MODERN ART: The Arts Council Collection

MODERN ART chronicles a life-long rivalry between two mavericks of the London art world instigated by the rebellious art critic Peter Fuller, as he cuts his path from the swinging sixties through the collapse of modern art in Thatcher-era Britain, escalating to a crescendo that reveals the purpose of beauty and the preciousness of life. This Award Winning screenplay was adapted from Peter’s writings by his son.

In September 2020 MODERN ART won Best Adapted Screenplay at Burbank International Film Festival - an incredible honor to have Shane Black one of the most successful screenwriters of all time, present me with this award: 

As well as Best Screenplay Award at Bristol Independent Film Festival - 1st Place at Page Turner Screenplay Awards: Adaptation and selected to participate in ScreenCraft Drama, Script Summit, and Scriptation Showcase. These new wins add to our list of 25 competition placements so far this year, with the majority being Finalist or higher. See the full list here: MODERN ART

THE ARTS 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

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

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

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

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).

John Hoyland

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

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

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: Hayward Annual 1979

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

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.

Frank Auerbach portrait of James Hyman

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.

Leon Kossoff

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