The Language of Sculpture

Henry Moore sculpture (etching & aquatint)

BBC4, the digital channel, have been running a truly excellent series of programmes about the Sixties and I became conscious last night that I'd not kept up to date with all of them.

They showed what I understood to be the second part of a three parter called Art and the 60s, and it was fascinating. It dealt with the radical changes in British sculpture which came about mainly through the work being done at St Martin's School of Art.

The programme led off with Anthony Caro's rebellion against the naturalism of his mentor, Henry Moore (he worked as Moore's assistant for two years). Destroying all he'd done in the Moore manner, he went on to devise a purely abstract form of sculpture made from flat aluminium rectangles, beams and rods, all painted a vivid colour

In this respect, it was interesting to hear him say that his very first sculpture in this new style was painted green. His wife told him it didn't work and suggested he paint it red, which he did.

I've never been a great lover of Caro's work, although some of his more recent work which I saw at Tate Modern a few years ago (such as Child's Tower Room), did seem to have something about it. There's no denying, however, that he set the scene for a break with sculpture of the past while providing a set of rules and guidelines (codified in print by William Tucker) to take things forward.

And following closely behind Caro was Phillip King.

King also spent a couple of years working with Moore and also came to reject his way of working. He embraced Caro's new sculptural guidelines and using new materials, such as fibreglass, produced strange, colourful sculptures derived almost entirely from his imagination, like Rosebud and Genghis Khan.. Long before I ever grew interested in fine art, I loved the work of Phillip King.

Indeed, the Sixties are where I began to be both fascinated by fine art and disillusioned by the direction it seemed to be taking. Because no sooner had Caro laid out his rules for making sculpture, then, of course, a new generation came along who saw it as their duty to throw out, or at least question those rules.

As the programme demonstrated, it was a short slippery slope through the performances of Bruce McLean, the recorded walks of Richard Long, Barry Flanagan's heap of sand with the middle scooped out, to the music hall posturing of Gilbert & George's Singing Sculpture..

My use of the term "slippery slope" I freely admit puts a slant on the programme which the producers perhaps would not want. But they were able to draw out of some of the older artists a view that much of the later work was "not sculpture."

And personally, I was fascinated by the fact that while Caro and King were prepared to talk openly about their ideas, people like Long and Flanagan were at first unwilling even to be interviewed and then either aggressive or monosyllabic in their replies to perfectly reasonable questions.

Geordie Frustration

Well, we're getting into the early part of the morning and there's a big yellow disc in the sky. That must be the almost complete blue moon fighting its way through the grey clouds.

I've just come from watching the latest episode of The Smoking Room, a comedy series on BBC3 I generally find amusing. Tonight's episode had a cameo part by someone pretending to be a Geordie, for no reason other than being a Geordie is funny/cool/whatever.

I know that Geordies have become flavour of the moment with the media. Generally, I don't have any objections to that. Christ, I actually watched the mediocre talent on Top of the Pops tonight simply because it was a live broadcast from Gateshead Quays. People said nice things about Gateshead and called it a "City". Which it isn't, but it deserves to be as much as Sunderland did (but then we don't have a Japanese car manufacturer to impress).

My objection to the inclusion of Geordies in tv dramas and comedies is that they keep faking it. There's some voice-over git on Channel 4 who does an absolutely awful Geordie accent. There's also Jane Middlemiss who crops up as much as Wogan did in his heyday and is just awful anyway.

But there now seems to be a desire to put Geordies in dramas because they're cool, not because they have anything to add to the plot. This week's Waking the Dead had much of its action in the North-East, but it was clear that the main character had learned his accent in the Sunderland/South Durham area, rather than somewhere around Alnwick in Northumberland, as suggested by the plot.

This is not parochialism on my part. The problem with the accents is that they're trying to be something they're not. Mostly they're trying to be Tyneside (ie. Newcastle and Gateshead), but for some reason, perhaps to do with acting schools, the actors are mainly from the Sunderland / Co.Durham area.

But if that's where they're from, let them speak like that. Don't encourage them to try to be Geordies. It's a difficult accent.

Obviously I have no idea whether other regional accents are convincingly portrayed on tv. They sound OK to me. But maybe other bloggers can tell me whether they had the same kind of annoyance when their accents went through the Popularity Barrier?

