Page 42 - Studio International - March 1972

UK commentary If I, as a London newspaper critic, harboured penetrate our backward-looking island. Most
any wish when the New Year arrived for the gallery owners have remained happy with their
Richard Cork artistic community around me, it was that we stable of accepted favourites, and any younger
would all begin to behave at last like an artist who is admitted to the fold invariably
irresistible force instead of an immoveable bears the cosy influence of his seniors' precepts.
object. Having lived in this city for two and a As for our national institutions, the Hayward
half years, and written a weekly column on Gallery has not yet managed properly to survey
gallery exhibitions almost as long, I wanted 1972 one single facet of the conceptual movement,
to be a time of repentance and renewal. Not only and the Tate has shown a comparable reluctance
should we own up to the timid complacency either to show or acquire first-class examples of
which has prevented us from playing a genuinely post-object art. Amends must obviously be
positive role in the international dialogue of made, and it is no use relying on the tiny handful
contemporary art; we should also ensure that of dealers who have already entered this field
every possible aspect of this dialogue was to make up the loss.
presented, examined and discussed during the But is it too late for us to reap the full
months ahead. benefits from developments which have long
Such a reform has, after all, been consistently since been absorbed in America and Europe ?
shirked over the past few years. Ever since this Art is most potent at the time of its inception,
country first started congratulating itself; in the and exhibitions or visits from artists who ought
late fifties and early sixties, on the advent of to have been invited here several years ago have a
a generation which seemed to be rectifying the melancholy, almost retrospective air about them.
provincialism of post-war English art, it Lawrence Weiner, for instance, who came over
simultaneously began to lay the foundations for to JACK WENDLER'S promising new 'gallery' in
yet another form of insularity. So besotted Willes Road, NW5 just after Christmas, was
were we with Riley, Hamilton, Hockney, Caro resolutely pessimistic about the value of staying
et al., that the temptation to rest content with in England. Admittedly, much of his programme
their achievements proved overpowering. A new is rooted in an aggressive attitude towards
establishment of taste grew up around them contemporary culture, and he never hesitates
which is still potent today; and even though a to come out with the most pugnacious
lot of these aging enfants terribles have for some judgements if the occasion warrants them. But
while been looking distinctly the worse for wear, there was nothing gratuitously hostile about his
England is only now realizing how much has mood when I talked to him: the surprise he
been happening elsewhere which failed to expressed about England's dismal lack of