Simon Turner - Rain(e)ing on Craig's Parade

Obviously, I knew I probably shouldn't have expected a balanced appraisal of the Vorticists from Craig Raine (the occasion: an exhibition at Tate Britain starting mid-June), as if there's anything that our Craig does with any degree of competence, it's robust critical invective (and very entertaining it is too).  Besides anything else, he's entitled to his opinions, and I don't have any real disagreement with the main thrust of his argument: the Vorticists were, as Raine asserts, rather belated and parochial in comparison with their continental cousins in the Cubist and Futurist camps, even if individual artists and writers - Wyndham Lewis, Ezra Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska, CRW Nevinson - were exceptional, and need to be judged on their own merits.  However, I did want to address a couple of minor points in the article which gave me pause.

[1]: The dismissal of Nevinson.  Raine, early on in his article, provides a list of artists affiliated with the Vorticist movement - including CRW Nevinson - and rather high-handedly asserts that none of them were "touched by talent" (not 'genius', note, but 'talent').  I can't speak as to the quality or otherwise of the majority of the artists in Raine's Rollcall of the Talentless, as I'm largely unfamiliar with their work, but Nevinson, frankly, deserves better than this.  During the First World War, he spent time at the front, and produced some of the most startling and enduring art of the conflict: he's second only to Paul Nash in this regard.  If his post-war work failed to match up to the high standard he set himself in wartime, this fact should in no way tarnish the achievement of those visual dispatches from the front.  There's an exhibition of Nevinson's Great War paintings at the Imperial War Museum which is running until the end of June, if anyone's interested in making their own minds up as to Nevinson's contribution to Modernism.

[2]: Problematic points of comparison (i).  Raine, it must be said, can 'do' analogy (apparently he wrote an epoch-defining poem some decades ago about a guy called Martin writing a post it note for his parents, which was composed almost entirely of analogies), and in his description of Gaudier-Brzeska's 'Hieratic Head of Ezra Pound' he proves this again, comparing the back view of G-B's monumental sculpture of the poet to "a scrotum and an impressive glans".  Not only did this make me laugh out loud, but it succeeded, neatly and economically, in getting to the heart of the dick-swinging, chest-beating, hyper-macho dogma underpinning the Vorticist movement.  All well and good; but in the same appraisal, Raine notes how G-B has managed to tame Pound's notoriously wild mane of hair, so that it "resembles a Zadie Smith turban", which phrase rather stuck in my craw.  Why not simply "turban"?  To draw Zadie Smith into the analogy feels gratuitous, a motiveless judgmental sneer at Smith's (entirely practical and reasonable) sartorial choices.  Must do better, Mr. Raine, must do better.

[3]: Problematic points of comparison (ii).  During a discussion of two works - one by Gaudier-Brzeska, the other by Brancusi - both entitled 'Fish', Raine pulls this arresting phrase from his writer's toolkit: "Brzeska's Fish has some of the ugly angularity of modern Israeli jewellery".  I'm not sure if I can see the function of this.  Is modern Israeli jewellery any more 'ugly' and 'angular' than its equivalent from any other country?  Not that I can see: a great deal of modern jewellery seems to be almost uniformly hideous, regardless of its national origin.  Is it any uglier or more angular than a motorway pileup or a building site or a Portsmouth multistorey carpark?  Or, indeed, anything in the world to which the adjectives 'ugly' and 'angular' can be attached?  Again, as with the jibe at Zadie Smith noted above, this feels to me like a burst of directionless opprobrium, serving no other function (as far as I can tell) than to elicit snorts of elevated derision from the no doubt hyper-liberal and entirely prejudice-free readers of the Guardian Review ("Ugly angularity is exactly what one would expect from modern Israeli jewellery, isn't it, Crispin?"  "Of course, Jocasta.  Another Fairtrade latte?"), which amounts to little more than Pavlovian bell-ringing dressed up as normative and reasonable critical opinion.  Frankly, I would expect more from the mainstream media. 

