Page 57 - Studio International - January 1969

known experience: that of walking into a Bacon show at MARLBOROUGH, for instance, I and politically.)
darkened theatre. As the viewer passes before couldn't tune out a university-looking man The Gauguin association is initiated mainly
it, the silvered outer panels work as mirrors— explaining to another university-looking man because of the increasingly curvilinear planes
an idea that has occurred to Rauschenberg on that Bacon had mellowed, lost his force, and in Bacon's recent work, and his faithful ad-
many occasions, and seems to reflect his was now painting pretty pictures even though herence to the symbolist's colours—oranges,
moralistic impulse, the let's-face-it philosophy the subject-matter remained 'gruesome'. violets and smokey blues, with scarlet re-
of his life-into-art theory. What can be more I couldn't disagree more. The cleanness and served for the dramatic highlights. It is also
classically philosophic than the 'know thyself' masterliness now so much more apparent in suggested because Bacon now uses the sur-
dictum ? Bacon's painting technique serves only to round, almost decoratively composed, to
But thyself vanishes as the electronic apparatus heighten the kind of horrible nostalgia, the heighten the importance of his area of concen-
picks up the sounds in the room (not whispers, piercing, rending sentiment of loss and be- tration: the human mask. Gauguin with all
but hand claps and giggles and stentorian trayal that I have always read into his work. his faith in the mysterious expressive value of
bellows). Once activated, the light dawns To me, the new elegant surfaces, and large abstract colour-form finally used it to direct
behind the panels and in gentle and very free areas that work as 'composition' only the viewer back to that which was his passion,
unobtrusively varied waves of flickering light suggest a Gauguin gone mad finally with his the human physiognomy.
a collage of homely kitchen chairs is revealed. poignant sense of beauty and its terrifying Of course, Bacon's portraits are not portraits,
Strictly speaking, the piece only exists in rela- inner founts. (Or perhaps it is not so far from I suppose, but a convulsive repetition of a
tion to the spectator. But why be so strict? Gauguin, not mad at all, writing graphically sensation he has concerning the inaccessibility
Once the show goes on, the spectator is en- and angrily of the self-performed abortion of of the other. His masks are of the modern
veloped in a Maeterlinckian mist. The stealthy a Tahitian girl, with all it implies sociologically variety, made of soft plastic stuff that twists
flitting of lights and shadows evokes reactions
that could hardly be called participatory.
They are the conventional reactions of the
theatre-goer at that moment when he is
drawn into the illusion of the play. The viewer
may clap or stamp absent-mindedly, but he
is never under the false illusion that his own
part in creating the illusion is any greater
than that of the audience before the live actor.
The success of Rauschenberg's use of tech-
nology lies in the degree to which he has over-
come the spectator's superficial responses to
the wonders of modern technology.
Far more austere and puritanical is the man-
ner of Dan Flavin, who stunned his audience
recently at the DWAN GALLERY by taking over
an entire gallery in order to enact his drama
of space. In the white-walled barrenness of the
empty gallery, Flavin took one corner and
framed it with two horizontals of pink and
gold fluorescent tubes. Its warm glow bec-
koned the viewer to enter Flavin's space fan-
tasy, which depends on a proscenium-like
triangular space in which the walls dissolve,
seem animated, and cease to have a logical
joining axis. Standing in the emptiness of the
room, the viewer has the dual sensation of
seeing a framed illusion and of having that
illusion affect the entire space in which he
stands, for the artificiality of the neon light
casts aspersions on the reality of the natural
light. In order to deal with Flavin's fantasy,
the viewer is obliged to sense the finally total
ambiguity of pictorial or sculptured space and
habitable human space. In this, Flavin seems
to meet the requirements I would expect the
sculptor to meet, but he does so in a stern and
almost coercive manner. The anger I saw in
the eye of a spectator before Rauschenberg's
Soundings was as nothing compared with the
ire of a matron who entered the gallery as I
was leaving, and finally, after frantic search,
found the illuminated corner.
Although I am usually tuned out when I enter
an art gallery, and rarely notice what people
say, the exhibitions lately seem to call forth
particularly voluble spectators. At the Francis
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