Page 46 - Studio International - November 1972

More on very much a focus or even something of a though less apparent and less fixed, abstract art
tradition (comparable almost to that of the
also may have its 'rules' — for instance, the
different positions of an image-sign in relation to
The New Art classical Academy) for various personal concerns the basic properties of, say, a rectangle; its
of the 'New Generation' sculptors — the school
literally brought them together, it provided a circumference, four corners, two diagonals, a
place to discuss art and to test each other's horizontal and a vertical axis and its centre.4
R. H. Fuchs opinions. Apart from the rather structured form This means there might be a marked difference
of communication between the members of the in the way one can (or cannot) understand this
Art-Language Institute one is inclined to believe new art. Traditionally a picture could become an
there is only a little institutionalized discussion almost objective image, highly readable, because
going on. This might be overstated; but even its organization of content referred back to some
when there still exists relevant discussion kind of systematic structure. The structure
In some ways 'The New Art' show at the among artists, it doesn't show in their work. suggests ways of understanding — but how can
Haywardl seemed to me very relevant to the Precisely that was very characteristic of this one, for instance, understand a Gilbert & George
contemporary art situation (in general; show and of the art situation now: that the work piece ? In the large, two-part piece in the
structurally the British situation is not seemed very private,3 like one's own speech. But Hayward (The Shrubberies I & II) there is, of
exceptional). Of course the selection could be one's speech refers to a systematized language: a course, a lot of traditional English iconography;
disputed, which is a problem for the home-front, set of grammatical rules enabling a person to one could record it in the usual way of the
but that was not the most important point of the understand the basic structure of somebody iconographer and come up with interpreting the
show. Other people would have come up with else's speech; one's speech is a personalized work as a romantic mode of enjoying nature or
other artists (every critic rightfully believing he form of a language-system. In recent art, one something like that — but that would clearly be
knows art best); as it is, however, the exhibition might say, the system is the speech — in an earlier senseless. Much more relevant seems to be the
provides a comprehensive view of just about art it was a more or less objective tradition that idiosyncrasy of the work and the stylization of
all the stylistic variants that claim to be or are provided a system for understanding. I am not the image's form, making it look like some
considered to be supremely 'contemporary'. sure whether it is correct to call art a language, ancient document — giving discrete glimpses of a
Still, it was not a group that was showing; the but in certain traditions of art there are private life like fragments of a fairy tale. It is not
fourteen artists (or combinations of artists) characteristics which, however slightly, make there to be understood; it is there to mystify
looked very different from each other, even if them resemble a language. In traditional you, or even (taking Gilbert & George's words
they seemed very close, as Richard Long and illusionistic art there is a rudimentary 'grammar' for it) to make you happy. About some of the
Hamish Fulton obviously are. As far as I can see provided by its objective: to create a convincing other artists similar things could be said. Except
this is something rather new — in earlier shows illusion of reality within the given scale of a maybe for John Hilliard's and Keith Arnatt's
with the same sentimental ambition of summing picture; so a tree has to be larger than a flower pieces (which are the most straightforward in
up the situation at a certain point in time (like but not as large as a mountain, a house in the terms of structure), all the works in the show
the famous 'New Generation' sculpture show in foreground seems larger than a mountain in the had something I think deliberately enigmatic
1963, or the at the time much-discussed painting background, the sky has to be blue and the grass about them; some of them (Craig-Martin's set
section of the 'Documenta' 1968) the artists green. That these relations are grammatical piece, or David Tremlett's works) were
seemed to be much more together as groups. But becomes clear if one introduces minor mysterious in a rather rhetorical way, while
now, in 1972, each artist is quietly (or deviations; within a general context of others (John Stezaker and Victor Burgin) were
sometimes fanatically) following the lines of his illusionistic realism, the appearance of an orange rhetorically difficult. The rhetoric of mystery or
own private orthodoxy.2 sky and a purple tree looks very intriguing — in the rhetoric of difficulty might even be called
One might come up with several reasons for fact such deviations introduce different part of the content of their work.
this. For one thing the hold of the art schools emotional modes (as in a Gauguin painting) The privateness of much recent art comes
over the artistic situation used to be much similar to the ones resulting from unexpected primarily from the fact that existing forms are
stronger, it would seem; St Martin's provided changes of syntax in poetical language. And breaking up all the time because they are, one
feels, too narrow to accommodate much stylistic
differentiation, in the way traditional illusionism
as a structure was so open that it could hold
early-Renaissance painting as well as Baroque
or Post-Impressionism. This might be a factual
reason for that privateness but there might also
be a much more relevant ideological argument.
One reason why the illusionist system could hold
out so long as a structure might be that art
wasn't concerned with structure as such. If one
reads the greatest theory of illusionist painting,
Leon Battista Alberti's On Painting (1435),
correctly, it was concerned with function: to
please, to instruct, to move.5 Formal or
structural decisions were made to suit that
function. Structure as such seemed only to have
become a 'subject' for art at the time when art
lost that explicit function; it then became much
more problematic how to make art.6 The first
major artist who made explicit in his work the
fact that making art is difficult was Cezanne.
Comparing a mature impressionist painting, by
Barry Flanagan Hayward II 1972. Mixed media Monet say, and a Cezanne landscape, one feels a
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