Page 45 - Studio International - September 1971

UK commentary
Donald Brook
The gift of the Alistair McAlpine collection to
the TATE GALLERY makes conveniently public
the nature of the English bid for dominance of
the international mainstream in the 'sixties,
and calls for some account of why it has failed.
(Or maybe, art history being what it is, one
shall have to write eventually ... some account
of why it did not deserve its success'.)
Out of sixty works by Annesley, Bolus, King,
Scott, Tucker, Turnbull and Witkin it has to
be noticed that there are striking pieces and
seminal ideas. But it is inescapable, too, that
there is something thin and fruitlessly aspiring
about much of the enterprise that cannot all be
attributed to lack of genius. Nor is it a defence
that without Anthony Caro the play is Hamlet
without the Prince : at worst it might be seen as
a production without its super-star, and maybe
for that very reason easier to judge on its merits.
It is my suggestion that the common
weakness can be traced to an infirm body of
aesthetic and critical doctrine that, while
providing the artist with some valuable 2
psychological energy, has nevertheless inhibited
those who have taken it too seriously and given
a prissily doctrinaire look to stuff that could with
advantage have been more various and lustier.
I refer to what might be called the American
formalist-phenomenalist-presentationalist
appreciative and critical syndrome; and
propose first of all to bestow credit where it's
due. Nobody, I hope, laments the passing of
the days when the possession of a little natural
sensibility and the writings of Sir Herbert
Read were the sufficient conditions of creative
and appreciative right-mindedness. Vitalism,
organicism, 'touch-space' and the practice of
art criticism as a genteel appendix to literature
were overdue for challenge in England by
mid-century.
The argumentative and speculative mood
was surely just as 'welcome as the demise of a
post-war humanism that had passed its prime,
and the new doctrines arrived most opportunely
to sustain the sculptors on a running wave of
prestigious American criticism, promotional
skill and-in Caro's case at least-spending
power. A protective sense of elitism, too, seems
to have developed quite quickly, so that already
impressionable and envious young diplomats of
other art schools count themselves accursed
they were not there, when St Martin's days are
celebrated.
But on the debit side it has to be said
(rather summarily in review) that the trouble
Spring Totem 1962-3
William Turnbull
Rosewood and stone
58 in. long
2 Phillip King
Tra-la-la 1963
Plastic, io8 x 3o x 3o cm
with the formalist-phenomenalist-
presentationalist syndrome is that Formalism
is either vacuous or something else;
Phenomenalism is false, and Presentationalism
is untenable unless so diluted as to retain very
little of the surprising flavour that made it first
seem attractive.
(For the record, and in case these strictures
seem unhelpfully negative, I am ready to assert
that a sound theory will admit realms of content
and context into its account of `form'; that it
will abandon phenomenalism for a theory of
direct perception, and that it will demand of the
alleged 'presentations' of art that they include
such sub-surface properties as representation,
expression and actual or fairly imputed
intention.)
So restless are the artists under the
dispensation they have themselves adopted that
they need to be constantly rounded up and
nipped for straying, by their critical shepherds.
Thus, for example, the author of a catalogue
essay, Miss Seymour, remarks that as with a
Moore, 'some splendid sexual images can just
as easily be read in a King'. But she adds,
primly: 'Yet external references do not enhance
the physical presence of the sculpture', with the
minatory air of one re-asserting a rule and no
apparent misgiving that what she says may be
untrue as a matter of fact.
The same sculptor's chosen direction, she
also says, ' ... as opposed to developing the
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