Art History Fieldwork Report.wps

ART HISTORY FIELDWORK REPORT

-1

JOHN A. WALKER (COPYRIGHT 1978)

North London. A Spring Sunday during the Easter vacation. With a borrowed camera I go in search of community murals for a lecture to be given to fine art students in the Summer term. I take the tube to New Cross Gate in South London. This area is a shambles. Once the London docks were full of ships, goods and dockers. Now the docks are deserted but people still live all around them. As the tube train emerges from its tunnel under the Thames, I see railway embankments, used car dumps, lorry parks, the remnants of old terraced back streets, various council housing developments, tall schools dating from the turn of the century, travellers living in caravans among rubbish tips; in short, the backside of the capital. I arrive at my objective: the Milton Court housing estate, a new council development. with concrete tower blocks, three-story flats, multistorey car parks, old half-demolished streets, and a red brick shopping precinct with a pub. Although the flats are fully occupied, work is still in progress everywhere: paths being laid, housing developments being completed, rubble, mud, building machines and materials in all directions. The heaps of sand, stones and bricks by the paths inevitably remind my art-educated vision of Post-Minimal sculpture with its 'antiform’ aesthetic. Children play with these materials giving them some order; in contrast, discarded card board boxes at the rear of a shop are being torn to pieces. Milton court is an exceptionally rich environment - perceptually speaking. The layout of the buildings seems to me, a stranger, chaotic, the architectural styles and

materials employed multifarious. Everything within sight has been designed by somebody but as a totality it makes no sense - no structure, just an accretion of odds and ends. Murals by students from a local art college adorn (if that is the right word) the external walls of the ground floors of the tower blocks and their entrance hallways. (This area includes Goldsmith’s College of Art.) Each of the blocks has been given a name: Hercules, Pegasus, Archer, etc; often the themes of the murals relate to these names. For example, Archer tower has an image of a Robin Hood type archer at its base. The tower blocks are harsh. Their bases are particularly unattractive therefore the murals function as a face lift for the architecture. Pictorial cosmetic. (After thought: will painting and architecture ever work together in harmony again?) In terms of content the murals are irrelevant to the problems and issues confronting the inhabitants of the blocks. Let us be frank. This estate is a ghetto for the working class and the lumpen proletariat. Among the population there appears to be a considerable number of West Indian immigrants and their British children. I note a number of anti-National Front graffiti and fly posters. However, the vast majority of the figures in the murals are white. One mural depicts the inhabitants of the block in question and shows an image of racial harmony - two children, one black and one white sitting close to one another. But in another mural there are black figures disporting themselves in a tropical paradise replete with sandy beaches, cool rivers, and waving palm trees; an image straight from the travel adverts and a vestige of the era of colonialism with its myth of happy savages. For those that work in factories, offices, shops, at home in the kitchen, the two weeks annual holiday 'away from it all' are a compensation - for those that can afford it - -

for the other fifty weeks spent in the inner city. To place these images of escape at the foot of these concrete boxes adds insult to injury. At last the sun emerges. There are now blue skies over Milton Court. Boys are playing football in a concrete area enclosed by wire mesh and short brick walls. These walls are covered by paintings of children, dogs, plus lists of names, all produced by children. A boy of about ten insists that I photograph the painting of the dog. He, it seems, is the artist and proud of his work. (I am happy to do so because I think his schematic, colourful canine has more energy and decorative impact than the murals by the artists.) I ask the boys what they think of the artists’ murals as compared to their own. They immediately acknowledge that the artists’ murals are better but it turns out that this refers primarily to their greater technical skill. Actually, they prefer to do their own art rather than having it done for them by outsiders. But would they, one wonders, have done any paintings at all without the stimulus of the artists? The Japanese camera I am using is expensive - the kind with a built-in light meter. What you see in the viewfinder is what will appear in the slides. All I really need to adjust is the focus. What a sense of power the camera imparts. Nothing could be easier than to press the button and appropriate the appearance of the world. I realise that the nature of my project - to record the murals photographically implies that I am using the medium transparently, as if photography was a neutral channel capable of transmitting the first order media (architecture/painting) without alteration. These thoughts trouble me but since I cannot see any immediate

solution I continue to take photographs: selecting a motif, framing it, deciding camera angles, editing in camera. The decisions are made quickly, mainly in response to the character of the motif. The mental computations seem almost unconscious, even though I have not taken enough photographs for the process to become automatic. (These words on the page, are they transparent too?) Back to New Cross Gate station. I take the train to Wapping on the North bank of the Thames and walk towards Cable Street, the Commercial Road, and Whitechapel. Jack the Ripper's old hunting grounds. (How is it that with the passage of time this destroyer of women has become a picturesque character.) Dock walls as tall as cliffs line the street (built to protect the merchant's goods, to keep thieves out and the dockers in). Huge, empty warehouses interspersed by several varieties of council housing developments (the sign of a dozen initiatives that petered out). Streets have names redolent of London’s golden age of trade with the colonies: Penang St, Cinnamon St, and so forth. (That wealth, where is it now? Who has it now? Not these people sitting in the sun on their back steps). I am a stranger with a camera. The locals ignore me and head for the corner pubs for their Sunday lunchtime pints. Around Watney Market I search in vain for a mural. It has probably been demolished. Community murals are ephemeral. My slides will probably outlive them. Meanwhile, in Cardiff, the Association of Art Historians is holding its second annual conference. No doubt some of my work colleagues are delivering papers and impressing audiences with their erudition and research skills. Most of them would

