Inaugural lecture on appointment to Professor of Painting at the Royal College of Art, London, 1973
IN AN ESSAY ON ‘Painting: Colour and Movement’, the French philosopher Merleau Ponty states:
We ask of the writer and the philosopher that they give their advice and opinion. We do not permit them to hold the rest of the world in suspense and we insist that they adopt a clear cut attitude. They cannot decline the responsibility incumbent on the ordinary man endowed with speech. Music, on the contrary, lies too much out- side the world and the visible realm to represent anything but a projection on the plane of the Being, with its ebb and flow, its growth, its bursting and its vortices. Only the painter is entitled to look at the whole complexity of things without any obligation to pronounce himself on them. It is as though, in his presence, the imperative of knowledge and action lose all their value.
These are very high claims, and they are made by a particularly perceptive thinker, someone who had a greater understanding of the nature of painting than is the case of most philosophers. In this passage he writes very much in the way in which certain committed painters think of their own activity. And it is true, certainly, that the aura of painting, or of the creativity of a single artist remains, or has remained until very recently, unique. ‘It is as though a whole continent has vanished’, wrote Pablo Neruda, a few months before his death. He was speaking of the death of one of his friends and contemporaries, that extraordinary man, much adulated, much maligned and now temporarily forgotten, very old and seemingly indestructable, who worked alone very late through the hours of every night making drawings and etchings that were acts of affirmation towards life, his own vitality and that of his profession. And it is also true that Picasso and a few of his major contemporaries were seen as offering a certainty, a guarantee that the very nature of painting, incongruously armed with its rudimentary tools and working methods, was valid and could triumph in the modern world, and it could also, in some ways, challenge it. But the validity of art and the identity of painting is now seen by many as less certain and Merleau Ponty's affirmation may appear remote and perhaps incongruous.
This is not surprising, for we live in a curious period in which sensibility huddled under a scarecrow disguise of tough-mindedness, ducks or pretends to ignore what surrounds us. This is a period in which gold, which was inserted in the mouths of the dead in certain very early cultures to ensure the well-being and safe journey of departed souls, has been extracted from the mouths of the victims of Auschwitz. It is a period in which US war communiques from Vietnam with their grotesque terminology of body counts would, if placed in sequence and read together atomize the human condition into a litany so terrible that no literary description of horror could equal it. It is a period in which, with what must be the ultimate irony of our time, Chilean political prisoners are being shipped from Valparaiso to Alexander Selkirk Island, the prototype that Defoe used for his novel. Here are the new Robinson Crusoes of the twentieth century and we should not invoke culture to plead ignorance concerning them.
An innate loss of confidence in rationality permeates our culture and infiltrates our critical evaluation. Take for instance the case of Goya's forty-third etching in the series of the Capricios. The print shows a man asleep, slumped in a chair, his face hidden in his folded arms. Behind him is a fluttering mass of bats and owls. No reassuring image of Minerva emanates from one of the latter whose wings, caught in the light, hover above the man's shoulders. A lynx-like witch's cat sits on the floor, disquieteningly unsleeping. The arms of the man rest on a desk. On its side are inscribed the words: The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters. It is the only one of the set of eighty etchings in which the title is incorporated into the image and not set below the plate. Previous interpretations of the text, stemming from liberal or Cartesian thinking, have always implied that imagination, shorn of reason, gives birth to hallucinatory monsters and plays a game of blind man's buff in an arena of craziness. More recently a new, and specifically contemporary reading of the text prevails: The Dream of Reason produces Monsters, that to dream of reason is, in effect, monstrous. The dual meaning of the word Sueño: signifying both sleep and dream, accentuates it is true, the ambiguity of the imagery. But the shift means far more. For it also signifies a rejection of the historical context of Goya's activities in the closing years of the eighteenth century, in that the painter's radicalism and anti- clericalism are denied by this contemporary interpretation. It is not so much the imagery of the visions of necromancy in Goya's print which now signifies meaning, but the imagery of a new and contemporary necromancy, wilfully conjured up and reflecting twentieth-century nightmares which is injected into the work.
