Foreground Groans

Head down to Green Park tube station and call into the local Pret a Manger to treat myself to a ham and cheese toastie and a decaffeinated frothacino and then, suitably refreshed, I undertake the short postprandial perambulation required to take me to the doors of the elegant Georgian townhouse that is home to the Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac.  But soft!  What’s that low moaning sound that I can hear emanating from the small display space at the front of the Galerie?  It sounds like it could be a small gang of humpback whales getting humpy over the lack of progress being made in the current Brexit negotiations; or maybe the mysterious ethereal drone of one of those mythical whispering drones that flicker through the skies above Gatwick before vanishing into the arboreal undergrowth below; then again, could it be the amplified gastric grumblings of some vegananuary galerie-goer whose metabolism is still pining for the calming carbohydratic quickfix that only a properly balanced mix of meat, dairy, gluten and cholesterol can provide?  No, none of these.  Actually what I’m hearing is an excerpt from Ryoanji, one of the less toe-tapping melodies constructed by that arch purveyor of aleatoric auditory entertainments:  John Cage.

And while the Galerie leaflet provides no helpful indication as to what instrumentation is actually making the whining ambient hum that’s disturbing the peace of the Galerie, a subsequent google search suggests it could be any combination of oboe, double bass, flute, trombone and vox humana plus obligato percussion – and, in retrospect, I do think I remember hearing the odd background clang amongst the other more continuous foreground groans.  As to the precise nature of Cage’s rhythmical algorithms that are presumably instructing the performance of the performers, I think that could probably also be found by googling around the internet but then I’m not sure that that piece of information would really makes very much difference to my overall appreciation of this particular monochromatic soundscape.  Certainly, discovering that the suite of sketchy scribbles (specially made by Cage to add a visual enhancement to his auditory treat) and now so reverentially displayed in glass cases in the room where the music’s playing, were designed by drawing the outline of various stones selected from a Japanese garden, doesn’t make them any less sketchy, scribbly or – dare one say it – superficial.

Of course, it’s fairly easy to mock Cage and all the other determinedly avant-garde artists when they started to indulge in what some might tend to see as their increasingly prissy, pretentious and wilfully arcane practices.  And, frankly, Ryoanji does seem pretty ripe for ridicule, but the roots of the radical experimentalism that ended in all this mannerist silliness deserve much more respect.  After all, the obsessive desire to rebel and challenge every aspect of the sureties and certainties of the previous stale traditional modes of production was, essentially, what provided the intellectual thrust that generated all the marvels of Modernism that made the first three-quarters of the 20th century such a wonderfully exciting period of artistic innovation and creativity.  And surely, anyone who was around to experience the last great flowering of Modernist movements in the late 1960s and early ‘70s can’t help but feel a sense of disappointment that the autumnal ‘80s proved to be such a dismal precursor to the inward-looking unadventurous pre-millennial Post-Modernist phase that has continued into the present day with no sign yet of any artistic renaissance in sight.

Of course, it wasn’t just the established anti-establishment music makers like Cage who were starting to run out of steam in the last quarter of the 20th century.  As the main displays here at Thaddaeus Ropac so poignantly demonstrate, the visual visionaries of the time were also struggling to make advances.  And so it is that the current substantial exhibition of collages and assemblages by Robert Rauschenberg – a close friend of Cage and arguably someone who had once been one of the most important artists of the ‘60s – fill the rest of the Galerie with a muted sense of approaching fin de siècle fatigue.

That’s not to say that all the works here are totally uninteresting or without merit.  In fact the show is really not bad at all.  It’s just that for anyone like myself who can recall turning over the pages of the art history books and seeing the charmingly exotic still lifes and portraits of the Fauvists splintering into the kaleidoscopic shards of the Cubists, and then the romantic insanities of the Surrealists being shoved aside by the noisy colour field extravaganzas of the Abstract Expressionists, suddenly being brought right up-to-date with the near-contemporaneous explosion of Pop Art was just so breathtakingly exhilarating.  To suddenly see Rauschenberg’s paint-spattered bed roll; his angora goat complete with spare tyre; the lectern with the stuffed eagle and then all those succession of great silkscreens featuring space men and movie stars, chrome-plated gas guzzlers and napalm-dropping bomber planes – well, bliss it was in that dawn to be alive but to be as young as I then was, was very nearly heaven.  At least, when I think back to that fast-fading time about half a century ago, that’s what my recovered memories seem to be trying to tell me.

All of which perhaps makes it inevitable that looking at this current selections of works – which Rauschenberg specifically created in the ‘80s as a sort of conscious backward-looking review of his work from the ‘60s – is an experience tinged with the same kind of melancholia that accompanies a visit to the hairdresser who insists on holding up a mirror up to show just how the long-haired excesses of youth have been reduced over the years to the present thinning silver strands of maturity.  So while much of the old Pop imagery is present – roller skates and radio sets, tigers and TVs all randomly collaged together with various parasols and other 3-D extensions – everything seems slightly out of focus and filtered through some kind of blurry mist of uncertainty.  And it’s hard not to read this fuzziness as symbolic of the artist suffering a loss of confidence in the artist which, in turn, was perhaps a more general acknowledgement that the swinging Sixties had swung their course and that the future had turned out to be a whole lot less optimistic than it had once seemed so certain to be.

In short, maybe the moral of the story is that artists, wittingly or otherwise, have no real option but to reflect the age in which they live and work.  And when times start to turn darker and more confused they shouldn’t really be blamed for producing works that seem to mirror the desultory world in which they find themselves stuck alongside the rest of us.

On the other hand, I suppose one could argue that there’s not much point in having messengers unless one can take occasional pot shots at them which, I think, is maybe the attitude of Bernard Jacobson whose Gallery is the next stop on today’s brief itinerary.  And, by a rather neat piece of serendipity, the opening work in this current mixed exhibition of prints, designed to commemorate the fiftieth birthday of the eponymous Gallery, is another of these slightly disappointing Rauschenberg silkscreens from the 1980s.  Incidentally, by way of marking the passing of this demi-centenary, Jacobson has indulged himself by adding a series of entertaining autobiographical notations to the usual labels identifying the works on display.  And through which I discover, not only that Rauschenberg could be capricious and mean-spirited, but I’m not alone in thinking that the artist’s work, that had been so vitally impressive at the start of his career, sadly but surely diminished with the passage of time.

Elsewhere included in the eclectic display of personal favourites from the great galerist’s collection are a succession of really very attractive items ranging from small works by Rembrandt, Durer and Goya through portraits by Renoir, Matisse and Picasso and then works of the more recent Modernists like Motherwell, Warhol and Hockney.  And it’s hard to deny that Jacobson has very sophisticated and intelligent good taste which, of course, is really just another way of saying that he’s picked work by artists that I also happen to like.  But what really put a smile on my face as I walked round the Gallery was when I came across the label that explained how Jacobson’s initial interest in art had been sparked when, as a schoolboy, he’d started copying some of Matisse’s early colourful paintings – since my own story is exactly the same.  Indeed, had my dear old French teacher, Mrs Tunstall, not loaned me a couple of postcards of the great Fauvist’s still-lifes so that I could copy them into my project book, well, I might very well not be writing these words today.

One response to “Foreground Groans

  1. Love the little bits of autobiography!

    Found Cage really interesting when I was a student too, haven’t heard anything more recent. Yes it does seem with some artists that their early work is the best. Still, I’m convinced there will be another renaissance – but maybe where we don’t think of looking!

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