Page 43 - Studio International - January 1972

RICHARD LONG AT THE WHITECHAPEL 9 NOVEMBER her (usually) eyes skewing towards one, the `THE SLADE 1871-1971' AT THE ROYAL ACADEMY
— 21 NOVEMBER only sign of life. What are they all doing there ? 20 NOVEMBER — 12 DECEMBER
There's no funny business —this isn't France.
The Slade was never the centre of a pioneering Decorous, silent, sad, you can be sure that one The majority of Richard Long's 'sculpture'
view of art education; what it actually did was thing unites them: sensibility and an unwaver- displays a narrow repertoire of basic configura-
never as extraordinary as the context in which it ing belief in the honour of true tones. The Slade tions : straight lines (walked in grass, over land-
did it. Its importance has been above all social. has been a place where art has been taken scapes—as recorded on survey maps etc.), circles
That is why it is not easy to illustrate the Slade's seriously. That has been its purest function in a (in white-painted wood on grass or sand,
sovereign position in the history of English hundred years, only a few of which have been depressed or elevated in grass or sod), squares (in
painting of the last hundred years with an anything but philistine. There was at least one stones among stones on a beach, walked in
exhibition limited to prize works. To have made place then, where a lot of people could work Wiltshire etc.), crosses (in stones among stones
the point fully it would have been necessary to together, believing in the absolute importance on a river bed, in pine needles, 'reserved' by
have shown comparative material, to have shown of art. Everything else follows from that—the picking off the heads of daisies in a field or by
for example the Slade's own old-masterish life misfits fitted, the poetry of uselessness suddenly removing seaweed from a beach, walked in dust
drawing alongside the stumped and stippled resolved in purpose, the marches and counter on grass), triangles (on sand in Kenya) and
monstrosities that were standard fare in other marches of those who can't stand what they do spirals (in seaweed on a tidal beach, in foot-
places; or, to have shown how isolated and but can't get on without it either. Of course the prints of dried clay on a gallery floor, in rocks
parochial academic practice had become in the exhibition has something of the fascination of on the Isle of Skye). The evident and un-
188os and how the Slade's introduction of an old photograph album : can that really be complicated geometricality of the form asserts
French studio practice had announced the Rodrigo Moynihan ? or Roger Hilton ? or its origin in human activity and thus prepares
possibility of an intelligent academism. As it is, Harold Cohen ? Very few come out at full the spectator for consideration of the 'inter-
you have to read between the lines. strength. Stanley Spencer is completely himself. action' between artist and environment.2
`Vingt ans perdus' Legros is said to have Bomberg, at a precocious peak. One wishes that So far as the sculptures themselves are con-
muttered as he left the building for the last it had been possible to go the whole hog and to cerned, Long's sense of occasion has almost
time and I would give a lot to have been able to have included students whom hindsight shows to always been impeccable — since his first public
ask him why. Because he had realized that he have been artists, but who were not prize- appearance at the Young Contemporaries in
should never have listened to Whistler's winners. Bruce Laughton pointed out in his 1968.3 His floor pieces employing small sticks4 as
blandishments, never have left France ? catalogue introduction that there are 146 artists units in basically geometric and linear patterns
Because English students were hopeless ? Or in the Tate collection who had been at the Slade. are comparatively self-contained and have
because he had realized at the eleventh hour Fifty are represented here. characteristically been devised for gallery or
that he should have learned to speak English One wishes too that there had been some way other indoor situations. Several more recent
during those twenty years ? But neither had of showing what it meant to have been a Slade works like those at the WHITECHAPEL consist of
Wilson Steer bothered to learn French at the student over the years, what it added up to. To `paths' of dried muddy footprints or carpets of
Ecole des Beaux Arts. What a crowd. learn to draw like Watteau or Ingres ? To what pine needles; in these some more or less specific
With Brown, Tonks, Steer, a certain end in 1914 or 1938 ? Rather to have gone reference is made to features and contexts of
preciousness comes in. One has the feeling that racketting through Soho to hear Marinetti. landscape and to origins in more or less specific
the dominant personalities of the time were To see Matisse at the Leicester Galleries, or to places. The out-of-door works are the least
shaped by their playing up to a social attitude or Zwemmers, to leaf through the latest book on easily circumscribed and the most problematic
expectation. It is incredibly difficult to think of African sculpture, or the new Minotaure, in terms of conventional notions of `arthood'
Augustus John (whose long shadow fell across knowing that these things counted. The Slade and `spectatorship', but there can be no question
the Slade for decades) as an artist in his own was the place that England had no place for, of their originality and attractiveness.
right, other than as a stereotype of a certain where deviance was not inadequacy or treason, In every case the particular configuration is
legend. Rather he seems not quite there in his where imagination was valid. No doubt the carefully related to the context in which it is to
time but adrift, aloft, in some bohemian books did have to be balanced by stuffiness. be seen; or rather, in the outdoor works, the
no-place, the masculine principle in an idealized The last part of the exhibition is the least `character' — geology, flora, climate, history
concept of art, of which the feminine principle telling, not merely because of the inevitable (subjective in personal association or objective
was met by those passionate, dying far-away dowdiness of the recent, but because in the last in record) etc. — as it impinges upon the artist,
girls whose gifts were such strong currency decade the peculiar flavour and function of the decisively influences him in the selection, placing
too ...Not even a toughie like Wyndham Lewis place has tended to be swamped by Dip.A.D. and 'construction' of his configurations. In cer-
could resist that legend. BLAST TONKS art. But the Slade will always be special, and tain outdoor works of 1966-7, Long used easily
indeed: Tonks and John are there below the worth watching. Its place at U.C.L. guarantees transported and easily assembled wooden
surface deformations of everything he did, his an independence and a disinterestedness. q elements, or the ubiquitous sticks. But it seems
necessary butt but also his underpinning. And ANDREW FORGE that to an increased extent Long's outdoor
what they stood for was surely the source of his `sculptures' have been 'realized' in materials
bitter energy —that censorious, complacent, which not only came readily to hand in a given
exclusive, rose-grey, tweedy mass of English context, but which can be seen as conveying
aestheticism, softly chuffing over its dreams and what has been for him the essential in the
smothering things as it died. Perhaps the most `character' of that context.
negative aspect of hero worship was that it turned The materialist observer of sculpture might
everybody else into an eternal student. In the feel it desirable to be able to assert that the
absence of that kind of certainty, doubt was the
thing.
I think of a certain kind of interior : a large
room with the grey light of a Bloomsbury winter
outside. Indoors young people stand about,
12 A. Rutherston
facing away from each other, frozen as in a The Confession of Claude 1901
dream. The artist is likely to be among them, Collection Slade School of Art
33