that process in its totality. Marx envisaged that men and women would thus be enabled to act more effectively upon it, and through it, and might thereby succeed in changing it. But, paradoxically, the findings of historical materialism seemed to set limits upon the efficacy of even collective action: the determinative influence of the economy in every aspect of social life was exposed. In contrast to the classical economists, Marx described the historicity of the economy and demonstrated that, broadly speaking, changes in the mode of production produced profound changes in social, political and cultural life. Marx came to describe the economy as a base, or structure, upon which a superstructure was erected consisting of such elements as law, politics, philosophy, religion, art, etc., the specific ideological forms of which were determined by the base.

The base/super structure metaphor — and it was only a metaphor — was at once among the most illuminating of Marx’s insights, and among the most problematic of his formulations. The metaphor, as one might expect if Marx is even approximately right, owes much to the specific historical moment in which it was produced. It is permeated by a characteristically 19th-century mechanism and over-deter- minism. Yet, Marx was surely correct in emphasizing that the processes of physical production had hitherto possessed a causal primacy over other social activities and that, as it has been put, ‘they form a framework for all other practices which all other practices do not form for the economy in the same sense’. Now the elaboration of the exact relations between the economic, political, cultural and ideological orders was recognized as a problem even in the era of ‘classical’ Marxism. When it came to specifics, Marx himself was often contradictory. In one moment, for example, he recognized the ‘universal’ or trans-historical aspect of certain works of art; in another, he reduced art to an ‘ideological’ product of the base. Engels introduced certain significant qualifications into the theory, recognizing the ‘relative autonomy’ of components of the superstructure, and the determinacy of the economy only in the last instance.

Marx also described the division of society into classes whose differing economic interests necessarily led to conflict. But the composition of these classes was not naturally given:

the industrial proletariat, for example, made itself, but only under the conditions determined by a capitalist mode of production. In Marx’s view, the contradictions inherent within this mode of production would lead eventually to the intensification of the struggle between capital and labour, the resolution of which would bring about the establishment of socialism (i.e. the ownership of the means of production by those who produced the wealth) and eventually realize that vision with which he had set out, the idyll of communism.

Now Marx possessed one of the most astonishing intellects in history: it is possible to become almost drunk with the breadth, complexity and range of his thought. His intellectual achievement is without parallel. However, it is important to emphasize that Marx left behind, not a system, but a series of giant torsos of an argument which he never completed. Furthermore, as we might expect if he was in any way right, much of his work is permeated with 19th-century ideology. In particular, Marx possessed a teleology characteristic of so much 19th-century bourgeois thought: thus he had a vision of the better world of socialism, and he tended to argue as if what he once called the ‘inexorable laws’ of history were necessarily and inevitably working in that direction. Hence the notorious ‘prophetic’ element in Marxism. Furthermore, Marx often sought to legitimate the method of historical materialism by invoking and over-deploying parallels from the natural sciences — a practice which was to lead to disastrous pseudo-scientific schematizations of his thought among some of his followers. In fact, many of Marx’s predictions and analyses were quite wrong. For example, his political scenario for the immediate future had as its lynch-pin the immiseration of the proletariat in advanced industrial countries: this did not happen. Furthermore, in no such countries anywhere in the world have the working-class revolutions which Marx so confidently envisaged taken place. Monopoly capitalism developed new forms of a far greater resilience than would have seemed possible to Marx. Meanwhile, bourgeois economists developed techniques which, when applied by politicians, could at least delay and submerge the manifestation of the critical inherent contradictions within the capitalist system.

Even more problematically, in those predominantly peasant societies in which socialist revolutions did take place, they did not lead to those great advances in human happiness which classical Marxism might have led one to expect. Socialism improbably arose out of the ashes of Czarist Russia; but with it came not so much the dawn of an era of human freedom, as the implementation of a new and vigorous brand of tyrannous oppression and repression. I do not wish ritually to rehearse again here all the horrors of the Soviet State, the lies, systematic perversion of the truth, the gulags, mass murders, concentration camps, the repressive State and Party apparatuses, the secret police, the savage destruction of the peasantry, and the suppression of every impetus towards a ‘fully human condition’. To call all this ‘Stalinism’ is just too easy: it implies — a view Marx would have rejected immediately, of course — that somehow all that was one man’s fault. The point I am making is that the phenomenon we call ‘Stalinism’ is, even today, the central problem for all of us working within the Marxist tradition; even those of us who, like myself, entered that tradition after those successive waves of disillusionment, up to and including 1956, which accompanied the realization of the true character of the Soviet State. Stalinism is not something we can deftly define out of socialism by saying that it does not concern us because we want ‘the real thing’. Marx wanted that, too: but the point is that when the economic base was transformed in Russia, capitalism and feudalism were destroyed, and socialism implemented — there can be no fudging this through talk about ‘State Capitalism’ — the ‘real thing’ diverged hopelessly from the vision.

Why then, if that is what I think, do I insist upon situating myself within the Marxist tradition? The answer is that I am still committed to a this-worldly struggle for justice for the oppressed, who include, but who are by no means synonymous with, the industrial proletariat. I further consider that ‘Man’, by which I mean men and women as a species, possesses potentialities for social reciprocity which cannot be fully realized under existing social structures, and that it is possible to envisage the realization through the historical process of forms of society in which those potentialities would be more completely fulfilled. I thus share with Marx an insistence upon the need for a theoretical method which attempts to grasp the historical process in the totality of its complex actuality and becoming. Historical materialism seems to me the only method we have which can begin to do this. Its past failures, however, have cautioned me against those who would make of this method, or any purportedly derived from it, a way of getting at absolute, ‘scientific’ truth — or of achieving that ‘total’ view to which it aspires. Further, despite certain questions and reservations, I consider that Marx’s assignment of a primary determinative power to the economy, and his account of the division of society into conflicting classes whose contradictions will demand resolution in history, are basically right. For all these reasons, combined with my unwavering respect for Marx’s formidable intellectual achievement, his open-mindedness, and empirical insights, I consider myself to be practising within the Marxist tradition.

This said, I must quickly add that in my view that tradition in the West has been fractured, even fragmented, by the prism of Stalinism. There is no way in which one can, in good faith, look back upon the texts, theories, and historical and political analyses of Marx, from our present historical moment, and simply pretend that Stalinism is not an issue. There have, however, been a range of responses, some in good faith, and some not; some compatible with one other, others not. Divested of any tranquil confidence in the inevitability and blissful consequences of the achievement of socialism, Marxists in the West now occupy a wide range of world views which lead them into varieties of political alliance throughout the spectrum of the left.

In sharp contrast to what has been, over the last ten years at least, a dominant tendency in the Marxism of many Western intellectuals, I have found myself forming the view that a central flaw within classical Marxism was its lack of any adequate conception of man’s relationship to nature, indeed of man, not as an ideological entity, but as a specific species, limited by a relatively constant, underlying biological condition, dependent upon natural processes and a natural world which he cannot command. This focus emerged during and immediately after a prolonged therapeutic experience of psychoanalysis; a process which limits one’s sense of infantile omnipotence, of the magical changeability of all phenomena through the agency of one’s own wishes, exposes the inadequacies of the intellect on its own, puts one back in touch with affects, the concreteness of one’s own body, the bodies of others, and the reality of the external world. Psychoanalysis leads one to realize that there is more to life than what goes on in the head. These general shifts in orientation were given theoretical spine and muscle through my reading of a number of contemporary Marxist writers — including Perry Anderson, Raymond Williams, Edward Thompson, and, surprisingly perhaps, most significantly, Sebastiano Timpanaro. (I say surprisingly since, unlike myself, Timpanaro is no friend of psychoanalysis.)

Timpanaro constantly emphasizes that materialism must begin by affirming the ‘priority of nature over “mind”, or if you like, of the physical level over the biological level, and of the biological level over the socio-economic level.’ Marxism, however, was born as an affirmation of the decisive primacy of the socio-economic level over juridical, political and cultural phenomena, and as an affirmation of the historicity of the economy. It emerged as a methodology of human action; its ‘moment of becoming’ was, of course, that of the revolutions of 1848. But it thereby ran the risk of ‘evading or underestimating that which is passivity and external conditioning in the human condition’. That is why so many of those suffering from infantile omnipotence are attracted to Marxism. Although Marx himself did not ignore or deny physical and biological nature, for him, it constituted ‘more a prehistoric antecedent to human history than a reality which still limits and conditions man.’ With Labriola, Timpanaro is thus led to insist that ‘our dependence on nature, however diminished since prehistoric times, persists amidst our social life’. Thus he writes:

It is certainly true that the development of society changes men’s ways of feeling pain, pleasure and other elementary psycho-physical reactions, and that there is hardly anything that is ‘purely natural’ left in contemporary man, that has not been enriched and remoulded by the social and cultural environment. But the general aspects of the ‘human condition’ still remain, and the specific characteristics introduced into it by the various forms of associated life have not been such as to overthrow them completely. To maintain that, since the ‘biological’ is always presented to us as mediated by the ‘social’, the ‘biological’ is nothing and the ‘social’ is everything, would once again be idealist sophistry.

Timpanaro’s position is not ‘humanist’: he recognizes the validity of polemic against ‘man in general’, in so far as that concept is used to assert the naturalness of such things as private property, or class divisions. But Timpanaro stresses that man as a biological being, endowed with a certain (not unlimited) adaptability to his external environment, and with certain impulses towards activity and the pursuit of happiness, subject to old age and death, is not an abstract, or ‘ideological’ construction, nor yet a sort of superseded, prehistoric ancestor to social man, ‘but still exists in each of us and in all probability will still exist in the future’. Certainly, Timpanaro would never speak of ‘Eternal Man’, or ‘Eternal Woman’. Not only does he stress that the species, like any other, is subject to biological evolution, but he draws attention to the probable eventual extinction of the species itself and of the world which it inhabits. Nonetheless, he points out that certain significant aspects of the human condition appear to be very long-lasting indeed : these, as we shall see, are of great importance in any attempt to understand our capacity to derive pleasure from the art of the past.

For Timpanaro, while retaining Marx’s division into structure and super-structure, and re-affirming ‘the preponderant part played by the economic structure in determining the major transformations of juridical-political institutions, cultural milieux and forms of collective psychology’, is yet able to write ‘One cannot help but recognize also that there are non-superstructural elements in cultural activities and institutions.’ He goes on to say that this admission does not in any way undercut materialism but, as he puts it, ‘rather calls forth a closer consideration of that biological nature of man which Marxism, and particularly contemporary Marxism, tends to disregard’. The division structure/superstructure was, for Timpanaro, ‘a discovery of immense significance, both as a criterion for explaining social reality, and as a guide to transforming it’. It ‘becomes inadequate, however, when it is taken as an exhaustive classification of reality, as if there was nothing that existed which was not either structure or superstructure.’ Or, as he puts it, ‘It is not only the social relations between men, but also the relations between men and nature that give rise to scientific and philosophical reflection and to artistic expression.’ The point is thus not a revival of Feuerbachian ‘Man’, or of the ideological constructs of bourgeois humanism, it is rather the completion of the projects which they left incomplete: the elaboration, within the perspectives of historical materialism, of a materialist conception of man, and of his relations to nature; a conception which must begin by respecting the concrete achievements and real knowledge realized through the natural sciences — including physiology, psychology, ethology, biology, zoology, geology, physics, chemistry, and astronomy.

‘Man’ in this sense — I can only repeat — is not an abstraction, an ideological construct of the bourgeoisie that can be swept away in the attempt to supersede bourgeois modes of thought. After all, the bourgeoisie did not only begin the discovery of man, the extrication of him from false religious conceptions. As a class it was also the first to begin to acknowledge the specific developmental condition of childhood; to start to recognize the special needs of the child. There are, I know, a few poor souls who argue that therefore children, as such, are nought but the ideological constructs of the bourgeoisie and that ‘under socialism’ childhood will cease to exist once more. (It’s funny how those who argue like this so rarely have children themselves.) But what about spermatazoa? In an even more absolute sense than ‘man’ or ‘childhood’, the concept and the word ‘spermatazoa’ only enters the language with the bourgeoisie: the sperm was only discovered after the invention of the microscope, and became enmeshed in the mystical (or ideological) construct of homunculi. But does anyone really think no such things as spermatozoa existed before the bourgeoisie successfully identified them? Or really think that, with the achievement of socialism, we could abolish not just the concept, but the actuality of sperm, together with the rest of bourgeois ideology? That is exactly what certain ‘Marxists’ are asking us to believe in respect of ‘Man’.

To some of you, my emphasis on man as a biological being may seem like plugging the self-evident, a question of commonsense. But its very common-sense character is cited by one grouping within Marxism as ‘proof’ of the fact that it is mere ideology. I am referring to the Althusserians and their tendentious legacy of derivative factions and fellow-travellers.

‘Now that one cannot win anyone’s ear unless one translates the most commonplace things into structuralist language,’ writes Timpanaro, ‘the task of Marxists appears to have become one of proving that Marxism is the best of all possible structuralisms.’ Althusserianism, despite Althusser’s coquettish insistence that he merely flirted with the language of structuralism, is a structuralism. And, if there can be said to be any common perspective amongst the gamut of structuralists from Lacan to Levi-Strauss, from Foucault to Althusser, it lies in their resistance to the placing of ‘man’ as the origin of social practice, their onslaught against any idea of ‘man’. For Althusser, there is no such thing as the individual as such: ‘each mode of production produces its own mode of individuality in accordance with its specific character.’ What he has to offer is a profoundly antimaterialist, de-humanized, anti-historicist, anti-empiricist philosophical system which retains certain trappings of Marxist terminology.

It is not the fact that Althusser has revised Marx which worries me, although I believe many of his ‘readings’ of Marx’s texts have been carried out in bad faith; it is his end- product, which Edward Thompson, in his dazzling critique of Althusser, describes as ‘a sealed system within which concepts endlessly circulate, recognize and interrogate each other, and the intensity of its repetitious introversial life is mistaken for “science”.’ Meanwhile, Althusser’s theory banishes all human agency, and human subjects from the historical process, which, for Althusser, has no subject.

Far be it from me to initiate the uninitiated into this esoteric, academicist cult: it represents the inverse of everything which I find worth preserving in Marx’s work. According to Althusser, that vision of a transformed world which I characterized as essential to Marx’s project must be expunged from Marxism altogether: he speaks of the episte- mological break, an alleged sudden leap from ideology to ‘science’ within Marx, reputedly characterized by the rejection of humanism. Althusser goes on to paint a picture of the Mode of Production determining every aspect of the lives of men and women — in the last instance, of course — through the medium of ideology, which, in Althusser’s work, undergoes a mystical process of transubstantiation, thereby achieving material existence. ‘Human societies’, Althusser maintains, ‘secrete ideology as the very element and atmosphere indispensable to their historical respiration and life.’ But, for him, ideology is not just ‘false consciousness’: it is the ‘lived’ relation between men and their world. Now, if Althusser was merely saying that the knowledge men and women have of their world is always partial, continuously subject to development and modification, in which the material conditions of their lives play a great part, then I would heartily agree. However, he turns this partial knowledge, ‘ideology’, into an hypostasized — that is, a personalized — ‘transcendental subject, which, by interpellating individuals, constitutes them as subjects’. In other words, human subjects, men and women, appear not as ‘essences’, as in bourgeois humanism, the great heresy for an Althusserian, but as mere effects, or shadows of the great subject, out there, of ideology as secreted by the Mode of Production. In Althusser, it is not God who makes ‘man’ in his own image, but Ideology-and-the-Mode-of-Production, IMP which functions in his system exactly, but exactly, as if it were God.

In Althusser, all the essential qualities of men and women — the result of their specific biological conditions — are alienated from them, and attributed to the great IMP. We are all somehow immersed, dissolved even, into this allegedly material secretion of ideology, even if we don’t realize it. Empirical knowledge is, according to Althusser, worse than useless as a means of escape. Experience, for him, is but a manifestation of the effects of Ideology upon us. Only through the quasi-magical process of Theoretical Practice — which Thompson rightly sees as the rigor mortis of Marxism setting in, and which I would characterize as a sort of mystical communion of Ideology with itself, and not, of course, with the world — can one hope to rise above the ideological mire and achieve pure, transcendent, ‘Scientific’ truth. Thus — if Althusser was right the little boy on the edge of the crowd could never, ever, have seen that the emperor had no clothes; nor can you look out of the window and say, ‘It is a nice day’, until you have acted upon mere metereology with Theoretical Practice; nor, of course, can I look at those Parthenon frieze panels and say, ‘That one is good.’

No doubt I am lucky: I was inoculated, for life, against Althusser because I was brought up under the shadow of Karl Barth — the greatest theologian of the 20th century. (If you really must resort to this sort of system, then make for Barth, not Althusser. The breadth and scope of the twelve volumes of Barth’s Church Dogmatics is infinitely more subtle than Althusser’s tawdry texts.) So many of the arguments, however, are the same. Barth put God — Father, Son and Holy Ghost — as his hypostasized ‘Subject’ — who of course, also ‘interpellates’ us — where Althusser puts the great IMP. For Barth, too, God was wholly transcendent, unknowable, utterly Other, and as Althusser says of Ideology in General, without a history — i.e., the Subject, par excellence. Barth despises men and women, too: for him, they are immersed in sin, blindness, and delusion which they are unable to see, or see through, since it is their lived relation to the world, by the very fact of being men and women, born in original sin. Barth despises experience, hence his polemic with Brunner against Natural Theology — the belief that you can see the evidences of God, or ‘The Truth’ by scrutiny of Nature. For Barth, Redemption was only to be found by scrutiny of ‘The Word of God’, the Biblical texts, which he fetishized throughout his life, making judicious use of the new ‘scientific’ techniques of Form Criticism to establish the ‘correct’ readings. The systems, the arguments, and much of the methodology are pretty much the same. Althusserianism is a theology. It has nothing to do with materialism, and less to do with the struggle for material justice and equity in this world.

Christianity began as an eschatological movement; believers expected the end of the world, the Parousia, or Second Coming, and the establishment of the Kingdom of God in history. This did not happen. Pauline Christology was the ideological attempt to reconcile early Christians to their disappointment; to deflect their focus of attention from this- wordly history to heaven, through the medium of complex, abstract texts and concepts. The process was accompanied, inevitably, by institutionalization and the growth of a priestly caste, which became ever more remote from the popular roots of Christianity.

Engels, time and time again, compared the 19th-century socialist movement, in Europe, with primitive Christianity. Marxism emerged out of the popular expectation of history-transforming revolution, which did not come. Althusserianism is the Pauline Christology of Western Marxism. It is the attempt to reconcile revolutionaries to the indefinite delay of the Parousia in such a way that they do not lose the Faith. ‘The Truth’ this time, however, is to be found not so much in the monasteries and seminaries, as within the cloistered enclaves of academia. As Thompson puts it ‘Althusserian theory . . . allows the aspirant academic to engage in a harmless revolutionary psycho-drama, while at the same time pursuing a reputable and conventional intellectual career’ — or, I might add, artistic career, vide Burgin, Kelly, etc. It is, however, a total betrayal of historical materialism — to which I am committed.

Of course, like all religious groupings, Althusserianism has produced its splinter sects, many of which question Saint Louis Althusser’s total banishment of the human subject. Even the most psychotic among us sometimes get hints that we exist as a limited, physical organism, subject to birth, bodily existence and death. This faint glimmering perception of real people has led to a sort of gnostic carnival of Late Althusserianism — a sort of re-insertion into the argument of persons who are not really persons at all. This, of course, is where Lacan comes in. Lacan, blessed and sanctified by Saint Louis himself — in one of the latter’s most ignorant and preposterous essays — is a some-time psychoanalyst who has concocted a ‘radically anti-humanist’ subject, i.e. a sort of bodiless ghost, wholly ‘implicated in signifying practices’. Lacan’s subject is — in his own words: ‘. . . de-centred, constituted by a structure that has no “centre” either, except in the imaginary misrecognition of the “ego”, i.e. in the ideological formations in which it “recognizes” itself.’ You may think you were conceived in flesh and blood, and born of your mother’s womb; but in fact, you are a mere side-effect, literally, of IMP. In the last instance, of course. Lacan and his acolytes are as indifferent to the psycho-biological continuity of the species as Althusser himself. Thus Julia Kristeva trumps up a subject which ‘unlike the free or self-determining unified individual of humanist thought’ is nought but an over-determined, complex, ever-changing nexus of contradictions produced ‘by the action of social institutions and signifying practices’. Not a trace here of flesh, bones, perceptual organs, instincts, penises, wombs, vaginas, or stomachs. Just ‘signifying practices’!

Roger Scruton was correct in describing Lacan’s works as fictions, ‘rambling from theme to theme and from symbol to symbol with little connecting thread other than the all-pervasive “I” of paranoia’. Timpanaro has hinted at the way in which Althusser banishes the subject from the historical process to replace it with one subject, Louis Althusser himself (whose shadow, of course IMP is). Lacan’s later work is no more demanding of serious attention than, say, Ron Hubbard’s scientological dianetics or the writings of Helena Blavatsky. Lacan constructs the ‘self’ upon an infinitely labile model, which reproduces its elements, without constraint, like a language. He is entirely lacking in any materialist conception of men and women as physical organisms.

In Britain, however, there is an indigenous tradition of psycho-analysis — the so-called ‘object relations school’, extending from Suttie to Rycroft — which takes full cognizance of biological ‘Man’, as Timpanaro describes him.The theory of the Self in such writers as Bowlby and Winnicott — who significantly draw upon such disciplines as ethology and paediatrics, rather than structural linguistics — is infinitely superior, and infinitely less ‘ideological’ than that to be found in Lacan. It is a sign of the rabid idealism of the Left that their work is either not read at all or despised. Charles Rycroft, the most distinguished surviving representative of this school, has written, ‘the statement that psychoanalysis is a theory of meaning is incomplete and misleading unless one qualifies it by saying that it is a biological theory of meaning.’ Rycroft, rightly, goes on to say that psychoanalysis interprets human behaviour not in terms of entities external to it — such as IMP — but that it ‘regards the self as a psycho-biological entity which is always striving for self- realization and self-fulfilment’.

There are many Lacanian-Althusserians who forget that in order to become Heavy-Weight Champion of the World, it is not enough to be oppressed, or to ‘live’ the ideology of competitive capitalism. You also need to have big biceps and to lack large mammary glands. In many, many human endeavours constitutional elements, though never everything, are indubitably of decisive, determinative significance. Let me introduce a highly personal note. I suffer from a chronic rheumatic condition, ankylosing spondylitis, among the determinants of which is a genetic factor. The illness is 300 times more common in people who inherit a certain white cell blood group, HLA B27, than among those who do not. A side-effect of this can be sudden, painful inflammation of the irises of the eye. This has happened to me twice, the last time just a few weeks ago. It caused me to reflect not just upon the particularity of visual experience — of which more in a moment — but also upon the fatuousness, stupidity and insensitivity of those who argue that those elements of existence which are determined by ‘biology’ or nature, rather than ‘IMP’ or whatever, are trivial.

The elimination of the psycho-biological subject from Althusserian theory inevitably has inhuman implications. In their wrong-headed book, Language and Materialism: Developments in Semiology and the Theory of the Subject, Rosalind Coward and John Ellis write:

Reference to the notion of ‘subject’ creates the very problem of language this book is dealing with. Since the term refers both to an individual in sociality, and more generally, to the space necessitated by ideological meanings, we have chosen to designate the subject with the pronoun ‘it’.

There we have it! No more people, only things. Coward and Ellis are full of praise for the way in which Lacanian theory is ‘grounded in materialism’, because it denies ‘man’ and recognizes that ‘the conscious subject is constructed in a certain position in relation to the signifying chain.’ Thus we are told that the ‘ultimate effect’ of Lacan’s work is ‘a complete undermining of a unified and consistent subject, the assumption on which all bourgeois ideology is founded.’ And so, in this farcical world of topsy-turvy mysticism, the term materialism emerges as the exact inversion of its classical usage: it means here nothing more or less than the denial of the biological and physical levels, of the person as a physical entity, limited (and to a degree determined) by the finiteness of the body, the genetic constitution and the inevitability of death.

