Page 51 - Studio International - April 1972

Coming to terms with a work of art, it goes
without saying, is a matter of intelligence as
well as sensibility. At a time when much new art
is esoteric and available mainly to an elite of
like-minded practitioners, the two functions
are often dissociated instead of being fused in a
unified response.
It seemed to me, as I went round the
London galleries, that this dissociation was
only rarely resolved. Sometimes a spontaneous,
unformed impression had to be quickly
succeeded by a cerebral analysis of 'what was
going on'. This usually presented the spectator
with an apparent complexity which was
exhausted before the constituent elements of
the work had been fully explored. Problems
also arose when artists concentrated on
specialized areas of visual research. For in art,
as in psychology, it is difficult to set up a
controlled laboratory environment in which the
experiment can be conducted. And even then
the results can be disappointingly slight.
However, in one case, a painter was able to
rely tactfully, and temporarily I suspect, on the
discreet support of the figurative image. In
another, a brilliant invention permitted an
exploration of colour in space where the rules
of the game were for once synchronous with the
player's experience of playing it.
But these achievements were, to say the
least, insecure. They were tactical improvisations
rather than long-term strategies. For those one
had to apply elsewhere, and more particularly
to the TATE GALLERY'S 'Seven Exhibitions'. There
were two opposing trends : on the one hand an
attempt was made to break out of the introversion
of much contemporary aesthetics and make
contact with society at large. Others, the concept
artists, limited their field of vision, regarding
art as a self-sufficient tautology.
Michael Moon's pictures (WADDINGTON'S
9 February to 4 March) consist of raised
horizontal stripes, set close together but
revealing a white background. The medium is
acrylic on plastic and the painterly variations of
pigment are in counterpoint to the machined
finish of the surface itself. One of the
consequences of Moon's choice of materials is
that the picture plane is flattened and the illusion
of depth prevented (this is compounded, not
very happily, by reflections caused by the
4 Henry Mundy overhead lights).
Texture Drop Change 1971 Having achieved a two-dimensional situation,
81 x 165/ in.
the artist then introduces three-dimensional
5 Brendan Neiland features in a controlled manner. This is
City Bonnet 1971
Acrylic on canvas achieved partly by the physical fact that the
x 6 ft.
colour bands protrude, but more importantly
6-8 Joseph Beuys at the Tate
Gallery, March 1972 because they are laid in alternating series. As
the eye passes down the canvas, one set of
stripes seems to recede and become the
`ground', while the other adopts the role of
`figure'. A horizontal reading is also possible: in
each stripe the hues shift like a linear spectrum.
Despite their genuine distinction, these
works suffer from a serious limitation. The
spectator, walking into the gallery, is
immediately moved by their glamour. But when
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