Page 21 - Studio International - December 1972

Erté: Following three major retrospective banana which completed the set. Initially, Correspondence
exhibitions celebrating Erté's latest birthday, no pronounced evidence distinguished this
his eightieth, Academy Editions, London, are model from its copies but this guise naturally
launching 'Erté Fashions 1912-1972' to deteriorated; the real banana began to display
coincide with the London show, open at the the signs of decomposition while the copies
Brook Street Gallery till 23rd December. In appeared not to change. A relation binding
1912 Erté designed costumes for Mata Hari. model to copy developed; what was initially
common to the model and copies had,
Stuart Walton, a self-taught Yorkshire artist reviewed on a suitable time scale, grown to a
is to be the first Yorkshire Television Fine Art relationship which both bound and
Fellow. The purpose of the Fellowship is to distinguished two related articles. The history
enable Walton to work for a year completely of the plantation cultivated the dialectical
relieved of financial pressures. It is a reflection contradiction 'growing apart/growing toward'.
of the company's policy of making contributions
to enhance and improve the artistic and In January 1971, again at the Museum of
cultural life of Yorkshire and Lincolnshire. Modern Art in Paris, Titus-Carmel exhibited
He is specifically commissioned to paint six Virgin Forest/ Amazon. Three extractor fans
northern cities. mounted on chambers were stationed in an
otherwise empty room. Each unit emitted a
separate odour (green wood note, flower note,
stagnant water, humus and dead animal note)
produced by chemical synthesis. The odours
combined to simulate the olfactory space of a Pro-Stuyvesant
forest. The extent of that space could be defined Since I wrote last on the subject of public
as the extent of its detection, but for the visual sculpture, in the context of the Royal Academy
and conceptual prominence of that room; the sculpture exhibition and the Stuyvesant City
rigid spatial notion became the delimitation of Sculpture Project, about a year ago - I have
the olfactory volume. been involved in continual frustration trying to
What impressed itself in The Great Cultural find a site on the same project: I have visited the
Banana Plantation and the Virgin Forest/ great Brancusi ensemble at Targu Jiu,
Amazon was the authority in the closure; the Rumania: and I have several times revisited
sense that what was done argued its own case, Rodin's Burghers of Calais, and the Balzac now
submitted itself as a real definition. The work at Hemel Hempstead. What I had not counted
did not 'explain' or 'interpret', did not 'imitate' on, namely an intense feeling of disappointment
its model, but invented its own life. In a sense at not seeing my sculpture erected, on any one
The age of Charles i will continue at the Tate this is an invention paralleled on the model, of several projected sites in Newcastle and
Gallery till January 14. The crux of the show endowed with properties, then relations, then Liverpool : and the experience of seeing
is a display of some of Van Dyck's most resolve, with affinities to the model's but sculpture, great in its own right, as sculpture,
splendid portraits. There is also the largest claiming a space of its own. function somehow more effectively as an
display for 20 years of the work of William Most of Titus-Carmel's graphic works are element of the 'real' world (i.e. in a 'public
Dobson who ranks with Samuel Cooper as the extensive series of black and white drawings; place') than in an environment of art (i.e. in a
most compelling British painter before `Discourses' on the subjects of change, museum) have caused me radically to revise
Hogarth. Drawings and prints, especially when alteration, deterioration, rupture. The graphic my views on the subject, possibly towards a
they can illustrate a theme, are also included in style employed for these drawings is relatively view previously held - 'it (the sculpture) could
the exhibition. neutral and materially descriptive (with be an object among objects, privileged only by
affinities to the work of the technical its unique configuration, its lack of recognized
Gerard Titus-Carmel draughtsman). type of function . . .' (Studio International,
John Blake writes : Gerard Titus-Carmel is The drawings are in series, for display in a January 1969). I don't feel attracted either to
having an exhibition of his work at the Royal line, and nominated 1, 2, 3, 4, ... n. There is no the Renaissance sculpture in the city square or
College of Art from November 15 to quantitative (or qualitative) value in the to the post-war Romantic 'sculpture in a
December 8. He studied print-making in number; the series could be represented as landscape' : both these conceptions use the
Paris at L'Ecole Boulle, and he continues to 1,1,1,. , n. There is no pertinent environment to 'frame' the sculpture, rather
live and work in that city. He was a chronology. The series displays no hierarchy or than allowing it a separate but parallel existence,
representative for France at the Venice dominant direction; the drawings are not as it were, in the world of things. I feel public
Biennale this year; he was included in the issued in instalment, no part leads to any sculpture should be experienced as occasional,
`72/72' Grand Palais show in Paris, and the specific other, the terms of each drawing are unexpected but pleasurable, like music heard in
`Düsseldorf, Amsterdam, Paris' exhibition equal. the street : rather than brutal, direct and empty
at the Guggenheim, New York. The exhibition Titus-Carmel's discourse is a narrative of as almost all public sculpture has been since the
at the RCA is his first in England. `potentialities' as realized in the instances of Renaissance (and a good deal of museum art -
In May 1969 Titus-Carmel presented The change. The potentialities necessarily precede sculpture and painting - is today). Good
Great Cultural Banana Plantation as part of an their actualization, bound to be a closure in sculpture can withstand any amount of visual
exhibition called 'Distances' at the Museum reference to the indeterminate possibilities they use and still have something to give. Sidney
of Modern Art in Paris. Sixty bananas were provide. Then this contraction, as it is affected Geist quotes Brancusi's friend Benjamin
erected on sixty brackets, disposed in five by the artist, becomes his signature, as it is Fondane - . the object is not real, but a good
rows of twelve brackets projected from one naturally determined. This private, intuited conductor of the real.' This beautiful
wall's surface. Fifty-nine bananas were closure becomes his complicity in the difficulty proposition indicates a proper aspiration for
artificial - thorough facsimiles of the one real and the resolve of nature. `public' sculpture now. 'A parallel existence': a
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