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º August 6th - August 12th 2001
Art Week
Sunday Arthur Neal, David Sylvester
Saturday The Site of the Sublime
Friday Art classes
Thursday Art teachers
Wednesday Stubbs
Tuesday Too much art
Monday Streamed, dammit

º Sunday 12th August 2001

 Art Week: Aged seventeen, I shared a room at school with, amongst others, a boy called Arthur Neal. We were already chums, if for no other reason than our dormitory beds were next to each other throughout our school careers (they filed us alphabetically: Macbeth, Martin, Neal.) And no, before you ask, there was none of that.

But now, in my final year, Arthur was doing the A-level art classes that I had been denied, and it was largely through him that I came to appreciate that art was about more than how much poster paint you could splash on a large sheet of sugar paper in one 80 minute double period.

I got to see Arthur's style develop over several years, from the initial shameless aping of the willowy Iain's post-Constructivist abstract oils through to much more personal explorations of texture and transparency using beautiful coloured inks.

At this distance in time, I don't recall much more than that, though I do remember Arthur getting very heavily into Samuel Palmer; did he suddenly switch to doing dense engraving things?

I saw quite a bit of Arthur in our first year in London after school. He was studying at Camberwell and I was working as a runner in a City advertising agency. I used to visit him in his father's grace-and-favour flat behind the Royal Garden Hotel, next to Kensington Palace (his dad was a secretary to the secretary to the Queen.) And later I think he moved to a squat in Nunhead.

I guess he was still painting, though I don't remember seeing much of it. We were too busy doing late-teen stuff like listening to The Incredible String Band whilst attempting to smoke dope through a teapot with tin-foil stretched across the top.

We lost touch eventually, though I heard whiffs of news: he broke up with his girlfriend, he'd gone off to be a shepherd (I blamed Samuel Palmer), he'd got married, he'd moved to Deal on the south coast.

And then, earlier this year, we found each other through e-mail.

Unfortunately Arthur confesses to being computer-illiterate, so our virtual conversation has been somewhat still-born, and most of my questions remain unasked and unanswered, though I know he's still painting and has two grown-up children. I even found his biography and some paintings on the net.

I have wondered whether he's found this blog, and what he makes of it, whether he recognised the me-that-was in the me-that-I-have-become.

But, in our brief correspondence, he has described Deal as being "of old, a gay town. Desmond Carrington and Charles Hawtrey and several thousand marine bandsmen plus as many miners" which I take to be a reference to certain pre-occupations displayed herein (though I'm not sure about the miners.)

So, Arthur, if you're reading this: it was thinking about you that spurred the confused confessional ramblings that has purported to be Art Week here at Blogadoon. And what better way to celebrate the end of it than with the only image to have appeared this week: your self-portrait.

David Sylvester was one of the few people who could be relied upon to write about art in simple language. (So much so that, when commissioned to write a piece, he would warn the editor that he used shorter words than most other critics, and ask to be paid for 3,500 words rather than 3,000.)

Much of his writing about art emphasises the viewer's physical relationship to the work "I find art affects one in different parts of one's body, for example, sometimes in the solar plexus... sometimes in the shoulder blades... sometimes in one's hands."

He was a keen sports fan. "I went to see a football match when I was 10 or 11. Arsenal v West Bromwich Albion at Highbury, and I came home and I wrote a report on it. In other words I'd been through an aesthetic experience and to complete the experience I neded to write my report on it. And that is what I've been doing ever since."

Impatient of the mystic logorrhoea that he called 'artspeak', Sylvester much preferred to concentrate on the physical realities of art. Francis Bacon was one of his favourite subjects:
"Looking at (an) image of an ectoplasmic head with an open mouth and an ear that seemed attached by a cord to the ceiling, I realised that it was a painting, not a cry of pain."

He admitted to being greatly influenced at the beginning of his career by Wittgenstein's infamous advice that "of that which we cannot speak, thereof we must remain silent."

For Sylvester, there is little point in attempting to discuss how a work came to be made; what is interesting is, firstly, the artist's avowed purpose, his public intentions, and, secondly, and essentially, the reaction of the viewer.
"Henry (Moore) never talked about the sexual implications of these caves, inside the blocks of stone or wood. This may have been because he was quite a prudish person... For me, those hollows and caverns in a Moore are very like exploring the cavities of a female body."

Sylvester, it seems, was no stranger to the female body.