Another aspect of loss of confidence in rationality is to be found in the manner in which society as a whole evaluates art and more especially its artists. Not knowing what to do with them it tends to allot to them the vague status of witch doctors. They are conceived as being engaged on some mysterious activity like rain-making, and are evaluated in terms of relative success or failure: the latter signified by a drought and the former by a monsoon of money. But what is common to all societies whose structures involve the use of divination or magic, from Hopi Indians to Bacongo tribesmen, is the fact that the number of magicians within such societies is fixed and, by necessity, stable. This situation is new in so far as it is probably the first time that any society has been unable to arrive at a consensus of opinion as to the number of shamans it requires.
Confusion is made worse by vaguely formulated statements concerning cultural identities. ‘The counter concept of popular culture’, it is stated, ‘is art’. But what is referred to by the term popular culture? Broadsheet ballads? A film at the local cinema? Pop painting? Miners' songs rooted in reality? Souped-up folk music rooted in nothing? Underground movies? By expropriating elements from so-called ‘mass culture’ certain kinds of contemporary art seek, it is true, to escape elitism. But simultaneously they furnish the same ‘mass culture’ with the aura and language of their own self-created image of avant-gardism. Critical and consumer language merge and cannot be separated. Everything becomes equal with everything else. And this is inevitable because the differences between avant-gardism and so-called mass culture are minimal. Both are simply reflections of a dominant middle-brow culture. Both factions of this imaginary dual culture are obsessed with the idea of profit and a constant search for originality. What comes to mind in connection with both, is someone flinging open the door of an antique shop and loudly demanding if there is anything new to be had.
The art market, with its self-expanding value of capital, presents an extreme example of that fetishism of merchandise which is shared by a major part of the commercial gallery system. The latter has been talked of so much and rightly criticized that I had originally intended to omit all reference to it. Perhaps I should make one comment, and this concerns its absurd archaism. Apart from the fact that modern galleries have closed in shop fronts, practically nothing, either in terms of their activities, basic layout or atmosphere differentiates them from what we can see in Watteau’s Enseigne du Gersaint, painted by him as a shop sign two hundred and fifty-three years ago. The only difference is that Watteau’s marvellous late picture shows a dog, seated in the road outside the gallery, nosing for fleas. All that has vanished from the modern gallery is, alas, that dog.
‘But’, as Brecht said, ‘because things are as they are they will not remain as they are’, and this is true of the art market. What the gallery system has produced – and here I am exempting those very few dealers and that section of private patronage which is not motivated by speculative interests – is a cultural cemetery. Young painters, to an increasing extent, have two alternatives when confronted with it. One consists of contracting out; the other of emulating the methods used by hunters in the Kalahari desert: that of making a drawing on the sand of the animal to be stalked and killed and then firing an arrow into it – the effigy in this case being the potential client and the drawing the art language adopted for the purpose.
Ever present, watchful, omnipotent and attentive, forming a caste of their own, we have a group of people who for want of a better word we can call the Mandarins of the art world. But unlike their classical Chinese prototypes, they are no longer only to be found in the echelons of the civil service nor, in the strict sense of the word, do they act as imperial court officials. They travel extensively, but their journeys seldom take them to remote provincial outposts. In this they have much in common with their Chinese ancestors. They include the important dealers, a horde of cultural entrepreneurs, and the great majority of the critics. Part of the activities of the new Mandarinate consists in playing counter-point to public relations prattle. but they have another and more important role. They are the carriers of that huge umbrella that has bedevilled independent artists in this country from Hogarth onwards and still exists as a hostile cultural weapon: it is an umbrella named Taste, and it casts a very big shadow from which critics rarely escape, so we shall safely leave them there. But it is on criticism, more particularly art criticism, that I would like to comment.
Mandarin critics are archivists. The enumerative aspect of much modern criticism a Mandarin concession to pseudo-scientific exactitude results in writings that are in practice catalogues. Catalogues however are simply scientific tools, they are not science. Such catalogues tend to be riddled with facts, and facts, as someone has pointed out, are like sacks: they do not stand up until something is put into them. But nor is the obliteration of facts under the flapping of conceptual banners a counter- solution. Tatlin’s tower cannot be understood in a vacuum that ignores the political events of 1923, but neither for that matter can the intensity of that artist's vision be grasped purely in terms of the figure for steel production in the USSR in that year. Nor can the ideas of Beuys and Dusseldorf be tossed into an imaginary bull-ring without an understanding of the background to the German student movement of the early sixties.
