December 1983
A Conversation between Frank Bowling, Paul Harrison and Jeremy Thomas
At a time when my work was slowly moving away from the kind of undisciplined expressionism my sojourn at the Royal College of Art afforded me, I began to seek out, and to listen to, my more formally trained friends; these happened to be mainly architects and engineers. Then there was my friend Paul Harrison, who to me simply represented science; the image of science as a study of pattern and order. Presently a lecturer at Poole Tech, when we met, in Bristol in 1958, Paul Harrison was about to commence his graduate work involving research on color, at the university there. But he was more often to be found in the Drama department and in the pubs around, worrying on the nature of 'context'. Our modest discussion group was actually formed some years later, in late spring and autumn, 1963. This consisted of myself, Harrison, the architect Jeremy Thomas and Jerry Pethick the Canadian sculptor who had studied at Chelsea School of Art and the Royal College at the same time as me. By autumn 1963 Finch's pub in Fulham Road, where we used to meet, had turned into a madhouse and Pethick, Thomas and myself decided that to do our talking we would travel down to Poole in Dorset where Harrison was living with his young family. This present talk was recorded in October 1983, also at Paul's house in Dorset.
What would be the value of such a planned act as ours, taking place twenty years on? To me the value is inherent in our gathering together: then and now. It is coeval with the act of visiting and talking about art and culture and not something separate; not disconnected in the sense that by visiting each other we would derive value from our attempts by referring to some future goal, or end.
On looking for newness, new ways of proceeding to announce ourselves, we considered a dry subject: something opposite to calm and composure of philosophy, like technique; not skill, but the making of an object and what lay behind its proficiency. How to make it really new but of tradition, the 'how'.
The science of making seemed appropriate to us for a variety of reasons. Art and technique tend to meet when one or the other are at their best, or at their worst. At their worst when they produce mannerisms and encourage that witless, heavy impotence which seems to run through the scene presently, and at best when technique is used, from time to time, to temper and restrain.
Also there is something compelling about the way in which, in western art and culture, we proceed from means to end. When, really, the nature of context, intensity of interaction, a living zest - people meet, things happen. In art it's mainly when you least expect it that it huts the bottom for you.
Frank Bowling: One of the things we were trying to get out of Paul when he was doing his researches on colour, was some notion as to what the physical properties of colour could do in art. There was talk about the possibility of the perfect painting: a picture of a root 2 rectangle of a particular colour - would this be the perfect painting?
As well as Paul's colour ideas we were trying to get ideas from Jeremy about geometry and structure.
Jeremy Thomas: Well, we began talking about two dimensional proportion using Jay Hambidge's book. But my mind, as an architect, was set on problems of three dimensional proportions where you thought in terms of volume. I was interested in Jerry's idea of the saxophonist and the potter who told him they considered themselves to be at the 'centre' of the thing they were making - the centre of the sound, and of the piece of pottery - and where you are thinking in terms of volume rather than area. We all know about two dimensional proportions. You have the Golden Mean and the root rectangle. But if you go into three dimensions you have the cube root which you've got in exactly the same way except that you have a proportion of volume which is equal to the overall proportion. And I was trying to push a sort of three dimensional Golden Mean which again has a whole number series, like the Fibonacci series, but which works in three dimensions. And I suppose I was slightly appalled that no one seemed to be interested in proportion, that painters were not really concerned with this sort of thing. They found it inhibiting. I think a lot of people would simply find it inhibiting. They don't want a picture to 'work', they want it to appeal, I don't know, to the guts or something.
