Page 19 - Studio International - May 1971

Virgin soils and
In an article published in Studio International in
old land December 1966, the English painter Patrick
Heron wrote of 'The Ascendancy of London in
Charles Harrison the Sixties', and justified it in the following
terms : 'It fell to us British to begin the trek back
into pictorial complexity and away from that
`The essence of farming on virgin soils is extension, arid "openness" which, in two generations of
on old land it is intension.' O.E.D.
Americans —the "first generation" ... and (far
more so) the so-called Post-Painterly
Abstractionists—has become at last an academic
emptiness. But those of us here who have seen
that this re-complication was in fact the only
way forward have been accused by American
critics of retreating into Cubism again . .
Recognising that I risk placing myself, where
Partick Heron would place me, among those
`younger British contributors to Studio
International' who are on what he identifies as an
American 'critical bandwagon', I cannot but feel
that overcomplication — a kind of formal archness
—has been the downfall of much British painting
over the last ten years. There has been a
tendency for certain British painters to stack up
`smart' images (often carrying implicit claims to
`social' and 'political' relevance), from a rich
and complex range of `cross-cultural' references.
Much of this has its source in the Independent
Group's activities centred on the Institute of
Contemporary Arts in the mid/late fifties, where,
among painters, Richard Hamilton was the
dominating figure. The ICA's rapid decline into
PREFACE failure and frivolity since its move early in 1968
Six years ago an exhibition of British art by into truly institutional premises in The Mall is in
younger artists, `London: The New Scene', a sense a symptom of the implications and failure
toured the United States and Canada. In its in the long term of those earlier claims to cultural
way it seems to have been fairly representative, relevance and energy, based upon a de haut en
and I remember feeling impressed at the time bas approach to culture in the broader social
by what the catalogue displayed. I feel now a context (claims which were themselves not
consciousness of anti-climax at the retrospect— sustained in terms of long-term commitment).
partly, I think, through a sense of the The making of Che Guevara posters or Che
impossibility of fulfilment of a certain potential Guevara paintings or Che Guevara exhibitions
which the 'art of the sixties' seemed to offer, but would be no reliable testimony to radical
perhaps principally as the result of a change in intention.
the nature of my own commitment, which has Another related tendency, within 'abstract'
itself been forced upon me by the implications of painting, has resulted in the production of a large
my response to a very different art. To this range of formally vacuous images out of a series
response, and to these implications, I of 'intelligently manipulated' image-concealing
confidently commit myself, in a manner which I and/or process-describing paradoxes. As
hope this present selection, and my own words Raymond Chandler wrote about Agatha
which follow here, will fairly represent. Christie's plots : 'To get the complication you
The following text is not intended to fake the clues, the timing, the play of
`introduce' or to 'represent' the work, ideas or coincidence, assume certainties where only 5o
interests of all, or indeed any of the artists per cent chances exist at most.'
included here. It is merely offered as a guide to The best 'younger generation' painting of the
my own state of mind at the time when this last five years (represented, I believe, by a
selection was made and these artists were proportion of the works of John Hoyland,
invited to participate. It should be quite Bernard Cohen, Jeremy Moon) has been that
evident from the sum total of what is included which has appeared most open and direct, from
here that neither I nor any of the artists the start, about means and ends.
represented are making unspecified claims to The refreshing virtue of the approach to
mutual compatibility in aesthetics, ideas, aims sculpture which Anthony Caro introduced in the
or whatever. The best service the spectator can late fifties and early sixties (largely to a small
render to the artist is to approach his work—in group of acolytes at St Martin's School of Art in
the first instance—as an endeavour in some way London) was its openness—a kind of 'no-cards-
distinct from the endeavours of all or any other up-my-sleeve' demonstration of what could be
artists. done, in the name of 'humanism' and in