The sciences, including the social sciences, have a growing tendency to become the prisoners of their own methodologies, making it impossible for them to resolve or explain a recurrent crisis of anything taking place outside their own field. This tendency, in my opinion, is also reflected in most contemporary British philosophy which, through its disdain of sociology, and concern for its own methodology of evaluative and factual elements, is meticulous but sterile. This too is reflected in the writings of those critics who insist that all criticism must exist within a conceptual framework and have nothing to do with the inductive study of cultural fields. The work under study is thus frozen and its position in movement or time is totally disregarded. A recent article stated that 'art itself, and not the world, has become the focus of the artist's investigation'. But art has no such autonomy unless – and this is implied by the statement – it relapses into conventional theology. What the statement also postulates is the concept that an artist chooses a language and then ascribes a meaning to it a formalist notion found in the critical writings of Greenberg and of his followers. What it ignores is that the relationship between subject and object splendidly described by Roger Bacon as the ‘commerce of the mind and things’ is fundamental to the problems and existence of visual language, and that this relationship can never be resolved or correctly understood if individuality and the individual – hamstrung by their own duality – are used as a basis of analysis. It can only be understood on a socio-historical basis. Neutrality in criticism is a deliberate surrender of responsibility, leading in practice to a debased historicism in which collected facts are set against a void – the void being that of any reasoned theory of history, a history not made up of a series of events but a series of processes.
Nowhere is this void more evident than in the cultural avant garde, those elitist shock troops who, back stepping wearily into oblivion, are ceremoniously decorated on the way by the societies which have institutionalised their proclaimed acts of subversion. ‘It is not things that have become deeply ingrained habits which we should contest, but the avant garde of things which are on the way of digging themselves in’. This was said by the young French writer Raymond Radiguet and the statement dates from before 1914. It is even truer now. It is not a question of attitudes to change. Very great twentieth-century artists, Matisse, Bartok or Leger for example, did not resist change and then proceed to rationalize that resistance. Nor, for that matter, did they shoulder their way through cultural clip joints trumpeting spurious claims of innovatory discoveries and careful tending, in Beaudelaire's words ‘the small holdings of their individuality’. The whole concept of avant-gardism is based on the notion of progress. But progress does not consist of exercises in solipsism, and the silence demanded by John Cage -the same silence as that of an analyst towards a patient - implies a search for finality in which only the consciousness of death offers access to a source of authenticity.
The inevitable and predictable reaction to this situation takes the form of a kind of cultural Luddism. But in 1811 the Lancashire and Nottingham Luddite weavers had a direct and legitimate objective in breaking the frames and looms. They were resisting what amounted to the annihilation of their livelihood and attempting to safeguard their very existence through working-class solidarity. In doing so they were perpetuating a centuries-old struggle of weavers in many countries. Subsequent evaluations of their ideas and actions have fluctuated wildly, alternating between charges of crass reaction in their opposition to industrialization to admiration in terms of their organisational and political skill. Now, doubts concerning technology and the effects of industrialisation have tended to endow Luddism with an aura of mythology, embracing Rousseau, Kropotkin, and David and Goliath. But what has been retained from Luddite thinking, and distorted, is the idea of smashing up the cultural structure of society as it now exists, dismantling its institutions and scattering its artefacts. These, naturally enough, include much that is loosely and often incorrectly included under the nomenclature of Fine Art. Action, in this sense includes a hatred of its function as a commercial commodity, an outright condemnation of the uselessness of art, and a rejection of the values ascribed to it. To reject its commodity value seems to me logical and desirable. To evaluate art in terms of its usefulness is an absurdity, since it pre-supposes a permanent idea of values, a functional role to all forms of creative language and a complete disregard of historical differences between the culture of one country and another. Questions concerning the usefulness of art are frequently formulated in such a way that they produce answers that are false or ineffectual from the start. ‘What,’ demanded the Russian nineteenth-century critic Bielinsky, ‘is a Raphael to a pair of boots?’. Tolstoi was to echo this. One answer, of course, is that neither should be luxuries, but that both Raphael and a pair of boots are essentials. The denigration of art on the grounds of its inefficacy in modifying or shaping vital contemporary problems would be more effective if it did not tumble into voracious Messianic proclamations or, to quote a recent review, did not take the form of doctrinaire tracts shaped like circular mazes and populated with identical twins. Inextricably entangled with this approach is the fag end of Dadaism, including Tristan Tzara's ides of ‘humiliating art’, now presented under the guise of a spurious sociology. Whatever the legitimacy of Dadaist activities in the twenties, they reveal, when re-adapted to the present, an attitude to cultural problems that is primarily bourgeois and essentially reactionary. Crude sociological interpretations of art, with their tidy classificatory systems and elementary reductionism, not only add to the general confusion but, through their uncritical analysis, promote and sustain the avant garde myth and the crude historicism. What is needed is a sociology of art based on a knowledge of social structures and social psychology.