Writing in the Sunday Times, AA Gill added his own voice those raised in lament at Sylvester's death earlier this year, writing about how his father opened a drawer at David Sylvester's office: "It was crammed to the top with condoms... Then, after another half hour, he noticed that a rug thrown casually over a sofa apparently hid a perfectly still curled-up person... I've just repeated this story to a woman who was a lifelong friend of David's. 'Are you sure it wasn't your mother?' she inquired dryly.."

Gill's piece ends, as mine does, with a quote from Sylvester that Gill describes as telling you everything you need to know about modern art:

"If one looks at anything with the intention of trying to discover what it means, one ends up no longer looking at the thing itself."

º Saturday 11th August 2001

 Art Week: One of the best books never written is my treatise called "The Site of the Sublime."

It's about how western civilisation was first taught the luxury of looking, beyond their mundane everyday concerns, to something higher and less well-defined. And how they were initially trained to expect to contact the numinous in a religious setting.

From there, the site of the sublime subtly shifted during the Romantic period to more secular outlets. People expected to be lifted out of themselves when listening to music, or reading poetry.

Or by looking at art.

How else to explain a remark that I treasure, overheard outside the National Gallery several years ago, as a back-packer turned enthusiastically to her travelling companion and exclaimed: "Man, that painting really wiped me away!!"

These days, if we want to touch a higher reality, we just pop a pill or too. The sublime has become just another commodity, the highpoint of a weekend away from work.

º Friday 10th August 2001

 Art Week: Although I read a lot about art (the excellent Thames and Hudson books in particular), the thought of submitting myself to any kind of formal further education never really occurred to me.

I drew a bit in my twenties (the bed-sit period), I became a keen photographer (and wrote a book on it), and I pursued various short-lived enthusiasms, many of which had at least some aesthetic element to them - I even tried embroidery at some stage, for about four days.

And then, in the mid-Eighties, shortly after we'd moved to Norfolk, Jane, one of my housemates, came home and announced that a woman she'd met at mothers-and-toddlers was giving evening art classes at the village school. And she'd told Jane that her funding was in danger of being cut because she couldn't meet the minimum class-size requirements. And Jane had decided that one answer was for me to enroll.

Our house was set quite apart from the village, and Jane's minglings with other local mothers was about as social as we got; if we needed company, we imported it from London for the weekend. I, in particular, had absolutely no desire to meet any of the people who lived around us.

But Jane can be quite forceful when she gets a bee in her bonnet, and a few days later, I found myself crammed into a child-sized chair surrounded by eight local housewives.

It goes without saying that I was the only male in the class, and a single, young, relatively attractive, relatively sophisticated male at that. Wednesday evenings became a hotbed of sexual tension, not least when the woman who fancied me most posed for a life-drawing lesson in her wedding dress - my, how my boyfriend and I laughed about that one.

It's easy enough to make fun of these parochial simplicities but it was the first time anyone had actually sat me down and taught me how to paint and draw. And I learnt. How to map out a drawing on a page. How to pre-stretch watercolour paper on a board. How to look.

And for quite a while afterwards I put what I'd learnt into practise. I spent several stoned weeks producing a painstaken painting of a child's red shoe, perfect down to a near-atomic level. A pencil sketch of my boyfriend's crutch in candy-coloured shorts on a pink Lloyd Loom chair. A bizarre but striking portrait of a Central American Indian, which I'll show you some time.

But then I got a computer and, somehow, it all became just graphic design. I miss drawing in particular, and wish I had the courage to take a pencil and a sketch pad into some of the gay bars I visit.

One day...

Towards a definition of art, kinda, sorta, maybe: the effectiveness of a work of art can be measured by the degree to which it produces a resonance above and beyond the thing itself.

Thus, infamously, a urinal in a gallery is more art than a urinal in a public toilet.
Thus, a seaside postcard that reminds people of an episode from their childhood is more art than random holiday snapshot.
Thus Richard Hamilton's painted relica of a newspaper photograph is more art than an original newspaper photograph.
Thus, a photograph of a burning Vietnamese child is more art than the bed in which you, and you alone, had a mental breakdown.

º Thursday 9th August 2001

 Art Week: My relationships with the people who have taught me about art have always been... interesting.

I don't remember much about my intense relationship with the art-teacher at my prep school, but I do recall that something I said to her caused great offence, and resulted in a long wait pacing the tiled floor outside the headmaster's study. (I have a dim memory of asking her if she loved me, which I hope is inaccurate.)

