Page 59 - Studio International - June 1966

William Tucker Thebes 1966 William Tucker Luxor 1966
Plastic 48 x 78 x 50 in. Rowan Gallery Plastic 50 x 71 in. Rowan Gallery

`Cool' is one of the stock adjectives for the new, Caro- nouncements of considerable weight and fairly revolu-
and-after type of sculpture, and is rapidly becoming a tionary import, but making them with the kind of flat
woolly, if not meaningless, word. But one does find it delivery which doesn't jerk you into attention about
rising unbidden to the lips again with a sculptor like what's really being said. This is particularly so of the new
William Tucker (ROWAN GALLERY), and not just be- sculptures. Most of them—as usual in Tucker's work—
cause the surfaces are smooth, the colour clear but sub- depend on repeated units with a progressive displace-
dued, the shapes opposed to the slightest flicker of ment or re-orientation of the fundamental idea building
emotional urgency. Tucker is like someone making pro- up through the sequence. In the best of the new pieces,
though, the units are big, simple, slab-like and number
no more than three (in one case, only two). And like
fragments of some dismembered monument, they just
lean up against one another, or are piled together in a
seemingly casual (but oh, so nicely judged) heap. They
are totally unassertive, in the sense that they don't gesture
at you, buttonhole you or even do much to surprise you.
But they work uncommonly well, with a calm logic all
their own. Tucker, it is often remarked on, is an Oxford
graduate in history, and so must be, as artists go, a fairly
scholarly guy. And if this is supposed to equate braininess
with a 'cool' style and art-objects which reveal an intel-
lectualized control, I suppose the fact is relevant. What
is most significant about this new work, though, within
the general perspective of developing styles that we are
being exposed to through recent exhibitions of Bolus,
Scott, Annesley and (forthcoming) Philip King, is
Tucker's personal halting of the 'sculpture-towards-paint-
ing' process. His wave-contoured slices of thick volume
do not look heavy in the traditional 'sculptural' sense, but
they relate to one another very much as volume and not
as spatially conceptualized visual ideas. The colour dis-
creetly locks them together: it does nothing to make you
react to them any way but plastically.
The Daily Telegraph screamed in horrified affront at
John Piper's photographs of suspender-clad thighs in
John Piper Figure-eye and camera I 1966
Collage, chalk, and ink on paper 15 x 22 in. Marlborough New London Gallery the collage-drawings he's shown at the NEW LONDON,
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