One practitioner who has fallen prey to this tendency recently endeavoured to argue with me that the pronoun T referred to nothing more than an ideological construct. An art historian who rants about signifying practices told me that, in her view, breast-feeding was unnecessary because ‘milk-filled plastic sacks’ were every bit as good. Naturally, if you deny any validity to the notion of the individual as a psycho-biological entity, you will end up saying such things. But I am not interested even in engaging with those who have such an idealist concept of the self. I turn, with relief, to the British object-relations tradition of psychoanalysis which begins with the recognition of the individual as an integral being, who, although he or she must immediately enter into social relations from the moment of birth in order to survive, possesses a physical separateness from, as well as a dependency upon, others. As Marcuse has noted, ‘Solidarity would be on weak grounds were it not rooted in the instinctual structure of individuals.’ Or, as I would want to put it, the continuing potential of the human species for socialism may have its remote biological, i.e. material roots, in the necessity of a relatively prolonged period of social dependency for the infant, if he or she is to survive.

The denial of the subject in Althusserian thought would be alternately pathetic and hilarious, were its implications not so serious. To cite Marx tells us nothing about the truth, or otherwise, of a concept. Nonetheless, it is worth pointing out to these Marxists that Marx and Engels never ditched the concept of ‘man’, least of all did they eliminate the idea of human agency. ‘It is men who make history on the basis of previous conditions.’ Or, as Sartre was to put it later, there is a space within which we can make something of that which has been made of us. The only words I would wish to add to Marx’s formulation are ‘and women’. But E.P. Thompson has drawn attention to the hysterical fury which Marx’s formulation evokes in Etienne Balibar, Althusser’s High Priest, and collaborator. Thus Balibar comments on the phrase, ‘the concept men . . . constitutes a real point where the utterance slips away towards the regions of philosophical or commonplace ideology.’ (Balibar wants to say that not just ‘man’, but also ‘men’, don’t really exist.) Balibar continues, ‘The “obviousness”, the “transparency” of the word “men” (here charged with carnal opacity) and its anodyne appearance are the most dangerous of the traps I am trying to avoid. I shall not be satisfied until I have . . . eliminated it as a foreign body.’

Carnal opacity! Let’s savour that phrase for a moment. Thompson points to its puritanism, its religious loathing of the flesh. Marx was absolutely correct to charge men with ‘carnal opacity’. We do, indeed exist with fleshly bodies, driven by hunger, and the vicissitudes and urgencies of the sexual instincts. (Why do Marxists always have so little to say about those, except on the eccentric fringes of the tradition.)

We exist, in feeling, fear, hope, greed and sensuality, and it is precisely that ‘carnal opacity’ of our material existence which the Althusserians want to wipe out. And as Thompson so rightly comments:

If we think about men as the trtiger (or mere bearers) of structures — or of their actions as ‘unjustified disturbance symptoms’ — then the thought will guide the act. As those lofty theoretical practitioners, the daleks, used to say, when confronted by ‘men’: ‘Exterminate!’

And this brings me back to the nature of Marxism and the centrality of Stalinism for all those who claim to be working within the Marxist tradition. For Thompson argues, in my view entirely convincingly, that although Althusserianism presents itself as anti-Stalinism, this is ‘a gigantic confidence trick’. For Althusser is only doing in theory what Stalin had already done in practice.

In the same moment that Stalinism emitted ‘humanist’ rhetoric, it occluded the human faculties as part of its necessary mode of respiration. Its very breath stank (and still stinks) of inhumanity, because it has found a way of regarding people as the bearers of structures. . . and history as a process without a subject ... It is only in our own time that Stalinism has been given its true, rigorous and totally coherent theoretical expression. This is the Althusserian orrery ... So far from being a ‘post Stalinist generation’, the Althusserians and those who share their premises and idealist modes, are working hard, every day, on the theoretical production-line of Stalinist ideology.

To some of you, this may all be academic. Stalin is, after all, firmly within his grave. But it is not just a question of theory, of attitudes to the past. In this decade, we have seen another successful socialist revolution — that in Cambodia — where, to use Balibar’s unhappy phrase — almost a third of a nation was ‘eliminated ... as a foreign body’. What happened in Cambodia was Absolute Stalinism, in practice. Thompson does not seem to me to be over-stepping the mark when he recalls, ‘with anxiety, that some of the leading cadres of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia received their training in “Marxism” in Paris of the 1960s’.

Let me summarize all this: I am struggling for a position within the Marxist tradition which is humanist, in so far as it recognizes men and women as psycho-biological entities; utopian, in so far as it is rooted in the conviction that the world need not be the way it is, or the way it has been, and that men and women can live more happily than they do at present by ordering their social lives differently; empiricist, in that, within certain limits, it recognizes the validity of immediate experience; moralist, in that I consider certain refusals of infringements against the person to be absolutely right, and not just class interests in disguise, e.g. the refusal of torture; economist, in that I consider that, over a wide sphere of social and cultural life, given the qualifications I have already outlined, the economy possesses a determinative primacy; historicist, in that I affirm the validity, indeed the necessity, of the historical materialist recovery of the past; and aestheticist, in that I do not consider aesthetic responses to be merely emanations of bourgeois ideology. My position is not that of a wet, liberal refusal of theory: it is rather the result of my interrogation of history. I have engaged with these theories, and I am rejecting them — as I see it, in the name of the struggle for socialism. Nonetheless, every point in the position I have just outlined breaches a cardinal sin in the Althusserian breviary. Edward Thompson has declared that ‘Libertarian Communism and the socialist and Labour movement in general can have no business with theoretical practice except to expose it and to drive it out.’ I find myself in strong sympathy with this view, although not yet quite able to endorse it. I am still sentimental enough to cling until the eleventh hour to what is probably no more than a fantasy of unity.

I have raised certain questions about the Marxist approach to art; I have clarified my view of ideology and politics. I wish to end by making clear how all this affects my aesthetics and my critical practice. Let us return to The Lady of Warka. Certainly, what Parrot wrote about it was tinged with the ideology of bourgeois spiritual idealism. I admit that. But it was a more materialist account than any offered by Marxists who deny the psycho-biological continuity of civilized ‘Man’ altogether.

The Althusserian art-historian, Nicos Hadjinicolau, is forced to explain ‘aesthetic effect’ as ‘none other than the pleasure felt by the observer when he recognizes himself in a picture’s visual ideology’. Such a view of art, as Brighton has argued in his cogent critique of Hadjinicolau, excludes the viewer’s capacity to experience the work, and the work’s capacity to act upon him. The pleasure to be derived from art is reduced to a narcissistic mirroring process, in which all the work can do is to reflect back to the viewer some aspect of his historically specific illusions. But if ideology is as historically specific as the Althusserians suggest, it is hard to see what I could recognize in a work produced in Sumeria in the fourth millenia B.C. ‘Eternal Man’ may be an ideologically loaded construct; but, demystified, it points in the direction of a much more materialist account than that which we can derive from Althusser, Lacan, Kristeva, Derrida, Balibar, Hadjinicolau, Coward, Ellis, Tagg, Burgin, Griselda Pollock, Kelly, Screen Ed., or Tel Quel.

Marcuse, you will remember, claimed that the fact that a work truly represents the interests or the outlook of the proletariat or of the bourgeoisie does not yet make it an authentic work of art. Marcuse feels that the universality of art cannot be grounded in the world, or the world-outlook, of a particular class. Art, he says, envisions a ‘concrete, universal humanity, Menschlichkeit, which no particular class can incorporate, not even the proletariat’.This Menschlichkeit is, you might think, ‘Eternal Man’ transposed to a Marxist framework. Unlike the bourgeois aestheticians, Marcuse stresses not transcendence into the ethereal realms of spirituality, but ‘the metabolism between the human being and nature’, which, he says, ‘Marxist theory has the least justification to ignore’ or to denounce ‘as a regressive ideological conception’.

Marcuse’s view is reminiscent of the one I expressed earlier: not only the social relations between men, but also the relations between men and nature give rise to artistic expression. For example, as Timpanaro writes:

. . . love, the brevity and frailty of human existence, the contrast between the smallness and weakness of man and the infinity of the cosmos, are expressed in literary works in very different ways in various historically determinate societies, but still not in such different ways that all references to such constant experiences of the human condition as the sexual instinct, the debility produced by age (with its psychological repercussions), the fear of one’s own death and sorrow at the death of other’s, is lost.

But Raymond Williams takes us even further than this. He says:

... it is a fact about classical Marxism that it neglected to its great cost, not only the basic human physical conditions which Timpanaro emphasizes in his reconsideration of materialism, but also the emotional conditions which make up so large a part of all direct human relationship and practice.

In my view, these ‘relative constants’, deriving from man’s continuing embeddedness in nature, are of the greatest importance in the experience of many works of art.

Rothko once wrote that he was interested only in ‘expressing basic human emotions’. He added, ‘the fact that lots of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I communicate with those basic human emotions.’ Predictably, Rothko is attacked in a recent article by two Marxist art-historians both for his allegedly ‘a- historical’ utterances, and for the ahistorical vacuousness of his pictures. But I think Rothko was right — in theory and practice. The reason his work transcends the shabby ideology and vacuity of American colour-field painting, whose socioeconomic determinants I have described elsewhere, is that, using these unpromising conventions, he does indeed reach through to significant aspects of the underlying ‘human condition’ by finding convincing representations for basic emotions. Similarly, Vermeer seems to have done much the same — although his painting refers not just to emotional life, but to certain ‘relative constants’ in the possibilities of human encounter with light, space and time. Again, Vermeer used the most ‘ideologically’ loaded of conventions — those determined by the Dutch, petit-bourgeois picture-market in genre painting. He was enmeshed within the ‘signifying practices’ of the class to which he belonged. Today, none of that matters very much to those of us who admire his great paintings. The point is that Vermeer ‘ruptures’ the ideology of his time, and of ours, by finding forms which speak vividly of potentialities inherent in those aspects of the life of ‘Man’, as a biological species, which do not change greatly from one socio-economic situation to another.

With both these artists, however, it is important to emphasize that the historically transcendent was not achieved by a denial of the culturally and historically specific, but rather by a working through of it. Here, too, we have an answer to an implicit problem for all Marxist criticism. As a theory of historical development, Marxism has always found it difficult to account for the fact that art is not subject to continuous or consistent development. The Lady of Warka is one of the oldest existing sculptures: it is also among the best. ‘Greatness’ and ‘quality’ in art must therefore derive from a relationship with aspects of human life which are, relatively speaking, very long-lasting indeed.

This is why Marcuse seems to me to be right when he says: A work of art is authentic or true not by virtue of its content (i.e. the ‘correct’ representation of social conditions) nor by its ‘pure’ form, but by the content having become form. . . Aesthetic form, autonomy, and truth are interrelated. Each is a socio-historical phenomenon, and each transcends the socio- historical arena.

If I understand him correctly, Marcuse’s defence of the autonomy of aesthetic form in the name of art’s own dimension of truth, protest and promise, does not imply a hermetic separation from exploration of the continuous potentialities of man’s underlying biological condition, but rather points towards an immersion in them as an implicit affirmation of the possibility of Menschlichkeit, as against the reality of a class-divided world. Or, as he puts it, ‘The autonomy of art contains the categorical imperative: “things must change”.’ Elsewhere, I too have spoken of the way in which great and authentic art, whatever its subject matter, constitutes a ‘moment of becoming’ which speaks of a possible historical future now.

Here, however, I wish to introduce what is perhaps the single most significant idea that I have learned from an Althusserian critic — namely Pierre Macherey. He argues that the aesthetic product is, like any other, the result of the application of a means of labour to transform a raw material. Unfortunately, because of his relativistic extremism, Macherey cannot usefully elaborate this concept. But Williams, recognizing the validity of biological ‘Man’ is able to do so. He writes:

The deepest significance of a relatively unchanging biological condition is probably to be found in some of the basic material processes of the making of art: in the significance of rhythms in music and dance and language or of shapes and colours in sculpture and painting . .. What matters here — and it is a very significant amendment of orthodox Marxist thinking about art — is that art work is itself, before everything, material process; and that, although differentially, the material process of the production of art includes certain biological processes, especially those relating to body movements and to the voice, which are not a mere substratum but are at times the most powerful elements of the work.

This passage is crucial. Most discussions of Marxist aesthetics take literature as their model: indeed, much of the sort of Althusserian left writing on art which I am attacking is a direct transposition of arguments about literature into the domain of the visual arts. However, I am maintaining that if we attend closely, in a materialist fashion, to the material practices of drawing, painting, and sculpture, we will discover that the arguments from literature are not valid for these practices, precisely because the biological processes (whose importance the Althusserian cannot admit) are much more important in them. It is not just that you do not have to study life-drawing or anatomy in order to become a good writer. A major difference between literary practice and drawing is that the word dog has a more opaque relationship to a dog than does a drawing of a dog. But the sculpture of The Lady of Warka is — to use Saint Louis’ own phrase about art — ‘bathed in ideology’ to nothing like the same degree as any work of literature, precisely because of its much deeper dependence, at the level of what it expresses and the way it expresses it, on relatively constant, underlying, biological elements of human life. Again, it is not just that in the entire history of sculpture, from the time of the Sumerians to that of Rodin, there has not been one significant work which is not either a representation of a man, a woman or an animal, whereas texts have been written on many varieties of purely abstract subject. It is also that in its material processes, sculpture is much, much more intimately linked to the biological and physical levels of existence than are, say, literature or philosophy.

Painting, of course, is in an intermediate position — somewhere between literature and sculpture; the significance of immediately biological processes and representations is greater than in the former, less than in the latter.

In my view, this recognition that the different arts are material processes in which the underlying biological processes are of varying significance casts quite a different light on the now all too familiar and often hysterical attack by Althusserians and structuralists on painting and sculpture as ‘bourgeois’ forms which must be smashed, superseded, destroyed, or otherwise annihilated. It was Burgin, I think, who dismissed painting as anachronistic daubing and smearing with coloured shit. But my point is that painting, drawing and sculpture, although they are always the bearers of ideological elements, and acquire significant aspects of their particular forms through socio-economic influences, are, as material practices, no more reducible to ideology than are childhood, spermatazoa, or, above all, ‘man’. The Althusser- ian-Structuralist mode of discourse on painting is about the ideological elements within painting, not about painting as such — as a material practice. We might well pause to ask why in all their multitudinous utterances upon art, Althusserians never speak of song or of dance. It is not just that the trans- historical character of these particular material practices — whatever their specific forms — is self-evident. (Who, after all, would want to march forward into a world where song and dance had been wiped out as ‘bourgeois’ art forms, except perhaps a few King Street die-hards?) But in these arts the material substance upon which the performer — or psycho- biological existent subject — works is that of his or her own bodily being; precisely that which, if you are an adherent of Althusserian theology, you wish to reduce to a mere ghost of no determinative significance.

Indeed, Marcuse has said that the rejection of the individual as a bourgeois concept recalls and presages certain fascist undertakings. The attack upon such material practices as drawing, painting and sculpture not only echoes those undertakings; it is also suspiciously reminiscent of that theoretical project to eliminate ‘Man’ as a psycho-biological entity, under the guise of an assault on bourgeois ideology, which characterizes Althusserian theory and Stalinist practice, and which I have already described at length. ‘This notion of theory,’ writes Thompson, ‘is like a blight that has settled on the mind. The empirical senses are occluded, the moral and aesthetic organs are repressed, the curiosity is sedated, all the “manifest” evidence of life or art is distrusted as “ideology”.’ Thus, inevitably, when those blighted by this theory or its derivatives turn to making works of art, they can themselves produce only art which is nothing but ideology.

In ‘Fine Art after Modernism’ I discussed in detail my conception of the historical growth of the Fine Art tradition and of the way in which it was shaped and contained by the institutional and professional structures of the bourgeoisie. I have talked about the development of a Mega-Visual tradition in the era of Monopoly Capitalism, and about the way in which this greatly changed the social function of the professional Fine Artist. I took the view, which has also been argued by Kristeller, and more eloquently by Raymond Williams, that the concept of ‘Art’ (with a capital ‘A’) as we use it today was historically specific, i.e. ideological. While that still seems to me to be true — and I unequivocally reaffirm it today — it is perhaps the case that I did not make it sufficiently dear in the past that the material processes of drawing, painting, and sculpture were not, in this respect, identifiable with ‘Art’. They have a material continuity which extends back into the earliest social formations. That continuity is now threatened by the encroachments of the Mega-Visual tradition. Indeed, E.P. Thompson draws attention to the way in which so much Althusserian idealism is not so much the inverse of bourgeois ideology, but rather an immediate reflection of its academic modes. Similarly, in the art world, the case against painting and sculpture is not unique to the left. What Victor Burgin advocates is also what Monopoly Capitalism is bringing about in reality. Burgin’s expressed hostility to ‘privileged’ media can be compared with the arguments of a specifically anti-Marxist sociologist, Robert Taylor; while his compositional devices are those of a Mega-Visual advertising man. Meanwhile, it is as well to remember that Burgin is not some outsider who has, as it were, been allowed into the extremities of the Fine Art garden-party by mistake. He is now at the very centre of the stage, deeply imbedded within the art institutions, prominently featured in two out of the three Hayward Annuals and in the Hayward photography show. He has held a succession of academic appointments and fellowships in visual arts schools. If there is any merit in his own argument, all this would not be possible unless the prevailing ideology favoured the destruction of those specific material practices to which he opposes himself: painting, drawing and sculpture.

At a recent ‘State of British Art’ conference, I made out my defence of the Fine Art tradition. Griselda Pollock then announced from the floor that she wanted to see the apparatus of art practice ‘uprooted, root and branch’. She must be pleased with the job Margaret Thatcher is doing, with, it would seem, a little bit of help in both theory and practice from her structuralist friends. Meanwhile, I continue to defend the Fine Art tradition, not for the ideological myths embedded and perpetuated within it, not on behalf of those economic forces subtending it, and certainly not for those ideologists who have recently invaded it and manipulated its weaknesses, but rather in the name of these specific material practices: painting, drawing and sculpture. I am defending these practices not for their own sake, but on the grounds that the imaginative vision of men and women realizable through them — what Marcuse calls the aesthetic dimension which speaks of a changed future, or that which I have called ‘moments of becoming’ — are not realizable in the same way either through words, or through mechanically made images, which imply quite a different relation to those underlying biological elements and to the world alike.

I do not only wish, however, to conserve drawing, painting, and sculpture as such, but further to see retained, revived and developed certain specific aspects of the bourgeois achievement within these practices. Some of my earlier texts unfortunately tended to imply that because certain techniques and conventions had arisen in the process of elaborating a bourgeois world-view through painting, they were necessarily wholly ‘ideological’ and of no value except in the service of the optic of that class. In stressing that the relationship of a work of art to history (and I did not mean art history) was decisive, I tended to underestimate the capacity of certain elements within the bourgeois Fine Art tradition to serve as means of approaching what Timpanaro called non- superstructural areas of reality.

Now these are complex problems which I will be developing and exploring elsewhere. But, broadly, my attitude to certain elements in the bourgeois pictorial aesthetic is (roughly) comparable to Timpanaro’s attitude towards the achievements of the natural sciences. Let me give one example. I am convinced that the theory and practice of expression as it developed within the Western Fine Art tradition is not reducible to ideology, but, on the contrary, gives many fruitful indications of where we might be looking for the material bases of significant aspects of pictorial and sculptural aesthetics.

I have already said something about this in my discussions of the painters Bomberg and Hoyland. The point is sufficiently significant to bear repeating here. In the Renaissance, a theory of expression emerged based upon the empirical study of anatomy. Alberti, one of its earliest theorists, believed that a good painting functioned by evoking emotions in the viewer through the expressiveness of its subjects. The ‘scientific’, or material basis of painting was thus rooted in the study of physiognomy and musculature. These were not sufficient for good expression: a brilliant anatomical painter might fail to call forth the emotional response in his viewers. Nonetheless, within this tradition of expression, there was no way round anatomy. In general, it remains true that as Western artists moved away from the anatomical base, as they came to prefer style to the scalpel, painting fell into Mannerism, where the painter’s primary preoccupation seems to be with his own devices and conventions, rather than with the representation of expression as learned from empirical experience. Inevitably, ideology then subsumed the search for truth.

By the end of the 19th century, the old science of expression was beginning to break up, or, to be more accurate (with the exception of certain pockets and enclaves such as the Slade in Britain), it had shifted out of the Fine Art arena and was being pursued by scientists like Darwin, author of The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. Artists were increasingly preoccupied with a new theory of expression — whose rudimentary ‘moment of becoming’ is, as a matter of fact, discernible even in High Renaissance anatomical expression. Expression came to refer more and more to what the artist expressed through his work, rather than to the expressiveness of his or her subjects. Indeed, the artist became, in a new sense, the subject of all his paintings, and the relevance of the old, ‘objective’, anatomical science of expression withered.

However, like the old, the new theory of expression was also ultimately rooted in the body, though in this case in the body of the artist himself. In Abstract Expressionism — and I am referring not only to the New York movement, but also its precursors and parallels elsewhere — the body of the artist is expressed through such phenomena as scale, rhythm, and simulation of somatic process. (This is quite obviously true of a painter like Pollock.) But again, as in classical expression, physiological depiction was not pursued for its own sake — even when it was skilfully done. Rothko might not have been able to render to us the physiognomy of Moses, Venus, or Laocoon — but he could, through the new expression, vividly introduce us to the face of his own despair. (But just as abstract expression was present as a ‘moment of becoming’ within High Renaissance anatomical expression — and as a significant element in much Romantic painting — so High Renaissance anatomical expression is present as a critical residue within much abstract expression. It is perfectly possible to talk about the anatomy of De Kooning, the drawing of Newman, the physiognomy of Rothko.) But just as the Renaissance science of expression had tumbled into mannerism, so too did the new abstract expression. Arguably, it was even more prone to do so because its guarantor was not so much the ‘objective’ discoveries of observation and the dissecting room, but rather the authenticity of the artist, his truth to lived experience. Similarly, the development of ‘Modernism’ saw the efflorescence of a Crocean, idealist, notion of ‘expression’ — which paralleled the re-entry of idealism into the physical sciences at the beginning of the century — which sought to detach expression decisively from any relationship to the body, or material practice, and to locate its source in some spiritual domain. Now I do not think that we, as socialists involved in cultural practices, will get far by clinging to the Crocean idealist concept of expression or its derivatives. I do, however, feel that we could advance beyond the present impasse in Fine Art practices by re-examining the full gamut of expression which roots itself in experience of and through the body. Here, for example, we might find many answers to such problems as the historical ‘transcendence’ of the expression of the Lady of Warka; the science of expression allows us to identify one way in which the art of the past, and of other cultures, can ‘speak to us’ without invoking eternal essences or any such nonsense. (A grimace is also a transformation of material.) But this is merely to point in the direction of my own future research.

My defence of the Fine Art tradition is not aestheticist, but part of that defence of ‘man’ against both the structures of capitalism and the reductions of resurgent Stalinism in the theorisations of the left. I would like to end with a final quote from Edward Thompson: ‘The homeland of Marxist theory remains where it has always been, the real human object, in all its manifestations (past and present) . . . ’ Thus my defence of drawing, painting and sculpture is my contribution to the defence of that ‘homeland of Marxist theory . . . the real human object,’ and my contribution to the struggle for what admittedly seems to me at present a remote possibility, the realization through the historical process of a society in which men and women, as biological beings necessarily entering into social life, can live as fully and as happily as is possible within those limits which nature places upon us.

MODERN ART: Overweening Treachery, and Suchlike / March 13, 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 was my father’s most influential mentor as an art critic. Berger has been internationally recognized as one of the few leading art critics in Europe throughout the 20th Century and a significant figure in the story of Modern Art. I had the opportunity to speak with him on several occasions and he had a profound affect on me too. I was taken back by the both the depth of his compassion and at the same time the strength of his integrity. When I was 13 after his speech at The Peter Fuller Memorial Lecture he hugged me with tears in his eyes and told me if there was anything I needed from him I should call him. Fifteen years later I did and he gave me his blessing to move forward with the Peter Fuller Project. In 2017 I traveled back to London to digitize and read the letters between John Berger and my father at the TATE archive. The letters were some of the most touching and beautiful correspondences I have ever read.

OVERWEENING TREACHERY, AND SUCHLIKE

by Peter Fuller, 1988

A few weeks ago I launched a new quarterly journal of the Fine Arts, Modern Painters. After twenty years of writing for other people’s magazines, I felt there was space for a different sort of contemporary art journal, one which celebrated the critical imagination; stood up for aesthetic values and had a particular focus on British art. I was determined that Modern Painters would question the conduct of the modern art establishment and speak out against undeserved reputations inflated by institutional or commercial interests. Modern Painters has sold nearly 10,000 copies.