Another time, we were taken out on a nature ramble and invited to create something from whatever we found along the way. I spotted a discarded rubber milking tube and stuck a shiny horse chestnut into one end of it, thus unwittingly creating an object that resembled nothing so much as a giant uncut cock. More shock horror.

(I was a strange boy - strange but innocent. For the Public Speaking competition one year, I chose an extract from a James Bond novel, in which the villain ties a naked Bond into a seatless wicker chair and then rigs up a carpet-beater such that it whacks Bond's ass every time the villain twitches his foot. I imagine I thought of it as a light satire on corporal punishment; it was only years later, after my testicles had descended, that I realised what Ian Fleming had been on about...)

My first art master at public school was a portly beard-and-corduroy man called Mr Pickersgill. He taught me a valuable lesson when I loudly pestered him to let me stay after class, and he quietly advised me that there are some questions best asked in a diplomatic whisper.

When Mr Pickersgill retired (or did he die from a heart attack?), he was succeeded by a willowy young Northener fresh out of art college whom we shall call Iain. Iain was also my assistant house-master and his bed-sit soon became a place of refuge for me.

I would knock on his door late in the evening and, if he was in the mood, he'd let me in and we'd talk until late in the night, about everything and nothing. He'd let me smoke the odd cigarette and even, on occasion, give me a glass of wine.

I wasn't the only sixth-former he entertained, but I was certainly his most frequent visitor. I guess the authorities filed the conversations (if not the fags and booze) under Moral Guidance. I certainly learnt a lot from him, especially once he told me he was gay.

He and the Music Master (also gay) sometimes smuggled me out to go and watch a movie in London. As I've said before, it's quite likely that it was they who took me to my first gay bar. But he never laid a finger on me.

Except once, in the last few weeks of my school career, when we drove out to Box Hill, walked into the woods and had a little lie-down. He kissed me and I kissed him back but pretty soon after that my basic indifference must have become apparent and it went no further than that.

I always thought of him as much older than me, but in fact he was probably only five or six years older at most. We corresponded for a while after I left school, but it dwindled out and I haven't heard from him for over thirty years.

He was a sweet man. I wonder if he's still alive, what he's doing and what he's painting.

Serendipitiously, I found this link (at Jonno's) to the Washington Post - "When we talk about art, words let us down -- or vice versa."

Make a note of these clichés, and maybe we'll come back to them later in the week. (Oh hang on, it is later in the week.)

1. Art is a universal language.
2. It captures the eternal human spirit.
3. It brings us closer to our fellow man.
4. It makes us better people.
5. It is timeless.
6. It expresses the inexpressible.
7. It is our secular religion.
8. It makes us human.
9. It heals.
10. We can't live without it.

º Wednesday 8th August 2001

 Art Week: Speaking of horses reminds me that one of the grandest revelations in my life was a visit to an exhibition of the work of George Stubbs at the Tate in 1984.

Given that he more or less only ever painted horses, Stubbs is the most unlikely candidate for this kind of epiphany. Born in 1724, he was the son of a currier. He was arguably more interested in anatomy than painting, and once spent 18 months dissecting horses and drawing what he saw, the corpses suspended in front of him, the air in his studio heavy with the smell of decaying meat.

His skill in delineating horses earnt him a mint creating a record of celebrated bloodstock for wealthy patrons, trophy portraits that ought to be only one step up from the almost wilfully naive pictures of vast pigs and huge cattle that were painted for farmers by itinerant artists in the eighteenth century.

Horses mean nothing to me, I've never owned one, never even really met one. Horses bore me. And yet... the quality of Stubb's obsessive vision, his appreciation of the grace and beauty of the horse, lift his work above the purely documentary to a place of its own. The exhibition (and the excellent catalogue) made a huge impression on me.

On the few occasions that Stubbs painted something other than a horse, the result is quite astonishing. Check out his Zebra.

If I said to you "Horses, what's all that about then?" I think you could probably come up with an answer, something about supplementing man's travel ability by maintaining a four-legged machine that runs on grass.

Similarly, you could explain wine ("tastes nice, makes you drunk"), or bicycle pumps, or sex, or butterflies, or... practically anything else in life.

But not art. Why is that?

At it's crudest, the function of modern criticism is simply to point out what is or is not worth buying, as when a newspaper lists the top five movies of the week.

Above and beyond that, criticism can act as some kind of substitute for actually attending the event itself; my most common reaction on reading a theatre review these days is to think "Well thank god I don't have to go sit through that."

At its best though, criticism attempts to examine, not only the affects of a work, but the methods by which that affect is achieved.

