Views and reviews

Vogue, August 1967⁶⁵

In midsummer, art drops from the air like syrup off the limes. There’s too much of it. It seems like chaos, and it only makes sense when you ignore most of it and bend what remains to some theme or theory.

The exhibition of Picasso’s sculpture at the Tate Gallery until 13 August seems to dominate the month.66 Not just in magnitude, or intrinsic importance, but by the way in which it seems to upset our ideas of what a work of art really is. The entire exhibition is overwhelming, and yet with some conspicuous exceptions, no single piece stands up very well on its own.

This is not to say that the minor works are there just to set off the important pieces. The show is a monumental whole, and nothing can really be taken away from it without diminishing the complete effect. As an exhibition, it goes a long way towards destroying the very idea of a masterpiece. Instead, it’s a show of prodigious fertility, which relies for its stunning effect on the volume and variety of it all. Seeing it spread out, one begins to realize that there is an acquisitive obscenity in the idea of taking any one of these pieces and setting them up as an owned object in a private home.

The show is like a Neolithic site, full of masks, arrowheads, pots and idols, left behind by some absconded occupant. The artefacts only make sense when seen together.

Picasso seems to create art as spontaneously as one of these Neolithic craftsmen. No other artist living today seems to be so utterly at one with his materials. He seems to have dissolved the surface between himself and the substance he employs. He almost seems to be part of the world of nature from which he draws his forms. In some ways, the secret of his dreadful power is very close to that of nature itself, creating species with the same careless, wayward energy.

Picasso is already a myth in his own lifetime. This is almost a cliché, but his mythical role is not just a function of his fame. He is actually like something out of myth; half-man, half-beast, like the uncouth minotaurs he likes to draw. He is like a primitive mediator between nature and man, imitating the fecund productivity of the one in order to assert the ambitious creative independence of the other. Shaggy-thighed, nimble-fingered and comic, he takes off the grand act of creation, even going so far in the great Boisgeloup heads to produce huge, voluptuously obscene visual puns on the organs of human reproduction.

But there also seems to be a mythical curse at the heart of Picasso’s achievement, at least with respect to the sculpture. He is like a melancholy Midas. Everything he touches turns, perhaps too readily, into art, or something like it. As he grows older, he seems to be almost a prisoner of his own productivity, and actually seems to be straining to lose himself completely in the world of nature which so mercilessly provokes him to create. There is something Promethean about his situation, stretched halfway between the total creative capabilities of God, and the ordinary blundering mimicry of human craftsmanship. As John Berger has pointed out, perhaps this explains the painful sadness of those drawings where the artist impotently confronts the effortlessly created body of his model.

For Picasso, in fact, the separation of human beings into men and women for the purposes of reproduction is a tragic metaphor of his own situation as an artist. The artist faces the spontaneous creativity of nature just as men face the mysterious pregnancy of women. In both cases, the male role seems trivial and abbreviated. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that in the Boisgeloup series Picasso should make a wishful blend of the reproductive organs of the two sexes – suggesting a sublime androgyne where the begetting power of the stallion male loses itself in the conceiving capabilities of the woman as nature.

It is a special irony that Picasso should have become so extravagantly rich by selling off his life in bits. Owned in pieces like this, his work shrinks and one needs to be reminded, in these late years, of his achievement, by seeing it all in a huge coherent mass.

The recent exhibition of Tim Scott’s sculpture at the Whitechapel put the problem of art ownership even more acutely.67 It is slightly ridiculous to think of any one of these large, brilliant coloured affairs being in someone’s private possession. Scott’s show was an environment rather than a collection. It was a space filled and occupied by his work, any part of which, if taken away and owned, would tend to lose its meaning and become an awkward gaudy obstacle.

