Page 50 - Studio International - November 1971

simultaneous operation within a single work of Around 1968, it seemed to me that our each differing only marginally from the next.
several discrete systems which, though forerunners, the American Abstract- The language of painting has become
functionally interdependent, are in visual and Expressionists, had demonstrated, in spite of reactionary, and has precipitated an ab-
conceptual contrast. Images extracted by their manifest intentions, the incapacity of reaction only—it was, in a strict sense, academic.
Phillips from popular culture often correspond non-referential painting to deal with other than It is not surprising that many, including artists,
to classical prototypes or to images familiar sensational experience. Their followers made a thought it dead.
from particular past works of art; they resonate virtue of paucity, and limited their ambition To break out of this Wand-vor-Gesiche
accordingly in his painting in terms as much of accordingly. The puritanical, reductive yet demanded an increasingly complex pictorial
the themes they served in their earlier contexts hedonistic convention I had absorbed, and to schema. Between 1968 and 1970 my paintings
as of their recent postcard sources. Moreover, which I had made some contribution, seemed to became dense and mingled in response to my
at least as frequent in Phillips's work as me unable to support anything more demanding desire to get 'everything' in. One risked pathetic
iconographic links are conscious analogies with than decor. fallacy. In May 1970, I came to see the stretcher
situations or states of mind from literature. Some of my contemporaries abandoned as an encumbrance. It gave the work a spurious
Significantly, lettering features prominently in painting for the reassuring actuality of sculpture, authority. Like a frame, it was left over from
his painting, to which his extraordinary treated in its turn abandoned for theatrical picturesque, window-frame easel pictures.
novel A Humument stands in a close entertainments and jargonart. Yet I felt that an Doing without it liberated what John Russell
complementary relationship, image there being activity as natural, developable and potentially referred to (in March 1968) as 'an exasperated
added to pre-existing word rather than vice- varied as painting could be made to yield an energy casting around for fuller expression'.
versa, while in works in both genres Phillips exact and exacting lived experience, as it had What I really want to say here is, in the most
concentrates on major transformation rather in the past, but without the literal annexation of general way, to refer to the content of my art—
than superficial invention, by making the whole visual phenomena external to itself. The what each work (and they are one-at-a-time)
work dependent on what literally already exists. painting had somehow itself to be the event. A might, through putting colours on to cloth,
In his work in any medium, Phillips serious obstacle was the dogma of lineal series— convey. But I cannot. The most I can do is to
capitalizes on that medium's peculiar resources. that each work should be merely a fragment of state an underlying attitude to art, and to
But his work stands healthily at the opposite one idea. One still sees exhibitions in which a painting in particular. It is this : in spite of
extreme to those who hold that an artist in the single painting is presented in twelve parts, changing mores and manners, of the
broader sense must foster the self-sufficiency 8 interrelatedness of the world of things and our
of his discipline and refer in his work to it conditioning consciousness, painting has now,
alone. Phillips's art springs in part from an urge and has consistently had, a constant function. It
to retrieve or rescue from obsolescence opposes chaos with particular meanings
powerful material that is not so much discarded, irreducible to words—it confronts non-entity. q
as unrecognized and unregistered because so DEREK SOUTHALL
close to us.
This instinct finds expression in the urge to
re-present our culture to us and to hold up to
our gaze, in the shape of our own behaviour,
some of the innate, recurrent aspects of the
human condition. This function, one of several
traditional to the artist, of giving form to the
culture as a whole, has a ritual aspect. Finally,
however, regardless of art's role as comment or
form, it is upon the activity itself of making a
painting that Phillips dwells at the richest level
of ritual. Indeed only rarely does he embark on
a painting without first positing for himself rules
and procedures which make the act of painting 8 Derek Southall
(like the act of executing a score) a performance. HWP No. 24 `Two of Three 1971
In this performance, Phillips is both performer Oil on cotton-duck 8ft in x 5ft 6in.
and commentator, disclosing with deliberate 9 Tom Phillips
self-consciousness the steps that account for Benches I, II, III, 1970/71
Courtesy Tate Gallery
each action. Process is crucial to content. At the
same time, detachment can mask its antithesis, 9
and the most vital paradox of these works is that
however explicit their exposure of process —and
partly, indeed, as a function of the very
obsessiveness of that exposure—each work by
Phillips is, in an open way that must elude
exact definition, a poetic revelation of an
imagination to which it is natural to see, in any
manifestation of the human mind, a rich variety
of equivalences across the culture, which is
obsessed with translating data (and with the act
of its translation) from one medium or
convention into another, and which is possessed
by an intense and romantic vision of activity
and of life. q
RICHARD MORPHET
198