Page 43 - Studio International - June 1971

in here a fact which has come to attention, that conservative sort of art, not least so because of its John McLean
Edgar Rice Burroughs was first translated into predictable deployment of simplistic matrices St Vigeans 1971
French with the title Tarzan Parmi les Fauves), of a nice/nasty, funny/frightful type, or on a Oil, acrylic and cellulose paint on canvas
7 ft 6 in x 10 ft 6 in.
which does not square up to the problem of combination of these opposites which pretty 2 Howard Hodgkin
Matisse, or discuss colour, or attempt to soon make the frightful take on a homely air; Mr and Mrs Richard Smith 1969-70
interpret and explain the quite extraordinary no wonder that assemblage is the traditional Oil on wood
sense of desolation that belongs to the home for low-quality political-protest art. 84 x 92 cm.
Courtesy: Kasmin Gallery, London
pictures of 1910-12—that descent into a sort of Also the home for whimsy and slack wit, or
Johnsiangrisaille, a sort of dumbshow painting for Dinean chumminess. On the nice-and-funny
which we recognise and respond to in the matrix, note assemblage's devotion to the toy-
sixties but which we totally ignore in Cubism. like, its relaxation into the roughly-painted,
The precise kind of depression in those less-than-serious and expendable mode of
canvases has never, to my knowledge, been making when grown-ups take pleasure in
described, let alone analysed. Braque's famous
remark about being tightroped together on a
mountain is commonly misinterpreted by
English people who believe in the Alpine Club
and in climbing a high mountain as a good thing
to do, especially with an old schoolmate. Try
to make anyone from le Havre believe that
Victorianism ! Braque was referring to
loneliness and solitary peril. Maybe, anyway.
D. H. Kahnweiler's My Galleries and Painters,
interviews conducted by Francis Crémieux, has
some good stories and some interesting glimpses
of the period, but still fails to be illuminating
about the pictures. Apparently when Picasso
was asked about them at the time, he simply
used the phrase which was written near the
prow of the Seine public steamers; 'Don't talk
to the driver'. One way in which adventurous
formalists might extend their discussions of
Cubism is by reference to current work in
linguistics and semiology, but I don't know
of anyone who's interested in doing this.
Certainly the idea of a 'language' of Cubism, a
phrase used by everyone, could do with
examination, and its implication that Cubism
is something that has been translated from
something else and could therefore be translated
back again deserves discussion. It might also
help with the problem of abstraction, since
linguistic theory has for some time discussed an
`abstract attitude', basic for the ability 'to
assume a mental set voluntarily, to shift from
one aspect of the situation to another, to keep in
mind simultaneously various aspects, to grasp
the essential of a given whole, to break up a
given whole into parts and to isolate them
voluntarily, to generalize, assume common
properties, to plan ahead ideationally, to detach
our ego from the outside world.'
There is something ingratiating about
assemblage, something that makes one feel that
it hasn't worked hard enough for its effects but
that this doesn't matter much; it has a built-in
invitation to indulgence. At two or three points
only in the history of modernism does it seem to
have been the brilliant and necessary thing
to do at the time—in Cubism, of course,
perhaps in Rauschenberg's combines, perhaps
elsewhere. The rest of the time, it is modernism's
sideline art, especially as one must separate it
from both straight sculpture and the Dada
and Duchamp traditions; if the use of material
is often the same, assemblage's sideline does not
involve aesthetic redefinitions. It is indeed a
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