Its success, however, has not been welcomed by the journals of the left. New Society, Time Out and The New Statesman have all published stories about Modern Painters which are not only hostile and inaccurate, but, in the latter two cases, downright malicious. Indeed, a columnist for the New Statesman, Francis Wheen, actually went so far as to accuse me of having betrayed all my ideals and at least one of my friends, John Berger; and according to Wheen and the gist of an article by Sarah Kent, art critic of Time Out, the new magazine demonstrates that I have allowed myself to be clasped to the bosom of the New Right. The evidence Wheen published was as conclusive and unanswerable as that which, in another context, was offered against John Stalker; Wheen pointed out that I arrived at the Tate Gallery for the celebrations heralding the opening of the Bomberg exhibition in a chauffeur-driven limousine - my father-in-law’s, actually. Sarah Kent’s evidence is even more damning. I must be a Thatcherite’ because I have declared my belief in aesthetic values and I have set myself against those things which she, personally, so greatly admires.

But what are those things? Herein, I think, lies a tale from which more can be salvaged than my reputation. Take the case of Julian Schnabel. I have long maintained that Schnabel is a buffoon who possesses neither touch, skill, imagination nor sense of tradition. For the first issue of Modern Painters, I commissioned an article from Robert Hughes which argued - more eloquently than I was capable of doing - along similar lines: Schnabel’s ‘cack-handedness’, Hughes claimed, was ‘not feigned, but real’; he had never learned to draw because his development had been smothered by his ‘impregnable self-esteem’.

Now it so happens that not long ago, Ms Kent informed the readers of Time Out that Julian Schnabel was ‘probably the most important painter since Picasso’. As will become clear in a moment, I am not among those who believe that it is at all easy to correlate aesthetic preferences with political positions; but the fact is that it is merely perverse for Kent, Wheelan and Co to try to characterise all those of us who oppose artists like Schnabel as belonging to the ‘New Right’.

After all, Schnabel was the Yuppies’ choice, par excellence, and it is hardly a secret in the art world that Schnabel’s reputation in Europe was largely fabricated by the man without whom the English New Right might never have risen from their tubular-steel arm-chairs: Charles Saatchi himself. En passant, it is worth noting that Mr Saatchi’s views about Modern Painters are almost identical with Ms Kent’s. He delivered himself of them to me for a full half-hour when, a while ago, we met by chance in the basement of a London gallery. I gathered that Mr Saatchi did not like my suggestion that his collection should be ‘transformed or eradicated’. I believe Saatchi has been a catastrophe for art in Britain. I am not saying this because of Saatchi’s wealth, nor even because of the politics with which he has chosen to associate himself (which I don’t like either), but rather because, as far as art is concerned, Saatchi has no taste or discrimination - one reason why he prefers to buy works of art by the baker’s dozen.

Perhaps I should have expected all this, for the article in Modem Painters, which definitively demolishes the reputation of Gilbert and George is by none other than Roger Scruton, whom everyone on the left loves to hate, whatever he says - even when he is opposing the country’s most prominent Thatcherite ‘artists’. The interest and irony of this juxtaposition were entirely lost upon the bigoted brains of many critics, but Roger Scruton’s courageous text merely confirms what has long seemed self-evident to me: that there is no easy or necessary continuity between a person’s economic, political and aesthetic beliefs. There have been many commentators, and not a few practitioners, who have wanted to argue that the modern movement (and more recently, postmodernism) ought to be acknowledged as being somehow the honorary house-style of the left; but in order to maintain this position, a considerable distortion of history had to take place. One had, for example, to ignore the fact that most of the great early modernist poets, for example, Eliot, Pound and Yeats, were men of the right, or worse. Modernism also provided the house-style not only for the ideologically OK avant-garde in the USSR, but also for Mussolini’s Rome and for the Rockefeller Centre in New York and the Hilton Hotel chain.

There is, I think, little to be concluded from this except that you can’t deduce someone’s politics from their taste, any more than you can deduce their taste from their politics. Although I despise those who are forever rehearsing their political ‘positions’, these, for what they are worth, are some of mine: I think that the expansion of the market creates more social problems than it solves. I prefer concepts of co-operation to those of competition; far from being a right- wing radical, I dislike the policies of the present government because it seems to me that it wishes to conserve almost nothing I would like to see conserved, for example, the Welfare State, which, I think, should provide health, educational and cultural facilities for all. I am convinced that contemporary means of production are polluting and destroying the environment, perhaps irrevocably; I am convinced that both morality and national security are better served by the shedding of nuclear weapons than by their accumulation. I despise the shallowness, imperial ambitions and commercialism of‘The American Way’. And I don’t like restraints on the freedom of the Press, apartheid, corporal or capital punishment. I am well aware that these views hardly make me ‘a man of the barricades’, but they are not usually those associated with the New Right either.

I also know, and respect, a great many intellectuals like Roger Scruton - a good friend of mine - who disagree with me on some or all of these issues. If I have changed at all, politically, since the heady days of the 1960s, it is in an ever-widening eclecticism, and a growing contempt for those who are convinced that their own political opinions and intuitions are something more than that. We ought not to try to escape the obligation which social life places upon us to make political and economic choices. So I still support the Labour Party, although admittedly without much enthusiasm; for the other options, I have none at all. Equally, however, since this is an area of human life in which the only certainty is doubt and uncertainty, I subscribe to the pious platitude that we should learn to attend to those with very different views from our own.

One of the great errors of the 1960s was the spread of the belief that the intellectual was, or ought to be, engage, in a party political sense; worse still, that, by reason of being an intellectual, he or she stood in some special ‘vanguard’ relationship to truth. Fortunately, in the absence of God, we have little choice but to leave ultimate decisions to the democratic processes themselves; but I have no respect for those bigots of the left or the right who claim to know ‘the only role European intellectuals can now adopt’; or who fail to understand that their own views are, as it were, but a part of a wider argument, and that even those who disagree with them may have some grasp upon aspects of truth.

Only fools and fanatics really believe that a man’s or woman’s political beliefs are most the interesting or significant aspects of their character. An individual’s ethical, spiritual and aesthetic beliefs are, self-evidently, of greater consequence and interest than his or her declarations of political preference at least up to a point. The point is over-stepped when the latter are of such a kind as grossly to distort the former. For those who like labels, pigeon-holes and bibliographies, i.e. for academics, all this is perhaps another way of saying that, intellectually, I owe more to Ruskin than to Marx. Indeed, I agree with Maurice Cowling when he writes, ‘Marxism is not so much untrue as, for certain purposes and in limited respects, true and unimportant’.

It is perhaps because I think this way that I see no great difficulty in making common cause on aesthetic issues with those with whom I may well disagree about politics and economics. (Despite - or more likely as a result of - growing up intellectually in a New Left milieu, I no longer believe that any c,ie, not even Perry Anderson, will ever arrive at a Correct Political Understanding of all the problems in the world. Indeed, I now think that such a project is just absurd; unsurprisingly, Anderson has ended up, it seems to me, being intelligently wrong about almost everything.)

For example, I do not think one has to be a monarchist - although like D.W. Winnicott, I am - to support Prince Charles’s attack on modern architecture; indeed, as I have discovered since publishing the full text of the speech in Modern Painters, support for the Prince’s initiative involves a range of political bed-fellows running from Professor Scru- ton to the architectural correspondent of the New Statesman and beyond on either side. Equally, the fact that I published Grey Gowrie’s outstanding study of Lucian Freud’s paintings does not mean that I will necessarily vote for Mrs Thatcher at the next election, nor that I have been converted to free market economies.

I see nothing odd or inexplicable about this. Politics certainly matter; but, given certain minimum conditions, they are not the only things that matter, nor do they necessarily matter more than anything else. Men and women with similar social goals often opt to pursue them through very different political means. This should hardly surprise us. Nobody, after all, would even raise an eyebrow if they discovered articles about John Ruskin and William Morris in the same art magazine today. We think of Ruskin and Morris as having similar ideas (whether we agree with them or not). Morris always spoke with profound respect about his debt to Ruskin; yet, in political terms, Ruskin was a High Tory, who was sceptical about democracy itself, whereas William Morris was a Marxist and a revolutionary socialist. I admire them both - although I recognise that, his politics notwithstanding, Ruskin was by far the greater and deeper thinker.

I have no doubt that some with different tastes and ethical beliefs from mine will squawk and squeal and try to make out that, despite what I have been arguing, the real differences between us are political. They will claim, as they have done so many times before, that I am slipping and sliding down the path that leads to the mire of right-wing reaction, whereas they are uncompromised men, or women, of the Left, marching along on the side of Progress, Light and the Socialist Future ... entirely forgetting, of course, that their own anaesthetic preferences involve climbing into avant-garde or post-modern beds with partners who are less than ideologically perfect, e.g. such philistines of the far right as the Saatchis, environmental thugs like Palumbo, or wallies like Gilbert and George. For it is not only aesthetic traditionalists like myself and Roger Scruton who enter into politically improbable alliances.

The fact is that, when it comes to art, among my modernist and post-modernist opponents, taste is a more powerful pull than political affiliation - just as they (rightly) point out that it is for me.

And this brings me to my last point: the case of John Berger. I have never, Francis Wheen notwithstanding, ‘denounced’ Berger as a Thatcherite. What I did argue in a recent article in New Society was that Berger’s Ways of Seeing in many ways anticipated the anti-aesthetic policies of Margaret Thatcher’s Governments - despite their political differences. I remain convinced that this is so. For Ways of Seeing is hostile to the very idea of aesthetic value; it sets out to oppose any notion of spirituality in art, of art as a channel of grace. Ways of Seeing attacks the right of museums to exist, arguing that they should ‘logically’ be replaced by children’s pin-boards of reproductions; Ways of Seeing appears to prefer photography to painting and presents ‘publicity’ or advertising, as the inevitable extension of the Western tradition of oil painting.

Of course, I did not ‘betray’ John Berger: what did happen I explain at some length in Theoria, my book published by Chatto and Windus, 1988, in which I describe how I grew out of his ideas. Briefly, as a young man, I was deeply impressed by Berger’s theories. But, unlike Berger, who departed these shores to live out his pastoral idyll elsewhere, I had every opportunity to observe what was actually happening to art and aesthetic life in Mrs Thatcher’s England. No one could accuse Mrs T. of clinging on to the values espoused in Kenneth Clark’s Civilization; but, give or take a few differences of political rhetoric, Ways of Seeing could easily have provided her Ministers with everything they felt they needed to know about art. For while Berger was milking his peasants in the Haute Savoie, Mrs Thatcher’s Government was shutting down Fine Art courses and her officials were arguing that the visual arts should serve material and industrial processes, rather than spiritual and aesthetic needs. The great museums were increasingly squeezed for resources and we witnessed the fostering of a philistine ‘culture’ in which figures like Saatchi dominated not only advertising but what was left of the Fine Arts as well.

I soon came to doubt whether the ideas contained in Ways of Seeing were quite so wonderful as I had once believed - and I found that many artists and teachers of art, up and down the country, agreed with me.*

While this tragic ‘modernisation’ (i.e. destruction) of Fine Art education was taking place in this country, Berger continued to do nicely from the reprinting of Ways of Seeing, but he said not a word about the Government’s anti-art policies. And so, quite frankly, I changed my mind. Berger never forgave me for this. Suffice to say, it was he, and not I who conclusively brought our friendship to an end.

But perhaps this was inevitable; for I had come to the view that, more than any other single book, Ways of Seeing helped to foster the unholy, anti-aesthetic alliance forged by some intellectuals of the radical left with others of the radical right.

Ways of Seeing, for example, is cited as an inspiration at the beginning of Sandy Nairne’s book The State of the Art, which celebrates the collapse of all aesthetic values into the quagmire of Saatchi-style post-modernism. The point is really this: there is no way in which the defence of the aesthetic dimension of life can be definitively rooted in a particular political stance; and yet many of us, myself included, believe that the social defence of this dimension matters as much as, if not more than, many of the political differences which understandably divide us. Ways of Seeing began as a diatribe against Kenneth Clark’s Civilization, with its affirmation of humane spiritual values and a continuing European tradition. But I have come to believe that Berger’s book is really a dated and dangerous tract which provides the justification for philistinism of whatever political colour. Clark offers at least a better starting point for the aesthetics of those of us who are socialist - as he himself was, and I remain - or, indeed, for those who are not.

{Art Monthly 116)

MODERN ART: Goodbye to all that! / March 12, 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.

GOODBYE TO ALL THAT!

by Peter Fuller, 1988

In 1970, I was an obscure and penurious critic writing for art magazines and the underground press; John Berger (whom I had never met) chanced upon an article I had written attacking the machinations of the art market under the pseudonym ‘Percy Ingrams’ in the Trotskyist paper, Red Mole. Berger sent this to Paul Barker, then editor of New Society, with a note suggesting that he should seek out Percy and get him to write something. My first piece for this magazine, ‘The £sd of Art’, appeared under my own bye-line on 9th July 1970.

Over the years that followed, Paul Barker gave me as much space as I wanted to work out my changing aesthetic ideas in public; he encouraged me to write about anything that interested me from a new interpretation of the Venus de Milo, to conceptual art, Sir Joshua Reynolds, or the origins of creativity in our species. This was a generous and risky thing to do - and I will always be grateful for it. Then, there were very few non-specialist British journals which made the space for serious articles of any length about the visual arts. Today there are fewer; and tomorrow there will be none.*

From my point of view, all this makes it sad and ironic that the last few months of New Society’s life should have been marked by a contretemps between Berger and myself, arising out of the article I wrote about Ways of Seeing last January. Much has been said here, and elsewhere, about my motives in publishing this. I therefore wish to close my contribution to New Society by explaining how my ideas about art have changed over the last two decades, and why I feel a radically different approach is now necessary.

Inevitably, in my early years as a critic, I was deeply influenced by Berger whom I met soon after the appearance of that first New Society article. The following month he sent me a letter in which he outlined what he saw as three elements comprising a ‘viable critical stance’. First and foremost was the assault on the art market and ‘the turning of works of art into commodities’; the exposure of this process, he told me, ‘takes us far into the economic and ideological workings of capitalism’. He wrote that whenever there was a chance of such revelation, ‘the critic should take it: without necessarily having to assess the creative value of the works in question.’ The second arose from ‘the use by a certain number of artists to pose and investigate a whole series of new social and philosophical schemes, kinetics, etc. The critic should take an interest in such work and ‘enter the questions posed’ in the understanding that the ‘answers ... must lie outside the works’ and that they were ‘more important than any “quality” of the works-in-themselves’. Many such questions, he wrote, ‘were about art in the hope of transcending art’. Thirdly, he recommended a sociological critique of the use of the ‘“professional” life of artists as a life-style of maximum freedom’.

For ten years, Berger was a constant source of support and encouragement. He had, of course, left England to live in a village in the Haute Savoie, but he wrote to me regularly, commenting on my articles in detail. ‘I liked your piece on Oldenburg - except for the last paragraph ...‘ ‘I thought the T.L.S. piece was excellent ... And Hamilton of course is all nostalgia ...‘ We visited each other frequently and I developed a sense almost of complicity with him, which was both flattering and exciting for a young and inexperienced critic. In 1975, he wrote ‘Within the art world we are alone’.

The following year he sent me a drawing of two men driving a stake into the ground with alternate blows of their hammers. ‘If we hammer away like this, we may dent something.’

I looked back over my blows of the hammer before I wrote this piece. In that very first New Society article, my ‘line’ was an all-out attack on the art market and the improbable assertion that the most interesting work in the future world, in any event, be unsaleable. ‘The art experience’, I wrote, ‘has come to lie in the interaction between the object and the viewer, far more than in any “value” inherent in the object itself.’ The article was spiced with asides on art with purely aesthetic goals, and noises of encouragement to a ‘new generation of artists’ who were starting ‘to create a new, articulate, genuinely revolutionary art detached from object slavery’. It is nothing like as eloquent as Berger; but it has all the hall-marks of the work of a devoted disciple.

This was not a role in which I felt comfortable for very long. For one thing, I was becoming increasingly worried about the direction ‘we’ were taking; for another, Paul Barker, the most perceptive editor for whom I have ever written, used to take me aside and hint that the purpose of criticism was to develop a vision and a voice of one’s own.

Gradually, I came to realise that ‘we’ were not at all alone; on the contrary, the critical stance which Berger had presented as being so radical that only he and I were pursuing it was in fact part and parcel of a new orthodoxy. For example, in 1972, there was a major exhibition of ‘The New Art’ at the Hayward Gallery; it consisted of words, processed information, conceptual pieces, etc., by artists including Gilbert and George, posing exactly the sorts of ‘questions’ Berger had told me the critic ought to enter. The show was introduced by Anne Seymour who praised these artists’ ‘eschewal of aesthetic mumbo-jumbo’, and argued that the artist could now ‘work in the areas in which he is interested - philosophy, photography, landscape, etc. - without being tied to a host of aesthetic discomforts which he personally does not appreciate’.

I found I was bored to tears by this sort of thing. I derived from it none of the pleasure and excitement which was what had attracted me to painting and sculpture in the first place; nor did it provide, by way of compensation, any more intellectual stimulation than could be wrung out of a children’s book or an amusement arcade. But, for much of the 1970s, there was hardly an artist under thirty who did not believe that this was the way in which he or she ought to be working.

What worried me was that I came to see the ‘justification’ for fashionable anti-art in the ‘viable critical stance’ Berger had outlined towards the art world and, more significantly, in his influential book and television programmes, Ways of Seeing. For, despite all that he and Mike Dibb have recently written, the undeniable fact remains that Ways of Seeing was designed to encourage the view that an interest in the spiritual and aesthetic dimensions of art is somehow bogus, and that oil painting is the ‘bourgeois’ art form par excellence and is somehow inherently corrupted by its ‘special relationship’ with capitalism.

It is true that Berger wrote essays elsewhere which had little to do with his general theory as put forward in Ways of Seeing. When he produced those marvellous studies of Grtinewald, Poussin, Vermeer, Courbet, Millais, Monet or Bonnard his writing was always reflective and evaluative; he never wasted time reminding his readers that these artists had, first and foremost, produced ‘portable capital assets’, and, as far as I can remember, he himself had nothing to say about the need for the art of such great painters to ‘transcend’ itself and to be absorbed into other anti-aesthetic forms of life and work. The problem - as I came to see it - was that, of all Berger’s books, Ways of Seeing had an overwhelming influence year in, year out, on generation after generation of art students. It still does ... And they have been encouraged to despise aesthetic experience; to ignore tradition; to abandon painting and sculpture; and to believe that there is nothing to be learned from a museum that they cannot as easily pick-up from a colour supplement.

Sometime during the 1970s, I began to feel that I wanted a theory of art which was derived from - rather than at odds with - my own deepest responses to works of art. Inevitably, I found myself drawn back to the traditional concern of aesthetics i.e. the quest of ‘the beautiful’, and to ideas about imagination, talent, genius, tradition - and the particular formal possibilities of the various arts. I came to realise that, although I was interested in paintings as social documents, that had little to do with the roots of my responses to them. What excited my passion, or on occasions my hate, was the success, or failure, of a painting as art. To use an analogy from another sphere of life, if I love someone, I certainly want to know everything I can about them; but such knowledge can never ‘explain’ my love.

In trying to make sense of my own responses to pictures, I found myself drawn ever further away from the narrow economic and sociological preoccupations that pervade Ways of Seeing-, I began to read traditional aesthetics, to study psychoanalytic and even biological ideas about imagination and illusion, and to become much more knowledgeable than I had been about the materials and techniques the painter and the sculptor use and their peculiar expressive possibilities. Inevitably, I found myself drawn into the aesthetically conservative and yet profoundly radical universe of Ruskin; and, it was through reading him that I rediscovered Kenneth Clark, and came to realise that there were many more ‘viable critical stances’ than I had previously imagined.

In 1980 I published Art and Psychoanalysis exploring some of these new ideas; I also wrote the paper Seeing Berger. Berger wrote to me immediately, expressing his agreement. ‘I have read the essay and I think it very good. Its arguments are just and clear, and they correct what is false in Ways of Seeing, as well as going beyond it. I never considered Ways of Seeing an important work. It was a partial, polemical reply - as you say. But I was worried that your essay might miss this process, and so become too textually attached to a test that was not important enough. My worries were quite unnecessary because you situate the questions you discuss marvellously. Reading you, we are back in the world.’ He ended with a characteristic image: ‘Strange how we work - and walk - the two of us. Sometimes it seems to me that we are each a single leg of some other being who is striding out’.

But then, equally suddenly, it was all over; it was as if either I had to be Berger’s other leg, or his deadly enemy. In public, he said nothing about my criticisms of Ways of Seeing, but, the following year, I expressed some disagreement about his reading of Picasso in New Society, drawing on the theories I had been putting forward in Seeing Berger. He wrote an angry letter to the magazine, which was published, accusing me of ‘parricidal intentions’. This was the only comment he has ever made about any of my writings in print, until the bitter tirade of his Confession published on 12 February 1988.

Inevitably, our personal relationship withered to nothing; throughout the 1980s, there had been many occasions on which - to put it mildly - I have found his conduct less than comradely. No doubt he has often felt the same. But, Mike Dibb notwithstanding, I cannot accept that I have come to hold my present views about Ways of Seeing because of the breakdown of my personal relationship with John Berger; if anything, it is the other way around. My relationship with Berger broke down because I came to disagree with the theory of art he had proposed in Ways of Seeing.

Today, I find myself unrepentant concerning my assertion that, give or take a few differences of political rhetoric, the policy towards the arts implied in Ways of Seeing is uncomfortably close to those programmes implemented by the present Government. The Director of the National Gallery recently compared Thatcher’s policy towards the museums with the dissolution of the monasteries in the 16th century. All this is perhaps not so surprising as it appears. Marxists and monetarists after all have at least one thing in common: they both believe that ethics and aesthetics are, or ought to be, determined by economic forces, ‘in the last instance’.

The ideas that John Berger put forward in Ways of Seeing have become the ruling ideas in the art world today. I do not question what he says when he claims that, elsewhere and on other occasions, he has put forward other views of art. ‘The transcendental face of art’, he wrote in a 1985 essay, ‘is always a form of prayer’. But the students who are given Ways of Seeing to read year in, year out, never get to hear of such remarkable qualifications. And they go on to read books like State of the Art by Sandy Nairne, Director of the Arts Council of Great Britain, which pays hommage to Ways of Seeing and then proceeds to argue that there is no such thing as aesthetic quality in art and that more or less everything in art is as good or as bad as everything else.

This week 22-28 May 1988 has been declared ‘British Art Week’. The television is full of the stuff. Any one who watches will become aware of just how widely the sorts of ideas put forward in Ways of Seeing are accepted by young artists and not so young arts administrators today. You won’t hear many voices - except, dare I say it, my own - raised on the television discussions in favour of ‘connoisseurship’ or ‘spirituality’ in art. The rhetoric of yesterday’s ‘radicalism’ is nowhere so cosily ensconced as in today’s art establishment.

Ways of Seeing was not, of course, the cause of all this; but it has done nothing to help resist the onslaught of the institutional philistines. Today, by and large, they are still calling the agenda for the discussion about art. In order to counteract this depressing orthodoxy, I started Modem Painters. If, as Berger’s ironic Confession implies, he now shares my views about this orthodoxy, then perhaps he would care to write for us. After all, with the death of New Society, where else are serious articles in defence of the aesthetic dimension going to appear? He might begin by explaining what, if not those put forward in Ways of Seeing, he does feel to be the ‘important’ ideas for the creation and understanding of art. Do they, perhaps, have something to do with its ‘transcendental face’ after all?

1988

MODERN ART: Against Internationalism / March 11, 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: Against Internationalism

by Peter Fuller, 1988

No exhibition has angered me more than the 1988 Hayward Annual. No sooner have we shaken off the thraldom in which New York has held British art for three decades, than we are invited to subsume our cultural identity once again ... this time in European decadence and neo-dadaism. Behind this invitation, of course, lies the conventional art-world wisdom that British art is, in Frances Spalding’s words, ‘essentially provincial’, and that ‘provincialism’ is a vice which needs to be dispelled by something called ‘internationalism’. Here, however, I want to argue a contrary view. As John Ruskin once said, ‘All great art, in the great times of art, is provin- ciaT. If we cannot easily grasp this, it is perhaps because we do not live in a great time of art.

Art historians often stress the modernity of the generation of British artists who began to achieve maturity in the 1930s - Henry Moore, Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth, John Piper, David Bomberg and Graham Sutherland, among them. But, in retrospect, it is easy to see that this modernity was of a peculiar kind. Before allying themselves to ‘The Modern Movement’, these artists belonged, first and foremost, to an indigenous British tradition, which they sought to revive, honour, and extend. And a strength of this indigenous tradition was that, in many ways, it was profoundly conservationist; the achievement of these great artists was as much a product of their refusal of modernism, as of their acceptance of it. Edward Mullins is not often right; and yet he is certainly on to something when he says, ‘Generally speaking, British art has been conceived either in self-conscious relation to Modernism or in stalwart rejection of it, but always in the knowledge that whatever Modernism might be, it belonged elsewhere.’ One of the problems with today’s generation of artists is that they see themselves as belonging to The International Art World Inc. before they conceive of themselves as contributing to a uniquely British tradition, which has always involved resistance to modernity.