FB: But I would like to say to you at the same time that because of that practise, that measuring and structuring, that I got from yourself and Paul, that I could probably make a picture work by eye, or I hope that I should be able to. And this was the whole notion, that you get some kind of rigorous involvement, formal rigour, a law, which becomes part of your ability. It seemed to me that what was lacking was not so much a reason for making paintings as a way of 'making it good'. I looked to you two whose backgrounds implied a more rigorous and formal approach to the business of making. And certainly in the case of colour I tried to get a deeper understanding of how colour works through the odd remarks Harrison would drop now and then. He talked about the 'weight' of colour. There were explanations in textbooks about the weight of colour, and one didn't know if it was tonnage or the weight that strikes your eye, or what. But the impulse towards this kind of thinking was, I felt, right. That even though one may not approach the technical prowess displayed in a Titian or say, Rembrandt's Jewish Bride you could try and achieve something of the way they built these paintings with the new acrylics and glues and so on. That is, there was a sense in which we knew we couldn't paint Titians or make great Michelangelo sculptures, but that is exactly what we were aiming to do within the limited social situation in which we found ourselves.
Paul Harrison: But what we also felt was that science could, in fact, provide something new. We were thinking about abstract designs and it was almost like the more abstract the better. It was an inclination really towards fairly simple ideas, we weren't being too pretentious. There was no attempt to make great art out of any sort of formula. We were trying, for instance, to put colour to light in a very simple way. Certainly that was what Jerry was doing, working directly with light rather than painting surfaces at all. We thought there could be a link with the study of light, things like the frequency of colour and so on. The whole thing became a little bit out of hand, certainly. But I think it could definitely be seen as a rejection of an expressionist attitude.
FB: Yes, it would not have been easy for us to articulate it as such. It was an intuitive response. Expressionism never came up as such in our conversations. It would be something as simple as the difference between 'nature colour' and paint colour, something which your high school senior now takes for granted, to the extent that if you asked he would think you were an idiot for putting it in those terms.
PH: In fact I remember there was quite a big production about avoiding local colour entirely. One was being, I suppose, constantly dragged back into a naturalistic area. Which, like expressionism, might be said to be another point of repudiation on our part. And I was looking towards what I call 'chemical colour'. This was something I was working on myself at the time. They weren't pure colours, they arose out of particular scientific situations. They were actually properties of certain structures. This was part of the fascination really. That these structures, which were in fact molecular structures, had their own symmetrical pattern; that a numerical value could be put to them; and that they were producing, shall we say, this particular shade of purple that you would never perceive in the natural environment. I'm not saying anything terribly advanced developed out of that but nevertheless it seemed as though it could be used by an artist in some way.
FB: Yes, when these things came up one went away and tried the nearest possible equivalent, through the limited materials that we had. One tried to make some of these things work in a painting or a sculpture.
PH: In our excitement it seemed there was perhaps a color equivalent that could be found. I remember fiddling around with groups of frequencies and wavelengths and so on. And of course one was brought up short by the physiology of the thing. But the point was not so much that the experiment itself would be a success, it was what could be got out of it in terms of art.
FB: well, I went away after some of these exxperiments with colour and the throwing around of those ideas about the 'perfect painting', and started to put blocks of colour together, measured out in terms of flat rectangular areas, to see whether some of those notions could bear fruit. So it's not that one was sceptical about that formula idea so much, that as the ideas came up we tried them on to see how they fitted. Certainly this sort of attitude later became the object of much criticism, the 'betrayal' of art and so on.
JT: I would think that anyone would want to find out more about ...
FB: ... ways of getting to unload your number! I agree it's a curious notion, but I can see there is the possibility of a real criticism. But I think if this charge were to be levelled it would be undermined by the mere fact of our intentions; our intentions were not so much going towards science, as to do with a cross-breeding. the intention was to get to a way in which one could facilitate the development of one's endeavour to make better art.
PH: It might be said that one was using science as a kind of crutch. But you've got to remember that we were thinking about these things in the early sixties. I don't think we saw these ideas as necessarily a direct critique of the art establishment that existed at that time. Really that was a very optimistic period in general, not just in the area of art. All right we were beginning to recognise the limitations of the art criticism and so on, and I was writing some criticism myself at the time, but it was simply that we were looking for new angles. Obviously at that time science and technology were coming into everything, evrything was being improved or at any rate affected by it. What we were doing was simply to question the possibilities, on the basis that we were all quite closely linked to an educational system. If there was an implied critique of that system it was in the sense that we were all looking for something new. We felt that one could look around and that there were other things to find out. I'm sure artists were getting involved in plenty of other things, it was happening all over the place. I'm sure our situation wasn't unique.
