Page 25 - Studio International - June 1972

commissioned and without 'patronage' from Art and industry relationship to our environment, then the artist's
industry, through a series of active collaborations area of responsibility must include those
at the level of production.] factors which tend to corrupt or undermine
this relationship, including environmental
The Heinz gallery, at the Royal Institute of pollution.
British Architects, Portman Square, London The abdication of this responsibility did not
Wi, was opened on 4 May. The RIBA's matter too much when the environment could
Drawings Collection will now be made available be safely treated as no more than a convenient
to the public for the first time through the pool of natural resources and a passive spectator
regularly changing exhibitions to be mounted in to man's industrial development. The recent
the new gallery. The opening exhibition was realization, however, that as well as gradually
called 'Great drawings from the collection'. poisoning our whole atmosphere with the
by-products of industrialization, we are also
Patrick Heron is showing recent large beginning to exhaust the available supply of
paintings with a limited selection of earlier natural resources, means that our relationship
canvases at the Whitechapel Art Gallery from with our environment has now to be
21 June to 16 July. The choice of earlier canvases drastically reassessed.
has been made by Alan Bowness and will Two issues are at the heart of the
consist of paintings done from 1956 to 1965. The environmental crisis. The first is the issue of
large paintings date from 1969 to 1972. Thirty- social control — who does what, and how — and
seven oil paintings will be shown in the the second that of social attitudes. To take a
exhibition in the Main Gallery, and the Small simple example, one can place the blame for the
Gallery will be filled with gouaches. pollution of our rivers directly in the hands of
those factory owners unconcernedly
Ceolfrith Arts Centre, in conjunction with discharging their toxic effluents. Alternatively
the Victoria and Albert Museum, is organizing one can blame it on a democratically-approved
a retrospective exhibition of the works of dom system which has both permitted such
sylvester houédard. The exhibition is financed practices to continue unchecked in the past, and
by grants from the Arts Council and Northern also legislates in favour of such activity by
Arts. It will open on i6 July at the Laing Art forbidding local river authorities to make
Gallery Annexe, Newcastle upon Tyne, and will public the results of toxicity tests on the
close on 9 August. The organizers are anxious effluent from a particular factory.
to make the exhibition a comprehensive one Too often in the past, science has tended to
and hope to include very early work and also as concentrate on the technical aspects of
complete a collection of Typestracts as possible, problems, and primarily on obtaining
and they would be grateful if collectors with 'control over nature', ignoring the side-effects
houédard works in their possession would loan of its activities ; while art, particularly in the
them for the duration of the exhibition. All past couple of hundred years, has reacted
works will be fully insured and acknowledgement against this tendency and gone to the other
made. Please write with details of the work(s), to extreme, concentrating on ideas about and
Ian Tinwell, Geolfrith Arts Centre, 27 attitudes towards objects rather than on
Frederick Street, Sunderland. Is the artist among those responsible for aspects of their mechanical functioning.
fragmentation of our environment ? Indeed it is often these two opposing points of
The Orangerie des Tuileries, Paris, opened view that are used to characterize the differences
an exhibition of the work of Georges de la Tour With the world's environmentalists and between the sciences and the arts : calculated,
on io May; it will remain open until 25 'eco-freaks' gathering in Stockholm for the objectified rationality against instinctive,
September. United Nations' conference on the subjective expressionism.
environment, there can be few who now doubt This fragmentation can, to a great extent,
The Tate Gallery is holding an exhibition of that the world is facing a growing ecological be correlated with the rise of industrial
the work of Barnett Newman, from 28 June to crisis. It is fashionable to blame the scientists society, particularly since the scientific
6 August. and technologists for creating the mess in revolution of the seventeenth century. It also
which we now find ourselves, and hand them has much to do with our current
Joan Miró catalogue. In order to establish the the responsibility for getting us out of it. environmental crisis. The whole tradition of
complete catalogue of the sculpture of Joan This may, to a large extent, be justified. landscape art, whether one is talking about
Miró, including collages, objects and reliefs, However, there is a strong case for arguing Claude Lorraine, van Gogh, or even Sidney
Maeght are searching for works created prior to that artists and those who support the Nolan, has certainly taught us an appreciation
I945. They would be grateful if the owners of traditions of art must share a certain amount of of and concern for natural 'beauty'. Yet often,
such works would contact them, sending a the blame for our present predicament. by necessarily abstracting this concern to
photograph if possible, at Maeght Editeur, The case can be made at several levels. At contain it within the limits of a canvas, it has
rue de Teheran, Paris 8. its simplest (and possibly most naive) we been separated from the immediate context of
might put forward the artist as the guardian of nature itself. Thus we may enjoy a painting of
`Kitsch: The Grotesque Around Us' is the those 'cultural' values which have been slowly fertile English fields or desolate Scottish moors
title of an exhibition originated by the Wichita eroded by industrial society. This does not mean without considering—or probably even being
Art Museum, which has been selected as a US that his job should be to keep all things bright aware—that both these have been artificially
contribution to 'Documenta 5' at Kassel, and beautiful, but implies that, if we take created, by centuries of agricultural practice
Germany. The exhibition will be held from one of the functions of art as being to order or by the destruction of many square miles of
30 Juneto 8 October. and communicate our experiences of and forest respectively.
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