In 1833, Lord Lytton published a book called England and the English, in which he wrote, ‘We should seek the germ of beauty in the associations that belong to the peculiar people it is addressed to. Everything in art must be national ... Nothing is so essentially patriotic as the arts; they only permanently flourish amongst a people, when they spring from an indigenous soil’. Such sentiments, if expressed today, would produce only outrage, and protestations about the ‘universality’ of art. But one contemporary of Lytton’s, at least, seems to have lived his artistic life along the lines the good Lord suggested, to considerable effect. I am referring, of course to John Constable. In 1938, with his usual perspicacity, Kenneth Clark remarked that Constable was not just ‘the most English’ of our painters; he was also ‘the most universal’. Though Constable admired and sought to emulate the highest achievements of the European tradition, he refused to follow those who urged the pursuit of contemporary French and Italian models. Indeed, it might be said that he eschewed ‘internationalism’ in favour of an almost belligerent ‘provincialism’, in which he indulged his ‘overweening affection, for the banks of the Stour and the scenes of his childhood. And even Roger Fry, who was no friend of British painting, nor indeed of any aesthetic based on natural form, had to admit that Constable electrified Paris ‘with a new revelation of natural colour which held the key to the later developments of European art’. Nor, of course, was Constable just an isolated instance: Vermeer, Monet, Cezanne, Matisse, and Bonnard may not have been British, but they were all devoted to their provincial perspectives.

John Constable: Golding Constable’s Kitchen Garden

In that 1938 essay, Clark warned, ‘the temptation to use the picture-making formulas of continental schools is as strong today as it was in Constable’s youth’. He argued that any young painter who would resist it must have something of Constable’s courage and determination. ‘The attitude to nature implicit in his work,’ Clark wrote, ‘remains fundamentally true. We can no longer accept a doctrine of naive imitation, but we can, and must, accept nature as the material means through which pictorial emotion can be expressed.’ Clark was surely right, for if the British art of the 1930s manifests a weakness, it may be described as too great an obsession with ‘international’ forms and varieties of modernism. Moore was at his most feeble when he moved furthest from the English landscape, and closest to the anonymous stringed foibles of the modern world. Ben Nicholson was at his most vacuous when he was most removed from William Nicholson. But Clark almost certainly realised he was writing at the beginning of the great Neo-Romantic revival in British art, when, briefly, artists rediscovered the provincial vision, and produced work of a calibre which had not been seen in Britain for many decades. Indeed, it was only with the onset of war, the departure of many of the international ‘avant- gardists’, and what Grey Gowrie once called ‘England’s return to her own romantic tradition’, that the achievements of this talented generation reached their fullest expression. This replenishment of a national tradition helped to heal the rift between the artists and a wider public, too. For the rise of ‘Neo-Romanticism’ saw an upsurge of enthusiasm for a contemporary art, which sprang out of a common culture and a shared tradition. It was, of course, exactly this attitude to nature which the modern movement and ‘The International Style’ sought to deny.

Samuel Palmer: Pastoral with Horse Chestnut Tree.

The paradox which today’s ‘post-modernists’ - with the possible exception of Therese Oulton - do not understand is that if our artists really want to aspire to the ‘universality’ of a Constable (or of a Cezanne) they will have to become very much more blinkered and British in their outlook. They will have to develop a sense of belonging to a national tradition which is at least stronger than any sense of being part of an international avant-garde, trans-avant-garde, or post-avant- garde. A genuinely ‘universal’ art in the late 20th century can only begin with what Clark called a ‘profound intimacy’ with particular places, persons and traditions. It is more likely to spring out of visits to Kew Gardens, the Lake District, or Wales than from trips to Diisseldorf, SoHo, or the Sydney Biennale.

Take the case of Graham Sutherland. In 1960, that fastidious and most European-minded of connoisseurs, the late Douglas Cooper, wrote a monograph on Sutherland which is a tour deforce, and ought to be made compulsory reading for every art student. Cooper stressed that there were none whose ‘sensibility and inspiration’ were so ‘unmistakably and naturally English’ as Sutherland’s; and yet Cooper argued not only that Sutherland was ‘the most original English artist of the mid-20th century’, but also that he was ‘recognised in European artistic circles as the only significant English painter since Constable and Turner’. What is beyond doubt is that, in his formative years, Sutherland did not travel abroad, nor did he look out, or around, at what was happening in the European or American art scene. Rather he looked back to the work of Samuel Palmer. Later, in the 1930s, when Sutherland progressed from printing to painting, his vision was transformed by his experience of the brittle landscape of Pembrokeshire, where he found vivid natural and spiritual metaphors for a world sliding into the catastrophes of war. There are many who believe that Sutherland’s most ‘universal’ paintings are those which he produced in this most blinkered, British, and provincial phase of his development.

But in the 1950s, ‘Neo-Romanticism’ was squeezed on the one hand by the die-hards of the Royal Academy, and on the other by a shabby social realism, followed by Pop, and the succession of American styles. A watershed in Sutherland’s own development was undoubtedly the hostile reception accorded to his fine portrait of Winston Churchill, which was quickly followed by ‘avant-garde’ infatuation with American abstract expressionism. Sutherland’s interest in British cultural life understandably seemed to diminish. He began to imitate Picasso and Matisse, and he spent more and more time in France. Predictably, this ‘internationalism’ eroded his art, which, in the 1960s, seemed to flounder and lose direction. It was only after 1968, when he revisited Pembroke once again, and re-discovered the roots and sources of his inspiration, that he began to produce work which not only rivalled, but, in my view, came close to surpassing his finest achievements of the 1940s.

Of course, we have to be careful here. I am not suggesting that art is best served by ignorance or xenophobia. I am however arguing for an informed provincialism which looks for immediate meaning in local forms, and finds its larger sense through affiliation to a national tradition. Indeed this is the best stance - perhaps the only stance - from which ‘international’ influence can be successfully assimilated. One of the many tragedies of recent art education is that it has done nothing whatever to foster such a sensibility. How many students are encouraged to study Constable as an English painter - rather than as the ‘precursor’ of French Impressionism? In the literary departments of our universities, we rightly have no inhibitions about reaching English literature; and the same ought to be true of painting and sculpture. But in how many art schools is British art history taught as such? How many art students are encouraged to see themselves as the heirs of Moore, Piper, Sutherland, Nicholson and Hepworth, let alone of Reynolds, Constable or Turner? And yet we wonder why our national tradition appears so enervated.

There is no need to record again here the tragic effects which American influence had upon British art in the 1960s and 1970s. Now that the dust is thick upon almost everything that ‘Situation’ and the New Generation produced, everyone realises how little was gained through subservience to Manhattan’s and Washington’s fashions. Robyn Denny’s plastic Rothkos cannot be compared with the real thing; all that is worthwhile in Caro was derived not from David Smith, Clement Greenberg, or Kenneth Noland, but from Henry Moore. And yet the case of Patrick Heron remains salutary.

In the 1950s, Heron began to emerge as perhaps our finest colourist. At first, he fed eagerly from Bonnard, Matisse, and Braque; like Sickert and Steer before him, he readily assimilated those aspects of French painting which enabled him to develop and extend his very English vision. But, like Roger Fry’s and Nikolaus Pevsner’s, Heron’s criticism revealed a fatal tendency to denigrate the British visual tradition. He never really saw just how much many of the artists whom he admired - like Ivon Hitchens, Henry Moore, and Bryan Wynter - owed to English Neo-Romanticism. Predictably, in the 1950s, Heron became a tendentious ‘internationalist’, and began to identify increasingly with American painting. As is now well known, this stance tragically backfired. On the far side of the Atlantic, the Americans relentlessly plagiarized St. Ives painting; at home, the artists of ‘Situation’ and ‘The New Generation’, imitated those plagiarisms. What is perhaps less fully understood is the distorting effect all this had on Heron’s own work. In the 1970s, his ‘wobbly-edged’ pictures often seemed to want to prove a point to the Americans. But today Heron appears to have come to recognise that the significant sources of inspiration and nurture for his own art had always been close to home - in, say, the British decorative tradition, so vividly expressed in the finest Cresta Silks, or the beautiful gardens which surround his home at Eagle’s Nest, in Zennor, near St Ives, in Cornwall. This recognition, with its implicit repudiation of internationalism, comes at a time when Heron is painting more beautifully than ever in his distinguished career.

I believe that the British tradition has something specific to contribute to the ‘post-modern’ world. George Santayana says somewhere that of all modern peoples, it is the English who provide the best example of a people in harmony with their environment. This may not be true. What is true, however, is that, in Britain, cultural tradition, climate, and environment, alike, have conspired to emphasise the value of seeking an imaginative and spiritual reconciliation between man and nature. In the days when the ethic and aesthetic of ‘Modernism’ were rampant, this British contribution seemed like a ‘sentimental’ or ‘nostalgic’ refusal of modernity. Today, in the ‘post-modern’ era with all its ecological and ‘green’ emphases, this is no longer the case. By being true to their native traditions, British artists may be able to make a unique contribution to the new, emerging ‘structure of feeling’, which would appear to be essential for the survival of the world as a whole.

(Art Monthly 100)

MODERN ART: Where Was The Art Of The Seventies? / March 11, 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.

Where Was The Art Of The Seventies?

by Peter Fuller, 1980

Future art historians will look back on the 1970s as the time when modernism breathed its last. Two experiences I had in the closing weeks of the decade underline this. The first was my visit to the Post- Impressionist exhibition at the Royal Academy. This made me recall how ‘modern art’ arrived belatedly in Britain when Roger Fry organized his famous exhibition, ‘Manet and the Post-Impressionists’ at the Grafton Gallery in 1910. Historically, Post-Impressionism was the ‘moment of becoming’ of modernism. But for me it was also that in a more personal sense. As an adolescent, I first became interested in modern art through reproductions of Post-Impressionist paintings. At Burlington House I found that, unlike myself, my first loves had not begun to age and wilt. I felt exhilarated. How good the Cezannes, Van Goghs, and Gauguins looked — especially that great Gauguin, Contesbarbares, which glows and beckons from the depths of its mysterious purple suffusions. I felt again all the excitement of my first discovery of the painting of that moment when modernism first discovered itself. I was overwhelmed by a sense of promise.

But I also found myself wondering. The Post-Impressionists did not share a common ‘style’, nor did they see themselves as belonging to a coherent movement. Even so, the best works in the exhibition had something significant in common. I tried to define what it was. As opposed to the official or salon artists of their day, I thought, these painters were asserting the right to imagine the world other than the way it was, or, as Roger Fry himself put it, they ‘do not seek to give what can, after all, be but a pale reflex of actual appearance, but to arouse the conviction of a new and definite reality.’

The promise with which a Cezanne, Gauguin, or Van Gogh is saturated springs from apparently technical, formal, or ‘aesthetic’ factors : the way in which colours are combined, or the material reworking of the picture space. For example, in the exhibition there is a magnificent late Cezanne — one of those in which he begins to offer a new view of man in nature. But Cezanne only realized this vision through the way in which he refused orthodox perspective, broke up the traditional picture space, and re-ordered it into an elaborate structuring of coloured planes. I am not, of course, saying that the formal or plastic qualities of a Cezanne are the only ones that count. Rather, in this Cezanne, content has become form. It makes no sense to separate the two.

Cezanne seemed to exemplify what I think Marcuse meant when he wrote that the critical function of art, its contribution to the struggle for liberation, resided solely in aesthetic form. ‘The truth of art,’ Marcuse declared, ‘lies in its power to break the monopoly of established reality (i.e. of those who established it) to define what is real.’ For Marcuse, ‘The autonomy of art contains the categorical imperative : “things must change”.’ I am sure that it is because he expressed this imperative through the materiality of his painted forms that Cezanne exults me.

And now for the second of my fin de decade experiences. In December, I was invited to sit on a panel at an Artists’ Union meeting. Afterwards, in the pub, I found myself surrounded by conceptual artists, ‘political’ artists, and someone who kept on about art practice and the ‘new media’. Like myself, they were almost all of the left : but I could not help feeling intense discomfort. This was accentuated when a man wearing a hat and an ear-ring (presumably in homage to that low charlatan, Joseph Beuys) handed me a copy of his new ‘avant-garde’ magazine, P.S. I opened it. The lead article was head-lined, ‘Mutation through Auto Surgery’. It recounted the true story of an unfortunate man who, troubled by his sexual drives, had cut open his own belly with surgical instruments and almost succeeded in excising his adrenal glands.

The P.S. article was clarifying. It vividly demonstrated how the great promise in the origins of modernism had reduced itself to the pornography of despair. It made me recall how, over the last ten years as an art critic, I have been invited to attend to all manner of desperate phenomena ranging from a man seated in a bath of bull’s blood, to used sanitary towels, amateurish philosophic speculation, stretched gin bottles, an infant’s soiled nappy liners, brick stacks, and grey monochromes — not to mention expanses of unworked pigment and matter posing as painting or sculpture respectively — and to consider all this as ‘Art’. Whether I accepted such invitations, or refused them, the end result was the same : I was called a negative critic. But that P. S. article confirmed my feelings about the correlation between formlessness and hopelessness. The gross reduction and widespread renunciation of the expressive, material possibilities of painting, sculpture and drawing by many late modernist artists has involved the loss of the potentiality for aesthetic transformation which these media afford. To quote from Marcuse once more: ‘Renunciation of the aesthetic form is abdication of responsibility. It deprives art of the very form in which it can create that other reality within the established one — the cosmos of hope.’

I began writing about art as the 1960s were running out. It seemed then that every fatuous dilettante who had been thrown into prominence during the previous ten years was being deified in full-scale retrospectives or elaborate survey exhibitions in the major art institutions. At this time, the Tate gave retrospectives to Lichtenstein, Hamilton who went on to paint flower pictures besmirched with turds and Andrex toilet tissue because, he said, he had tried everything else — minimalism, Oldenburg and Warhol. At the Hayward I saw Caro, kinetics, *Pop Art Redefined’, Riley, i.e. ‘Op’ art, and Stella retrospectives. At the Whitechapel, Hockney, then the same age as I am today, was celebrated like an old master. There was ’60s sculpture at the ICA, and in Bristol you could have seen a full-scale retrospective for fairy painter, Peter Blake, whose ability as an artist is as concrete as his garden gnomes.

Contrast all this institutional celebration of new British and American art with what is happening, or rather not happening, ten years on. In the closing days of Norman Reid’s administration, it seemed that the Tate was becoming a hermetically sealed, brick bunker after the last stand in the battle of late modernism had been fought and lost : it was almost defunct as an exhibition space for immediately contemporary art. At the Hayward recently one has been able to see ‘Outside Art’, by amateurs, eccentrics and the insane, and a jamboree of nostalgia dredged up from the thirties. For whatever reason not one artist emerged and made any significant cultural impact within the last ten years. At the end of the seventies, the institutions have not been able to identify any current artists or tendencies they consider worth a second look, let alone worth full canonization.

But, if there was a difference in climate between the ‘art world’ of the sixties and that of the seventies there was also, sadly, a continuity in the development of late modernist art itself. I want to focus on this by looking at the work of an American artist who is symptomatic of the ’60s: Andy Warhol. Warhol, you may remember, was a sometime commercial artist who surfaced in the reaction against an exhausted abstract expressionism. Between 1962 and 1964, he produced a series of 2,000 ‘art objects’ in his ‘Factory’. I say he produced: his ‘paintings’ however were made through repeated application of commercially manufactured silk- screens to canvas. Some paint was added later — usually by Warhol’s assistants. Subject matter was pilfered from commercial media, or what I call ‘the mega-visual tradition’; e.g. transposed news photographs, glamour shots of stars, can labels, dollar bills, etc.

How did the art institutions justify giving so much attention to this sort of thing? Well, when Warhol had his retrospective at the Tate in 1971, Richard Morphet, who is still on the staff there, argued at great length that Warhol’s work was just like ‘all major art’. In the catalogue, he went on, and on and on about the fact that these works contain some paint, i.e. about what he calls ‘the reality of paint itself as a deposit on the surface’ — as if this automatically put Warhol on a par with Titian. ‘A major effect of the experience of looking at (Warhol’s) paintings is an unusually immediate awareness of the two-dimensional facts of their painted surfaces.’ We may recall that the paint was put there by assistants. This did not stop Morphet acclaiming Warhol as ‘the sensitive master of a wide variety of surface incident’.

Although Morphet recognized ‘the immensely important operation’ in Warhol’s work of ‘passivity, detachment and chance’, he yet managed to detect (or so he thought) a flickering residue of artistic imagination in the way the things were made. About one work, Marilyn Monroe’s Lips of 1962, Morphet wrote:

To depict Marilyn’s lips 168 times in 49 square feet is a more remarkable innovation than may first appear. Requiring selection, masking, processing, enlargement, transposition and application, in conjunction with decisions on canvas size, placing, colour and handling, it means that the finished painting is a complex and calculated artefact, which is not only unique, but strikingly different from any that another individual might have produced.

Thus Morphet sought to rehabilitate this vacuous poseur for the ‘High Art’ tradition. (En passant, some years later Morphet distinguished himself again in a 5,000 word article in The Burlington defending Andre’s notorious brick stack: he praised its ‘limpid clarity’ and called it a positive statement of ‘general relevance to modern society’.)

But what did left critics say about Warhol? Were they exposing the mystification that surrounded his work? With a few exceptions, unfortunately not. Let me explain. During the sixties attacks on the ‘unique’ or ‘privileged’ art object and the ‘traditional media’ (i.e. painting and sculpture) became the vogue. For example, in 1968 the French critic, Michel Ragon — I could have picked on scores of others — wrote, ‘the artist is a man of the past because he is prejudiced in favour of the unique work, of the artificial scarcity of his product so as to increase the price; he leans toward outmoded techniques.’ Ragon called the artist ‘an avatar of the artisan class’, and claimed that soon, ‘he will be the only artisan in a world that will finally have achieved its industrial revolution.’ Artists were, he felt, counter-revolutionaries and ‘antitechnologists’. The future, however, belonged to automation ‘which alone can reduce the hours of work and thus release the worker from his oppressed condition giving him access to culture and genuine leisure’. So, out with all ‘objects of aesthetic consumption’, not just the ‘armchair’ art of Matisse, but even Guernica too, and in with an art which escaped ‘from the limitations of the easel painting, from being a mere wall adornment’.

This sort of talk informed the left apologetics for Warhol. For example, in 1970, Rainer Crone, a Marxist, published a monograph describing Warhol as ‘the most important living artist in North America’ and praising — a phrase to remember — his ‘anaesthetic revolutionary practice’. Crone wrote that ‘Warhol was the first to create something more than traditional “fine art” for the edification of a few.’ He claimed that he did it ‘by combining the easel painting with a realistic prefabricated visual content, thus providing us with a new critical understanding of the easel painting.’ Crone saw Warhol’s creativity as limited to the selection of subjects but praised his ‘suppression of personalized expression’ in favour of what he calls, ‘a socially meaningful conception of the artwork’.

Thus the art institutions were saying, ‘Warhol is all right because this is art. Look, real paint! Even a dash of imagination.’ And a vociferous sector of the art-left was saying, ‘Warhol is all right because this isn’t like art at all.’ I accept neither of these arguments. Warhol was a vandal. The key renunciation he made was that of his expressive relationship to his materials, by which I mean both the paint itself and his representational conventions. The way in which his ‘paintings’ were made precluded the possibility of there being any realized, expressive correlation between the imaginative vision of the artist and the concrete working of his forms in paint. His pictures might just as well have been made by anyone else, and indeed they often were. (Ironically, given Crone’s claims, although Warhol thus shattered the possibility of aesthetic authenticity, market authenticity remained unaffected. A ‘genuine’ Warhol, whatever that means, fetches much more than a ‘fake’.) But Warhol’s real crime is that he threw away what Marcuse called the power of art to break the monopoly of established reality. In his hands, or rather out of them, painting came close to being a mere reflection of the prevailing ideology and the dominant mode of production.

His assault upon ‘personalized expression’ was not the initiation of a new revolutionary practice : he was rather the harbinger of what I set out by calling the pornography of despair. Anyone who doubts this should look, if he can stand it, at the magazine Interview, which Warhol has been publishing in the 1970s. In its chic-right punkishness, it surpasses even P. S. for sheer nastiness. But I have dwelt so long on Warhol and the responses to him because they epitomize the dual tragedy of the art of the last two decades. Mainstream, late modernist, institutional art was relinquishing its specific material practices — the skills of painting, sculpture, and drawing — and thereby, it would seem, the capacity to create imaginative, ideologically- transcendent forms. Instead of resisting and exposing this progressive impoverishment, the art-left was forever seeking rationalizations for it.

The destruction of imaginative expression is even more manifest in abstract art than in representational. Elsewhere, I have written about the heroic but largely unsuccessful attempts of the classical generation of abstract expressionists to find a new means of painterly expression, rooted in the body of the artist as subject rather than in perceived anatomy (as in Renaissance art) or in the anatomy of perception (as in, say, Impressionism). The search for a way through from Abstract Expressionism’s magnificent failure was occluded by the rise of anaesthetic dogmas and practices.

In 1962, in an essay called ‘After Abstract Expressionism’ Clement Greenberg, the most powerful critic of the sixties, wrote, ‘it has been established . . . that the irreducibility of pictorial art consists in but two constitutive conventions or norms: flatness and the delimitation of flatness.’ He held that ‘the observance of merely these two norms is enough to create an object which can be experienced as a picture.’ Thus, he claimed, ‘a stretched or tacked-up canvas already exists as a picture — though not necessarily a successful one.’ He maintained that this reduction expanded rather than contracted the possibilities of the pictorial: all sorts of ‘visual incidents and items’ that used to belong wholly to the realm of the aesthetically meaningless now lent themselves to being experienced pictorially.

Greenberg has been much criticized of late for his aesthetic conservatism. However, my quarrel with Greenberg is that he conceded far too much to a pseudo-historicist art ‘radicalism’. It is true that Greenberg always insisted on the importance of ‘aesthetic consistency’ which, he argued, showed itself ‘only in results and never in methods or means’. Nonetheless, in practice he preferred painters who were in the process of renouncing their constitutive expressive means: Pollock, who dripped paint off sticks, rather than De Kooning, and later painters who used spray guns (Olitski), stained the canvas (Frankenthaler), or poured pigment out of buckets (Louis). All these artists had a residue of aesthetic transformation of materials in their practice (as Greenberg had in his theories); but they were well on the way to the dumb automatism of Warhol and minimalism.

Indeed, Greenberg showed comparable indifference to the imaginative, expressive work of the artist. He had little respect for the latter’s creative integrity and would enter deeply into the lives and studies of his proteges effectively to instruct them as to what the next step in the art-historical process would be. If recent painting has an author or subject for Greenberg it is much more the art-historical process itself, rather than the individual artist, who emerges in his theory as the mere effect of a subject outside himself — art history. Greenberg describes, though he claims never to have prescribed, modernism as engaged upon a quest for the ‘essence’ of painting which he sees in purely physicalist terms as ‘the ineluctable flatness of the support’. I believe that his diminution of the importance of the imaginative, material process of expression was a significant factor in the reduction of art towards ideology. The difference between an Olitski and a Pink Camay soap advertisement is discernible, though hardly significant.

Greenberg believed himself to be defending the potentialities of painting as a medium: but his physicalist definition, while it allows in the category of the pictorial, cricket-pitches, table-tops, carpets and tiles, excludes the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel (which is not flat). Thus, despite all his protestations, I would insist that Greenberg helped to open the floodgates for what was to come, i.e. the dissolution of the medium within the modernist tradition. For myself, as you will see, I insist that any definition of a picture must contain reference to the fact that it is not just a thing (although of course it is necessarily that) but consists of materials, including pictorial conventions, which have been expressively worked by an imaginative human subject.

The central contradiction in Greenberg’s project was that he clung to a conception of the autonomy of aesthetic experience which was at odds with his modernist, stylistic historicizing. Many of his followers rejected the aesthetic element in his work and kept the rest. William Rubin of MOMA was behind the fabrication of Frank Stella, a fully ‘automatist’ painter, at least in the 1960s. ‘I always get into arguments with people who want to retain the “old values” in painting’, Stella told Rubin, ‘the “humanistic” values that they always find on the canvas.’ Meanwhile, Stella professed himself committed to the presumably inhuman possibilities of ‘modular repetition’, i.e. stripes. Sort of Warhol without the faces.

