Page 30 - Studio International - December 1973

TWO EXHIBITIONS IN RETROSPECT*

HAMISH FULTON

IN THE
STEDELIJK

MUSEUM,
AMSTERDAM

The exhibition: one small room of
Amsterdam's big museum, with small black
and white photographs and worded papers
stuck on its walls in groups, without frames or
glass. People almost fell through it into the
dramatic stair-well strung with the spill-over of Installation shot, Hamish Fulton exhibition, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
Ben Vautier's simultaneous exhibition of
theatrically verbal assertions and instructions
(`conceptual art' at its brand-label worst):
`Where are the Van Goghs, anyway ?"Which place, that time : into Fulton's trip. It means It's also that the high technical quality of the
way to the postcards ?' Let them pass. empathizing by analogy with the time-feeling of photographs, the careful lay-out of typography,
A quiet place, this room. Intimate. You have pilgrims at the time of Chaucer and and exact spatial relationships among these
to get close to see the pictures, read the words. Piers Plowman, of Sitting Bull (born in the exhibited materials and their traditional
And then closer — to see that some photographs Moon of the Snow Blind) and Indians' traps for pictorial conventions — these seem less
placed exactly edge to edge are of the same place stampeding buffalo, of the pre-historic Nazca important as beautiful art-forms than as
in different seasons; some, piled in strict peoples documenting their relation to hills and characteristics of a craftsman taking care to do
vertical separation, represent different stages sun and time in those extraordinarily justice to the work. And so responsible is
(of mind-blowing scale) in an invisible path mysterious land drawings of Moses and Jesus Fulton in this that there's no lapse in honesty,
towards or away from a point in a vastly in their mountain-stays and wilderness-journeys directness or mystery in this exhibition. The
mountain-valleyed landscape; some seemingly of 40 days in Biblical time, and of Fulton in his work stands alone, without any translation or
different terrains are points on the same journey, own 344-mile journey through The Highlands accompanying art-historical information to
and some visually similar views come from and the Islands back into his own cultural- intrude on the fleeting potency of its
different continents and types of land — if their genealogical history as a member of the experience: its real sartori.
verbal labels (captions ?) are to be believed. It `ancient clan of the Maclaines of Lochbuie' to
takes time, to walk around, and back, to think find (and photographically document) the
in front of each of the twenty-four sets. That clan's now derelict castle 'home'. It means Both these exhibitions took place in April-May 1973.
straight furrow running back vertically like a associating yourself with humble workers along I did the writings in May t973: in a laundromat and
path, didn't I just see that before in another these photographic journeys — sometimes the sunny studio apartment lent to me by friends
piece ? (No, the first was in Nazca, Peru; this is anonymous peasants in South America and while they were away on holiday and my own place
was roofless (literally). Those conditions were not
labelled Grims Ditch, Ancient Pathway, England, once The Saltwood Roadman, and irrelevant to my reasons for writing short
Hertfordshire.) But they both look walkable — once The Beaver known only through the `exhibition reviews' for the first time in years (at least
like those internal pathways almost sculpted by remnants of his neatly industrious tree-felling. my notes weren't buried under rubble). But also I'd
been inspired by Brian O'Doherty's April invitation
beautifully light-filtered lush English flora of It means associating yourself with animals : to write short reviews of any. exhibitions which
The Pilgrims' Way and Facing Both Ways (really feeling significance in a Polarbear track, the turned me on in whatever city I happened to be,
with assurance that they would be published by
`hollow lanes' — reminds me of how nice that is territory of a Dead Magpie, the shedded skin Art in America. I liked his business-like brevity,
for the title of Fulton's book-exhibition last of a snake; feeling Cloudy 1 Listening/Waiting open and non-chauvinistic attitude towards the
year). But what about those eight centrally through a photographed rabbit huddled geography and nationality of art (a pleasant change
from that of other art-magazine editors I met in
photographed roads and lanes, which look so beneath a rock under a vast sky crowded with Manhattan then) and also the inherent respect in such
hard and flat as they mount up and back into storm-clouds; taking as talisman or a carte-blanche. So back in London, I sent him a cable
some amazing distances in Walking on the situation-symbol some lapwing feathers or a about the Caulfield print retrospective at London's
Road Ahead ? Some of that looks like hard bleached skull as related to that primitive Waddington Galleries and the Hamish Fulton show
at the SMA, and got a 'delighted' telegram from
work; the label says that they were views from a human counting-of-days by knot-tying and Art in America after sending the typescripts, so when I
32o mile walk over 14 days, quite a feat of stick-notching. finally heard indirectly that O'Doherty had left the
endurance and sustained work; I'm not in But getting into this work also means magazine, I withdrew their rights to publish what
they probably no longer intended to publish anyway.
physical shape to test disbelief by doing it looking and thinking right here and now in very The fact that these were to be my first
myself. But then walking around this room precise ways. The precision is more of the representation in Art in America affected both what I
chose to review and how I wrote. In keeping with my
(slowly with feet-aching stops) with periodic associative connections of the 'hard-edge long-standing aversion to stylistic territorializing, I
journeys to the cafeteria for a 'civilized' coffee metaphor' in metaphysical poetry than that linear wanted to 'select' work of obviously different
and cigarette and chair — this is in no way similar reasoning of linguistic-analysis philosophy, appearance; to accentuate my (more recently
developing) interest in writing in a style resonant with
to the walking experience pin-pointed and and even more like brief verbal particulars that of the visual work approached, I wanted the
alluded to in Fulton's work. welded into a Haiku. It's not just that Fulton is simultaneous juxtaposition of two different 'review'
Getting into this work means getting your extremely sparing of words and pictures, or styles. And so the Caulfield piece is done with a more
head out of this room and into that path, that that their relationships are indirect in meaning. traditional art-historical sub-structure, while the
Fulton piece is more contemporarily poetic. (I must