FB: what I think was unique, if anything - and I must be careful in putting it this way - was that even though the education we'd been given was narrow, we were short on dogma. We were very inquisitive. Whereas some people might have taken up this proportion idea from Hambidge's book and run with it as a sort of theme, or art notion, we wanted to see what were its possibilities, how useful could it be. That business of making a painting of one colour, of certain dimensions, was something that was taking place, or was about to take place in the very near future. But that's not what our little circle was about, those easy solutions. We were already, I think, firmly entrenched in ourselves as creative people. There was no looking around to see what the next thing was going to be, or where the stuff was going to go next. I think I'm right in saying we had the measure of ourselves. It was not a question of getting a new gimmick and making your mark out of that. We didn't know anything then about formalism or Greenberg. We looked at American painting - Rothko, Newman, people like that - only as a first step towards making good art. The intention wasn't in the least to emulate them. what we were trying to do was to find a way in which we could structure our work so that it could carry the kind of excitement we thought art in museums had. And of course the trap there, into which I eventually fell - was Pop art and surrealism. And it's only the attempt to get out of that, in the investigation into formal ways of structuring and formal considerations of colour and what it does, that brought me to American abstract painting of that generation. I think actually Jerry is still locked into a kind of - I was going to say 'rejection' but I think that's not the word - a kind of suspicion of what we now call formalist painting. I was interested in Jeremy's response, as an architect, to the Tate Gallery's New Art show. Having looked at the work he turned round and said to me that he would prefer to see the Rothko room. I'd like to hear more about that.
JT: I think I just found the New Art boring. Perhaps I must look closer but, like the sculpture show at the Hayward, out of the whole thing I found about four of the works engaging and the rest depressing and worrying. Perhaps this is just architectural taste.
FB: Can we consider the New Art 'informal'?
JT: It's certainly unstructured, if that's what we mean by informal. I think it's happening in architecture too, in this idea of 'post-modernism', which again seems to be flip and insubstantial.
FB: The term has been taken up in painting and sculpture from Charles Jencks. A former New Statesman critic has it that Jencks never got iy right. It seems that in his approach Jencks never really fully grasped the notion of architecture, and welded this business of 'there must be a new way of making architecture that's more decorative' onto this false premise. It seems to me certain that post-modernist architecture is mainly engineering with borrowings from various decorative styles simply stuck on.
JT: It's applied yes, it's not part of the context. Is the New Art considered to be post-modernist?
FB: 'Post-modernism' is like a resounding drum. Like another of those terms that one used to hear a lot of -'post painterly abstraction', which is perhaps more easily understandable since there was clearly painterly stuff and stuff which was not quite so painterly. Let's go back to someone like Goethe and the issue of the link between science and art being somehow a moral issue. I tried to locate the reason behind our seeking each other out. And it seemed it was partly a search for something, as I said earlier, that would put 'spine' in one's endeavour. But I also think what we were involved with was a moral search, a search for that kind of verification. If we have any idea of Goethe's development, it's clear from his own life as I understand it that he started off rejecting this notion of formal discipline, and gradually as his life and his career developed he became more involved with it. It seems to me the richness of his discoveries and what he was able to achieve is an illustration, or model, of what we were trying to come to grips with. Can a moral case be made for what we talking about in those days, the search for structure, rigour and so on? Was Jeremy really implying something of this kind in his rejection of New Art?
JT: I feel that paintings should be expected to last in their own right, and not just as a statement about how one felt in a certain year. I accept that's a very narrow view.