The obliteration of art, including that of the past, on the grounds of its supposed uselessness is, using the word in its strictly political sense, populist demagogy. In this connection it is relevant to note the extreme care taken by revolutionary movements, radical governments and politically orientated artists to safeguard the art of the past; examples as diverse as that of Courbet in 1870, Lunacharsky in Russia in the twenties, the Spanish republican government in 1937 and, more recently, events in China prove the point. Concepts of art are determined in a given society by what is seen as the relationship of the present to the past or to the future. Cultures for instance in which the present was seen as actual and the past as symbolic enabled artists to minimise the dichotomy between the two. The notion of time in such societies, when present at all, was shuttled between past and present. The concept of historical time in western societies meant that the sense of the present oscillated between concepts of the past and of the future, the former engendered by tradition and the latter by millenium religions. Modernism, in varying degrees in the late nineteenth century and up to the 1940s was largely sustained by a concept of the future. Whether latent or proclaimed, this made two demands on art: the formulation of a language that would replace traditional aesthetics and a conscious role on the part of artists as precursors. A deep, exhilarating confidence in the future that sometimes almost superceded an awareness of the present, notably in the first two decades of the twentieth century tended to promote ideological concepts in art which, even when not overtly political, relied on a very strong consciousness of history. Modernism has been defined as a methodical adventure and this is true of certain of its phases. But Modernism as a concept and driving force has ceased to exist.
Painting, due to its seeming vulnerability, is an obvious and designated target for attack. Its apparent archaism is equated in certain quarters with the history and disappearance of neolithic cultures. A kinetic artist, noted for his blatant self- publicity and careerism, himself specialising in tall structures, has dubbed painting totem making. Painting, so it is said, has been by-passed, superceded, made redundant. A well-known critic, in a recent book which deals with the factors of multiple reproduction of works of art by photography, art speculation and the supposed iniquities of female nudes being used as subjects in pain- tings in the past, writes that ‘painting has become information’. This is incorrect. It would be far nearer the mark to say that much painting, reproduction, and especially multiple reproduction – Warhol comes to mind – has become documentation. This has nothing to do with information. Documentation has to do with verification. Documents offer proof of something, even if that proof is misleading. Information has nothing to do with verification. Further on we are told that ‘when paintings are reproduced they become a form of information’ and as soon as the meaning of painting is transmittable this meaning can be manipulated and transformed’. Reproductions can of course be manipulated and transformed, notably by photo montage. But the meaning is not open to manipulation and transformation solely by the process of transmission. Meaning can equally be manipulated and transformed when looking at the painting itself. There is, in any case, no need to exult over the function of information in relation to the significance or content of art. Umberto Ecco makes this point when he states that 'the more a message is ordered and comprehensible the more it is predictable so one cannot accept a definition which equates the significance of a message with the amount of information conveyed in it’.
One of the most intelligent critics of the twentieth century, Walter Benjamin, stated that the crisis of painting began in the nineteenth century with the advent of public collections and the emergence of a new mass public, which made the act of contemplation demanded by painting far more difficult. He also drew attention to the fundamental difference between the way one looks at a picture and the manner in which one looks at a building. Buildings, he pointed out, are never contemplated. What is obtained from architecture, at all levels, is graduated experience.
I would regard this as a fundamental problem. Amongst other things, it raises the validity of an issue that was central to much thinking at the beginning of this century, notably among Constructivists: the attempt to fuse all forms of visual imagery with architecture and architectural concepts. It also poses the question – an immensely important one – of whether the essential act of contemplation of a work is at all possible outside that graduated experience, formerly partially obtained from natural environments and now only conceivable through created ones. As the quality of the latter recedes like an outgoing tide, the answer is in the negative.
Contemplation, to a large extent, erodes empiricism. It also tends to transcend subjectivity. But it has its caricatural analogy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I refer to that contemplation demanded by the exhausting rhythm of work on industrial production lines, in which objectivity is so immediate and implacably repetitive that subject and object are irrevocably sundered.
