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May/June 2009 An alien new to this remote parish of the Milky Way might be forgiven for thinking we in Britain have devised an ingenious novel method for curing economic depression. Our construction industry has ceased even its poor levels of productivity and atrocious craftsmanship, but we are not, it would seem, going to spend our way out of debt and recession by building houses, reservoirs, power stations, heavy industrial plant, railways, polytechnic colleges, and other useful assets. No, that tried and trusted formula would be too easy. Instead, we’re going to build art galleries, dozens of them. By 2020 we’ll have rationed water and daily power cuts but, hell, we’ll have wall-to-wall conceptual art to light up our lives and slake our thirst. These new facilities will be paid for with crisp, newly minted loans which the most illiterate and innumerate generation in our modern history will eventually have to pay for. They will exhibit more of the art, such as that typified by the execrable Altermodern at Tate Britain, which nobody is going to see in existing galleries and in which only a handful of career civil servants and their placemen critics has any scholarly or other interest. It makes you wonder how we’ve managed to survive to date without all these galleries. We must have been spiritually and sensorily deprived. Thus, scarcely a day passes without the unveiling of another fancy scheme. The latest is an admin, storage and conservation block for the British Museum, a small part of which will house the temporary exhibitions currently shoehorned into the Reading Room. Designed by town-planning busybody, Richard Rogers, it resembles – like most of his firm’s stuff – a row of fully extended aluminium ladders, and is obviously therefore highly sympathetic to its Georgian and mid-Victorian Bloomsbury setting. It will be built to the west of the museum’s back entrance and require the demolition of a row of period houses. The cost is £135 million and follows only eight years after the £120 million that was spent disfiguring the central courtyard by Rogers’s former colleague and fellow lord of the flies, Norman Foster. Unfortunately, we are going to have to get used to watching Mr MacGregor striding about his garden in a hard hat trilling about the unique stories he will soon reveal before our very eyes. Leaving aside the obvious inconsistency of a national arts lobby which, like a scratched 78, repeatedly pleads poverty whilst constantly dreaming up new, grandiose and expensive building projects, my main objection to this latest extension is its deflection from the main purpose of the British Museum, which has for years been neglected by successive directors. Apparently, opening all the museum’s galleries at the same time is not the first priority of the BM’s directors, seduced as they all are by expansionism and newspaper praise for their ‘vision’. Some galleries remain shut for months on end simply because either the will or the resources are not there to open them. I’ve referred many times in these pages to the closure of the classical sculpture and architecture galleries. As a weekly visitor to the BM, the opening of the basement architecture gallery has only coincided with my visits twice in the last five years. (On one of these occasions my delight was spoiled by concern about being entombed when a forgetful attendant returned to lock the door. My skeleton would be discovered years later draped across some fragment of egged-and-darted pediment – such a mystery would defeat even Jonathan Creek.) The galleries showing the Bassae Frieze, so expensively refurbished a decade ago by an American donor who has doubtless been told that ìOh yes of course Mrs Fatpurse, they are open round the clock, honest they areî, are in my experience accessible only once every five or ten visits. The galleries containing sculptures from the Mausoleum of Halicarnassos and the peripheries of the Acropolis are also closed erratically and daily. If the BM can’t afford to open for every visitor these allegedly key episodes in their antique ‘story’, how will they afford to run a new annexe with 1,100 square metres of additional exhibition space? I can’t begin to fathom the philosophy at work here. For sure, it has nothing to do with the scholarly and educational purposes of the museum. Thank heavens the over-rated and egocentric architect Daniel Libeskind wasn’t allowed to disfigure the Victoria and Albert Museum. That one was a close shave all right. Even those who routinely support any modern excrescence would have been regretting it by now. The same maniac’s ‘university’ building on the Holloway Road is hideous enough – looking every inch a huge mistake it is filthy and in need of demolition well under a decade after it was opened. The Imperial War Museum in Salford is, however, in a different league of incompetence. Not only is it a grubby eyesore but it’s a cold bunker totally unsuited to its purpose – which is to show art and objects in sympathetic surroundings. It shouldn’t need stating but the subject of the Imperial War Museum is its collection not the building housing it. There is, alas, no practical purpose Libeskind’s structure could well serve. I’ve been in multi-storey car parks which are aesthetically and functionally more winning than this draughty dump. There is, for example, nowhere to exhibit properly paintings and sculpture. The current exhibition, the worthy Women War Artists, is unviewable. Lighting originates high in the rafters and is burningly harsh in an otherwise gloomy, concrete cavern where drawings and paintings are exhibited on makeshift partitions. The work of Evelyn Dunbar, along with Laura Knight the best artist in the exhibition, cannot be seen close up because of the viewer’s intervening black silhouette. I’ve never seen an exhibition in a national gallery hung as badly as this one is – the museum’s curators of art, and I suspect it is not their fault, must be in despair. Additionally, that grand machine depicting an underground station by Walter Bayes is jammed high on a wall in an acute corner and is impossible to see except when positioning oneself slightly around another corner. In this place there is no purpose to its exhibition. Elsewhere, one is presented with an apparently random assortment of objects in a vast, dark hole where it is impossible to display objects as a coherent narrative. How did the trustees of a national museum sanction a design so entirely unfitted to its purpose as this