PH: I don't know how much mileage can be got out of the issue of morality in this context. I think the only morality that would have any general gainsay these days is eco-morality-ecology. It's the only area that a good proportion of the audience going to see New Art might be expected to agree on, in moral terms.
FB: New Art comes out of liberalism ... but surely the search for values, eternal values, is a moral search? I think what I'm putting forward is that the artist's search for an art that might be expected to last is a moral search. I'm making this claim; that the search we were conducting for ways to make the art as substantial as we possibly could, as tough as the work in the museums, through what was available - colour science, structure, architecture - is a more specific search. I think you could say it has a moral content to it, or moral aspect, which is different tot he sort of flag waving, breast beating, that you find in exponents of the New Art such as Schnabel, Baselitz, and the rest. Let's take my work. It was concerned with legalistic ritual murder, birth, all sorts of themes which on the face of it you could claim as being of the utmost importance - that this was the 'right stuff'. At the moment that I became suspicious of the work I was not suspicious so much of its content as the way it was put together. I began to feel that it wasn't enough to say that what is urgent is the distortion of human life by political regimes, or that life and death is urgent, but that the pictures had to be substantial within the confines of the material itself, within the history of what was the best. I realised that the subject matter was not my main concern, that subject matter was more like your portmanteau that you carry around, it was not what makes pictures look good.
Art has to be made from a basis of certain restrictions and if it's going to be good art it's going to surmount those restrictions. And this is my basis for pointing to certain kinds of art being made at the moment which seems not to be able to accommodate restrictions. I'm not saying that the one colour picture notion would work, because in fact that seems to me to be an impoverished area within my discipline. The one colour picture never really worked. I've seen one or two examples that looked OK but as a whole series of things they ended up being a big yawn. But I'm still saying that restrictions as such can only produce a kind of maximalising from the good artist. There have to be restrictions in the sense that you can't build a building in an intemperate climate without having certain constituents. You can't paint a good picture without having these limitations in the same way.
Let's say another work for restrictions is 'formal' or 'formality'. Formalsim has t do with producing your best within the limitations of the activity itself. If your Golden Section works because it opens up spaces that people can go through and feel confortable within, that this is something to do with the way people turn and the way they stand, then build buildings on the Golden Section and don't build them on some other notion to do with flattery of the political climate, like decoration for the sake of it. A lot of the buildings we see in London when we're running around buying materials, have non-functional bits of pre-cast plastic just stuck onto the facades. Which makes a terrible distortion and lie of your cyma recta/cyma reversa that youu get in older architecture. Yes, those people did sometimes make those geometrical swaggers for decoration, but the internal logic of the thing is left explicit. Whereas an awful lot of postformal architecture does not make sense in terms of an ideal notion of freeing the person in his space. Painting falls fooul of the same sort of thing I believe. Too uch of the explanation is political, sociological and market. It's too much to do with how society works and what pressure groups in society can bring to bear on each other.
If you have a tie-up, for instance, between the museum, the dealers and the market, the artist who fills their collective brief can do almost anything and expect to get a sort of structure that will carry him. On the level of official recognition the curator is a promoter who then lends further reinforcement by, very often, writing about the work. And the dealer meliorates as the items find a public. We can say there's a sort of wheel, and the art that comes out is more involved with sociology of whatever cultural milieu or circle the artist is involved in, than some real well-spring of expression. And I can't see that limitations in any kind of formal sense has any part in that. It seems to have to do more with what materials are available 'on instruction' from within the closed circle.
