I was struck recently by a comment in David Jones' collection of prose writings, Epoch and Artist, in which he poured cold water on critical dismissals of abstract art, arguing - persuasively, I think - that abstraction, which Jones takes to be specifically formal in character, i.e. pertaining to questions of compositional balance, tonal characteristics, and so on, is a central component of all visual art, whether abstract or figurative. To reject abstraction out of hand, Jones goes on, is to mis-read, almost wilfully, the direction of modern artistic developments.
The argument in question is taken from a letter Jones wrote to the Listener in 1950, but the views expressed remain pertinent; and whilst the debates surrounding abstract art, and its figurative opposite number, have largely dissipated in recent years, occasionally resurfacing in the form of public spasms over the Young British Artists, or Turner-prize winners whose work involves sheds or animal dung [1], the same argumentative terms have remained a staple, though translated and mutated, within poetry circles. Mainstream commentators have a tendency to occasionally blow off steam about inevitably unnamed 'postmoderns', who are allegedly clogging the universities with dangerous radical ideas, and running 'subversive' literature classes where the entire Western canon is thrown in the rubbish chute in favour of the collected works of JH Prynne (boo, hiss!), which are, of course, treated with an almost god-like reverence [2]. The 'postmoderns' themselves have a tendency to react with quiet dignity, no doubt in private intercut with deep clefts of scorn, though their own polemical reactions to the mainstream are equally visible, in their aesthetic choices rather than their public statements: their places of publication, their shared discourses, their chosen forms and modes of address, all scream 'marginal' from the rooftops.
All this is merely background, however: the crux of the matter is that both ideological camps - and I do truly believe that ideology is at stake here: this is a ruck about the very nature and meaning of poetry in our current socio-economic epoch - seem to be communicating in entirely different languages. In some regards they are, but they share enough of a vocabulary - often revolving around the notion of the aesthetically and ethically correct (sometimes the two are conjoined) - to mean that communication is a possibility, that there might (just might) come a time when the squabbling could be put aside, and everyone could both write and read in an environment where such sectarian politics did not come in to the equation.
One might - more cynically - suggest that such a rapprochement is an impossibility by virtue of the fact that both parties need the mutual antagonism. The mainstreamers can only defend their position - post-Larkin, semi-interesting - if they can persistently raise the spectre of Olson-chewing, Deleuze-spewing barbarians mustering at the gate. The barbarians themselves, meanwhile, might equally be said to thrive upon a narrative in which they are the oppressed and subjugated indigenous populace of some far away land called Experimental Poetry, stomped upon at every turn by the oak-thewed hegemon of the Mainstream Marines. This seems like the most realistic scenario. First of all, both camps are effectively fighting over a ghost - a general poetry readership - which, if it ever existed (and really, there is no evidence to suggest it ever did) no longer does. Moreover, if we take the proliferation of media into account, it becomes impossible to talk about single ideological blocs in some bipartite power struggle. The mainstream is a chimera that we should, frankly, quit whining about all the bloody time: all the energy wasted ranting about the London poetry scene, and how Picador would never publish John James - would John James want to be published by Picador? - would be far better spent writing more and better poems that would blow the mainstream's own rather pedestrian output out of the water. By the same token, the mainstream's bug-bear - a sinister, Prynne-spearheaded cabal of postmodern eggheads lurking in every English department across the country - appears equally illusory: 'postmodernism' cannot be defined in such monolithic terms that it can be used so frequently as an umbrella noun covering a multitude of sins (or virtues, depending on how we read the situation).
The internet, in particular, has unveiled the sheer ridiculousness of the Sharks vs. Jets mentality that seems to dominate certain sectors of the poetry community, revealing as it does a total aesthetic democracy, where any number of styles of writing, from the gentle and Larkinesque to the balls-to-the-wall radicalism of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetics or flarf, can find a suitable home. Who edits Poetry Review in any given year is not the be all and end all of our definition of poetry's health; we have to stop using the centre ground as our yardstick. Aside from anything else, the poetry cake that we're all fighting for a share of is too small for such playground politics anyway. Can't we just stop all the fussin' and the feudin'?
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[1] The Daily Mail, as in so many things, is particularly idiotic on this score. Every year they run an 'alternative' Turner prize, where they give an award to a purveyor of 'proper' art - their definition, of course - which is invariably a byword for landscape paintings or portraiture in a god-awful tradition of semi-literate realism, which examples invariably display the visual flair and compositional imagination of a beige turd.
[2] The terms that the mainstream bulldogs use are strangely similar to the aggressive insult 'tenured radicals' which was hurled at survivors of the counter culture on American campuses during the various 'culture wars' that rocked our cousins on the other side of the big drink in the 1990s.
Showing posts with label Painting. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Painting. Show all posts
Tuesday, 23 October 2007
Tuesday, 16 October 2007
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.
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.
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