not be found dead on the Milton Court estate. In terms of visual culture, what is common to such disparate districts of London as Hornsey, Paddington, Tower Hamlets, New Cross and Hampstead? The answer: a photographic view of Egyptian pyramids with a blazing sun and a gold coloured cigarette packet - advertising hoardings featuring an image for Benson & Hedges special filter cigarettes (designed by the advertising agency Collett, Dickenson, Pearce and Partners). (1) Not all of us are subject to community murals but we are all subject to the propaganda of the mass media. I photograph the hoardings in preparation for a lecture on art and advertising. Asian immigrants are to be found, appropriately enough, in Assam St. Near Commercial Road the streets become much noisier and busier. Shops are full of tatty, gaudy clothes and expensive looking radio sets. At noon, I reach my final destination: the Whitechapel Art Gallery. It features a retrospective of Carl Andre's sculpture. Outside the pavement is packed with East Enders and the usual male drifters and winos. Inside, there are only a few people, mostly foreign tourists. On the ground floor, Andre has a set of floor pieces in metal. (The sculptural equivalent of Minimal painting but using the floor as a ground instead of a wall.) On the first floor, there are wood and brick pieces. All very aesthetic. I am permitted by the young man guarding (!) the arrangements of logs and bricks to take some installation shots for educational purposes. Photographing individual pieces is forbidden by owners exercising their rights under the copyright laws. Over coffee and a scone in the downstairs snack bar I study a panel of reviews and press reports. No sign of any radical dissent. Why

are the art critics so mealy mouthed. (Two years ago the press was much more outspoken). (2) I ask myself: what is the connection between what I have seen outside and what I have seen inside? Compare and contrast. Materially and formally, there is a resemblance: Andre arranges simple geometric blocks, so do the local councils of London. Ultimately, their theoretical source is the same: the ideology of modern architecture and sculpture, pure forms without frills, without ornament, cheap and functional. But, of course, their functions are different. The architecture has a content, literally, that is, people; they animate the sterility of the blocks. They humanise the buildings in spite of the best efforts of the architects. And, as I have said, theirs is an exceptionally rich perceptual environment, full of disorder, muck, and half-completed projects. Whereas, in the gallery installation, the buzz and complexity of everyday life has been eliminated. It is a haven of rest, pure forms, spaces, and materials. Like a graveyard. In terms of price, in terms of the education necessary to comprehend its purpose, this sculpture is not accessible to the people. Yet it is being shown in Whitechapel. The gallery doors are wide open. There is no entrance fee. Hence, physically it is accessible to them for a month. The show offers itself to them as a zone of contemplation. Here is a relief from the traffic, the tawdryness, the litter, the noise, and the frenetic commercialism of Commercial Road, that is, a relief from the world as it is, 1978, London's East End. Will they come? No. And why should they? The bricklayer who lives or works on the Milton Court estate knows more about bricks than Carl Andre. The carpenter also has a finer appreciation of wood than the American artist. His art, therefore, is for those that have ceased to work with their hands. Art for the bourgeoisie and the

intelligentsia. The Whitechapel location is a blind. The show is not addressed to East Enders but to West Enders. Andre's sculpture is thoroughly quietistic. It is suitable for a religious sect or a hierarchical society in which nothing changes for thousands of years. In a handout Andre remarks: ‘Ideas … no, my work has no more idea than a tree, or a rock, or a mountain or an ocean'. Pure Being (no Becoming). But bricks and metal plates are not fragments of raw Nature, they are not unmediated, they are natural materials that have been transformed by human labour and machines to serve human purposes. Andre wants to deny human labour and purposes, even his own (that is, the mental labour involved in the artist’s decision making process selection, arrangement). He even wants to deny art itself. Art is artificial. It is not a natural phenomena but, again, the product of collective, human mental labour over many centuries. Try this as a definition: art is a social institution. Outside the art framework, whether physical - the art gallery - or mental - the mental set of the viewer, Andre's bricks revert back to their everyday status as building materials. Andre intends us to enjoy wood as wood, form as form, space as space. Pure phenomenology. Sensory perception for sensory perception's sake. Underlying the work is the idea - philosophically absurd - of a return to things in themselves: 'if only we could pare away all our social conditioning, if only we could detach the material, the form, the space from its relationship to everything else, from its relationship to human needs and purposes, then we could really see it as it is.’ However, if we succeeded in this enterprise then we would be no longer human because it is precisely those sooia1 relationships and purposes that make us human

and give meaning to our lives. Today, I have seen and photographed community murals, children's paintings, advertising hoardings and American Minimal sculpture. Only the children’s work seemed to offer any example of use for the future: a society is needed in which art is produced by the people for the people. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------(1) For more on the Benson & Hedges campaign, see John A. Walker, Art in the Age of Mass Media, 3rd ed ((London & Sterling VA: Pluto Press, 2001), p. 53

(2) In 1976 there was a scandal in the British press about the Tate gallery’s purchase of Andre’s sculpture Equivalent VIII (1966). The so-called ‘bricks’ affair. See John A. Walker, Art and Outrage: Provocation, Controversy and the Visual Arts, (London & Sterling VA: Pluto Press, 1999), pp. 73-78. --------------------------------------------------------------------------------John A. Walker is a painter and art historian. He is the author of Left Shift: Radical Art in 1970s Britain, (London & New York: I. B. Tauris, 2002).