Page 51 - Studio International - February 1974

art, are the kind of things that Wright art') cannot count as an example of on what new art should be like; more conspicuous and dominant.
lacks, and that impel one's respect contemporary literature influencing and that Victorianism meant that the Flavin began to work almost
towards European neo-classic landscape. Palmer looks a little charmers were likely to turn into exclusively with fluorescent tubes,
landscape, where we can find it; for weaker, perhaps, than he should, preachers, and that the preaching was aligning the fixtures singly or in
it has a real edge over the italianized since the sepia and gum drawings liable to be of an intolerable type. groups on the walls of a room. In their
quasi-naturalism which too softly from the Ashmolean were not Take The Hireling Shepherd. For the various configurations, the lit tubes
and pervasively formed our own available for the exhibition. But moment we will ignore the impulse to exhibited a very intense and
national tradition. Calvert's copper plates, one with an urge on the jovial slattern to the point immediately sensible visible state ;
English landscape at its most oddly Primaticcioesque figure, make of Anticipating Marriage. Also the and as the work developed in
ordinary is peculiarly vacuous. The up for this. repressively Paisleyite views that complexity the light phenomenon
singular lack of content is not In the eighteen thirties and Hunt wished to communicate (this seemed to indicate a different set of
redeemed by supposed connections forties, as the naturalistic impulse is in large measure an anti-Catholic conditions within art. The evolving
with English literature. The 'literature grew, the ordnance survey maps, painting). What is so awful is not complexity stemmed from a threefold
of landscape' is a section in the show. scientific books and documents, just that the bourgeois moralism is interaction : the use of standard
There are the usual quotes from geological treatises and the like loathsome, but also that it is so industrial fixtures as a light source, the
Milton, Thomson, Crabbe, seem increasingly relevant. They were bourgeois. And that is something we light cast upon local surfaces or
Wordsworth, etc. Let us not assume, important to the development of can lament with the landscape dispersed in naarby space, and the
though, that the fact that various Ruskin's attitudes towards the way tradition in mind ; for in all the years subsequent articulation of these
poets described what they saw makes that art could interpret the natural that were filled with fiddling around elements within a specific place. The
them into artists; nor feel that because world. Although he nowhere says so, with the rules of the picturesque, or surrounding area is therefore
various artists illustrated old books he surely read Luke Howard sketching antiquities, or looking for actively engaged and co-extensive
their authors became the inspiration (whose classification of clouds into quaint corners, or cultivating with the disposition of the lamps : a
of artists. Pictures are not made out of cirrus, cumulus, etc, is in the gracious rural thoughts in churchyards room is a container to be filled with an
words. It's interesting how many exhibition), most probably Howard's and country estates — in all those years explicit light; or is a given structure
Romantic poets and major Climate of London, a volume which we never had what the French had ; a to be shaped or displaced accordingly.
literary figures of the nineteenth explains how to make a cyanometer, a spirit in art of a public, neo-classical The installation design is highly
type, secular and republican, which variable and Flavin's invention is
extolled the passion of an impressive. Recently, the artist
intellectual revolution, praised civic designed an extensive installation
valour, applauded the downfall of comprising 'corners, barriers, and
tyrants, meditated on Empire, corridors' for the St Louis Art Museum.
quarrelled with Michelangelo. By the Something similar in scale should be
time those ambitions, or their commission ad here.
equivalents, seemed relevant to There were four pieces in the Lisson
English art, it was too late. Realism show. Two of these were situated in
couldn't hold them (interesting, that) adjoining rooms : a sequence of six
just as it could not itself be 14-inch circular fluorescent lights
sustained in England. Some kind of centred vertically on the wall of one
Victorian settlement had been made. room ; and a sequence of ten identical
It was not a real settlement; Ruskin, lights centred horizontally on the wall
who understood Turner, broke on its of an adjacent room. In both
wheel. One cannot write the history configurations the lamps were
of what did not happen, but why not alternately cool white and warm
lament that there were no paintings of white, and this pattern produced a
Cromwell (Madox Brown did one fine resonance : the fusion of an
much later) at the time of the 'old, mad exaggerated and proximately
blind, despised and dying king ?' temperate light. The two rooms were
What kind of art might we have filled with an exorbitant white light.
