Page 41 - Studio International - October 1972

(Above and right) Southampton 1924, Caproni Ca 60 1921
an aesthetic appreciation of technology is to be pre-literate children and illiterate adults alike are being applied more obsessively, intensively
expected, if the gap between the two cultures make such connections spontaneously, and exclusively than is normally the case, either
(or the three cultures, if we differentiate powerfully and instinctively. We don't in literature or in everyday conversation.
engineering from pure science and art), is in need to repeat all the researches into
some way to be bridged. Absence of functional non-representational visual forms made by
requirement then ceases even to seem a projective psychologists,9 for it's common
functional requirement of our works of art. enough knowledge that empathic and other
One may regret the extent to which aircraft associations confer on certain patterns
have remained icons of a glee in progress and a resemblances to smooth or spiky states of mind. Beaufighter Mk 1C, 1949
militarism as naive as Futurism's, and of creeds Similarly, both pre-literate and highly literate Certain types of aeroplane, particularly those
more mindless still. But over the last quarter of a (poets') minds naturally see faces in the fire and built between 1910 and 1925, commonly remind
century this has slowly been supplemented by a shapes in the clouds, or in the Rohrscharch test. people of grasshoppers, with their slab sides,
countervailing nostalgia quite different from Pop From this angle minimalism can be seen as, not blunt noses, their cockpits perched up like
art's faible for the thirties. The last few years unimportant, but a highly significant preference insect eyes, and a multiplicity of spats, struts,
have seen a steadily increasing interest in for a certain kind of shape, whose emotional and bits which look like legs, stalks and
collections and flying displays by veteran and connotations are extremely strong, although no probosces. Perhaps the similarity isn't altogether
vintage aircraft. Occasionally a sense of aircraft more specific than musical shapes, and to be accidental. Both insects and these aircraft flew at
design, as spiritually evocative, appears in described in terms of asceticism, liberation, speeds where bird- or fish-like lines were of
painting. ambivalance, etc. The wartime debate about secondary importance. And if insects bristle with
How beautifully Magritte has endowed aircraft recognition confirmed the extent to sensitive and functional external bits and bobs
the denizens of his industrial aviary which associations sharpened sensitivity to it's because their external skeleton corresponds
with a feeling for flight as lift, rather than speed! visual shapes and configurations, and the early to aircraft cleanness of line. Pioneer aircraft
He has caught that oniristic yet intersubjective emphasis on dry, purely formal, descriptions recall dragon flies — for their thin bodies,
sensation that obsolete aircraft resemble extinct rapidly yielded to a fuller interest in the delicate wings, and their brief lives in those
animals and also that unexpected sensation of aeroplane-type, often extending as far as a kind Edwardian summers. But none of these
absence of motion which is peculiarly marked in of free-wheeling caricature (i.e. indication by associations so outweigh other factors as to
night flight (in World War Two Stephen exaggeration). Thus the Handley Page Hampden become obtrusive. Thus the long De Havilland
Spender saw the bomber 'more beautiful and would be nicknamed, for its broad wings and its series named after insects no more seemed
soft than any moth/With lowering furred thin tail boom, the 'Flying Tadpole', or the insectoidal than the Westland Pterodactyl,
antennae feeling its huge path ...')8 `Flying Champagne Glass', or, for its slab-sided whose name was suggested by its form, seemed
Once we have, not merely admitted, but fuselage (scarcely wider than the pilot), the reptilian or prehistoric. While agreeing with
rejoiced in, the continuity between the `Flying Suitcase'. But tadpoles, champagne minimalists and purist formalists that it may
minimalist and the engineering ends of the glasses and suitcases have many conspicuously often be necessary to expunge from pure form
spectrum, and excluded from our range of incompatible connotations, and their application, every misleading association, I would not agree
responses only the exclusiveness of any in the same context, to one type, serves as a with them that this process can only be carried
particular approach, there seems no reason to useful reminder that people are quite capable of out in the absence of associations. For I would
baulk before a similar sliding scale through to abstracting the purely visual aspects of a verbal argue that sufficient expulsion of misleading
what so many visual art theorists still quaintly description from all the others, just as they are associations often occurs quite straightforwardly,
call literary associations. Quaintly, because the quite capable of distinguishing between both the sa appropriate, and that where it doesn't, it can
saturation by verbal cliché characteristic of our role of words and concepts as labels (i.e. easily be encouraged to do so. Here, it seems to
culture has no more to do with what is valid in definitive classifications) and their use as me, the most flexible response to the problem
literature than visual cliché with what is valid in indicators (for attracting attention to aspects of lies. Thus an aircraft name like, say, the
the fine arts. There is certainly nothing things only). Visual art theories about the Brewster Buffalo no more hinders a minimalist
specifically literary about the fact that one pollution of pure form by verbal association are response to its form than would its designation
object may remind us of another. After all often vitiated by an exaggerated fear that words by a number. I would add that numbers carry all
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