Meanwhile back in London, Caro was importing parallel ideas into sculpture. His ‘radical abstraction’ dehumanized the medium by rejecting all anthropomorphic reference. He also ‘dematerialized’ it by deploying steel elements, painted so they appeared weightless, as lines and surfaces in space rather than as masses or volumes. Caro abandoned traditional expressive techniques of sculpture in favour of the placement of preconstituted elements joined by welds. As Warhol had ‘picked-up’ images and techniques from the mass media, so Caro, working in three dimensions, turned to industrial production for I-beams, tank-tops, and other prefabricated components. Elsewhere, I have shown how Caro’s work belongs to the culture of the early 1960s : he emerged in 1963, the year of Harold Wilson’s ‘white-heat of the technological revolution’ speech, and of the publication of Honest to God, which attacked the anthropomorphic conception of the deity, and sought to render him ‘radically abstract’ by bringing him off his pedestal and constituting him as ‘the ground of our being’. Caro’s Warholesque ‘suppression of personalized expression’ made it hard for him to resist the ideology with which he was saturated.

But Caro is not as dumb as Warhol. I doubt whether in the long run he will be remembered as having made a serious contribution to sculpture, but his best pieces, like Orangerie, seem aesthetically successful in a way which differs from that possible through mimetic sculpture. Michael Fried is surely right to suggest that in such works Caro has so transformed his materials that they are expressive of certain experiences of being in the body — like the best abstract painting. These, then, are Caro’s ‘humanist’ rather than his ‘formalist’ sculptures. But the achievements and failures of Caro’s practice are one thing : his pedagogy is another. His influence has been disastrous upon two generations of sculptors.

Take those of Caro’s pupils and followers known as Stockwell Depot sculptors. Peter Hide, the most prominent, simply welds together chunks of matter (steel), comparing what he does with the ‘freedom’ of growth. Where then are the resistances, conventional and material, with which Hide struggles to create form? Hide has abandoned expression in theory and practice. I do not think that, in any meaningful sense, he can be said to be making sculpture at all. From Hide, it is but a short step to heaping up stuff in its natural conformations and calling that sculpture too. And that, of course, is what Barry Flanagan, another of Caro’s pupils, did throughout the 1970s in his exhibitions of sand, wood, hessian, rope, sticks, etc. in heaps, piles, stacks and bundles.

Caro has claimed it is not his fault if people take his view that ‘sculpture can be anything’ so literally as to call walking and breathing sculpture. But this is as if Greenberg was trying to claim that he could not be held responsible if people chose to call merely stretched or tacked-up canvases pictures. Caro’s reductionist position on expression, combined with his emphasis upon ‘the onward of art’, was inevitably the immediate precursor of the view that only the material existence of the sculpture as object mattered. And if, of course, sculpture and painting are just ‘stuff’ in the world, then why bother with the stuff at all? Why not walking, breathing, or cutting out your adrenal glands? Physicalists like Greenberg and Caro are inevitably fathers of the total idealists, the conceptualists who abandon the medium altogether.

Flanagan was also a prominent exhibitor in a large-scale exhibition, held at the ICA in 1969, called, ‘When Attitudes Become Form’, and sub-titled ‘Live in your head’. Interestingly, he chose to exhibit, among other things, pieces of unstretched canvas propped up against the wall with sticks. This was the coming-out party for the ‘non-art’ names of the 1970s : it was the first time I saw work by Andre, Beuys — the felt, fat, dead hares, and political parties man — Bochner, Burgin, Dibbets, Haacke, Kosuth, Serra (walls of black pitch) and so forth.

The work ranged from loosely folded pieces of cloth, to documentation about earthworks, mathematical calculations, cartography, pseudo-sociological surveys. All the tiresome ballyhoo of ‘Post-Object’, ‘Idea Art’, ‘Art Povera’ and ‘Conceptual Art’. For example, one artist had sent a plastic box by post to an undeliverable address. When this was returned he wrapped it again, and sent it to another such address. And so on, and so forth. On the wall was a sheet of paper stating that the last package he got back, ‘all registered mail receipts, and a map join with this statement to form the system of documentation that completes this work.’ This sort of untransformed, petit-bourgeois, bureaucratic practice was acclaimed as somehow ‘radical’. In the catalogue, Flarald Szeemann claimed, ‘the medium no longer seems important . . . The activity of the artist has become the dominant theme and content.’ These artists, he said, aspired ‘to freedom from the object’; while Charles Flarrison wrote of ‘a rejection of the notion of form as a specific and other identity to be imposed upon material’.

By 1970, Donald Karshan was introducing a major exhibition of conceptual art in New York with the words: In this end of the twentieth century we now know that art does indeed exist as an idea. And we know that quality exists in the thinking of the artist, not in the object he employs — if he employs an object at all. We begin to understand that painting and sculpture are simply unreal in the coming age of computers and instant travel.

Meanwhile, in a 1971 essay, ‘The Education of the Un-Artist’, Allan Kaprow praised those who ‘operate outside the pale of the art establishment, that is, in their heads or in the daily or natural domain.’ Unfortunately, however, the ‘Un-Artist’ proliferated within the art institutions as well. In Britain, conceptual art became the seventies orthodoxy, that which was proclaimed in Studio International and Arts Council galleries. A big promotion of all this was ‘The New Art’ at the Hayward in 1972. The Tate, rising to the occasion yet again, wheeled out another of its resident, anaesthetic clowns, Anne Seymour, who wrote in the catalogue that all these conceptualists had in common an ability to ‘look reality in the eye’. But, she added:

. . . reality doesn’t have to be a nude lady of uncertain age sitting on a kitchen chair. It can also be a Balinese ‘monkey dance’, a piano tuner, running seven miles a day for seven days, or seeing your feet at eye level. It can mean that the artist can work in areas in which he is interested — philosophy, photography, landscape, etc., without being tied to a host of aesthetic discomforts which he personally does not appreciate. The artist, in other words, need not bother about form or aesthetic transformation. He can just do his own thing. And that’s official. By such logic one might as well recommend that National Health doctors should be freed from the ‘discomforts’ of a medical training they don’t appreciate . . .

One such new style British ‘artist’ was Victor Burgin, one of the few who emerged to make a name and a career for himself in the 1970s. Burgin is not an eccentric, or an outsider. His slick and empty work has been included in two out of three official Hayward Annuals: he even gets in on the photography shows. The abysmal Burgin is, in fact, a salon artist, a ubiquitous Bouguereau of our time.

But Burgin helps us to answer the question, ‘Where was the art of the 1970s?’ In 1969, he stapled a ‘path’ to the floor of a London gallery. The ‘path’ consisted of 21 ‘modular units’ (of course) each of which was a full-size photograph of the section of floor to which it was attached. Burgin justified this with a theory of ‘Situational Aesthetics’ arguing that recent attitudes to materials in art were based on awareness of ‘the interdependence of all substances within the ecosystem of earth’. The artist, Burgin claimed, was ceasing to see himself as a ‘creator of new material forms’, and might as well subtract materials from the environment as put them there. ‘As art is being seen increasingly in terms of behaviour,’ Burgin wrote, ‘so materials are being seen in terms simply of quantity rather than quality.’ Naturally, holding such views, Burgin heaped scorn on painting and sculpture which he described as ‘the anachronistic daubing of woven fabrics with coloured mud’, and the ‘chipping apart of rocks and the sticking together of pipes’, respectively: these material practices he described as ‘arbitrary and fetishistic restrictions’ imposed ‘in the name of timeless aesthetic values’.

Burgin’s piece can thus be seen as the negative of, say, an Andre tile or brick piece : the latter is just untransformed stuff, legitimized by ideology. Burgin’s photographs declared the presence of the absence of the stuff. Late modernist art thenceforth became either nothing at all — I knew of seven painters working in London in the 1970s who made nothing but grey monochromes — or ideology, tout court, divorced from even the semblance of material practice. The late modernism of the 1970s thus disappears into an anaesthetic black-hole, or, to use a less conceptually suspicious analogy, up its own arse.

You may remember Burgin’s 1977 piece at the Hayward Annual. He decked a room with examples of the same printed poster which showed a chic advertising photograph of a glamorous model and a jet-set man. Not even Warhol ever stole from the prevailing ideology of the mega-visual tradition quite as blatantly as that. So how did they justify putting this on a gallery wall. The photograph was sandwiched between the slogans, ‘What does possession mean to you?’ and ‘7% of our population own 84% of our wealth’. Here we have Warhol, less the residual materiality of the paint and that ever-so-imperceptible trace of imagination, plus an added extra ingredient. Political content! For some of the art-left — but not, I hasten to add, for me — that made Burgin a pillar of virtue.

Burgin was just a ring-leader of a tendency that dominated the official, so-called ‘avant-garde’ in Britain in the seventies. A surfeit of space and attention was given to such practitioners as Art Language for interminable verbal obfuscations about matters on which a first-year philosophy student could put them right; Gilbert and George — tedious poseurs, yet the Tate bought a video tape of them getting drunk; Stephen Willatts, author of sub-sociological schemes, like ‘The Artist as Instigator of Changes in Social Cognition and Behaviour’ and — you’ll enjoy this one — ‘The Social Resource Project for Tennis Clubs’; Mary Kelly, with her saddeningly forensic presentation of faecal stains on her child’s nappy liners and hocus-pocus rationalizations about her obsessional neurotic condition copied from Lacan’s theories about the ‘de-centred subject’. But the list is interminable. It includes APG, Hilliard, McClean, Simon Read, Stezaker, and Tremlett. All are in effect delivering up anaesthetic pieces of structured ideology.

If you think I have exaggerated the importance of this tendency, you have obviously, like many, been just too bored to attend to the art of the 1970s. Over the last ten years, such artists have consistently been promoted as the ‘avant-garde’, the way forward for art in Britain. After numerous Arts Council and British Council sponsored shows, the Musee d’Art Moderne in Paris organized a survey looking back over the British art of the 1970s, ‘Un Certain Art Anglais,’. .. and there they all were again. If I have been a negative critic, I have had good reason for being so.

It would be wrong to imply that, even within late modernism itself, there was no fight back against conceptualism. By the middle of the decade painters and sculptors were protesting against their eclipse. However, developments in conceptualism had, as we have seen, been foreshadowed in much of the work of the late 1950s and 1960s. The defences of painting and sculpture thus tended to be made by those who had in fact been involved in the ‘physicalist’ reductions of them. For example, in 1974, Andrew Forge organized a major survey exhibition of British painting at the Hayward Gallery : he wrote, ‘What faces painting (and sculpture too) ... is a compound of antagonism and indifference.’ But he went on to define painting as ‘coloured flat surfaces’, with no reference to expressive or aesthetic transformation of materials. Predictably, many of the paintings by new artists exhibited in this Hayward exhibition, and elsewhere during the decade were just that: coloured, flat surfaces. They deserved all the inattention they got.

The following year, 1975, William Tucker attempted to do the same for sculpture at the Hayward. He subsequently explained that his exhibition, ‘The Condition of Sculpture’, was devised in the context of ‘a general hostility in the art world to sculpture as physical and substantial, as “thing”.’ But it was a tedious spectacle: room after room was filled with placements of welded I-beam, expanses of steel plate, with, in effect, ‘things’. Predictably, Tucker, too, produced a physicalist definition of sculpture: sweeping aside the fact that for all but the last few years of its history, longer than that of civilization itself, ‘sculpture has manifested itself in the form of human or animal imagery’, Tucker insisted that the image was not primary. ‘It is through the rendering of the human form,’ he wrote, ‘and of drapery . . . that we are made aware of the underlying condition of gravity.’ Thus he drew the ‘fundamental limits’ of sculpture below the expressive image, defining them as ‘subjection to gravity’ and ‘revelation through light’. These, he said, constituted sculpture’s ‘primary condition’ which holds not merely for our time and place but for any time and place. If these limits were attended to, Tucker said, sculpture would be seen to ‘advance and prosper’. But, again, his definition is not of a sculpture at all : it applies to any damn thing which exists in the world, and can be seen — a cup, a table, a corpse, a heap of sand, a human body, a few pieces of aluminium tubing, fitted together a la Nigel Hall. Tucker complained, ‘I have found it more or less impossible, to persuade students at St. Martin’s, up until a year or two ago to actually make anything at all. They have been so busy taking photographs, digging holes, or cavorting about in the nude.’ But, like Caro, he entirely failed to see how his own reductionist view of sculpture was the inevitable instigator of this. After all, I should think it is more fun cavorting in the nude than fitting those wretched sticks of piping together.

Now it is true that, in the latter part of the decade, there were significant stirrings in the traditional media. I will say something about these: but I have accused late modernism of relinquishing the expressive potentialities of painting and sculpture. I now want to explain what I mean by ‘expression’ and why it is worth preserving. Well, I mean something both physical and affective: facial expression provides a good analogy. An expression is a transformation of the visible musculature of the face in a way which reveals inward emotion; this may produce affective responses in others, who may be moved, or alternatively experience our expression as inauthentic. Expression is intimately involved with the emotional and bodily basis of human being: expressions of suffering, rage, and ecstasy are, for example, similar in every society. But historically variable social conventions powerfully inflect expression too. A Geisha girl may greet us: but she does not greet us as we greet each other. Similarly, expression in art involves a transformation of materials according to inner dictates in ways which are intended to have an effect upon others. Expression in art, too, has much to do with the culture within which it is realized; and yet when it is successful it does not seem to be culture-bound. It touches upon areas of experience that have a relative constancy about them. As a socialist, I defend painting and sculpture for their particular expressive potentialities which, I believe, enable them to participate in the construction of what Marcuse called ‘the cosmos of hope’ in a way that, say, a photograph just cannot. But expression cannot be realized without an imaginative human subject who acts upon and significantly transforms the materials (physical and conventional) cf a specific medium to produce a concrete work of art. Late modernism thus jettisoned the constituent elements of expression. I want to look at them more closely, to see how they combine together.

Take first the imaginative human subject, or artist. In some quarters, today, the very concept of a human subject is under attack. Now we live in a society which, like any other, is in large part determined by the underlying structure and movement of the economy which is determinative (though not in any simple or unmediated way) over wide areas of social, institutional, political, intellectual and cultural life. The way we think, structure our feelings, and relate to one another is thus in many respects historically specific, or ideological. Some commentators have gone on from this to say that ideology is everything. They claim it constitutes our ‘lived relation’ to the world : we do not so much think as ‘are thought’; we do not act, but ‘are acted’ by a structure outside ourselves whose effects we become. Much late modernist art reflects this sort of thinking. I have described how Warhol’s practice and Greenberg’s aesthetics gave but a nominal significance to the artist as creative subject. Similarly, conceptual artist, Marie Yates, echoes these fashionable views when she declares, ‘there is no practice except by and in ideology’, and claims that she has finally rid herself of ‘romantic idealism’ and come to acknowledge ‘the fiction of the unity of one’s work or the individual as origin of such’.

‘Bourgeois individualism’ was one thing: but this assault upon creative individuality is quite another. It belongs, I think, to the ideology of monopoly capitalism. Certainly, late modernism progressively shunted value in art away from the creative artist into the historicist process, dissolving it into the movement of a continuum of styles and technologies, a flux of ideologies. If it were true that the value of art was nothing but an ideologically specific phenomenon, then the great art of the past would appear as alien and opaque to us. We could not begin to enjoy it without a complete reconstruction of the conditions under which it was produced. But manifestly this is not the case. Through its authentic expression the greatest art of the past posits a human subject, and reveals a human practice, which tears through the veils of ideology to speak of ‘relatively constant’ elements in human experience. It affirms that we are not mere effects of an alien structure, that we can, as Sartre once put it, make something of that which has been made of us.

There is nothing mysterious about the individuality to which authentic art bears witness. We are certainly shaped by ideology; but we are also immersed in the natural and physical worlds. We exist as psycho-biological entities: as well as entering into social life, each of us lives out a biological destiny, comprised of such things as birth, growth, love, reproduction, ageing and death. Of course, we experience these things through social mediations : but these are not so transforming that it is impossible to speak of an ‘underlying human condition’ common to all who possess human being. This condition is constituted not just by basic physical characteristics that have remained effectively unchanged since the beginnings of human civilization, but also by such common sentiments as pain, fear, sorrow, hope, love, affection, and mourning for the loss of others. It also contains certain, as yet historically unrealized potentialities, such as the potentiality for social life itself. Great art, authentic art, makes use of its necessarily ideologically-determined pictorial conventions to dip down into this rich terrain of relative constancy and constant potentiality.

Late modernism and its left apologists deny this : but the best Marxists have long recognized it. I have learned much from the work of Christopher Caudwell, a brilliant British writer who died in 1937, aged 29, fighting with the International Brigade in Spain. Caudwell saw that ‘great art — art which performs a wide and deep feat of integration — has something universal, something timeless and enduring from age to age.’ Caudwell tried to explain this, saying: ‘This timlessness we now see to be the timelessness of the instincts, the unchanging secret face of the genotype which persists beneath all the rich superstructure of civilization.’ Marcuse, too, saw that ‘art envisions a concrete universal humanity, Menschlichkeit, which no particular class can incorporate, not even the proletariat, Marx’s “universal class”. And Max Raphael, a great Marxist scholar, saw in paleolithic art ‘a symbol of our future freedom’: for him, the great art of the past was a constant reminder that ‘our present subjection to forces other than nature is purely transitory.’ Authentic expression then, by its very nature, protests against ideology, and refutes the view that the human subject is constituted wholly within ideology.

A vital element in both ‘artistic expression’ and this underlying human condition is imagination: this is our capacity to conceive of things other than the way they are. Like the potentiality for fully social life itself, the faculty of imagination is rooted in the long period of attachment and dependency which characterizes the infant-mother relationship in our species. The infant cannot adapt immediately to the world like a new-born foal: he lacks the motor-power even to seek out the mother’s breast at the moment he feels hungry. Imagination envelops the infant’s experience as ‘reality’ constrains that of the foal. In later life imagination manifests many ‘infantile’ features: a certain receptivity, a ‘negative capability’, a renunciation of rational mental process, and a putting of reality in brackets. But imaginative withdrawal also implies richer and more fully human action when one, as it were, returns to the world. Marx knew this very well. In Capital he describes imagination as that which distinguishes the labour of men from that of animals like bees, ants or beavers. A man is able to conceive of the goal of his labour before he embarks upon realizing it.

Under present modes of production, however this capacity to work freely upon materials according to our imagination is severely limited. The assembly line or office worker with his ‘modular units’ and mail receipts is engaged in something more like the work of an ant. In these circumstances imagination becomes split off from future action: it tends to be reduced to mere ‘fancy’, which can be locked into the ‘other realities’ offered by such ideological systems as advertising, science-fiction, or religion. The left has often (and rightly) protested against this last stage in the process : but it has rarely given full weight to the true power of creative imagination. Marx called imagination ‘that great faculty so largely contributing to the elevation of mankind’. But Marcuse is entirely correct to relate the reduction of art to ideology in much later Marxist aesthetics to what he calls ‘a devaluation of the entire realm of subjectivity, a devaluation not only of the subject as ego cogito, the rational subject, but also of inwardness, emotions and imagination.’ Regrettably, the art-left has been no exception. But authentic expression can challenge this eclipse and occlusion of the imagination.

The artist can resist the reduction of our dreams to commercial fantasies, and the banalization of our hopes for a better world into a preference for one brand of soft drink rather than another. He can offer a ‘moment of becoming’ in his work which, as it were, realizes an affective instance of that future as an imaginative image now. Caudwell once wrote:

The poem adapts the heart to a new purpose without changing the eternal desires of men’s hearts. It does so by projecting man into a world of phantasy which is superior to his present reality precisely because it is a world of superior reality — a world of more important reality not yet realized, whose realization demands the very poetry which phantastically anticipates it. Authentically imaginative painting and sculpture can do the same.

But, and this is important, imagination cannot be equated with expression : this would be to fall into the idealist error of Croce who identified art not with some physical, public object but rather with a spiritual act. He held that expression was synonymous with intuition; I am saying that expression can only be realized in and through material. In this respect it is more like work than reverie. Let me draw a parallel from imaginative writing. Raymond Williams has recently stressed the crucial difference between ‘the conception as it moves in the mind’ (whether of a character, the outline of an idea, the perception of a place, or the sense of an action) and what he calls its ‘quite material realization in the words’. Williams says that this realization in the words takes place through a complex process which writers themselves rarely fully understand: it is, he adds, a material process.

Unlike ideas, written ideas, written characters, written actions, etc., are not free. The writer has no choice but to engage with the resources of a specific language. Such resources, Williams argues, are at once ‘enabling and resistant’. Elsewhere, Williams stresses that the stuff upon which the writer works — language — has ‘a very deep material bond’ with the body. He says that communication theories which concentrate ‘on the passing of messages and information’ often miss this. ‘Many poems’, he writes, ‘many kinds of writing, indeed a lot of everyday speech communicate what is in effect life rhythm and the interaction of these life rhythms is probably a very important part of the material process of writing and reading.’ He adds, ‘from a materialist point of view this is at least the direction in which we should look for the foundation of categories that we could if we wish call aesthetic.’

I entirely agree with these observations: but^how much more true these points are of painting and sculpture. Here the matter upon which the artist works consists not just of historically determined pictorial conventions and techniques, like the ‘specific language’ of the writer; but also of definite, physically existent substances — paints, a supporting surface, marble, or bronze — in bodily struggle with which the artist’s expression is realized. Let me stick to painting for a moment. We can say that if we except late modernism, then in Western art at least both these elements of the painter’s materials have themselves involved a definite, and ‘very deep material bond’ with the body. For example, from the Renaissance until the late 19th century, the ‘language’ of paintings was based primarily on the artist’s grasp of perceived, or objective, anatomy: the bodies of others. It was supposed that expression was realized through the accuracy with which the expressiveness of the subject of the painting — Mona Lisa, Venus, Saturn, Griinewald’s Christ, Louis XIV or whatever — was made manifest. The model in Leonardo’s expressive theory was literally physiognomy.

In the late 19th century this began to change through a process by which the subject of the creative process, the artist, became increasingly the subject of the picture, too. American abstract expressionism — especially Pollock — can be seen as an attempt to base a whole system of material expression entirely on the realization of the artist’s ‘life rhythms’ in matter, i.e. paint. I have talked about the historical determinants of this development elsewhere : the point I want to make here is that we have a continuity of expressive practice which is rooted in the human body, whether that is conceived predominantly ‘objectively’ or ‘subjectively’. (We can learn something about expression with a scalpel; and something else by exploring its informing emotions on an analytic couch.) But once we become aware of this continuity, we realize how much ‘abstract expressionism’ there was in works produced according to the canons of classical expression; and how much objective anatomy there is in much abstract painting. I’m not just talking about De Kooning’s women: it makes perfect sense to me to talk of the physiognomy of Rothko.

The fact that a picture has been made by a human being with a body and range of emotions — ‘an underlying human condition’ — not dissimilar from our own is central to the experience of aesthetic effect. I could go on about this : here, I just want to say that in life even before we have words, we express and experience emotion through touch. A caress, kiss, punch, or smack are all physical gestures. The language of emotion — ‘touching’, ‘moving’, ‘uplifting’, ‘transporting’, etc. — reflects this. The affective communication in painting, too, flows from such things as the range of qualitative nuance in the painter’s touch, the imprint of which is visible in the way he has worked his materials. Since we possess similar bodies, and a similar emotional range, we can respond if he is successful in his expression, and we in our receptive attention. But, of course, it is not just a question of touch: scale, combinations of shapes and colours, the handling of line, and the affective evocations of certain forms of spatial organization even when conventionally determined — can also aspire to be imaginatively expressive of aspects of that rich communality of bodily existence, and its potentialities, which can never be wholly occluded by mere ideology however pervasive it may be.

I think Max Raphael had something like this in mind when he wrote, ‘art is an ever-renewed creative act, the active dialogue between spirit and matter; the work of art holds man’s creative powers in a crystalline suspension from which it can again be transformed into living energies.’