The more ostensible content there is in a work, the more tempting it is to concentrate on describing the work, rather than discussing the way that it works. Drama is easiest to describe ("this happens, then this, then there's an explosion") and art is the most difficult.

Perhaps that explains why there seems to be so little mainstream art criticism around: Art London lists upwards of 60 galleries in London alone, and yet it's only ever the major shows which seem to merit any discussion.

I don't need to point out that when I talk about 'art' in all this, I'm using the word in its narrowest, plastic, definition as opposed to the sense that includes music, theatre and literature, do I?

No? Good - because what with all the various materials used in some of the stuff I've seen lately (Bruce Nauman tape loops, neon rivers, giant photographs, a room hung with upside down typewriters) I'd hate to have to try and pin it down any further.

º Tuesday 7th August 2001

 Art Week: Unlike some people I've had the pleasure of meeting recently, I've never met David Hockney, despite living down the road from him for several years and spending a lot of time walking past his studio hoping to be invited in to a party.

But I did once have sex with his boyfriend in the toilets at Notting Hill Gate tube station.

Does that count?

Sometimes I think there's just too much art in the world.

My ex (the good ex, not the bad ex) was friendly with one of the younger members of the Marlborough Galleries dynasty, and she occasionally guided him towards some good prints at reasonable prices. One of the nicer things he ever did for me was to leave them in my charge when he hopped off to Kuala Lumpur.

My particular favourite is a Ben Nicholson lithograph, a fairly simple arrangement of five or six densely-coloured abstract forms against a hazy beige background. I didn't much take to it the first time I saw it, but over the past few years an appreciation of its subtle balance has unfolded in my head like a Japanese paper flower in a glass of clear water.

It's a privilege to live with it (and you can be sure I kicked up a hell of a stink when he tried to retrieve it on a recent visit.)

But if it takes me that long to come to appreciate one lithograph, what am I supposed to do when confronted by an exhibition of Ben Nicholson prints? How am I supposed to react when confronted by an entire gallery filled with pieces by Nicholson's friends and contemporaries?

The average studious visit to a national gallery of art takes, what, three hours at most? And in that time one will be exposed to, what, three or four hundred works? Works that each took several months, often several years, to complete.

400 works times 2 months divided by 3 hours... does not compute.

I guess it's no wonder that modern-art favoured the quick fix: Warhol, Rauschenberg, Koons. Or that Brit art has reached a stage where you don't even have to see the work to smell the buzz: Tracey Emin's bed, Damien Hirst's shark, Gavin Turk's Che.

During his visit to New York, David told me, he visited something like 29 galleries in one morning. I wonder how much of what he saw there will still be with him in a year's time?

º Monday 6th August 2001

 Art Week: One of the things for which I have never forgiven my Minor Public School is that, the year I joined, the powers that be decided to stream children to O-level, with results that impacted my future career choices quite severely.

At the end of our first term, at the tender age of 13, everyone in my year was subjected to an exam. Those who did less well (the B-stream) followed the traditional three-year course of studies: Lower Fourth form, Upper Fourth, Fifth. The brighter kids (the A-stream) were pushed to O-levels in just two years.

Thanks to the resulting pressure on the A-stream curriculum, tuition in several traditional subjects was either dropped or severly curtailed. So I never had to do Religious Studies, hoorah, but I only got one double-period in Art each week, boo.

I always enjoyed art classes, above and beyond their traditional appeal as a ligger's paradise, and I often asked, and received, permission to stay after class and carry on working. But I never got a chance to take Art as an O-level subject. So it was never an option for A-level.

I chose English Lit and French as my sixth-form subjects and did well at them (in those days French was fifty per cent language and fifty per cent literature.) I also did Maths, for some bizarre reason, and hated it.

I had a strong attack of teen-moodiness around this time, and more or less wilfully refused to get decent grades. In consequence, when I left school, I didn't go to University but went straight out and got a job (in advertising) instead, where I made a lot of money and was generally unhappy.

In a parallel universe, though, I would have got good A-level grades in English, French and Art and would have gone on, not to university, but to Art School.

Art School, in the late Sixties, can you imagine? The politics. The sex. The drugs. And hey, maybe even some art as well.

I wonder what would have happened after that? I like to think I'd have made a good artist (whatever that is) but I guess it's equally likely that I'd have discovered drugs and become a heroin addict or, worse, a graphic designer.

Even to this day though I find it intensely annoying that, all because of some stoopid scholastic fashion, I never had a chance to find out.

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