Page 48 - Studio International - September 1971

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7 Jackson Pollock from St Katherine Dock to Stepney, now
Search for a Symbol 1943
Oil on canvas showing at MARBLE HILL HOUSE, Twickenham.
43 x 67 in. Here the famous rub shoulders with the
obscure, and the catalogue is a more reliable
8 John Hoyland guide than the works, about which are which.
15.12.70
Acrylic on canvas The real objection to the Bond Street
96 x 72 in. Standard, that presses harder every year, is not
that this nebulous but fateful test is altogether
9 Peter Hide
Arch 1970 bogus—for it isn't—but rather that it is so
Mild steel and concrete overpoweringly well-adapted to the elevation
and perpetuation of one kind of art. And I do
not mean simply the object, the marketable
investment commodity, although that is
certainly part of it. I mean an art that is formed
by the successful critical ideas and attitudes of a
receding historical era, and is thus a perpetually
conservative force that has nevertheless
somehow succeeded in masquerading as the
most authoritative assessor of the real worth of
new art. Perhaps once, in the Golden Age there
were avant-garde dealer-galleries, but the
distinction between philanthropy and business
has certainly sharpened.
So, reverting to my first theme of the
dominance of the formalist-phenomenalist-
presentationalist critical syndrome, it is natural
to find that Robyn Denny at the KASMIN
GALLERY (full of videotape cameras on viewing
day) is the typical—and admirable—well-
promoted artist, while nowhere within a
metaphorical square mile of him is there any
conspicuous effort to come to terms with an art
that is more than meets the eye, or impossible
to pack in a fair-sized crate.
This generates a sort of fretfulness, and
maybe a tendency to exaggerate the intrinsic
importance of works like David Shepherd's
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