I have tried to demonstrate elsewhere that ‘Art’ is a historically specific concept, one which only came into being with the rise of the bourgeoisie. Art in this sense may indeed be disintegrating under late monopoly capitalism, which has given rise to a mega-visual tradition, characterized by mechanical means of producing and reproducing images. But, you see, the ‘arts’ with a small ‘a’ — including painting, sculpture, and drawing — are not just ideology. They are specific, material practices, with specific, material expressive potentialities — which have not been superseded by technological advance. The art of the 1960s devalued the imaginative, bodily and expressive potentialities of the artist as a creative, human subject. In focusing upon the physical existence of the art-work in isolation, the late modernism of the 1960s produced works that were alienated from men and women; those damn ‘modular units’, mere things. The art of the 1970s went further, abandoning tradition and stuff. Expression had been destroyed. Art revealed itself in the conceptualism of the 1970s as naked ideology.

The art-left, tragically, has endorsed this development. Ragon, you will remember, saw the artist as ‘a man of the past,’ an ‘avatar’, the only artisan in a world that was finally achieving its industrial revolution. Crone praised Warhol’s destruction of ‘personalized expression’. Burgin heaps scorn on the notion of ‘autonomous creativity’ as ‘fetishistic and anti-technical’. The art historian, Nicos Hadjinicolau, a theorist of a similar kind to Burgin, has even gone so far as to say there is no such thing as ‘an artist’s style’. ‘Pictures produced by one person,’ he writes, ‘are not centred on him. The fact that they may have been produced by the same artist does not link them together or at least not in any way that is important for art history.’ Thus, Hadjinicolau says he has ‘refused even the idea of aesthetic value in art history’. For him, ‘the essence of every picture lies in its visual ideology’.

Now these commentators think they are radicals, hard- headed socialists, producing a devastating critique of ‘bourgeois’ Fine Art. But I think what they are in fact doing merely theorises that ideologically-blinded way of looking characteristic of late monopoly capitalism. They talk about paintings as if these were advertisements : the static visual form, par excellence, of monopoly capitalism which has long since superseded entrepreneurial or ‘bourgeois’ capitalism. In the advertising image, ‘artist’s style’ has indeed been eliminated, since the image is corporately conceived and mechanically reproduced. The advertisement lacks any stamp of individuality. In it, the imaginative faculty is prostituted, and aesthetic effect reduced to a redundant contingency. The advertisement is constituted wholly within ideology: for I know that if it fills me with intimations of mortality, it is only to convince me to consume a low tar cigarette, or to purchase Elixir Vitamin Extra compound. Thus, the pity of it is that these so-called critiques of bourgeois art emerge again and again as ways of looking through monopoly capitalist spectacles.

But the expressive potentialities of these media — painting, drawing, and sculpture — (indeed of the arts, with a small ‘a’, in general) — were never the peculiar possession of the bourgeoisie. They have histories which long ante-date, and one hopes will long survive, the bourgeois era. William Morris, another Marxist thinker for whom I have the greatest respect, knew this very well. True, he criticized the Fine Art tradition much as I am now criticizing the Mega-Visual tradition : but he defended the arts, with a small ‘a’, as ‘Man’s expression of his joy in labour’. And, today, of course, it is the Fine Art tradition which has become the only possible conserver of the arts in this sense.‘The Commercialist,’ wrote Morris, ‘sees that in the great mass of civilized human labour there is no pretence to art, and thinks that this is natural, inevitable, and on the whole desirable. The Socialist, on the contrary, sees in this obvious lack of art a disease peculiar to modern civilization and hurtful to humanity.’ The pity of it is that many socialists — including many socialist artists and art critics — have declared themselves in this matter as being on the side of ‘The Commercialist’. But on this point, we can be clear and categorical. Let me quote just one more time from Marcuse: ‘Against all fetishism of the productive forces, against the continued enslavement of individuals by the objective conditions (which remain those of domination), art represents the ultimate goal of all revolutions : the freedom and happiness of the individual.’ The expressive potentialities of painting, sculpture and drawing need then to be defended, not just from those threats coming from without, but against the reductionists within — those vandals like Warhol, Caro, Burgin and their followers, whose activities have deprived us of realized moments of hope.

I said earlier that there were stirrings in British painting and sculpture in the latter part of the decade which indicated that some artists are struggling towards a revitalization of what I have been calling the material expressive process. This is not easy: at the moment there are no ‘given’ pictorial conventions which are valid for anything other than small, particular publics. The artist lacks immediate access to the ‘enabling’ yet ‘resistant’ resources of a given language. And then, of course, the artist is bedevilled by the not unrelated problem of the crisis in his social function. Neither prelates, princes, nor wealthy manufacturers presently have much need of painters or sculptors. The great corporations of monopoly capitalism have their own mega-visual media. The State is desperately uncertain about what it wants artists to do, for whom. These are problems I have discussed before and no . doubt will do so again. But I want to end by pointing towards some individuals and tendencies who, in their practice, are struggling to transcend these difficulties, to embed, to use Max Raphael’s phrase again, their creative power in ‘a crystalline suspension’ from which it can again be transformed into living energies.

In the late 1970s, this problem was approached, as one might expect, from both ends of the expressive continuum. Some artists attempted to revitalize abstract art, to move away from the ‘modular units’ of minimalism towards ways of working their forms and materials which were affectively significant, again. The first I saw of this sort of work was Stephen Buckley’s. Buckley’s early pictures were violent, technically and as images : he used techniques like tearing, stitching, scorching, and stuffing the picture surface, yet his works remained paintings. I felt that he was wrenching every possible device and convention of painting in such a way as to force it to be expressive again. I was impressed by those early works, — which I saw as ‘analogues of the body’ — and I do not retract what I said about them. But today, I am perhaps more aware of their weaknesses rather than their successes. Buckley was a bit like a bricoleur — a man who uses a table- top, a piece of sacking, an old hack-saw blade, or whatever to do a reasonable job patching things up. But the bricoleur, by his very nature, cannot create something new. He is trapped, as Levi-Strauss once said, by the ‘constitutive sets’ from which his elements came. The ‘constitutive set’ for Buckley was late modernism itself. There was no way it could give back to him the skills of drawing and touch, which he lacked. The non-painting techniques that he imported meant that, in the end, his works tended to lack that aesthetic unity which is essential to the capacity of art to evoke that other reality within the existing one.

Still, Buckley remains for me much better than the chic- punk artists who followed in his wake — those who seized on this process of expressionist bricolage of modernist conventions and, within two years, turned it into a decadent mannerism. The majority of pictures in the ‘Style in the Seventies’ exhibition — the title is the give-away — were like those fashion models you see in glossy magazines with gold- plated razor-blade brooches and green and red hair, done by Vidal Sassoon, of course. But Artscribe is not so elegant as Vogue. Still, even within this unpromising milieu, some painters have emerged who do not seem to me to be all bad. Perhaps the best British abstract picture of the 1970s was painted by an artist who emerged in the 1960s — John Hoyland. But this was an exceptional work for this painter.

Within abstract art, I feel that what is happening in sculpture is presently more significant than painting. The work of the Wimbledon sculptors — Glynn Williams, Ken Turnell and Lee Grandjean — impresses me. They seem to be fighting out of the pall of formalism and dead matter which stood in for sculpture for so much of the 1970s. Turnell, in particular, may be on the verge of a new and vigorous way of handling the human figure.

In effect, his work connects with that of those artists who have been trying to work from the other end of the expressive continuum: that of immediately representational pictorial ‘languages’, their revival and replenishment. Early in the decade, ‘photo-realism’ posed a similar reduction within representational art to that which ‘modular units’ presented in abstraction. Photo-realists took a given image, a photograph, and merely transposed it from a mega-visual medium into paint, allowing precious little scope for imaginative conception, painterly handling, or aesthetic transformation. Their work is effectively without expression in the sense I have defined it. Around the middle of the decade, Kitaj, however, began to argue vociferously for the retention of the old representational conventions, rooted in human anatomy, as part of the ‘material’ upon and through which the artist works to realize his expression. I did not fully appreciate the significance of the ‘Human Clay’ exhibition when it was mounted at the Hayward in 1976 : this was in part because there is an element of militant antiabstractionism in Kitaj’s polemic, which draws lines which would exclude some of the most significant of post-war painters, like Rothko and Natkin. There are good non- representational artists; and there are presently some representational painters around whose cultish affectation has led them to produce works almost (but not quite) as bad as those in ‘Style of the Seventies’. Still, I am sure that in my 1976 reaction to Kitaj, there was more than a trace of that over-historicist, false radicalism of the art-left. I remember that I accused him of trying to revive 19th century bourgeois pictorial conventions. So I, too, was then slipping into that denial of the existent human subject which I have today criticized so much in others. I was talking as if 20th century man was not made of human clay too! The proof of a painting, in any event, is always in the looking. And I should say straight away that Kitaj has made what I regard as one of the very best British paintings of the last decade. I am talking about If not, not, which was shown in Bristol in the recent ‘Narrative Painting’ show. This is an extremely complex picture whose effect comes from numerous different elements — nuances of colour, blending of different modes of spatial and perspectival organization, the skilful drawing of the figures, even the literary allusions and references. But all these devices, and all this matter, has been brought under the artist’s imaginative control: he has imposed a convincing aesthetic unity upon his materials. He has created, in form, and in content, what Fry said the best Post-Impressionists achieved. This is not ‘a pale reflex of actual appearance’ — but it arouses the ‘conviction of a new and definite reality’. No doubt, some will say it is dreamy, escapist, or utopian. Christopher Caudwell once said :

. . . the illusion of dream has this biological value, that by experimenting ideally with possible realities and attitudes towards them it paves the way for such changes in reality. Dream prepares the way for action; man must first dream before he can do it. It is true that the realization of our dream is never the same as the dream; it looks different and it feels different. Yet it also has something in common with our desire, and its realization was only possible because dream went before and lured us on, as the harvest festival made possible the harvest.

The best painting — from Poussin to Cezanne — has often been a form of materially realized social dreaming. And we should not allow our social dreams to be monopolized and banalized by those who want to sell Vodka and bath salts . ..

I could go on about the art that I have found exceptional and worthwhile. I would like to have said something about Ken Kiff’s marvellous psychoanalytic paintings — so close to my own sensibilities. But I cannot end without saying how Kitaj’s polemics, and the parallel sociological research of my colleague Andrew Brighton, have raised the question as to whether the most significant painting of the 1970s was not made far away from the late modernist corral. The Royal Academy Summer show may be largely a wasteland: it is rather less of a wasteland than, say, the average mixed late modernist show. The painting of Peter Greenham and Richard Eurich is certainly, from my perspective, among the most considerable of the decade. Yet I wonder how many art students have even heard their names, let alone seen their pictures.

Certainly, the most exciting thing about the withering of late modernism in recent years has been the bringing into view again the work of a great, and I believe still much neglected tradition in British painting, founded by Bomberg in the latter part of his life. Bomberg, disillusioned with the modernism in whose birth he had participated, spent the latter part of his life searching for ‘the spirit in the mass’, or, as I would put it, finding the physical means to record his imaginative encounters with real objects, real persons. In effect, he sought to maximize both aspects of the expressive continuum: the ‘subjective’ physical handling of materials; the ‘objective’ empirical, perceptual observation of things in the world. The recent show of his late works at the Whitechapel was a revelation. And to think that we ignored this, while lapping up the garbage of late modernism that wafted over from America. I say ‘we’ ignored . . . Some of Bomberg’s disciples kept not only his methods, but his spirit, his imaginative grasp of the world alive. I am thinking particularly of Dennis Creffield, Frank Auerbach, and Leon Kossoff. Kossoff, in particular, painted some of the best works of the 1970s. I have written, at length, elsewhere about his great painting based on figures outside Kilburn underground station, which combines the most violent expressionism with the most cautious, restraining, empirical accuracy — almost Pollock and Coldstream in the same picture. It is one of the few real masterpieces of the decade ...

But you can see why these things have been so little known and talked about, say in the art press, if you consider what David Sylvester wrote about those late Bombergs. He said:

. . . stylistically, Bomberg’s late work was backward-looking, added little or nothing to the language of art that had not been there 50 years before. If it is, as I believe, the finest English painting of its time, only its intrinsic qualities make it so : in terms of the history of art it’s a footnote.

I have tried to show that the over-historicizing of aesthetics is bound to lead to this kind of foolish judgement. Those of you who are still bound up in ‘the anachronistic daubing of woven fabrics with coloured mud’ should take courage. You may be producing only footnotes to art history : but there is a chance that your work is among the finest of its time. As for the art- historical text itself ... I should not worry too much about that : it leads only into the pornography of despair.

MODERN ART: Carl Andre Interview / March 10, 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.

AN INTERVIEW WITH CARL ANDRE

by Peter Fuller, 1978

Equivalent VIII, Carl Andre — *Equivalent VIII,* Carl Andre

Andre is an eminent 'minimalist’ sculptor who emerged in America in the 1960s. He achieved notoriety in Britain in 1976 when his sculpture Equivalent VIII — a pile of bricks - was acquired by the Tate Gallery. This interview was recorded in 1978, immediately before the opening of a major exhibition of Andre's work at the Whitechapel Gallery in London.

FULLER: The row over the Tate’s acquisition of Equivalent VIII, ‘the bricks affair’, took place two years ago: it served, as the catalyst for an outburst against ‘Late Modernism’ in Britain. How do you feel about all this now?

ANDRE: It had little to do with art and much to do with authority. Auberon Waugh wrote that the English middle classes were choosing my work as the barricade upon which they were going to fight to gain control of English cultural and political life.

Has this episode changed your way of working, or your attitude to your work, in any way?

Absolutely not. I’m glad I wasn’t in England at the time because the temptation to make a fool of myself would have been enormous. Mass media exposure like that is absolutely no use to an artist. It doesn’t even help commercially. You don’t have 100,000 brick pieces in a warehouse, like a rock and roll group’s albums. I don’t think I’ve sold a work in England since then.

You were involved in a similar controversy over here in the US when you made a permanent site sculpture in down-town Hartford, Connecticut, consisting of 36 boulders, weighing from 1,000 lbs to 11 tons, laid out in eight progressively smaller rows, weren’t you?

There was a lot of media attention again. But this does not have much to do with art. Then there was an initial reaction: I spent a week in August directing the placement of the boulders from large trucks, with a large crane. People came up and screamed at me that art couldn’t be made from boulders, and if it could, I wasn’t making it in any sensible way, and that I had no right to do this. I now believe that initial reaction of waves of vibrating, screaming rage had more to do with the fact that, like many cities of its size in America, Hartford has been gutted through bureaucratic decisions made by people who are remote from the general population, people who work in air-conditioned penthouses at the top of skyscrapers, and ride to their houses in the suburbs in limousines. The common population never meets these people at all. At last, they were seeing someone who was changing the face of their city. He was not just a crew member who could say, ‘Well, lady, I can’t do anything about this. I just work here.’ I was responsible for what I was doing. But I believe that the rage of working-men and women who went by was just initial. It occurred while I was working, and dissipated.

Who in Hartford benefits from the presence of your work, and how?

I hope the people of Hartford who pass that way benefit. What was formerly just a bleak stretch of lawn is now a place which invites loitering, standing about, taking of lunch, leaning against stones, and talking to your neighbour. I hope it’s helped to civilize that small section of Hartford. A park is a civilizing influence. It improves the aesthetic surround and raises the level of cultural expectation. The piece was commissioned by the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving, a private philanthropic trust which was celebrating its fiftieth birthday. They wanted to give a large sculpture to Hartford, and I was called upon to make proposals. Once the project had been originated, the National Endowment for the Arts put up half the cost. Thus, in a tactical sense it is a monument to the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving, and in the larger sense it is a gift to the people of Hartford.

Many left ‘social critics’ in Britain, myself included, criticize the Tate for pursuing an acquisition policy which treats art solely as the logical development of an autonomous continuum of art history, set apart from the material and social conditions of life. We regarded the acquisition of your bricks as a typical instance of this policy.

You are describing a formalist attitude on the part of museum people: but I don’t think they are that formalist. Certainly, I think that as a doctrine, formalism has done damage by leaving out the personal histories of artists. It relates one object to another object; but objects do not relate to each other like that. Objects relate to each other only through people, their makers and their audience. This is an almost apolitical objection to formalism, although it has political implications. My work really reflects my earliest experiences; an attempt to recapture the vividness of them. Art works don’t make art works; people make art works.

Do you accept that apart from the wrath of Auberon Waugh there was also a legitimate left criticism of the Tate’s acquisition of the bricks?

I would hope that after the revolution my work would be deemed worthy, as before. There are some things that are going to be, I hope, preserved by the revolution. I do not believe that progressive social change means the destruction of everything that is valued in the present society. I don’t think that’s a Marxist point of view either.

Andrew Brighton has recently argued that the way in which the Tate collects excludes virtually all contemporary artists whose work explicitly ‘services or evokes the emotional lives or beliefs of any section of the general public’. Does your work service or evoke the emotional lives or beliefs of any section of the British public?

The British public doesn’t have much to do with art. That’s because of the economically-determined conditions of society. There’s no money for the great capitalists in having people interested in art. There’s money in having them interested in television. Television can be used as an art medium, but the television we watch night after night is not art. It is the antithesis of art. So I think the general public is discouraged by all kinds of conscious and unconscious means from having a real, central relationship with art of any kind.

Do you agree that your work is a typical example of an ‘international style’ in modern art?

There are indeed stylistic bonds between my work and William Turnbull’s, for instance. He is an older artist, and a fine one. When I saw his work for the first time I recognized a kindred spirit. Richard Long is also an artist whom I admire enormously. There is an international art community. Actually, it’s a NATO art community, because it covers Western Europe and North America.

Don’t you think that this ‘NATO art’ might be at the service of international capital?

During the Roman Empire there was Roman Imperial art. Whenever you get a large, cosmopolitan exchange of information, with a centre of dominance — and certainly New York City could have been thought of as the financial and economic capital of this NATO empire — this is bound to happen. Today, it’s changing; America is slowly sinking back into a fairly normal country, rather than Number One. But art follows the surplus value; the reason why contemporary art flourished in New York was because all the surplus value had to go through New York.

Is it reasonable that the Tate should be acquiring your work, and Le Witt’s, when, for example, it has no picture by Edward Hopper?

I absolutely agree that they should have an Edward Hopper.

What’s your view of Hopper?

It has changed over the years. When I was very much younger, I admired Hopper. But for most of my adult life I just was not interested in his concerns. In 1960, I honestly believed abstract art was morally superior to representational art, because so much representational art was kitsch. Some of the work with the strongest commitment which I see is representational. Hopper is of this kind. Robert Rosenblum was once asked who was the most over-valued, and who was the most under-valued artist: he answered ‘Andrew Wyeth’ to both questions. Wyeth is very popular with the general public; Hopper much less so. But if you compare their paintings, I agree with you, Hopper is a profoundly more valuable artist.

Hopper was concerned with the material world, and the sensuous world, as you claim to be. He was also interested in the social world and the specific experience of alienation within it. But he was interested in a popular accessibility which you are not, surely?

I’m certain that Hopper was not interested in it, either. He said he was interested in light on the side of the barn. Artists follow their concerns rather obsessively, and their work, if it is valid, or done with energy, strength and quality, cannot help but touch upon ordinary, popular experience. That’s what I feel about my own work. If my efforts are so eccentric that they do not touch on concerns which will be valued by any human being, then my work is indeed defective. It may prove, in the long run, that my work does lack that quality, but for me, now, it does not because my work is from the sum of my own experience. I don’t feel it as an abstract exercise in design, or mental gymnastics. But I would accept your test that if, eventually, my work fails to awaken some unprejudiced interest, then it has failed. The Tate got my work because they considered it representative of a certain style of practice that emerged because of certain objective conditions in the 1960s one of which was, in New York, that the so- called New York School, the Abstract Expressionists, were really the first group of artists from America of world- historical importance. The American imperial assertion was made through NATO, and the victories of the Second World War, and so on; the assertion of this art followed the surplus value and the capital of empire. It definitely happened that way. Now I came to New York in 1957. My work has never been a reaction against Abstract Expressionism nor was that of Frank Stella whom I knew very well and who was painting his black stripe paintings: it was rather an attempt to keep the aspiration of the older artists, and somehow to approach the power of their work through different means. We had seen the fiasco of the second generation of Abstract Expressionists: people were painting portraits of paintings by De Kooning, and portraits of other people’s paintings. From Frank Stella I learned that you have to make art as strong as the art you admire, but you can’t make it like the art you admire.

Don’t you think that the Abstract Expressionist movement was abused by the agencies of imperialism, and pushed throughout Europe as part of America’s imperial, cultural policy?

Absolutely. It is documented in the historical archives. During the Second World War the OSS, the secret operations branch of United States intelligence, was set up. One of the arguments for continuing the OSS as the CIA after the end of the war was the fact that cultural campaign money, imperial campaign money, could not be gotten through Congress because those who were interested in founding the CIA recognized that, whether they personally liked it or not, Abstract Expressionism would be seen in Europe as the dominant art of the time, and they wanted it to be shown. United States Congress, however, almost to a man thought that abstract art was a Communist plot, and therefore did not want to give any money to it. So you had to form a secret organization that would propagate the American art image, a wonderful contradiction!

It is sometimes said that your work constitutes a decisive rupture in the Fine Art tradition, but Richard Morphet’s apologia for the Tate’s purchase of the bricks claimed they should be valued for classical sculptural qualities. Where do you stand on this?

I may be absolutely mad, but I see my work in the line of Bernini, Rodin, Brancusi, and then I would put my name at the end of that line. Perhaps I am utterly deluded, but the urge in my work does come from the work of the past, and I do not consciously wish to destroy or rupture my continuity with it. There is a principle in science that when any theory succeeds another theory, it must preserve the previous theory: Einstein does not overthrow Newton, Newton’s becomes a smaller, specialized theory in Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Not that I believe the work of Bernini, Rodin, and Brancusi is diminished because of the work of Carl Andre, rather I think that it is continued. I hope that in my work I preserve the interest people ought to have in Bernini, Rodin and Brancusi. I’m not in favour of destroying museums, at all, although I think a lot of the treasures in museums should be returned to the places from which they were stolen.

In 1970 you said, ‘to say that art has meaning is mistaken, because then you believe that there is some message which art is carrying like the telegraph, as Noel Coward said. Yes, art is expressive, but it is expressive of that which can be expressed in no other way. ’ But what is expressed through say, Equivalent VIII?

It’s like a poem. If you can succeed in successfully paraphrasing a poem, that is a sign that the poem fails. This is even more true in a painting or a sculpture: if there was another way of doing it, it should have been done in another way. Art does not function merely in the domain of language.

But you should be able to indicate directions in which I, or anyone else, could derive something, whether perceptually, affectively, or intellectually, from your work.

I absolutely agree. I am not saying that nothing at all of value can be said about a work of art, but I’m too subjectively bound up with the work. I could only answer by sitting down and telling you the story of my life. But that’s beside the point, too. I can relate to you things in my conscious memory which I think were combined. Perhaps under analysis I could present unconscious things which were there, too. But sculpture is a mediation between one’s own consciousness and the inanimate world, which is after all what life and death are about. The making of art requires that this mediation between the self and the inanimate world must be of some significance to another consciousness. But, to me, it’s not communication. It is as if a beautiful woman invites you to dinner at her flat, and the food is very good: you eat the food, and take pleasure from it, but this woman is not also necessarily telling you something that can be told in any other way.

The fact is that in Britain most of those who saw the bricks, of both left and right, working class and middle class, either failed to respond, or responded negatively — without pleasure. How should they look at Equivalent VIII differently to experience a positive response?

The bricks were presented to the British public, by the media, as one point. Nothing else was provided: just one point. Given one point you don’t know whether you’ve got a circle, a straight line, or what. If you have only one member of a category, then the category does not make any sense.

Whatever your intentions, many cultural meanings now attach to the bricks. But you tend to deny them and say they have nothing to do with your art.

Years ago, I was quoted as saying art is what we do and culture is what is done to us and our art. Works of art, any human concern that’s shared by many people, becomes enriched by the sum of those concerns which can never be identical with each other. But everyone says the bricks cannot stand by themselves, they need an argument, or line of work, to surround them. I absolutely agree; but the Venus de Milo would just be a stone woman if nobody knew about sculpture. It would seem a very odd thing to do. It may be true that the line of works that I’ve done, and even what is called ‘abstract art’, may prove historically to be worthless, or a great cultural desert. I’m not denying that possibility: the judgement of history will finally emerge.

Since ‘culture-free’ art is manifestly impossible, shouldn’t the anticipation of the cultural response to your work be taken into account in your project?

The only way I could think of trying to do that would be trying to flatter the taste of people whom I thought might otherwise dislike the work. That’s verified in portrait painting. Wasn’t it wonderful what happened to the portrait of Churchill? I think that was an intimation of what’s going to happen to my work. I wish I could say, however, that out of pure motives you make great art, and out of corrupt motives you make poor art. But that’s simply not true.