Attempts of course have been made to by-pass the issue. An enormous amount of contemporary painting denies contemplation through a language of immediacy. But great painting is more complicated. The qualities of a picture of Georges de La Tour for example, with their strange analogies with Proust, are not the result of a purely formal solution to spatial problems. Nor for that matter, of the spectator necessarily being acquainted with these. They are based on the result of injecting improbabilities into the logic of representation and sabotaging that mimetic aspect of perception which is an essential part of contemplation.
The so-called monadic nature of art is constantly over-stressed through the caricatural importance of its present so-called uniqueness. In the Hegelian sense art is a partial system, depending on the multiple significance given to objects of a privileged nature. These objects act as mediators between all other systems making up society. The present crisis is not due to art being intrinsically a privileged activity, but to the breakdown of the components consitituting society. Its role, in this sense, can only be re-established by the restructuring of those societies.
The paradox of great painting is that the processes of its inception are extremely complicated – and this by no means refers only to traditional easel painting – while the methods used to produce it are relatively straightforward and, since paradox is the dialectic of life, the enormous strength and resilience of painting lies in this very fact. Braque’s work provides what is perhaps a typical example, and if I cite him in this context it is simply because his work is, to an archetypal degree, of the kind which is concerned with expressing an immutable stability, very much concerned with time and expressed through a language heavily dependent on aesthetics. For this reason his work has been alternately much admired and heavily criticised and is now perhaps beginning to be re-assessed. Each painting of Braque is like an oration anchored to an affirmation of permanence. But, even allowing for Braque's reticence and the verbal camouflage which his statements expose, what he tells us concerning his attitudes to working methods is revealing. ‘If I had an intention in my life’, he once remarked, ‘it was of accommodating myself to each new day. In doing so it follows that what I do resembles a painting’. In a text of 1959, printed in short sections on four consecutive pages (and even here the element of time is affirmed) he wrote ‘when I begin it appears to me that my picture is, as it were, on the far side of the canvas, covered with white dust. I only have to dust the canvas. I have a small broom to set free the blue, another for the green and yellow: these are my brushes. When everything is dusted off my painting is finished...’ Attitudes such as these are of course very much bound up with the concept of the creating of art as an act of homage, in the idea of that which must be praised. Such concepts do not of necessity imply a vapid idealism, nor are they disassociated from practical imperatives or situations arising from necessity. They pertain as much to Rembrandt's Oath of the Batavians as to Van Gogh’s painting of a pair of boots, to Malevitch’s Square as to a sculpture by David Smith.
There is the past and what a particular artist, at a given time in history, sees as the past. The desire to create basic alphabets, to feel in Klee's words ‘as one who is new born’, is a comparatively recent phenomenon. The influence of psychology partly accounts for this, but above all developments in anthropology and access to ethnological sources have been decisive in offering what appears to be an umbilical cord to naivity and so-called primitivism. In theory this has appeared to offer a guaranteed access to uncontaminated sources and a pass word to primary creative impetus. In practice it has frequently resulted in a simple and straightforward plundering of other cultures. ‘Archaic arts, primitive art and the primitive periods of the arts are the only ones that do not date’, states Lévy Strauss, but his remark is perhaps more applicable to the love or connoisseurship of art than to its inception.
One of the primary tasks of visual art in the immediate future must be to reconstruct a syntax of language. Grapes are no longer trampled in wine making. But syntax is. And it was the fragmentation of syntax, necessary at the time, which was decisive in painting and literature in the first half of this century. Each object, each reflection of an object, all speech and each echo of action became a hypothesis in its own right. To an increasing degree this approach now appears redundant, to be less a re-enaction of the recent past than a kind of rehearsal of a re-enaction, increasingly convoluted and increasingly formalized.
The driving force of many artists in the twentieth century was the attempt to create a symbolic language sundered from and independent of tradition. Such an attempt has certain similarities with some sections of the early Romantic movement. But some of its members were able to achieve their intentions via a specific concept of nature, creating paintings that are in effect auto- biographical works, through an empathy with nature (outside any context of Romanticism very relevant things could be said co cerning Cézanne in this respect). The strength of symbolic representation in painting lies in the fact that it cannot easily be disassociated from meaning or transcribed into language. Its weakness, quite apart from the obvious contemporary problem of symbology becoming ever more alienated from collective understanding, lies elsewhere. It is to be found in the continuous abbreviation of the language used in twentieth-century painting, in which formal elements of style are themselves invested with symbolic meaning, often a completely arbitrary or non-existent one.