In spite of Raine's rather flailing attempts to dampen my enthusiasm for the Tate's exhibition of Vorticism, I'm still planning on finding time in my diary to make a visit.  I'd urge you to do the same.  I can think of far less productive ways of spending my time: stewing impotently for days on end over Craig Raine articles and then venting (equally impotently) on my blog, for example.       

Simon Turner - What I See in Prunella Clough's Paintings (I)

"Works of art await use" - John Berger

Irregular swathes of turqouise set amid a flat field of white, jagged edges rimming the sea-coloured patches: peeling paint's gaping gnashers, or foam-jets roaring up the massive sides of cruising tankers. The whole effect is startlingly physical, the flat surface pushing at the bounds of two dimensional space, as if the embedded textures were somehow alive, straining to push through from behind the suface of the image and out into the 'real' world.

What I just wrote is a description of a particular wall in a partciular street in a particular town of the English Midlands, but could just as easily have served as an attempt to render into words one of Prunella Clough's canvases. Patrick Heron has already noted Clough's ability, in her art, to change the way we see, her painting's capacity to not only reflect, in an astonishing and idiosyncratic manner, the urban world around us, but also to challenge us to see that world in an entirely new capacity - as a series of textures and patterns waiting to be found and transformed into landscapes.


I first discovered Clough's work - in the form of her painting 'Vegetation' (1999) - during one of my regular visits to Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. My method during these visits was usually one of aimless wandering - I rarely went there with an exhibition or a particular artwork in mind, though I always made a detour to see a priapic Picasso sculpture, a primitive Christ in varnished wood - hoping something would catch my eye each time. Sometimes it did, sometimes there was nothing, no shock of the new. In the case of 'Vegetation', I was immediately taken with its strangeness, the fact that it was something other than the (admittedly beautiful) Pre-Raphaelite superabundance for which Brum's art gallery is demi-famous to those in the know. No alabaster lunatics floating down river here, just an axpressive abstract arrangement of - well, pebbles, aren't they? Or is it a landscape seen from above, from a great height? One of my first thoughts - one of the images the painting deliberately suggests, I would now argue - was of the primitive cave paintings at Lascaux, buffalo etched in 'crude' but infinitely vivid terms on the sweating rock; and that chain of association led on next to crop circles and Mayan ground-sculptures and aerial photography. The painting seemed - seems - possessed of an almost limitless capacity for expressiveness. This is its power, the power of Clough's work considered in totality, in fact: the paintings are never wholly abstract, certainly, but neither do they (for the most part at least) go in for definitive signification. We are by no means in the realm of social realism or urban documentary when we are witness to Clough's canvasses, in spite of early gestures towards these modes. These earlier pieces, even, are characterised by a tension between, on the one hand, a tendency towards abstraction, and, on the other, a refusal to dismiss figuration outright. (Her grand canvas 'Lowestoft Harbour' (1951) is arguably the most achieved of these earlier works.) Later, the human body is gradually discarded as a subject, perhaps precisely because of its corporeality, its status as a grounded singular signifier, rather than a floating, potentially infinite suggestion of an image, or network of images. The body always means too much: it both reaches out to a world beyond the borders of the canvas, and back through previous representations of the human figure in art. It denies the polysemy that Clough's canvases are so clearly striving towards.





But Clough's later paintings are by no means dry exercises in academic abstraction, and viewing them can often be a highly sensual experience, the artist clearly taking delight in her compositional method, the interplay of colours, their feel, their energy. 'Waste-land' (1979), for example, has the ryhtmic vibrancy and fludity of a jazz quartet, jagged black lines like trumpet blasts blocked out over the tinselly rhythms of gravel, and the sinewy guitar lines of coiled rope. This abstract swings, and knows it. Yet it's real too, and not just jazzy interplay. I've noted the gravel, but note, too, the Allen key to the bottom right of the composition, and the bursts of colour scattered throughout the painting's largely monochrome surface like scraps of dayglo packaging. This both is and is not a real wasteland, realism and abstraction meeting and colliding, leaving charred metal and pellets of stone in the aftermath.