one demonstrably is? This building is a monument not only to the over-indulgence of egotistical modern architects, but also to the gullibility of clients too scared to slap down the fashionable and ask for something suitable and sensible. The first room of the Palladio exhibition at the Royal Academy was a post-nuclear scene worthy of Lindsay Anderson. The new visitor had to step over the piled bodies of those rendered quickly and deeply unconscious by that most potent weapon of mass destruction: the architectural drawing. Seriously though, how long could you look at them before slumping jelly-kneed and lifeless over an Airfix model of the Villa Capra? Palladio’s genius and perfection is nothing without the high sky and idyllic randomness of surrounding Nature. Instead of wasting your time and money on these scraps go to Greenwich or Chiswick, or Filey. Following its journey north, where as I reported recently it was impossible to see clearly, Whistlejacket is back stabled in Trafalgar Square. Wherever you stand in his gallery he is now gloriously visible. National Gallery curators should perhaps travel away with their pictures to give provincials the benefit of their considerable expertise in hanging pictures so they might actually be seen properly. In the same gallery as the Stubbs hangs Rain, Steam and Speed, Turner’s 1843 account of sulphurous fumes swirling over the Thames during a shower. A down GWR rake of open passenger carriages is passing across Maidenhead bridge apparently, and famously, in pursuit of a hare. The train is here, they say, as a symbol of man-made tempest, the monster of modernity threatening the very survival of Nature herself. In order to convey the ferocity of the unleashed iron beast of progress, Turner had to paint what he knew about an engine rather what he could actually have observed when encountering such a locomotive head on. As a result we can see the hot coals of the engine grate, which are visible only from the driver’s end of the barrel, certainly not from the front. What we should be seeing bearing down upon us is only the sooty silhouette of chimney and smoke box, which in Turner’s case he has imagined, inaccurately, to be shaped like a vintage port bottle. This black form both encasing fire and spitting red sparks across the track, works within the picture structure as a hot focal point. It’s splendid, yes, but quite illogical. As Constable said of Turner – though I can’t now recall why or when – it was as though the little fellow deliberately set off fireworks in his pictures to bring them alive and make everyone else’s look dull in comparison. Rain, Steed and Speed is a literal example of this. Not having attended one for many years, this year’s London Art Fair reminded me how ridiculous such events are. Grown men lurk about like shifty hawkers shuffling their feet and rubbing their mitts, tongues drooling ready to slurp across any passing buttock. Most of the work on display is decorative rubbish. The fairs do appeal, it seems, to silly, middle-aged women with half a nose for art and bugger all else to do of a Thursday morning. They work the floor in busy pairs and trios seeking out and praising the most revolting muck. I enjoy stalking them and eavesdropping on the competing crescendos of their observations. Their breathless speech and spastic arm movements are seen nowhere else in life, excepting perhaps from the equally risible wafflers on the Newsnight Review banquette. So, one searches in vain. Or not quite. Jonathan Cooper can hold his head high this year for including on his stand four sculptures from the 1950s that would grace any national or regional museum; two maquettes by Kenneth Armitage; a scrawny but elegant female figure staring moonfaced at the sky by Reg Butler; and a portable bronze of a glamourous lady by the marvellous and inventive, and regrettably shortlived, George Fullard, which, had the opportunity presented itself, I’d have half-inched without either second thought or regret. As soon as you read that an exhibition about drawing will feature a selection of ìinternational artistsî you know you’re dealing with a show which will have nothing to do with drawing as you’ve come to understand it. It will be an official State Art version of the medium in which selected contributors have done almost anything but draw. It will, therefore, involve a laughable perversion of accepted definitions of what constitutes a drawing. The current State Art display about ìdrawingî at the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art would have gone unnoticed if it hadn’t been for a correspondent in a newspaper pretending that the alternative ìinternationalî style of State Art drawings represents some sort of a new departure. The Times’s review by one Joanna Pitman, whose photography notices in the same paper are not worth reading because she knows next to nothing about the subject and has no developed critical response to the medium, was pitched at a startling level of ignorance. To start with she is under the misapprehension that drawing isn’t done any more. How can you be writing for a national newspaper whilst under so serious a delusion? Startled by her discovery that it is indeed still done, she refers gushingly to someone who draws parallel lines on a wall with a pencil. This apparently demonstrates that the graphic tradition is alive and kicking and ìtaking the language of drawing beyond our expectationsî. Ms Pitman, I could stick a 6B Staedtler up my arse, scribble some profane graffito on the tunnel vaulting of my large bowel and claim that I was taking the language of drawing to new heights, or depths depending on your point of view. It wouldn’t make what I did in any way artistic or otherwise pertinent to anything at all. It would merely represent a rather disgusting novelty, which would – hooray – get both my name and magnificent fundament into the papers. Ever the willing State Art lapdog, Pitman continued: ìDrawing needs to be lifted out of the purgatory of preparatory craft.î No it doesn’t you brainless ass. It is not purgatory but merely an approach which needs to be won by dedicated achievement, and the little victories of figurative drawing, though they can’t claim to be either innovative or advancing the language (whatever that means), are subtle pleasures in themselves. Those who can’t understand the simple satisfaction of an astute observation convincingly conveyed shouldn’t be passing themselves off as art critics. David Lee | |||||
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