So perhaps you could produce more popular and accessible art without compromise?

If I wanted to do that I would go into one of the mass- orientated arts. I’m not saying that mass-orientated art must flatter its audience, but it may flatter it and still be very strong. The strongest 20th-century art is film, without question. I love film, but I feel no calling in it, no vocation. I have probably enjoyed film more than sculpture, but I have the calling, or urge, to work in sculpture. The age of film was probably over by 1950: think of those Hollywood Studios which did turn out some extraordinarily great films for the most crass and commercial reasons.

What sort of response are you expecting to your Whitechapel retrospective?

I hope the English public will realize that they have placed much too great importance on my work. After all, it is only art. The Fine Arts have been called elitist, but ‘elitism’ seems to me to refer to some degree of power. Few people of any kind are interested in the Fine Arts today because they are not present in people’s homes. There is not an original artwork in the house where I grew up. Perhaps we are seeing the withering away of the so-called Fine Arts, painting and sculpture. I don’t know. If that is so, I hope I’m not accelerating the process.

Who do you expect to come to your Whitechapel exhibition and enjoy it?

It’s impossible for me to tell. Perhaps people who are waiting for a bus who come in out of the rain. That’s fine if they get some shelter. I hope that the Whitechapel show will provide enough to determine the ‘polygon’ of my work. There is no reason why the reaction to my work now cannot be informed. It will be easier to sort out just what is blind prejudice, what is informed dissent, and what is informed appreciation.

You once said, ‘my works are in a constant state of change. I’m not interested in reaching an ideal state with my work. As people walk on them, as the steel rusts, as the brick crumbles, the materials weather and the work becomes its own record of everything that’s happened to it. ’ Do you therefore disapprove the Tate’s decision to remove the ink-stain from the bricks?

I approve their removal of it. That statement was not meant to refer to vandalism, but to the fact that I do not polish metal plates. As a boy, I had to shine my father’s shoes. The idea that somebody would have to shine my sculpture is offensive to me. It certainly would not be the rich collector who did it, but some poor chamber-maid, or butler, on their hands and knees. You can’t walk on the bricks or timber pieces, but the metal pieces are kept much in the best condition by being out where people walk on them.

Isn ’t vandalism part of history, too?

Vandalism is part of history, but then so is Auschwitz. That does not mean we should approve and continue the practice.

Although you reject the term ‘conceptual’ artist, you have always agreed that you are a minimalist. What do you mean by ‘minimalism’?

I think it applies less to the work than the person. I found that at that time in order to make work of strength and conviction you could not do a scatter shot. You had to narrow your operations. That’s not true of every artist, but it was true for me and some others. I’m a minimalist because I had to shut down a lot of pointless art production to concentrate on a line which was worthwhile. You could say that minimalism means tightening up ship, for me.

Hockney has said that he believes that modernism is dead. Do you see yourself as a defender of late-modernist values?

Certainly not. Abstract art can produce as much trash or kitsch as representational art. Kitaj and Hockney, however, have said that their objection to modernism is that all art springs from drawing the figure. Their art does. But you could not describe Stonehenge, or much other art, as drawing the figure. In debates like that, I can only be correct: they believe that art other than their own isn’t valid. Well, if they are right, I’m wrong. But if I am right, then their art has its validity, and my art has its validity. If I am right, they’re right too.

Are you a pluralist then?

I’m a kind of anarchist, I suppose. I don’t think anybody should tell an artist what he should do, or what he shouldn’t do.

Do you have any empathy with the view that British art should become less hegemonized by American styles, that it should move in the direction of a national art?

In England that would be like demanding a truly national cuisine. I think it would be a disaster.

In 1970, you spoke of your attempt ‘to make sculpture without a strong economic factor’. You said, ‘I find that it’s necessary for me to return to this state and make sculpture as if I had no resources at all, except what I could scavenge, or beg, or borrow, or steal. ’ Do you still feel the same way?

Yes. I think there’s a tendency, with our prosperity, to go forever grander projects, ever more stupendous earthworks, if you can raise the money. Scavenging the streets, industrial sites, and vacant lots is perhaps similar, for me, to what drawing from the figure is for Hockney. When I started making sculpture I had no resources except what I could scavenge, borrow or beg. That was how my practice evolved. If I become too remote from that I think my work will lose whatever vitality it might have.

In the catalogue to your Guggenheim exhibition, Diane Waldman wrote, ‘the conventional role of sculpture as a precious object, and its ownership, has been vigorously attacked by (Andre’s) oeuvre which refuses, by definition, to make such accommodations. ’ Do you agree?

No, of course not. It is the genius of the bourgeoisie that they can buy anything: collectors buy ideas and goldfish in bowls, all kinds of things. That is the genius of the capitalist system. If they set out to make a commodity out of you, there’s absolutely no way you can prevent it. There’s nothing wrong with precious objects. There are a lot of objects which I find precious. Other people do not find them precious. The question is whether their only legitimacy is that they are articles in trade.

Would you call yourself a Marxist?

Yes, Marx is the only philosopher I have read who made sense to me of the common life everyone lived. There is no better definition of freedom than Marx’s — ‘the recognition of necessity’. I wish that in the United States there was a Marxist political party, but there is not. There’s all kinds of infantile Marxist insanity, which is fractionating and divisive. I am absolutely inert and inactive politically now, because by vocation I’m not a politician, but there is no group which I can attach myself to.

As a Marxist you are presumably aware of the labour theory of value?

Yes, indeed.

Where do you think the exchange-value of your works comes from?

Both Marx and Engels separately explained why art was the one commodity that seemed not to reflect the labour theory of value. They wrote that they had seen works on which many hours had been spent which were in their opinion without value, and others that seemed to have been dashed off in seconds that were of great value.

But how are the exchange-values of your works created?

These values are official, but, as we know, they are not scientific. The values the market place creates are objective in the sense that they are exchangeable, but they are not objective in the terms of science.

You have spoken a lot about the ‘immanence’ of your sculpture. Do you mean by this that its value resides inherently in its material existence in the world?

Absolutely. I think that is the essence of materialist philosophy.

Don’t you think that exchange-value is something that’s projected on to the work by dealers, critics, and museum men, and that it contradicts what you call ‘immanent’ value?

In Das Kapital, Marx describes the exchange-value, or commodity value, as something like a ghost which travels alongside the real productive value. But my Marxism has never been a formal, organized study. You may say I admire the sentiments of Marx, and his organization of a philosophical point of view. But in no way am I a politically effective person.

Much of the popular resentment against your work seems to me to arise from the fact that it comes to signify the high price attaching even to relatively unworked and worthless material if it is legitimized by art institutions as art.

I can give you a perfect example of that. When I was working in Hartford, a man came up to me and delivered a tirade. He was so furious I thought he would have apoplexy. He ended saying, ‘There’s no art; there’s no craft. There’s nothing. Art is craft.’ I asked him what his work was. He told me that he was a propeller maker. Now that is a doomed trade if ever there was one: in ten or twenty years I don’t think there will be many propellers in the world. He was a man who possessed great skill, yet who was rapidly becoming obsolete. I think it was his own lack of significance in the world of production that he was getting at. Productive activity arose in the neolithic age when there was also a great outburst of abstraction, with the megalithic monuments and so on. I’m not saying that abstraction is more advanced, but perhaps abstract art has occurred in human history every time there has been a total technological change in the organization of society. Perhaps abstract art is just catching up with the industrial revolution. My work reflects the conditions of industrial production; it is without any hand-manufacture whatsoever. My things are made by machine. They were never handworked, because they come from furnaces, rolling mills, cranes and cutting machines. I’m the only one who handles these things by hand when I take them off the stack and put them on the floor. I’m not claiming that as any kind of craft. But is it possible to make art, which is a branch of productive activity, in which the hand does not enter into the production of the materials of which it is made? Perhaps my work poses the question as to whether it is possible to make art that parallels the present organization of production, technologically and economically.

How much did the Tate pay for Equivalent VIII?

I think it was £4,000. Something like that. They couldn’t have got that Andre for less. That’s what is ridiculous about this.

For the Hartford piece you were paid $ 87,000, of which you spent $7,000 on materials, and expenses.

I would say that I spent roughly $10,000 or $12,000: it was largely expenses.

Don’t you think this sort of pricing increases the anger against your work? If you took a reasonable fee you might get more acceptance for what you claim to be your real concerns.

The economic system tries to drive the artist out of his position as the primitive capitalist to make him another employee. I don’t want to be forced to be someone’s employee. I have my primitive capital interest in my work, and that is what you are buying — not my labour time. The advanced capitalist wants to drive the primitive capitalist out of business; he doesn’t want to drive the worker out of business.

I was in the gallery when Angela Westwater telephoned and ordered the steel plates which you later laid out on the floor to form your current New York exhibition. When they were in the factory stock-room these plates were worth so much; when you arranged them on the gallery floor without working them in any way, a few days later, they became worth a hundred times as much. A six-by-six plate-piece in your gallery now costs $ 22,000. Aren’t these magical values bound to be the most striking thing about the work?

The difference in value between, say, a Morris Louis painting and the value of its canvas and pigment is even greater. Sculptors have to bear the burden, and painters do not, because the material value of the basic supply is so much greater in sculpture. The material cost is a relatively large proportion of the sculptor’s cost. I very much resist this thing of turning my relationship to my work into that of an architect who accepts a fee for a large capital project. I am making capital goods and selling them as capital goods, in a primitive capitalist way. I don’t deny that.

But why should people value this specific pile of bricks, or arrangement of steel plates, more than any other?

Because that pile of bricks is my work, and if you want to get the authentic example or specimen of the work of Carl Andre then you must go to Carl Andre and buy it. I have a monopoly supply. Now this supply can be forged or plagiarized, but then one would be dealing with the work of a forger or plagiarist. This is very simple. There is less startling matter there than meets the eye. But we generally tend to overvalue money and undervalue art.

Equivalent VIII was a reconstruction, not an original, wasn’t it?

Yes. The original has been destroyed. At the time I made these pieces I did not have the money or the space to store the bricks, so I had to return them to the brick supplier. When I wanted to reconstruct the works the plant that had produced the bricks was no longer in existence. In the case of works which have been destroyed, and this is also true of the Pyramids, because I was subject to economic deprivation, I reserved the right to reconstruct them. But I’m not interested in reproducing or adding to the number of works of a given kind that exist. But if others attempt to produce reconstructions, then these would not be art because art is not plagiarism.

What is this factor ‘art’ which seems to be the component which confers value?

It is a connection we supply between objects. Certainly, it is not scientific or objective. If the human race should be annihilated suddenly art would go with it. The objects might remain, but the relationship between them would be gone. Art is definitely an unofficial system of value created by people.

So art, for you, is a special kind of exchange-value that attaches to arrangements of certain common-or-garden units, or objects, in certain circumstances?

I would hope it was production value, not exchange-value.

Much peasant art is expressed through piles of materials which are used and used up, like log piles, in the South of France.

Or hay bales in Belgium! They are magnificent sculptural arrangements. The only difference is my self-conscious intent to have made it art. In the work of Brancusi, the remaining endless column is the gate-post of a peasant farm. I don’t think that’s a sign of the debility of a work, but rather of its strength.

You came from a middle-class background, didn’t you?

Not really. Not a bourgeois background. My father’s father was an immigrant Swedish bricklayer; in the United States he met with some success and became a small building contractor and bricklayer. He was a very small entrepreneur, basically a skilled worker. My father worked as a draughtsman in a shipyard, again essentially a skilled worker, but he was no capitalist of any kind. The class structures of England and America are quite different; in Britain, the constitutional monarch is the Queen, in the United States the constitutional monarch is the dollar. Not really; obviously economic forces rule. But in England the Queen can knight her horse trainer or the Beatles, and that’s one way of conveying value. In the United States there is no way of conveying value except with money. I think this is why British artists get less for their work than American artists. Americans are used to conveying value with money. In a way it makes American society more vulgar, simple and clear. How much money you have determines your social position. It’s much less ambiguous. I find it extraordinarily difficult to follow the intra-class wars that go on in English drawing rooms.

You went to an expensive private school though?

I was a scholarship student. My mother was naively socially ambitious. She’s despaired ever since because I discovered my vocation in art there. Late at night my mother cries and says that I was ruined at Andover. I found an art studio there, and from the first time I worked in one it was my greatest material pleasure. That’s what set me out consciously to make art. Without that experience, I don’t think that it would ever have happened.

Barbara Rose wrote that in the early 1960s you walked into her house and announced that you had 'resigned from the middle classes’. Is this true?

Yes, what that really meant was that I had already ‘dropped out’. I had abandoned the fantasy of upward social mobility, of having a suit and tie, which I have not worn. My family expected me to do better than my father, to go into a profession, perhaps. I realized that I was not following any course that might lead in that direction.

Do you identify with the working class then?

I identify with the productive class and the production class, too. That must include managers and even imaginative capitalists. The trouble is that there are so few imaginative capitalists any more. That’s what is really humiliating. It’s annoying to be ruled, but doubly humiliating to be ruled by incompetent people.

Would you accept the criticism that you are an ouvrierist? You carry out work like working-class work, but you wear clean overalls. Your identification is formal: it does not go beyond the level of appurtenances.

It is formal rather than practical because I don’t hang out at the factory, and I don’t live in the working-class district of the city. I cannot deny that, but I don’t think this formal connection is false.

Between 1960 and 1964 you worked on the Pennsylvania Railway as a freight brakeman and freight conductor. What did that mean to you?

Quincy, where I was born, is an industrial suburb of Boston, so I was with working people all my life. It wasn’t a matter of descending into the working class, or any such thing. It was a way of surviving and earning my living. I never expected to earn my living as an artist. My compulsion to make art was not economically ambitious: it was not making me a penny. I had to support myself and my wife. It was outdoor work, and fairly healthy. There are no minor injuries on the railroad. You get cut in half, but you don’t cut your thumb. I learned a hell of a lot about sculpture on the railroads.

Is that echoed in things like the timber blocks arranged in a long line?

Yes. My work was taking long trains of cars that had come in from another city and drilling them; that is, hauling them up in bands and drilling them into different tracks. I’d have to draw up new bands and take them all over the place. It was essentially filing cars, a matter of moving largely identical particles from one place to another; then there was the whole terrain-following business which I like very much in my work. A band of cars segments and follows a terrain: it’s not rigid.

You once said, ‘I’d like to reduce the image-making function of my art to the least degree. ’ Is that still true?

Yes, it is. But in a way I’ve realized that it’s a futile job. You cannot absolutely remove the image.

The work itself becomes an image of Late Modernism, doesn’t it?

Yes, it did. But I once said that the earthwork people were taking the concerns of modernism and putting them in wild and distant places away from the museum and gallery scene. But if my work had any significance, I was introducing into modernism concerns which had escaped it, like industrial materials. There had been the Bauhaus, and so forth. But I thought the Bauhaus was backward. The stuff students produced in the first year always seemed much sounder than what they produced in their last year.

Hollis Frampton once wrote of your ‘utter concern for the root, and the fundamental nature of art’. Would you accept that?

The appearance of art is not usually of interest to an artist; it shouldn’t be of interest. Aristotle said that all art was representational but that it must not represent the appearance but the process of nature. I think works of art should refer the process rather than the appearance of art.

Wouldn’t you agree that part of the root, the fundamental nature of art, is image-making?

Which came first, sculpture or painting? Probably painting. The first savage who smeared him- or herself with red mud and was delighted. I think the urge to sculpture is closely related to a sense of mortality. People began to sense that they physically and temporally passed through this world, and started setting up markers to indicate where they had been, almost like tracks, evidence of existence. Fundamentally, primitive art had more to do with this than communication. The evidence of existence could start to be used to communicate. Art can be used to communicate and to facilitate communication. But that is not its fundamental essence.

Although the work of sculpture must exist as a thing in the world, its raison d’etre as sculpture is surely its ability to refer to areas of experience beyond itself?

It must have a demonstrable relationship with other works that we call sculpture. That’s one relationship.

You once said, 7 want wood as wood, steel as steel, aluminium as aluminium, and a bale of hay as a bale of hay. ’ Then you say you want a bale of hay as art. But there is a contradiction here. In order to become art, you must present the bale of hay as something other than itself.

I almost never have used a single bale of hay: that, to me, is not a work of art. The urinal is not a work of art, to me. Perhaps to Duchamp. But the relationship among 12, 30 or 50 bales of hay or plates, the will, the desire to make combinations like that is, to me, the desire of art. A metallurgist might be interested in one plate or even a chip of steel. My early pronouncements on these matters were very much overdrawn. I was a young man trying to clarify for myself what my work had to be. Now I hope I am as stern with myself, but I also hope that I have a better understanding. But one has to narrow one’s understanding to a certain degree to get something done.

Would you agree now that the thing-in-the-world is only realized as a sculpture when it is seen, through perception, as a meaningful sign?

No, no. It could be an empty sign, and that may be valuable.

But certainly a sign.

No, no: as evidence. You may say you wish to stop the traffic on a road. You can put up a ‘STOP’ sign, or a red light, or you can put a landmine there. I think the first form is a sign, but the second is not. It is a phenomenon. Works of art are fundamentally in the class of landmines rather than signs. That’s my own deep feeling. The linguistic aspect of art is tremendously overstressed, especially in the conceptual thing. It is part of the vulgarism of our culture, ‘What does it mean?’ and all that. Ten years ago I would have argued this point with you about the cultural matrix that makes a work of art sensible. But now I realize that without the matrix of art, of sculpture, or of the general culture, there would be no reason to value the work.

You reduce sculptures to the role of signifiers which you say signify nothing. These are then released into the cultural world where they signify things external to yourself like Late Modernism. And this is what is constituting them as works of art, whatever your intentions may have been.

This may be what is happening, but it is not part of my conscious design. I think in our society we constantly confuse the information and the experience. Certainly conceptual art is really about information. It is not about thought processes and the body operating in its own luxury and pleasure and so forth.

Would you agree that Pop art was essentially a superficial art which attempted to put in brackets the substantial signifier, whereas you set out to produce the obverse of Pop, signifiers completely devoid of signs?

To a certain degree my work is the antithesis of Pop art. Many of the Pop artists had attempted second-generation Abstract Expressionism and, disappointed with their results, wanted to find some other thing to do. But Pop art has always seemed to me to be about a world that was already formed, its images were already present, whereas my materials have not yet reached their cultural destiny. The bricks are not joined together; the plates are not stamped, or deformed. They represent the unrealized material possibilities of the culture. This may be fanciful, but it is the exact opposite of Pop art, which generally represents something finished, whose destiny is totally determined. Perhaps one thing my work is about is the fundamental innocence of matter. I don’t think matter is guilty of all the transgressions of which we are always accusing it. Advocates of gun control think that by keeping these tools of death out of people’s hands there will be less murder. That may be true, but it is not the problem. The problem is the values of a society where guns are lusted after in the first place. Matter is not guilty of the material conditions with which we surround ourselves. You cannot blame the bricks for my art: you must blame it on me.

Is it true that in 1965 you were canoeing on a lake in New Hampshire when you suddenly realized your work had to be flat as water?

I had found a brick in the street, a beautiful white brick made of synthetic limestone. Sand and lime are mixed and run through a superheated steam oven. Chemically, it is almost identical to limestone. It’s a very nice material, and I wanted to use it in my next show, although I was not sure how. I think I already had the ‘equivalent’ idea, that all the pieces should have the same number of blocks. But I was wondering whether they should be of different heights or not. In a canoe, the centre of gravity is below the surface of the water. I looked out at absolute water seeking its own level. The surface had a perfection you never got on land; there is no grade on water. From that, I decided I wanted them all two tiers high.

Wasn’t this close to the kind of flatness Greenberg was talking about at the same time?

My practice is so remote from painting that I would not even have thought of the connection. At High School, I never could do anything but a flat painting. Whenever I tried to achieve some idea of space, I failed. Finally, I did a monochrome painting, not as a revolutionary art form, but because that was all I was painting even when I used colour.

When you were seeking flatness, there was also Greenberg’s flatness, and the literal superficiality of Pop. Do you deny any relationship between these three apparently similar phenomena?

The objective conditions under which these works were produced were the same. But there was much less interchange among all these people than is usually assumed. They didn’t really know each other: I didn’t know Donald Judd, or Robert Morris, and they did not know the timber pieces using units which I made before 1960. Although I agree that the objective conditions for minimalism were essentially the same for the Pop artists and colour-stain painters, ‘flat’ in sculpture is not fundamentally about illusion at all, but about entry. I wanted to make sculpture the space of which you could somehow enter into. You can enter the horizontal plane in a way that you cannot enter the vertical unless you are Simon Stylites. But also as Lucy Lippard and I have agreed in conversation, works like my metal pieces could not have arisen without air travel. There is an analogy between looking out of an airplane at the ground, and looking down at the work.

I think that the emergence of‘flatness’ as a credo in the Fine Arts reflected a certain urban experience which emphasized the superficial rather than the physical, which denied interiority. Despite many of your claims, I feel that the floor pieces express this experience without transcending it.

I would hope that they do. But, if the works do not convince you otherwise, I cannot. But I would say this. The one single characteristic of matter that draws me to sculpture is its mass. It is flat because that is the most efficient use of mass one can arrive at. I’ve never made the proto-typical minimalist work, the box. I have never been interested in volume at all. The way to achieve mass effects economically, of course, is through flatness because the 3/8-inch, foot-square plate is a much more efficient unit of sculptural mass than the cube made from the same amount of steel.

But why does ‘flatness’, or efficiency, matter in a sculpture?

I was once quoted as saying that sculpture was a matter of seizing and holding space. Given the resources available, using plates rather than cubes or boxes was the most efficient way of working. I think aesthetic efficiency is one of the signs of a strong work of art. I don’t mean simplicity, because a complex work of art can pack aesthetic efficiency too. The struggle is not between simplicity and complexity but between efficiency and inefficiency.

You once wrote, ‘there is no symbolic content in my work. ’ But a pile of bricks, say, is a very personal symbol, surely?

Almost a personal emblem, or a psychological emblem, that relates to earliest experiences.

A symbol in the psycho-analytical sense?

Yes.

You are modifying your view about symbolic content then?

When I made that statement I was both naive and being polemical. In polemic one caricatures; one must. I now realize that one cannot purge the human environment from the significance we give it. But I have a theory that abstraction arose in neolithic times, after paleolithic representation, for the same reason that we are doing it now. The culture requires significant blankness because the emblems, symbols, and signs which were adequate for the former method of organizing production are no longer efficient in carrying out the cultural roles that we assign to them. You just need some tabula rasa, or a sense that there is a space to add significance. There must be some space that suggests there is a significant exhaustion. When signs occupy every surface, then there is no place for the new signs.

But what would you say to the view that your obsession with materials which have been ‘digested’ into similar units, but not fully refined by industrial production, can be correlated with a fascination with shit?

Yes, of course. Absolutely.

Would you also accept that the obsessional ordering and arranging of materials which plays an important part in your work correlates with the ego-defence mechanisms holding back the dangerous instinctual desire to play with your own shit?

Yes, but some infants would rather smear on the wall, and others were drawn to play on the floor with it. And that’s only to divide painters from sculptors. I don’t think that I could be accused of being a painter, even as an infant.

Perhaps one reason why your work interests some people is because it closely reflects anal-erotism, which has been thinly sublimated through classical, middle-class, obsessional modes of ordering, close to those of the miser, or the accountant?

Exactly, although the same thing is true, but cannot have the same class connotations, at Zen gardens in Japan. That’s a different class, but also human beings. William Carlos Williams once answered that question beautifully when he was asked if all artists and poets were neurotics who had never left a primitive state of sexual development and therefore were obsessed. He said, ‘Yes, that’s true of anybody who does anything remarkable.’

You wear industrial overalls, but they are always immaculately clean. Here again is this association with dirt, manual labour, physical smearing, and so on, and its immediate denial in their cleanliness.

If you are really interested in dealing with dirt, you have to be very fastidious. You can’t afford to be sloppy. Here’s another of these parallels. When he was a draughtsman out on the ships, my father pragmatically and empirically built up his knowledge of a very strange speciality which was not taught: the sanitary and freshwater plumbing of ships. His great ambition for me when I was a little boy was that I should grow up to be a sanitary engineer, planning the great plumbing and civic engineering works of the city.

A new Haussmann!

Not so much the streets as the sewers.

Haussmann made a sewer which was his joy and pride. He took people on tours round it.