It seems to me that some of the most interesting work in painting at the present time is to be found in those trying to forge a visual language that is literate but non-literary, or, alternatively, in the painters who are making tentative attempts (outside the context of any so-called avant gardism) to work in visual meta-language: language, that is, that uses its own terms to explain or analyse the terms of another language. But for all its qualities this area of painting is prone to become a prisoner of reductionism and is of course open to the charge of being hermetically sealed, at least at present, against any kind of social involvement, let alone a social role. ‘Where are all those little guys in black pyjamas?’, was the question asked recently by an extremely perceptive and intelligent painter, looking round the pictures in an exhibition gallery. Where indeed? The fact that the exhibition was in the Royal College of Art is immaterial. The question could have been asked about almost any work in any current exhibition. Quite apart from the resistance on the part of young painters, and in this particular instance the reference to Vietnam was hardly greeted with enthusiasm, a Himalaya of formal preconceptions stands between anyone wishing to make a visual statement connected with Hanoi and a viable form of language which would sustain such a statement. There is one certainty however. Painting has one thing in common with written and spoken language and this lies in the fact that when it attains the power of projecting a force sufficiently strong to create history it becomes essentially and intrinsically political. In my opinion one of the few contemporary painters who has achieved this is Matta. The issue, at the moment, tends to be ignored or treated with cynicism. A Polish writer once described politics as ‘a Derby of Trojan horses’. Perhaps it is. But perhaps we should start thinking of putting some real horses into the race.
What then should be done? What practical steps could be taken to begin to make art culturally relevant? How can we make use of what we have? I shall outline two proposals. Neither are particularly original. I regard both as vital and urgent. At the same time I am aware that they are to some extent expedients. What I do want to emphasise is that both are essential and should be seen as such. In no case should one exclude the other. Both are concerned with the visual arts. Both involve expenditure in money and effort.
We need what is in effect a crash programme modelled on the Works Progress Administration projects which, in 1935, stemming from the American depression, formed part of the New Deal. The New Deal was a composite collection of make-shift, often ram- shackle legislation and I am not using its economic premises as a model. But WPA Federal Arts Projects have been little studied in Europe or in this country and are usually referred to with contempt when they are referred to at all. I do not share this attitude. In both practical and psychological terms they did in fact accomplish a great deal. They triggered off a cultural self-consciousness which merged into a new social consciousness. WPA projects of the New Deal were instrumental in creating conditions in which entirely fresh attitudes came into being concerning the cultural diversity of the States, and they reached into the grass roots of American popular culture. They influenced all media and were the basis of a great deal of original work in the cinema, in writing – notably in terms of the novel – in photography and, to some degree, in the traditional visual arts. They put unemployed artists to work.
A lot of money went into all this and, the nature of the American system being what it is, allowed for a lot of waste. In this country the reactions to such ideas are strictly Pavlovian. They are based on the idea that culture is expensive, which is often but by no means always the case, and on the need for some kind of guarantee that great creative work would emerge from a tidal wave of, for want of a better word, art projects which a WPA type of operation would launch. Was it not the case, it would be argued, that a great deal of work undertaken by American painters at the time, those working on mural projects in post offices for example, ultimately proved to be of poor quality? The answer is yes and the added answer is that this, within the context, is not particularly relevant. What is relevant is to argue that if none are done at all it is singularly difficult to envisage that they could be very good. In these matters one is not dealing with the grading of eggs on a poultry farm.
A project such as this is designed to meet a crisis and cannot be programmed beyond its initial phases. In its long term effects it could serve to demonstrate that the values ascribed to culture, so often projected as immutable and permanent, are in effect established by needs. At first glance it would seem that the relative decentralisation of local government in this country would be an advantage in implementing art projects which should essentially be based on regional needs. In practice, this seldom works. Prejudices and fear are so entrenched that there would be great difficulties in using most local government machinery in any practical way. It would, therefore, be necessary that those responsible for launching and supervising projects, especially large scale ones, should have relative autonomy whatever close contact they may later establish with local authorities.
WPA type projects should operate in three ways. The first, an obvious and relatively easy one is to increase and expand the finance and scope of what is already set up, that is organisations already running exhibitions, Arts Council regional activities and local groups of painters and sculptors who have already established some kind of embryonic organisation of their own.
