Dropping Perpendiculars

After the last couple of blogging weeks spent on tourist trails searching out the highlights of Liverpudlian and Mancunion cultural life, it definitely feels like time to flee South and return home.  And so after boarding a mainline train at Manchester’s Piccadilly terminal I’m pleased to be able to indulge in the kind of Modernistic textual jump-cut that allows me to reappear – 180 miles, seven days and two hyphens later – at London’s namesake underground station, right back in the centre of the omphalos of the capital’s comforting chaos.  And as I stride once again along these familiar sunny boulevards, I can hear the pigeons tweet out a welcoming chirpy chorus of hellos while cockney costermongers doff their caps and a dozen smiling baristas wave their chocolate shakers in unison creating a miasma of dusty granulated sprinkles that fill the air with the sweet aroma of…well, maybe it’s not quite like that but it is nice to be back in a place where the accents are not quite so uniformly strange and some of the streets, if not entirely paved with golden deposits, are nevertheless lined with commercial art galleries.

One such byway being Albermarle Street and it’s amongst the cultural cluster here that I start today’s sojourn by calling into Marlborough Fine Art where there’s a display of sketches, drafts and doodles by Paula Rego.  I think I’ve probably blogged before about how I rate her as the most consistently skillful and interesting figurative artist currently working in the country today.  It’s not just that she has such a clear and confident style of painting but that the quirky Gothic narratives she conjures up compel the viewer to undertake a kind of forensic scrutiny in an effort to unravel the mystery of the scenes that she describes with such convincing characterisations.  With their frequent hint of menace and teasing unresolvability, I think they’re probably the visual equivalent of the plays of Harold Pinter, similarly well-constructed and providing the same sort of niggling urge to rationalise, however impossible and uncomfortable the exercise is bound to prove.  Or something like that.  The problem being that whereas it’s usually quite easy to detail the faults in second rate art, explaining the reasons for the successes of successful art leads to the kind of verbose waffling that tends to satisfy neither writer nor reader.

At which point I think I’ll give up on attempts at aesthetical analysis and just note that even though the current display consists mainly of preliminary drafts, and there are no properly finished works nor any full scale pastels or paintings, nevertheless, this chance to gain a peek over the shoulder of the artist at work is expectedly and awkwardly enjoyable.  While there’s a hint of a promise of gaining some insight into Rego’s mind and methods, and how her subliminal thoughts translate to preparatory outline studies and then into the story structures that she’s developed during the course of her substantial career, I think this is ultimately illusory – though definitely an illusion well worth the investigation.

So, a good start to the day and one which encourages me to stroll on down the road and into one of the fashionable Paul Smith fashion boutiques which is situated nearby.  Naturally enough, the well-groomed staff who lurk at strategic points throughout the store look at me with growing quizzicality as I wander about.  After all, the main purpose of the shop is to sell expensive high-end clobber and gear and I’m sure that these highly trained young professionals can instantly tell by the scuff marks on my pair of Clarks brogues and the cut of my unmatched M&S jacket and chino slacks that the pursuit of sartorial excellence is not a high priority item on my personal list of essential ambitions.

Eventually, one of them very courteously asks if they can be of any assistance which, fortunately, then gives me the chance to explain that the point of my visit is not to inspect their luxury suits and exquisite accessories and accoutrements but to take a quick look at the other designer chattels and peripherals that are also dotted about the space and used to create the kind of general ambience of sophisticated good living and elegant extravagance that might relax a more typical client to the point where he would feel the urge to purchase some pricey new duds.  And there are indeed some pretty little sculptural nick-nacks and free-standing ceramic doo-dads here but best of all are the sequence of Nigel O’Neill abstract line drawings and small pair of colour prints, the deceptive minimal simplicity of which belies the years of dedicated application that has gone into their production.  I confess that I’m a bit of a fan of these geometric puzzle drawings but then they bring back so many happy schoolboy memories of when I too had to play about dropping perpendiculars, subscribing tangential arcs and otherwise manipulating points and lines, not in any attempt at artistic innovation or experimentation but in an effort to find the hidden proofs to the Euclidean postulates that filled the yellowing dog-eared pages my well-thumbed mathematical text books.

Ah, daydreaming about those happy formative years of chalky blackboards that squeaked, scratchy fountain pens that leaked and sweaty gymkit that reeked, I retrace my steps and turn into Burlington House and, with pedagogy on my mind, head appropriately for the recently refurbished Benjamin West Lecture Theatre.  And today’s infotainment is a debate between the comic author Howard Jacobson and the serious art critic Waldemar Januszczak concerning the merits or otherwise of Conceptual Art.  The contest has been given the wordy and slightly facetious title of The Joke that Went Too Far or the Birth of Modern Art which sort of gives a fair indication of both the positions of the respective speakers and the almost vaudevillian approach that they then take to their pontifical promulgations.  Both speakers are fluent, clever, comic and comfortable enough to tease each other and generally provide an hour of entertaining knockabout stuff.  In broad terms, Jacobson, while allowing a certain respect for Duchamp as an ‘interesting irritant’, directs his main points to a generalised attack on Conceptualism by insisting that the mere act of thinking is insufficient to produce art which, by definition, requires some element of physical, tangible construction.  By contrast Januszczak considers Duchamp to be as important and influential as Giotto and Caravaggio and the fountainhead, if not of Modern Art as a whole, then certainly the undeniably important movement of Conceptualism.  And that the work that he created was not just full of wit and brilliant philosophical ideas but also looked good and had an unmatched seminality during the course of the 20th century, the legacy of which continues to grow.

Frankly, I think there are problems with both positions.  Jacobson’s argument seems entirely misplaced since there have been very few, if any, Conceptualists who have been so pure and self-limiting that they have literally only ever thought up ideas for works of art and then not gone on to construct some object or perform some act which could be recorded and presented as the finished work of art.  And as for Januszczak, I’m sure he must be aware that Duchamp was most specific in his insistence that the items he chose for his readymades weren’t meant to look good and were very deliberately chosen so as not to have any aesthetic appeal.  But then, as I’ve already suggested, neither speaker was exactly trying to adopt a tone or attitude of any great academic rigor.  Then again, if neither produced much by way of perspicacious profundity or new great intellectual insights, the convivial banter provided an amusing enough hour of lightweight disputational diversion.

After which I take a brief peek at the Academy’s new display of works by Renzo Piano.  And here I have to admit that I’ve never been very successful at making much sense of architectural drawings and designs, and the thought that being presented with a tiny wood and plastic table-top model would somehow enable me to envisage how an actual full-size multi-story concrete and glass monster would appear in real life, has always struck me as just plain silly.  Consequentially, I breeze through the show pretty much undistracted by all the sketches and toytown maquettes that I’m equally sure would absolutely fascinate those more literate in the ways of layouts and plans – and particularly those who enjoy looking down from the heavens on to the tiny buildings below and sharing the God-like perspective of the architects who planned them all.

Which just leaves enough time for another quick taste of the art that stands at the intersection of art and maths, geometry and pattern-making.  This time it’s courtesy of Michael Kidner and a small, neat and rather lovely display of his paintings, sculptures and one magnificent floorpiece that carpets the Flowers gallery in Cork Street.

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