Page 45 - Studio International - February 1971

are used to. Anyway, I was reminded of this legitimacy of what these artists do, and since the human being. It is not a question of life
when looking at Ed Ruscha's collection of books the ones I met only told me, a seedy and style so much as a question of life.
in Nigel Greenwood's soon-to-be-vacated blabbing journalist, because they were drunk, Nineteenth-century developments of these
Glebe Place gallery. We're already well familiar I'm not telling. But if you want to be in the ideas are most fully expressed in Ruskin, as one
with some of the earlier ones, like the Gasoline secret, do your own secret art and don't tell me. would expect, and his anti-capitalist message
Stations, the Sunset Strip and the Small Fires. If the most important thing in art now is to that 'There is no wealth but life' is developed
They belong to the early years of West Coast keep up the pitch of the argument, this may not and extended by him in so many ways that his
Pop (often concerned with money; painting it, be the way to do it. But it gives a clear pointer insights have more relevance than any of the
like Hefferton, O'Dowd and Rivers, or doing to a problem which will shortly become acute. later and slighter developments (such as School
high jinks with gallery prices, like Keinholz). This is that various forms of the most advanced of Paris bohemianism, or the underground) that
Characteristic of the oldy European thinking of art are going to be subsumed in, simply, human we have seen since. It is now revolutionary to
some early pop was Ruscha's realist-manifesto behaviour, and therefore that there is a pressing be a Ruskinian. In the last year I have noticed a
type statement concerning the first photo book, need for the discussion of that hoary and weary couple of the keepers of the Tate Gallery's
`Why, I was bringing the news. No-one knew old Romantic chestnut, the idea of the artistic modern collection, wearing, respectively, a
about those gasoline stations'. life. Not originally an artistic so much as a skinhead haircut and a Viva Zapata moustache.
His new Book of Stains belongs to a rather poetic idea, its original Romantic form in What modern symbols of intransigence and
different aesthetic. I knew about it from the England, in many ways the opposite of the revolutionary spirit ! And how silent those men
catalogue to the MOMA Information show this Noble Savage idea which preceded it, argued have been about entrance charges ! Is there any
summer, in which context it seemed newer and that those qualities we associate with poetry—its place for that life-style, that radical chic, in
brighter than its actual physical experience. intensity, concern with emotion, its total showdown art ? q
Unlike the earlier books, which were gummed or eschewal of the dishonest, its liberality and
sewn, and on cheap paper, this one (in a limited measure—should be the constant attributes of
edition of seventy copies) is loose-leaved, 6
boxed, expensively done, and has to be handled
in precisely the same way that you look through
drawings in the print rooms of the great
European galleries. The visible, as opposed to
the ideational, experience of this book is in the
difference between the totally ordinary or
sometimes fastidious nature of the stains, many
of which are invisible. One becomes more
fastidious, of course, on approaching the
visibility threshold.
All this is very well, but it's not where it's at.
Ruscha's likeability and pricey charm, his use
of trade marks (the gasoline stations have been
coming up for seven years now, both in oil on
canvas, and as prints) places him pretty firmly
on the collectors' side of the fence. I can
imagine Lord Eccles buying the Book of Stains.
And Ruscha's neat sense of timing may not
endear him to those artists who now believe in
making a distinction between strategy art and
showdown art, and believe that the former is
meretricious, and the latter is necessary. This
applies to all sections of the art world. At the
silly party for the Institute of Contemporary
Arts' disgraceful Comics exhibition (Toys last
Christmas, comics this; are we never going to be
allowed to grow up ?) I noticed a couple of
young artists, known to me, standing apart,
silently, their backs to the wall, their eyes
narrowed, watching the closed-circuit television
system that relayed a dancing and singing
Michael Kustow, dressed up as Mickey Mouse.
No need to ask them why they didn't feel like
joining in the fun.

The forms of showdown art will be crucial, but
it is hardly for me to suggest to artists what
forms they will take. I'm a little worried,
though, about a wandering vagueness that
sometimes seems to be current, and seems to me
to be anti-showdown. I suspect (for reasons
that are obvious, one cannot be sure about this)
that there is a vogue for secret art at the moment.
Since I have not made up my mind about the

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