Page 51 - Studio International - May 1968

tional structure in which preconceived answers are elicited by the
asking of familiar questions. The exposition of the 'Thesis on line' is
an imaginary one which can only be resolved in a drawing.
Occasionally this exploratory system-building gets out of hand.
Sometimes, for the sake of completing a conceptual series, Flanagan
will extend a sculptural idea beyond his capacity to embody within it
an original sculptural experience. Stack, which is part of the series to
which Heap, Bundle, Rack, Pile and Line belong, is less successful than,
say, Rack because the idea of forms piled together is too literally
expressed. The allusion is too specific and the sculpture's impact is
limited to the area of previous experience. It has become orthodox.
The most successful sculptures are those like Heap and Rack where the
concepts of heaping and racking are re-invented as aspects of the
vocabulary of abstract sulpture.
At best Flanagan shows the determination of the truly original
artist to avoid taking anything for granted. It is as though he were
redefining in his own terms even the laws of physics; not producing
different conclusions, but reaching those conclusions intuitively in
terms he can understand and which he can validate by relating them
to experience. Flanagan has collaborated with John Latham on
various projects and he shares Latham's healthy disrespect for ortho- tions and maybe they'll start thinking beyond them. Make sculpture
doxy and for the systems which, by restricting the terms of enquiry, free of preconceptions about sculpture and you will free it from
reinforce orthodoxy. As a student in the sculpture department at `meaning', thus leaving it open to embody original experience.
St Martins School of Art he was faced with an avant-garde orthodoxy Abstraction is an increasingly essential characteristic of Flanagan's
which it must have been particularly hard to stand up against. His sculpture precisely because total abstraction precludes 'meaning'. It
response to that situation, and to the wider situation of which it was is as if the sculptor were determined that what cannot be expressed
a part, was forcefully expressed by publication of a letter to Anthony sculpturally shall not be expressed at all, and that what cannot be
Caro in a student magazine which Flanagan co-edited :1 'Rejection apprehended physically by the observer shall not otherwise be access-
has been a motivation for me. ... Am I deluded ... or is it that in ible. The rejections which have motivated Flanagan have largely,
these times positive human assertion, directed in the channels that as I see it, been aimed at rejection of all, in the activity of making
be, leads up to the clouds, perhaps a mushroom cloud. Is it that the sculpture, that has not proved indispensable to that activity. Some of
only useful thing a sculptor can do, being a three-dimensional thinker these rejections have been made with a characteristic wit. In an early
and therefore one hopes a responsible thinker, is to assert himself key work, in order to commit himself the more absolutely to sculp-
twice as hard in a negative way. Effort in this direction at this time is ture, he sought to divest himself of the literary notions which
progress as it will encourage general redirection.' (Letter from preoccupied him as a student by writing upon the sculpture itself the
Gloucestershire dated June 1963.) Deprive people of their assump- words 'N'existe pas'. As he has said: `... Rather than run away from