The second concerns activities which are of a purely temporary nature and which, though immensely important, hardly exist at the moment. These are essentially bound up with the concept of art as spectacle and are less concerned with straightforward theatre, though by no means ignoring it, than with mixed media, exhibitions conceived in terms of expendable artifacts, didactic exhibitions of all kinds and temporary environments. This field of activities involves mobility and can be expensive since it may necessitate new designs for temporary structures to house exhibitions and fairly sophisticated transport.
The third involves large scale projects of a temporary or permanent kind. It involves legislation, would be the most bitterly fought and resisted and, of the three, is the most ambitious. It concerns those works in all media: architectonic sculpture, kinetic works, mosaic murals, etc. which are always vaguely referred to as having an architectural or environmental function but which, in reality are vital and essential components of both. Though formerly confined to urban situations it would be a mistake to think of them now purely in terms of cities. Since we are always being informed that lack of funds precludes such projects I am suggesting legislation which would require that 1% of the budget of all major buildings be alloted to art projects incorporated, from the outset, into the architect's design. As a further measure, 1% of the yearly revenue of advertising agencies making use of large bill boards on sites on roads and in cities should be diverted for the purchase or renting of large sites suitable for murals, often temporary ones, and to commission artists to do them. Since we are permanently deluged with large scale imagery I am proposing diversification. In addition, I am suggesting that a further 1% tax be levied on the budget of all major highway projects and that the money be used to commission large scale two- and three-dimensional projects on new roads, fly-overs and bridges.
The first idea is by no means new and is in fact law in various countries including Sweden and France. It is objected to on several grounds. One of these is that it tends to produce formalized and repetitive work in the form of concrete retaining walls and monotonous types of applied design on large wall surfaces. But numerous examples prove the contrary. Architects, especially those trained in functional idioms, tend to be suspicious of the idea, partly because they equate it with the use of ornament and partly because of the few ghastly examples of 'sculpture as afterthought' which confront them in this country. A great effort would be needed to break down this prejudice. The other two ideas outlined above are, to the best of my knowledge new ones. I regard them as non-Utopian, practical and necessary.
In addition, and complementary to a kind of WPA scheme, I think it vitally necessary to set up what at first sight will be considered outmoded and irrelevant: an Institute. As the very word is liable to produce a mass raising of shields and a roar of dis- approval I will hasten to define it.
What I envisage is neither a renovated academy nor a mini university. Titles of institutions are difficult to select and usually pedantic but, in terms of aims and activities, that of Institute for Visual Studies and Research would come nearest to what I have in mind. A possible model of comparison might be found in the Ecole des Hautes Etudes in Paris, but minus its administrative structure and certainly at first devoid of the prestigious image of that school.
The objectives of this new body would be to undertake creative research and the people working within it would have a role and function very similar to scientific research workers. Outside opinion should see them as such. Though a majority of them should come from post-graduate colleges of art and schools of architecture a significant percentage might be selected from practising artists and in some cases DipAD courses. The numbers involved would be very small: about seventy-five. Expansion might eventually take place but the setting up of such a body is not envisaged as a pilot project for a larger scheme. Such an Institute would not require its own building and apart from a co-ordinating director would only need a very small secretariat, thus eliminating an expensive administration from the start. Capital outlay would be confined solely to acquiring or, in certain cases, building small units comprising studios, workshops and study rooms. In one or two instances very large studio workshops might be required for group projects. These facilities, which would be rent-free, would be located in four or five separate units and not all of these would be centred in London.
Those working within this framework would receive small grants but would, through carefully worked out agreements, have unlimited access to those institutions, organisations, expertise and materials pertaining to their area of research. Some examples are as follows. Painters and sculptors and those engaged in certain types of conceptual work operating in the field of philosophy, linguistics, semiotics and art history would be linked to relevant departments of universities, as would those artists concerned with ethnology and anthropology. Those working in kinetics and related fields would have direct access to industry and the appropriate departments of certain universities.
Others concerned with those categories of activities involving environmental work, of schemes having to do with the use of visual language in situations involving collective response which should be equated in importance with mass media but never are - should collaborate with departments of sociology, though the varied nature of their activities presupposes very direct links with planning organisations, urban studies, architects and the theatre. The Royal College of Art could have a very important function in this context, notably through an increased role of its research department.