In fact, it is in the act of imagining the proper destination of these works that one goes some way towards understanding their appeal and function. Scott himself suggests that these huge coloured bulks belong in an enclosed space devoted exclusively to them. They would become nonsensical if put among other domestic objects. He also rejects the official alfresco of a municipal park. They should be housed instead in a special aesthetic gymnasium where the spectator is free to wander round exercising his mind just as he would on a set of trapezes, swings and parallel bars. With works of this sort, art has made a break with its traditional function and points forward instead to a more didactic future where the artist, instead of asking the audience to purchase parts of his work, will charge admission to an enclosure in which his work will challenge the spectator to a debate about space and its understanding.

For sculptors of the New Generation their work consists of solid acts of intellectual demonstration. The relationship between the surface and the enclosed volume of the piece is no longer clear. The pieces are sliced open in order to show how the inner space relates to the skin which encloses it. The whole question of what a surface really is becomes an issue here. By treating the skins with different colours and textures which vary from the rough matt to high polish, Scott gets the eye to scan backwards and forwards throughout the depths of his objects so that space starts to argue with the spectator. At one moment the gaze is stopped at the outer pellicle by the dense dullness of its painted surface. Or confronted by a huge transparent sheet of dark Perspex, the eye can choose to look right through and see the tinted space beyond, or, pulling back a bit, it can see instead the reflection of the world immediately in front. And this reflection, of course, includes the image of the spectator himself in the very act of choosing to see or not to see himself. And as a third choice the Perspex flange can be viewed as a thing in itself…in other words neither as a mirror nor as a plate glass, but simply as an interface existing in its own right.

These are early days for Tim Scott and for the New Generation of which he is possibly the most impressive protagonist. It is hard to see how artists of this sort will be financed in the future since they have so decisively cut themselves off from the older forms of patronage. It would be as absurd for an individual to own one of these works as it would be to own a large model of the atom. They belong in some as yet non-existent ‘thinktank’…perhaps something like a planetarium which puts on spectacular demonstrations in return for a decent admission fee.

There are other exhibitions, of course, but for the purposes of argument one play makes more of a point in the context I have chosen here. Peter Dews and the Birmingham Rep have pulled off a difficult trick with their new production of As You Like It at the Vaudeville.68 The setting is brilliantly stylized and set in a vaguely nineteenth-century limbo. I have never approved very much of playing around with period when producing Shakespeare. It rarely does more than tickle the palate of an audience bored with the original text. But in this case, largely because the setting is so cunningly blurred, the trick has worked in favour of the text. More than anything else Dews has welded his production into a sort of traditional panto which brings out the essential artificiality of the play itself. Artificiality in the best sense, though. As You Like It is not, as some of the more idiotic daily critics assume, a badly constructed piece of unlikely naturalism. It is a coherent piece of mystical formality, which rather like the Boisgeloup heads of Picasso, plays games with the puzzle of human bisexuality. The elaborate deceptions, transvestitism and so on are not just bits of idle Elizabethan tomfoolery, but essential features of hermetic Renaissance paganism. The contrived symmetries of the plot are as solemn and formal as a medieval zodiac or a Book of Hours. In fact the play is constructed almost like a religious diptych in which the two halves of human creation face each other like mirror images. Man and woman, brother and sister, vanquished and privileged, old and young. Around the axis of the mystical duality Shakespeare weaves an action which comes very close to Mozart opera. Dews has managed to focus this fugal formality and through the medium of a nineteenth-century operetta has restored the pagan mystery of the Renaissance.

Here and there, however, the modern gaiety of the production slightly obscures the elegant gravity of the original play. The wrestling match, for example, staged with dazzling sense of parody, takes away the mythical horror of Charles the wrestler. For this odd episode at the start of the play is just like something out of a fairy story. Charles is a sort of foul fiend with whom Orlando, the miraculous foundling, must struggle before he can begin his journey through the dark wood. A slight touch would have done the trick. Since the scene was conceived in terms of telly wrestling, Charles could have come on like Dr Death and the traditional parallel would have been completed at the same time.

But this is a rare and at times quite sublime production. It’s a scandal that the audiences were so small both times I was there. Shakespeare, it seems, will only survive in this country when performed either by great stars or famous national troupes. Quality alone, it seems, is not enough.