Page 46 - Studio International - September 1971

3 Gilbert & George 5 Rose Finn Kelcey
`The Paintings; with Us in the Nature' 1971 Black Hand 1971
(one of a set of six) Nylon 105 X 120 cm
Photo: John Donat
6 Alan Sonfist
4 David Shepherd Crystal Enclosure Detail 1968
Size by Arrangement 1971 7 x 4 x ½ft
Bricks
Photo: Courtesy of the Serpentine Gallery

fabrication idea in a more conceptual direction, superior to those attainable by dropping a ship's lounging with stiff ease in their urban clerks'
is also probably part of a widespread move biscuit into a bowl of stewed fruit. suits on grassy banks and five-barred gates
among King's generation toward a more But dutifully one notices the intelligent against stagey pastoral backdrops sprinkled
perceptually oriented way of working'. Here is gathering of pictorial resources : paint as the with sugary cow-parsley and buttercups and
prescription offered not in indifference to the surface of canvas, paint as tangible pigment, great chestnut candles.
facts but as if under their warranty. Well, paint as stain, paint as insubstantial colour; and Here and there the vegetative detail,
would any sane betting man put his money on the locking together in one frame of languorously especially in the supporting wings, is
percepts against concepts, with a count of heads drifting and explosively centrifugal movements, individuated with full Romantic intensity, but
to follow ? And if he did, and won, what arrested off-centre by a clipped rectangle of for the most part the painting is as greasy and
deductions should be drawn ? painted canvas. generalized as any Victorian amateur's.
What should happen next in British sculpture— The drift and scatter of pigment and colour The piquancy of all this can very easily be
indeed, what is already happening on the is ultimately all falling, in a way that quietly missed by outsiders. Gilbert and George are
evidence of the McAlpine exhibition — is asserts the vertical posture of the support English eccentrics whose comedy depends
surely a breakdown of the precarious during painting; and this brings out very nicely upon sustaining the conviction that all their
coherence of the 'movement', an improvement the physical limitations of the object (paint, attitudes, actions and standards are absolutely
in the quality of argument about goals and canvas, gravity) and their remarkable normal while, by implication, those of other
guiding principles, and an art that will become transcendence by unmeasurable depths of people are absurd. The whole joke, at the
harder and harder to promote for lack of colour and images of galactic size. expense of serious contemporary art (which
slogans. Not to mention patrons. To find a fault (as sharply distinguished from may, admittedly, take itself too seriously) is
For the time being it is my own opinion that placing on record a rebellious wave of boredom thin and very English; requiring no justification
William Tucker's work is most admirable for with all the tail-end of Abstract Expressionism) for cult initiates, and sustaining none for the rest.
the range of its intelligent invention and its it would be necessary to argue that the paintings
uncompromising indifference, as an oeuvre, to are too greedy—that they seek to do nearly Two exhibitions of collectors' goodies
the fashionable imperative of stylistic coherence. everything at once, short of becoming figurative contrast nicely in content and style. The
But Phillip King's is the most likeable, for its —and that this wouldn't be a laudable goal even `Masters of the Twentieth Century' at the new
manifest charm. if they succeeded. Anthologies of modernist MARLBOROUGH are the ones from those modern
painting sit as challengingly on a single canvas art-history books that see art as, mainly,
John Hoyland's work has probably not often as caviar, chips and trifle on one plate, without figurative expressionism and Cubism en route
been called charming, but his exceedingly pretty even a comparably redemptive absurdity. through Paris and the U.S.A. to the saleroom.
lilac, moss-green, pink and beige paintings at the The Non-Objective World', on the other hand,
WADDINGTON GALLERIES stretch one on the rack Those deadpan art comedians Gilbert and at the ANNELY JUDA GALLERY, takes
between duty and impulse. The impulse is to George have raided the tradition of landscape, Constructivism and ideological non-figuration
dismiss a tradition of pictorial effort going back as if it were the most natural thing in the world. mainly from Russia, Germany and Holland to
at least to Hofmann as largely wasted, having Their six large triptychs at the WHITECHAPEL much the same destination.
issued in objective consequences not aesthetically GALLERY show them, in the centre panels, At the Marlborough the paintings tend to be
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