If you take a couple of the artists who were of that generation of Pop - and I think New Art is mainly novelty and Pop - I think we can look at what Larry Rivers tended to paint, look at his approach. What does he paint when he comes to London? He paints Bill Brooker, he paints Liz Frink, he paints David Sylvester [ Mr Art ]. It was like he was a court jester and it worked for him. Larry is someone we all know so we can point to him. Take Jasper Johns. We don't know him so well - but what does he paint? Again you could say the work has an easy passage in terms of the sociology of the culture. It's explained in terms of map making, the significance of emblems and flags, their meaning in western culture. And not until a long time after was it spoken about in the same terms as Rothko or Newman. That is, the terms dictated by the activity itself and the means through which he could make the stuff. Of course some of that was over the top; some of the talk, the promotional drive for that other generation. But it was certainly nothing in comparison to what we have now. For instance, this idea that Schnabel's plates are brushstrokes. I mean, that's such a leap! Whoever thought that one up should be given a prize. Rene Richard ... but then it should be laughed off because anyone who understands what language can convey would see immediately that there's no connection. We know what he's talking about because clearly Mr. Richard is a poet. But it's not communication, there's no way it can be upheld. It's a poetic phrase only.
Artistic freedom does not permit easy solutions. Form and freedom go together. And the plates are an easy answer. An easy answer to creating a rippled surface. You drag a loaded brush down a whole lot of plates and crockery and the paint splashes and it flashes a sign: 'rippled surface'. One can point to painting that has achieved things, say Hans Hofmann, and the verve you get in the handling of the stuff: the brushing of the paint, the mauling of it, is made easy in this plate stuff. For me it's not inventive or new, it's just show. An easy solution.
PH: Perhaps it's also sown onto a bit of eco-morality, the recycling of the city's detritus. If you ask any first year student to go away and paint something that's socially significant the first thing he's going to do is empty the rubbish bin, indicating the detritus of the consumer society.
FB: There's that too maybe. But I don't think that one can really level criticism at Schnabel so much. Because the artist as an individual has to make it into and through society. I think that if one is levelling criticism of this kind it has really to be at the coterie that makes it possible for all this work to be taken seriously. And he doesn't do that on his own. I think, if anything, you have to take your hat off to him because he is an American phenomenon, like all those early stars. Someone who made it big right away, very young. And he's not so uneducated an artist that he doesn't know about brushstrokes and about the kinds of special effects that will call attention to themselves. That big brush stroke has a history. One can think of Ed Strautmanis painting with a big mop out of de Kooning, and out of Kline. Schnabel is a friend of Ed's, but the difference between Schnabel and Ed Strautmanis is that Strautmanis is aiming with a kind of hot naïve energy to drag his paint so that it has an equivalent in Goya. He's thinking about those big broom paintings of Goya's. I don't think Schnabel's ambition is the same kind. I think he's calling attention to things that are immediately located in the society in which he lives, his immediate environment.
The big brushstroke has a history in American painting, in people like Kline and de Kooning and it is accepted as that which is expressive [look at Lichtenstein's cartoon strokes]. But over and above that is the marketing. And bully for Schnabel that as an intelligent person he is able to find the right combination of people who would support him in the market. I mean he must be the most expensive painter alive - does Francis Bacon even command those prices?
The reservations I have developed about Rothko since my earlier enthusiasm are consistent with my reservations to do with contemporary chaps like Schnabel and Baselitz. And again it's to do with an overexposure to the rhetoric that followed in the wake of his work. There was also the rhetoric surrounding the work while it was being made. The business about the "non-imagery", about "Nature", Rothko's preaching, which seems terribly much like Schnabel's although Rothko of course was a much older artist when he made it big. But the breast beating about his mission, and the piles of crapulous writing on the art, built up a reservation in me which was underlined by my visit to the chapel in Texas where I though the quality of the work was poor. Jules Olitski was already painting better pictures. But maybe that's all by the way. It's like the plates being an extension of brushstrokes. When you hear that sort of thing, you think, Oh yes that sounds right. And when you see the work you think, Oh my God, it's just a weak brushstroke.
[PICTURES]
WORK IN PROGRESS 1983 ACRYLIC 72"X120" [SANDCIRCLE?]
WORK IN PROGRESS 1983 ACRYLIC 72"X144" ??//
LENT. 1963. OIL TWO PANELS, EACH 72"X72"