Ah! The municipal sewer of Boston was indeed right by my house in which I lived as a child. The house was on a kind of peninsula in a marsh, and on either side of it were two gigantic dykes. When the enormous sewer, it was so big you could drive teams of horses through it, could be underground, it was. But they had to keep a certain grade, so that when it went over lowlands they had to build these enormous dykes. My boyhood experience with these great earthworks, and the idea that the excrement of the whole metropolis of Boston was pulsing by my house, was undoubtedly important.

Sometimes the instinctual impulses break through in your work, as in your dog-shit cement pieces of 1962.

Absolutely.

Do you agree that the particular infantile experience that you are recreating as an artist is the productive one of shitting?

It is more complex than that. It starts with that; it is a vision in which excrement is necessary, and can be satisfying in certain ways, but it also has to be accounted for in another way. In the West there is an over-developed system: we do not know how to get rid of our industrial excrement. And we have a crisis, indeed almost an anal crisis, in the culture.

The infant values his own shit very highly, and the family, particularly the middle-class family, tends to value it not at all. Your work is involved with this same paradox: Is this thing to be valued highly, or not at all?

In a certain way. It is a kind of primal scene of its own, isn’t it? I think this cannot be denied.

In the Freudian conception, the obsessional is also usually preoccupied with the contradiction between the idea and the thing, and so on. Your denial that you are a conceptualist and your preoccupation with ‘immanence’ and stuff can be seen in these terms too?

Absolutely, yes.

Is your work a symptom of an obsessional neurosis which it does not transcend?

I hope that it does not transcend it, but provides catharsis for it and goes beyond it. Moore said, and I’m paraphrasing now, that all art is an attempt to regain the vividness of first expressions or experiences. I think he meant conscious experiences: at least it goes beyond the instinctual, beyond the infantile omnipotent state, when we begin to be aware of ourselves in the world. The omnipotent infant does not require any art because he is god.

When you create value as if by magic, by laying out those steel plates, that seems to me an immediate gratification of early feelings of infantile omnipotence.

But I started placing them there when they weren’t worth anything.

But the situation changed. A t last the world recognized the value of your shit! Don’t you acknowledge that there is an element of magic-making, of infantile omnipotence in your work?

Well, not omnipotence. But I used to dream when I was a little boy that I was a great general leading a great army into battle. And then somebody would come up to me and say, ‘You can’t do this. You’re just a little boy.’ And then I would be sent home.

Are you still waiting to be sent home?

(Laughs.) I hope I’m not sent home when I go to the Whitechapel.

MODERN ART: John Hoyland / March 9, 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.

I’ve also included a short documentary on John Hoyland to accompany the essay from Beyond The Crisis In Art because of Peter’s memorable performance during the introduction.

Beyond The Crisis: John Hoyland

by Peter Fuller

I should say it straight away: there were some works in this exhibition that I had not seen before which impressed me deeply. I am referring especially to a group of paintings Hoyland made around 1970, and I have in mind one in particular: No. 13 in the catalogue, named in the artist’s irritating manner, 26.5.71.

26.5.71 — I suppose we must continue to call it that — is not just a good painting: it is also one of the few significant paintings which I have seen produced in Britain in the last ten years. Had I known this work before, I would not have published some of the views about Hoyland which I have in the past, at least not without qualification. I will make further self-criticism in a moment. First, I want to state one thing clearly: this work demonstrated to me that Hoyland does not always produce ‘paintings about paintings’; here, he reveals himself as closer to artists like Rothko, the early De Kooning, or, more recently, Diebenkorn and Natkin — ail painters who have consciously used abstraction to speak primarily of experience beyond the experience of art itself.

Before I say more about what I mean by this, I want to describe the formal mechanics of this painting. 26.5.71 presents you with a paradox: it seems to offer a taut ‘all-over’ surface, a skin of paint, and a limitless, billowing, illusionary vista within the same picture. (In this respect, despite the differences in the way they handle their materials, it is very like certain Natkin paintings which I have described and analysed elsewhere.) There are two main compositional elements: an opaque rectangle of thick, sensuous impasto in the lower right hand area of the canvas, and a delicate, predominantly blue background, reminiscent of English water-colours, especially the ‘skying’ sketches of Constable and Cozens.

26.5.71 draws you, the viewer, into its ambivalences. You can never be sure: should you ‘read’ the paint as being stretched tight over ‘the picture plane’ (to use the now debased jargon), or should you, as it were, allow yourself to be drawn in, behind the surface, and to float with the impasto rectangle which suddenly seems to be cut loose and to be drifting in the vastness of uncontained space.

26.5.71 is a work of nuance and complexity. In the ‘foreground’, on what is (accordingly to one reading at least) that flat ‘picture plane’, are laid a number of thickly painted elements which are clearly related to the impasto rectangle. If I said that these suggested splattered flesh, I would be introducing an element of horror which is not present in the experience of the work itself, although, for all its sweetness and prettiness, it does arouse a sense of fear and apprehension — even of tragedy: there is that about it which jostles deep and usually submerged affects in the receptive viewer. Nonetheless, the paint on the surface undeniably evokes flesh, palpable though diffused, ‘dislimned and indistinct as water is in water’, a mere presence, pinkish, melting, peachlike, milky, yet still as specific and enticing as a bosom issuing from a blouse, a siren, sucking you towards the recessive illusions of that ‘background’, an ambiguous skyscape filled with pale and insubstantial forms, whispering shadows, thin washes, castles in the clouds, and soft floating wisps and streams of colour, like gentle rains, lost in that engulfing and suffusing vastness. And then suddenly, it is all quite safe and ‘flat’: the rectangle snaps into place, and you fall back outside the painting again. You are almost relieved to hear some pedant standing next to you muttering something about ‘only marks on the canvas’.

In describing my experience of 26.5.71, I have touched upon some of its illusions and allusions and hinted at the ways in which its forms and colours draw out certain emotions in the viewer. Later, I will be specific about the nature of those emotions and how they are aroused. Now I want to say that one of the strengths of 26.5.71 is that its ‘background’ has clearly been derived from the perception of nature. I was not at all surprised to read in the catalogue that this picture (and others like it) had been painted soon after Hoyland had moved his studio out to the Wiltshire countryside. There is a freshness about the space in this painting which is a long way from the derivative effects, the stuffy, second-hand ‘art space’ of so many of Hoyland’s works in the 1960s, when he seemed content to copy the conventions and techniques of American abstractionists. Now I am not saying that 26.5.71 is a closet landscape, that you should admire it for its verisimilitude to the Wiltshire sky, nor any nonsense of that sort. With its fleshly foreground which on one reading can and on another reading cannot be separated out from that elusive skyscape it is clearly touching upon intimate areas of psychological (rather than purely perceptual) experience.

This may seem self-evident to any sensitive viewer; nonetheless, the ‘reading’ of 26.5.71 which I have put forward (and will further elaborate later) could not be accepted by the critical ‘authorities’ on Hoyland’s art, nor, I suspect, would it be endorsed by the artist himself. For example, Bryan Robertson writes in the catalogue to this show of ‘the inviolability of abstractness’ manifested in Hoyland’s work; he maintains that the artist is intent only upon ‘refurbishing and extending the possibilities of pictorial principles’. One might well ask, what is Robertson afraid of?

The question as to how far Hoyland is a painter preoccupied with formal considerations for their own sake, and how far he is skilfully deploying such conventions to express experience beyond the experience of painting itself, is crucial. The attempt to answer it will enable us to isolate the central contradiction within this artist’s project; I therefore make no apologies about pursuing it in detail.

I want to go back to a text which Bryan Robertson wrote at the time of Hoyland’s Whitechapel show in 1967. Robertson was among those who brought Hoyland into prominence; in explaining his pictures, Robertson said that Hoyland was ‘affably entrenched in current formal terrain, resting content with an abstract vocabulary of colour, texture, surface, space and shape’. The colour, Robertson insisted, ‘is blankly itself and not indicative of psychological state or physical condition’. He insisted that ‘it stands for nothing except shades of artifice, without reference to anything else’. This all sounds straightforward enough, and if it were true, then Hoyland would be a non-painter, a real bum of an artist, for that is formalism pure and simple, unredeemed by any flicker of relationship to experience.

John Hoyland, 7.11.66 — John Hoyland, *7.11.66*

It is not just that I have seen more in Hoyland, and come to refuse this judgement. There are plenty of passages which indicate that Robertson is not really convinced by what he writes either. For example, at one point he observes that Hoyland’s work ‘seems always to come from strong psychological and emotional compulsion as well as from intellectual conception’. More significantly he writes that some of Hoyland’s paintings ‘embody a more vulnerable, certainly less impregnable condition’ than others. He even says that in the vulnerable works ‘this airless context of high artifice suggests frailty, impermanence, instability— tragedy even’. But having admitted this, Robertson hurries on to say that this is ‘almost certainly irrelevant’. Hoyland, he explains, ‘appears to be deliberately restricting himself to strictly formal disclosures’.

Here, it seems to me, Robertson is saying that the ways in which Hoyland composes his pictures — his ‘formal disclosures’ — are such that they do, in moments at least, signify (even to Robertson) experiences beyond the experience of art — and powerful experience, like the sense of ‘frailty’ and ‘tragedy’, at that. But Robertson recommends the viewer to ignore this, and to regard only the technical devices through which the expression is realized. He seems like the sort of person who might say, ‘Never mind your experience of the powerful emotions which that music evokes in you. That’s just irrelevant! Get hold of a copy of the score and work out how the composer did it! That’s the only thing that matters.’ I am not against formal or technical analyses: I am strongly against the view that they are the only responses which are relevant. I do not think, however, that this is just a weakness in Robertson’s critical method (although it is certainly that): it is a weakness which Robertson shares with Hoyland, and because he shares it, he condones it.

It is, of course, true that in many of Hoyland’s early works the ‘frailty, impermanence, instability — tragedy even’ was there very much as a secondary reference. Hoyland was borrowing so much, for example, from Rothko that it was almost inevitable that some of the latter’s deep sense of tragedy, his preoccupation with what he called ‘basic emotions’, should inevitably brush off on him together with the technical devices. But I would maintain that in 25.5.71 (whatever Hoyland may, or may not, have seen in De Kooning), the ‘frailty, impermanence, instability — tragedy even’ were his own, authentically experienced and represented, and that here the ‘formal disclosures’ were the means, or servants, of that expression.

But just as Robertson will only let us peep at the content of these paintings in his critical account of Hoyland, before hurrying us back to ‘the inviolability of abstractness’, so the artist himself seems reluctant to let us do more than glimpse in occasional works, like 26.5.71, or, more frequently, through ‘moments’ in otherwise formalist paintings, a world of imagery and emotion realized through the formal means. There is much denial especially in Hoyland’s work of the last seven years. He seems to have internalized Robertson’s attitude so thoroughly that the emotional authenticity realized in works like 26.5.71 has receded. It is almost as if Hoyland thought that he ought to be making works in which only the ‘formal disclosures’ were relevant.

His later paintings get more and more like the 1812 overture. The special effects get louder and louder; they are cleverly done: the ‘sound’ is certainly impressive. But these are the compositions of a virtuoso, an out-and-out professional. The affective qualities of later Hoylands are often shallow: depth, tentativeness, and authenticity have been sacrificed. Ideology, in this case, fidelity to style and the criteria of modernism, is repeatedly preferred to the search for a truthful account of experience. The tragedy is not so much that Hoyland succumbs: he is hardly alone in that; it is that we know from his best work that he is capable of doing so much better.

Here I want to introduce what may seem like a digression, but it is not: it is central to the way I see Hoyland’s paintings. In the Renaissance, a theory of expression emerged based upon the empirical study of anatomy. Alberti, one of its earliest theorists, believed that a good painting functioned by evoking emotions in the viewer through the expressiveness of its subjects. The ‘scientific’, or material basis of painting thus included the study of physiognomy and musculature. These were not sufficient for good expression: a brilliant anatomical painter might fail to call forth the emotional response in his viewers. Nonetheless, within this tradition of expression, there was no way round anatomy: in general, it remains true that as Western artists moved away from the anatomical base, as they came to prefer style to the scalpel or at least a rigorous empiricism, painting fell into ‘Mannerism’ where the painter’s primary preoccupation seems to be with his own devices and conventions rather than with the representation of expression as learned from experience. Inevitably, ideology displaced the search for truth.

By the end of the 19th century, the old science of expression was beginning to break up, or, to be more accurate (with the exception of certain pockets and enclaves, such as the Slade in Britain) it had been annexed away from Fine Art and was being pursued by scientists, like Darwin, author of The Expression of The Emotion in Man and Animals. Artists were increasingly preoccupied with a new theory of expression (whose rudimentary ‘moment of becoming’ is, as a matter of fact, discernible even in High Renaissance anatomical expression). Expression came to refer more and more to what the artist expressed through his work, rather than to the expressiveness of his or her subjects. Indeed, the artist became in a new sense, the subject of all his paintings, and the relevance of the old, ‘objective’, anatomical science of expression withered.

However, like the old, the new theory of expression was also ultimately rooted in the body, though in this case, in the body of the artist himself. In Abstract Expressionism — and I am referring to not just the New York movement, but also its precursors and parallels elsewhere — the body of the artist is expressed through such phenomena as scale, rhythm, simulation of somatic process. (This is quite obviously true of a painter like Pollock.) But again, as in classical expression, physiological depiction was not pursued for its own sake — even when it was skilfully done. Rothko might not have been able to render to us the physiognomy of Moses, Venus, or Laocoon — but he could, through the new expression, vividly introduce us to the face of his own despair. (The association between certain colours and certain affective states was critical here.) But just as the Renaissance science of expression had tumbled into mannerism, so did the new abstract expression. Arguably, it was even more prone to do so because its guarantor was not so much the ‘objective’ discoveries of observation and the dissecting room, but rather the authenticity of the artist, his truth to his lived experience. My view is that although, in one sense, abstract expression is necessarily limited by solipsism, in another, it has opened up new areas of experience which were simply not available to artists working within the classical theory of expression. Those areas were, of course, revealed through ‘formal disclosures’ — new organizations of the picture space, of colour, and of form, which were capable of evoking emotions unreachable through physiognomic expression: but decadence and mannerism set in when the new areas of experience were defined as the sole legitimate territory for art (as in Bell, Fry and their successors) or, worse still, when (as in Robertson and Sylvester) pursuit of ‘formal disclosures’ was advocated for their own sakes, rather than for that of the emotions and experiences which could be revealed and evoked through them. This led to an art which was either concerned with optical sensation (i.e. decorative) or with the intellect in isolation from the world of feeling (i.e. much systems and all conceptual art). Above all, it led to decadent art for art’s sake.

I hope that you will now be beginning to see how I wish to ‘situate’ Hoyland. He is an artist who seems to me to stand on the very brink between being a genuine abstract expressionist, and an up-market interior decorator, albeit a rather good one. This is the contradiction at the centre of Hoyland’s project. It is one reason why, I think, Rothko was so important for him in those early years. You can see Rothko as either ‘The Father of Minimalism’ or the supreme painter of an unsuccessful struggle against depression and suicidal despair, the artist, par excellence, of the ‘basic emotions’ surrounding mourning, exile, absence, and loss. Hoyland cannot make up his mind, though; in the end, it is the wrong Rothko he opts for, a Rothko of ‘formal disclosures’, for whom the ‘tragedy’ is assumed to be irrelevant. That it why he so often seems content to offer us sub-Hoffmans souped up Louis, and Olitskis which are at least better than their ‘originals’.

But this, in a sense, is to be too critical of Hoyland, for, if he hovers on the brink, he never absolutely falls over it. Thus whereas it is possible for Hoyland to say, ‘as for scale, there is no mystique in what I do about the human scale, though a canvas is often as high or higher than a man, and longer than one can reach’, what he actually does seems to me always intimately linked to ‘the human scale’. (Thus when a brushstroke, or whatever, is longer than his reach, he will often constitute it, by contrivance, to the scale of that reach: his paintings ‘higher than a man’ are no more unrelated to human scale than is a colossus.) Similarly, whereas it is sometimes true, as Robertson observes, that Hoyland’s colour seems to be self-referential, equally often it is powerfully evocative of emotional experience.

This leads me to an important point about Hoyland’s expression: just as I indicated that abstract expression was present as a ‘moment of becoming’ within High Renaissance anatomical expression, so, it seems to me, High Renaissance anatomical expression is present as a critical residue within abstract expression. (It is prefectly possible to talk about the anatomy of De Kooning, the drawing of Newman, the physiognomy of Rothko.) Hoyland never quite tumbles out of abstract expression into decoration, or decadence, because he conserves so much of classical expression. In particular, unlike so many younger abstract artists, Hoyland can draw, and draw well. The sort of drawing on which so many of his paintings are based can only be learned through years of ‘objective’ study, through drawing directly from the model. In this respect the recent tendency to point out that Hoyland relates not only to American artists like Rothko, Hoffman, Louis, Olitski, etc. but also to de Stael and Bomberg — both of whom were consummate draughtsmen who straddled both traditions of expression — seems to me correct.

This observation enables me to explain something which I experienced acutely when I visited Hoyland’s show soon after reviewing the Stockwell exhibition — and that is the almost infinite superiority of Hoyland over such younger abstract artists as Abercrombie, Gouk, and MacLean. When one reads what these artists have written or said, they confirm what is abundantly evident from their paintings themselves: they are only interested in poking around at the signifiers of art. They have no theory or practice of expression, not even an ambivalent and confused one, as Hoyland has. For example, in an Artscribe interview MacLean (whose work is 100 per cent decorative, though good decoration unlike so many Stockwell artists) said of Hoyland, ‘he has got a good feeling for spread, tonal spread. He knows how to cross the paint surface,’ etc., etc. But he showed no glimmer of insight or interest in the experiences which the technical devices were being used to realize. Similarly, it is typical of Gouk (who cannot draw) that he should polemicize against drawing as ‘the bane of British painting’. Because those artists have jettisoned so much of the theory and practice of classical expression (far, far more than Hoyland) not even abstract expression is open to them. The best they can hope to be, under these circumstances, is good decorators: many of them have precious little chance of becoming even that.

But I said earlier that I would return to 26.5.71 and be specific about that area of experience and those emotions which, whether Hoyland is intellectually conscious of it or not, are expressed through the work. This is, contrary to Robertson’s view, not just a legitimate critical enterprise, but a necessary one if the critic is to be anything more than a technical journalist. Just as, within the classical theory of expression, the critic endeavoured to elucidate the physiognomy of the Mona Lisa, or whatever, so too critics within the modern theory of expression must look into the face of the painting itself, and relate what is seen and felt to the world beyond that of painting.

It is Hoyland himself who gives us a clue towards accurate verbalization: before he painted this picture, Hoyland was quoted as saying that he was interested in the idea of ‘unity- in-division’: ‘and if you have a rectangle it is interesting to add to it, to enrich and complicate the area by giving an independent life to shapes inside it and not allow them to be endlessly restricted by their unification with the over-all picture plane.’ He then said, ‘In trying to do this, it is possible to get both actions at once: a separate existence inside a totality.’

Here, I can only state an argument which I will substantiate at greater length, elsewhere. I believe that in 26.5.71, through his formal devices, Hoyland achieved a powerful visual equivalent for this desire ‘to get both actions at once: a separate existence inside a totality’: but that behind, or rather within, that formal intention was a highly specific emotional content. Through his forms he evokes in those viewers who find this work ‘good’, feelings belonging to an early stage in infancy — that when the infant is both positing, and denying, its separate existence from the mother and the world. At this time, the baby becomes dimly aware of the otherness of the mother, of the fact that he himself does not flow seamlessly into the world, or into her — but has a separate identity. This ‘otherness’ he simultaneously denies and explores during a vital, perhaps the vital, period of developmental growth: at this time, the baby necessarily posits the idea of ‘a potential space’, which David Winnicott, a psychoanalyst, once 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.’

It is just such an affective, ‘hypothetical space’ as this that Hoyland, using all his considerable technical skills and abilities as a proficient, trained adult artist — is able to recreate. The viewer is the subject of the work; he floats within the fleshliness of the breast-like contents of the ‘picture plane’ in the vastness of the whole world, that ‘skyscape beyond’. Everything — self, mother’s breast, and sustaining environment — is fused together on one reading; sharply separated out, on another, or, as Hoyland puts it, one has both actions at once — ‘the overall picture plane’ and ‘a separate existence inside a totality’. It is not just the fact of a relationship to this area of bodily experience which makes 26.5.71 a good painting (any more than the attempt to draw a beautiful woman’s face necessarily results in a beautiful drawing); it is the quality, depth, and authenticity of the relationship that are decisive: here Hoyland is successful. We experience a sense of ‘goodness’, or we deny our experience.

In my view, explorations of this kind are in no sense regressive: they constitute the real reason for valuing the products of abstract expression. Certainly, here painting enters a terrain where no theoretical or linguistic statement, by its very nature, can begin to be as effective. (One only has to compare the achievement of 26.5.71 with the obsessive, aesthetically dead, forensic ramblings of Mary Kelly in her Post-Partum Document which touches more consciously, but much less convincingly on the same subject matter, to appreciate that.) These are issues which deserve more thorough elucidation — and I explore them further in a forthcoming monograph on the painter, Robert Natkin, and also in my book, Art and Psychoanalysis.

I made some reference earlier to the need for me to make self-criticism concerning certain aspects of my utterances on Hoyland. I have already indicated that I had not seen enough of his work, and what I had seen I had not looked at hard enough, to justify my earlier view that he — like say Gouk and Abercrombie — was an unmitigated formalist. Foolishly, I allowed myself to be influenced by the brigade of critics — from Robertson to Maloon — who have insisted that Hoyland’s ‘formal disclosures’ are what count. They may have advanced his career, but they are ultimately the artist’s worst enemies.

Despite this, I am not inclined to be too apologetic about what I have said in the past: there is, I repeat, a contradiction within the artist himself. I was emphasizing one side of that whereas I said nothing about the other. I relied too much on Hoyland’s post-1973 work in which the denial of his discoveries in 1970/1971 is often made explicit through the flattening out of his space, his apparent loss of touch and nuance, and his frequent application of a deadening, stifling ‘all-over’ impasto to the whole picture-plane.

This contradiction, though manifest within the works, also comes out in Hoyland’s confused attitudes towards his own practice. Once, at a public meeting in the Hayward Gallery, I saw Hoyland take the microphone and turn upon a poor, unfortunate woman who had been so foolish as to expect to walk into a gallery and see something on the walls that she could enjoy and appreciate. Hoyland shouted at her that modern art was difficult, that one could not expect to understand it without knowing a lot about it: without, as it were, putting in a great deal of homework, and acquiring a deal of specialist knowledge.

On the other hand, in this catalogue, Hoyland says, ‘One discovers a painting as one might discover a forest with snow falling, and then suddenly, unexpectedly, come upon an open glade with sunlight penetrating the falling snow, simultaneously. Paintings are not to be reasoned with, they are not to be understood, they are to be recognized. They are an equivalent to nature, not an illustration of it; their test is in the depth of the artist’s imagination.’

These views on what painting is are incompatible; but the truth is that at its best it is neither a hermetic and self- evolving process for a circle of knowledgeable intellectual initiates and professionals, nor is it, like ‘an open glade with sunlight penetrating the falling snow’, natural, and transparent in what it has to offer. As long as he oscillates between these two options, between, as it were Robertson’s formal stupidities and his own .instinctual anti-intellectualism in his work, and his thinking about his work, Hoyland will remain ensnared. If he comes to realize — as he seemed to in 1970/71 — that painting is the necessarily artificial constitution of experience, through certain definite pictorial skills, with their roots in the human body and its potentialities, then he may yet become a major painter.

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.

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.

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: Fine Art After Modernism / March 15, 2020 by Laurence Fuller

FINE ART AFTER MODERNISM

MODERN ART: In Defence Of Art / March 14, 2020 by Laurence Fuller

IN DEFENCE OF ART

MODERN ART: Overweening Treachery, and Suchlike / March 13, 2020 by Laurence Fuller

OVERWEENING TREACHERY, AND SUCHLIKE

MODERN ART: Goodbye to all that! / March 12, 2020 by Laurence Fuller

GOODBYE TO ALL THAT!

MODERN ART: Against Internationalism / March 11, 2020 by Laurence Fuller

Seeing Berger: Against Internationalism

MODERN ART: Where Was The Art Of The Seventies? / March 11, 2020 by Laurence Fuller

Where Was The Art Of The Seventies?

MODERN ART: Carl Andre Interview / March 10, 2020 by Laurence Fuller

AN INTERVIEW WITH CARL ANDRE

MODERN ART: John Hoyland / March 9, 2020 by Laurence Fuller

Beyond The Crisis: John Hoyland

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

SEEING BERGER
by Peter Fuller