preferred to the landscapists' ? Downstairs in the gallery, a small
Joseph Wright of Derby useful instrument for measuring the There is a great deal more to be said near-square arrangement of
Sir Brooke Boothby 1781, 58 1/2 x 81 3/4 in. fluorescent tubes—similar in
intensity of blue of the sky. Ruskin on these lines, and the study of what
century gave up on English art, carried one with him in the Alps. The landscape art was like will not be structure to several much larger
especially the landscape side of it. exhibition ends with the Pre- furthered in a real sense if it is previous works—spanned the corner
Coleridge writes somewhere that a Raphaelites. The role of landscape in conducted with the same timidity juncture of a small room. A coupled
painting lies in a realm 'between a their art is clearly problematical. There with which the art was made. As red and pink fixture — inwardly facing
thought and a thing', which is one of wasn't much of it, and there is no always, no criticism made above can and casting light into the corner—
the very few things he said about art ; such thing as a pure landscape by a apply to Turner. formed each vertical support; the red
and one can see that the sort of work member of the brotherhood. For they Tim Hilton fixtures were aligned to the walls. The
he had around him might have were as opposed to the landscape constructed square was horizontally
appeared empty : pretty dull or tradition, 'the old mistress' as Millais Dan Flavin at the Lisson Gallery, completed by an outwardly facing
dully pretty on the thingy side, and jeeringly called it, as to the Royal London, December 1973. blue tube, attached top and bottom.
nowhere on the thoughtful side. Academy hierarchy. Who could blame This exhibition — the artist's first in The central area of corner, spanned
Wordsworth's famous Guide to the them ? Their mistake was only in this country—was long overdue : by the frame, was visibly dissolved in
Lakes is in the literature section, remaining totally cool towards Flavin has been making powerful art a projection of melded pink and
since it was originally published as Ruskin's admiration for Turner. Now, since the early 60s. The installation at mauve. Simultaneously, the cast
the text accompanying drawings of a this was because they felt that the the Lisson Gallery was untypically light appeared to film over the open
picturesque type by Joseph tradition as a whole was bankrupt, small in scale but concise and square and reverberate — like the
Wilkinson. The catalogue fails to stylistically, but it was also because thorough, and the show was first-rate. magnified surface of a bubble. The
point out that Wordsworth despised they felt themselves to be socially Flavin was born in New York City in reversed red verticals cast a
Wilkinson's plates, on ideological purposive artists. The degree to 1933. He studied art history in New contiguous red band on the wall
grounds. At least by 1810 there was a which Holman Hunt actively opposes York at the New School for Social surface and this was bounded in turn
real split between the literary the pastoral mode in Strayed Sheep Research and at Columbia University. by a complementary blue stripe. The
vanguard and the landscapists, who and The Hireling Shepherd In 1961 he constructed the first of a corner area above the structure was
were in no position to comment or bespeaks a new pictorial method series of 'electric light icons' in which suffused in a triangle of pink,
contribute when real issues came up, and a new attitude towards the the basic form was a painted square- flanked by outwardly diminishing
as happened with the Elgin Marbles public consciousness. It was an fronted block edged with incandescent patches of blue ; the corner below the
controversy. The remarkable immense change of direction. But, bulbs and fluorescent tubes; these frame was predominantly blue. The
episode at Shoreham, with its alas, we are by now in Victorian objects were emblematic, bluntly framing structure and the cast
peculiarly reactionary outlook England, even if for five or six years designed, and expediently made. A radiance were remarkably
(Palmer felt that he had been after 1849 the PR B's new pictures couple of years later, the blocks were congruent. The edge of the structure,
'pluck(ed) from the pit of modern did feel like contributions to a debate dispensed with as the light became viewed against the intense light,