Most research of this type would be initially based on projects and the selection of those submitting them would be made by a mixed body including specialists working in university departments or in those fields relating to their proposals, including industry in the case of projects involving technology. One is not talking here of an artist attached to a university. Whatever the advantages accruing they always seem to end up like rhinoceros in the king of Portugal’s zoo. What is envisaged is people working outside the context of highly structured institutions but this is essential possessing the identity of the one to which they belong, engaged in work involving interested specialists in other fields and thus breaking down the mutually destructive isolation and exclusivity now common to both. The results of any project or body of work stemming from the initial project would be exhibited, demonstrated or published and submitted to the Institute for viewing and discussion. It would then be made generally available to the public in any appropriate form and with maximum publicity. This would go some way to re-define the role of experimentation. It would separate private experimentation, now constantly presented as ‘work in progress’ from what I assume to possess far greater significance, the presentation to the public of work which is the result and culmination of private experiment. Creative artists working in this way would do so in conditions of complete freedom except in one respect. They would not be authorised to exhibit in the context of commercial galleries nor sell any part of their work or findings during the period in which they were working in the Institute.
The objections to all this are obvious. Am I not presenting a blue- print for cultural elitism? My answer is that I see elitism as inextricably bound up with financial gain. Nor is there an elitist concept concealed in the factor of selection. In spite of their glaring inadequacies, what DipAD courses have demonstrated up to now – and the scandal of so-called qualifications for entry may invalidate this is – the immense aptitude of many students to study and make investigations into fields, sometimes very complex ones, from which the gross inequalities of the educational system have previously excluded them. Am I suggesting, something that is frequently regarded as a major heresy, that all artists should be scholars? Not in the least. But what I am implying – and surely Charles Olson is a case in point – is that one does not exclude the other. My suggestion is an alternative to the idea of the artist seen as a kind of two-man circus horse made up of Lucky Jim at one end and Neanderthal man at the other. It is quite certain that the ideas put forward are of no use whatever to certain types of artists: I cannot see a painter like de Kooning operating in the context of what I have in mind, nor, for that matter, a Rousseau or a Morandi. Their work was and is autonomous. That of a Maholy Nagy or a Lissitzky is not. It could easily be argued that there is the danger of a new Mandarinate –exactly what I have been attacking – emerging through the proposed working system, a kind of artist's monastic order with all its attendant disasters. There is always this danger and it can only be avoided by the creative vitality and intellectual level of the work itself and through a changed sense of responsibility in those producing it. But if I were asked if I also saw the scheme of offering the possibility of essentially creative work being carried out in conditions which were relatively insulated from the prevailing chaos I would, it is true, negate this suggestion less categorically.
What is possible is that the proposed set-up might bring us nearer to an understanding of two problems which seem to me to be central to art in our time. It might result, though this is conjectural, in providing partial solutions to them. Both are concerned with art and sociology. One of these is the relation between art and liberty and the other, contiguous to the first, concerns the function of artistic innovation.
The presence of many factors, including liberty, are required to produce a work of art. But liberty alone is not sufficient to engender it. What is required is the existence of a certain distance between any creative individual who expresses a vision of the world and the society or sections of that society which elaborates the projection of this vision and makes possible its practical implementation. Very great works can only come into being through this process being a coherent one. But the genesis of such works and the vision of the world expressed through them are only intelligible through a set of examples given by a collective idea and not through psychological interpretations relating to the subject or to the in- dividual concerned. The entire problem of cultural liberty lies in in an awareness of this distance, in its re-evaluation and attempting to define it through the visual language of the work itself.
Lastly there is the problem of style. Through a process of mediation the concept of style enables a work to be understood as part of history. This was certainly true when referring to all art up to the end of the nineteenth century. Historically determined by social structures, art formerly developed on two levels. One of these was relative continuity which could always imply that developments could take place within the context of a coherent style, since the language of the latter was usually resilient enough to allow improvisation, to permit improbabilities to be injected into its own structure of probabilities. The other was the emergence of specific artists who were introducers of reality into that style radically transforming it but seldom motivated by iconoclasm. It is possible that art cannot function in the future without the re-emergence of a similar structure. It is possible that the elaboration of a visual language tough enough to be used as the basis of a style may be the essential problem confronting artists of the next decades. If this could be accomplished we could start thinking of a society emerging which would be, to borrow a phrase of Leger’s, a ‘luminous one’. The alternatives seem to me to be remarkably bleak and we desperately need that luminosity.