Page 61 - Studio International - April 1974

second, on until 9 March, is entitled long horizontal work mounted on between the two. Catalysts, Herbert Read and Roland Penrose, it
'The floods in Egypt' ; the directors brown paper—which is virtually impresarios, unpredictable in both was decided to hold an International
also plan to import 'readymade' identical in format and function to the their social and artistic reactions, Surrealist Exhibition in London,
displays. relief. His book, a limited edition, combining Bohemian insouciance Mesens should have become one of
Although Wegner and Grylls no contains aphoristic remarks typed on with a certain economic shrewdness, the dominant personalities in a
longer indulge in camp jokes at the very cheap, roughly textured paper. neither really devoted himself manifestation which was, at worst, a
expense of the avant garde, their His statements record daily, interior wholeheartedly to one art form, but succès de scandale, at best a
current programme of display conversations and humdrum actions : each illumined whatever he did with remarkable public relations exercise.
exhibitions is, nevertheless, a he lights a cigarette 'to gain time', he an imaginative insight which The relationship with official
continuation of their critique of art admonishes himself, admits his nourished itself rather on dreams of Surrealism was tangential, but it was
activity. doubts, hesitations, prevarications; a the future than on memories of the a vivid presentation of avant-garde
At Situation Angelo Bozzolla, an typical remark 'All in order' (pause) past. art in a country which at that time was
Italian sculptor and art historian, is 'he could have sworn it'. On the tape Born in Brussels, Mesens apt to look at the works of Russell
having his first one-man exhibition. (out of order on my visit) was a commenced his creative career in Flint as exercises in permissive
The work consists of four elements : recording of a ticking clock overlaid music, largely under the influence of modernism. Two years later, in 1938,
relief, drawing, book and tape, the by the intermittent sound of Erik Satie, and though he was to Mesens returned to manage the
mixed media, especially sculpture Bozzolla whistling. abandon it, 'for moral reasons', London Gallery in Cork Street, and
accompanied by tape recording, Book, relief, and drawing relate in musical notations often played a also to edit a magazine The London
extremely fashionable at the moment. terms of colour : their pale greys, significant part in his graphic imagery Bulletin, which began as a series of
The relief is narrow — only a few ochres and browns evoke the music, and the kind of liberation which catalogues for the gallery, but soon
inches wide — and is displayed at eye tonalities of the Italian landscape. was achieving in the twenties no developed into a lively and
level. It snakes around three of the More importantly the four elements doubt attuned him to those explorative independent magazine of general
gallery walls and is made up of comment on the passage of time. In
rectangular slabs of dried clay total they constitute a metaphor for
mounted in a shallow, U-shaped, the absurdity of existence and reveal
wooden channel. The scale of the the artist's deeply pessimistic and

Bozzolla, Wall Relief 1974 melancholic view of life; yet Bozzolla
finds that even a half-hearted
relief is highly ambiguous : it can be commitment to art can ameliorate the
viewed as a distant horizon, or as a sense of futility.
frieze seen from afar. Similarly, its
John A. Walker
length appears to be arbitrary —the
wooden channel is open at both ends; E. L. T. Mesens at Acoris. cultural attitudes which he was to Mesens La Désenvoütee 1965-8
Collage. 40 40 cm.
therefore the relief is a slice of a London, February maintain throughout the rest of his
continuum whose extent is only Homeric in their feuds, embattled in career. Poetry was his next concern — interest, though, naturally enough,
limited by the dimensions of the their attitudes, ferocious in their an art form, as he said, which will with a bias towards Surrealism.
gallery. personality cults, intransigent in conquer all domains of human Together with the Mayor Gallery and
The clay's surface is full of visual their doctrines, the surrealists of the activity'— though perhaps this Guggenheim Jeune, the London
incident— cracks, scratches, thirties can be detected through the rhetorical statement was to suggest Gallery was to act as a rallying point
indentations, lumps, crumbled rapidly thickening mists of time as rather his own private preoccupations for contemporary art until it was
fragments— which, like Leonardo's creatures of myth rather than of than a final historical aphorism. For he closed by the war in 1940.
spit marks on a wall, are suggestive, actuality. It is only the survival of Dali had already become closely involved For the next few years Mesens
from ten paces, of representational which reassures us that the whole with Magritte and, together with worked for the Belgian section of the
imagery, especially figures in a thing happened as it actually did. Less Nougé, they founded that Belgian BBC but managed throughout that
landscape ; however, at close frantically rococo in his attitudes, surrealist group which converted a time to maintain his own idiosyncratic
quarters the imaginary pastoral scene but equally enigmatic, conspiratorial national preoccupation into a image, and to keep the flame of the
disintegrates into a welter of chaotic and influential, within an admittedly contemporary art movement, surrealist imagination flickering in a
marks. more limited field, was Edouard Mesens's own Martha-like activities variety of cafés and public houses,
Conditioned by print, one's first Mesens, who died in 1971 at the age in the field being marked by a notably 'The Three Horseshoes' in
impulse is to 'read' the relief from left of sixty-eight. Acoris, the Surrealist succession of art galleries which he Tottenham Court Road. In 1945 the
to right, but although the vertical Art Centre in Brook Street, has been ran or controlled —the Galerie de London Gallery opened again in
divisions between the clay slabs act as showing a selection of the works I'Epoque of 1927, the Galerie Mesens Brook Street, financed by Roland
paragraphing, there seems to be no which he executed in the last four of 1931, and later the semi- Penrose (with whom Mesens had
logical sequential thrust in one years of his life, and though in an ideal institutionalized Palais des Beaux- frequent disagreements based on
direction rather than another. Nor is aesthetic world these should be Arts. He had become an accredited those dialectic feuds which were so
there any formal development, only regarded perhaps merely as apostle of Surrealism, and as the integral to Surrealism), Zwemmer and
random texture and arbitrary change, independent artifacts, it is as pressure of political events gave the Peter Watson, and staffed largely by a
which, as one walks along the length difficult to disassociate them from the movement a more resolutely young Liverpudlian jazz-fiend,
of the piece, produces an effect of personality of their creator as it would international complexion, Mesens George Melly. No longer purely a
monotony and meaninglessness. be to do the same with the writings of slipped into the role of its St Paul. surrealist centre, Mesens's new
Displayed at the opposite end of the Apollinaire. It was inevitable therefore that gallery was to supplement the ICA as
gallery is Bozzolla's pencil drawing — a There are indeed resemblances when, largely under the influence of a breeding ground for new ideas. It