Musical Beetroot

Spinach beet (A4 sketchbook, Pilot disposable pen)

It can hardly have escaped your notice that I'm passionately interested in Art and in Gardens. I'm therefore really pleased, over the moon, even, about having booked my tickets to London at the end of the month. At last I can get to Tate Modern to see the Hopper exhibition.

But I've also just realised that on the same trip I can take in Tate Britain, where they're showing The Art of the Garden. Hurrah!

Lest you get the impression that the Zip Passion Portfolio contains only two quivering passions, however, let me reassert my abiding interest in music. And here, I'm indebted to Occupied Country for drawing my attention to the existence of The John Martyn Website. They're playing One for the Road and Johnny Too Bad at the moment, but the selection will change.

I've been a fan of John Martyn for years and used to look forward to his gigs in Newcastle a lot. Even when I thought he was slipping a little into MOR with the Phil Collins-produced numbers, I still thought he was terrific; just not as terrific as in his Echoplex period.

There was a good tv documentary on Martyn a couple of weeks ago and it was encouraging to see him making a determined effort to get back on the road, despite all of his set-backs, not least being the loss of a leg.

Last night's BBC4 documentary on Viv Stanshall was also well worth watching. I had no idea he'd done so much after the Bonzos split up - everything from an opera to a ship converted to a floating theatre. Yet most of it came to nowt, mainly because he had no faith in his ability to succeed, and kept walking away from things, people, projects.

An unjustly neglected English eccentric, I didn't even know, until now, that he'd died in his top floor flat when he set his beard alight. I think it was "Legs" Larry Smith who said that if the fags couldn't kill him from the inside....

Neil Innes carried much of the story, inevitably, and had a good tale about their first drive across America. Being somewhat odd-looking, they were stopped by a police car. The police officer asked them if they had any drugs, coke, hash, whatever. "No, no," said Innes, hoping against hope that Stanshall would keep quiet, "we're British, we prefer a good pint of beer."

"D'you have any weapons, any guns or knives?"

"No, no."

"Then how do you fellas expect to defend yourselves?"

At which point Viv Stanshall leaned forward and said, "Good manners!"

Oh, and it's not all old stuff I like. This week, the CD player has been occcupied with: Manu Chao, Philip Glass, Andy Sheppard, Andreas Scholl, Duke Ellington, EST, Brad Mehldau, Bill Frisell, Rabih Abou-Khalil, Gregory Isaacs, Zappatistas, the Baghdaddies and Natacha Atlas.

And Donovan.

Hopper again...

And now we come to the tricky bit. My old buddy, Buddy K (AKA Throdorus Gassoon) suffers from a form of Comment Box Claustrophobia, so I've imported part of his latest Comment here. How this will work out, should the occasion occur again, remains to be seen.

But it's my blog and I'll do whatever I think is right.

Saw the Tim Marlowe show on Hopper, thought it all a bit shallow - but the paintings were great - and I suspect not a little influential on Mr Zip - especially the view of a NYC building from the train (can't remember the title).

Surprised he didn't mention the other great US big city alienist of the time - Cornell Woolrich. Hopper's paintings would make great covers for his books. Suzie Sue and I are going to see it next week.

I missed most of the Tim Marlow programme tonight, but have generally found him interesting and competent enough. I think he's more of a populariser of painting, and who am I to condemn him for that?

I also missed some of the Alan Yentob (I still find it difficult to believe he changed his name from "Botney") Imagine programme on Hopper last night, because instead of checking the tv listings, I fell under the spell of Jurassic Park III. What I did see, however, was very good, and I'm assured Patsy123 has it all safely on video, waiting for my trip to London.

What fascinates me about all the attention the Hopper show is getting is that it's painting we're talking about. Not someone's snot in a jar. Not a room lit by a light-bulb taken from the desk-lamp of the architect of the Twin Towers and placed in a gallery context. Not ....oh, make up your own. You can do it. Anyone can.

Now why should it be that so much attention is being given to a 20th century American Realist painter? Could it be that there's so much more to say about his work than there is about snot in a jar? Surely not.

Or could it be that the publicity surrounding contemporary art was enough to get the general public into galleries, but now the same general public have recognised that a lot of contemporary art is superficial bollocks.

At the same time they've been exposed to the long tradition of painting and suddenly realise that, hey, we can look at this! It isn't elitist after all. You might have to work at it. You might find that the more you learn about art history, the more you get out of gallery visits. But we can enjoy looking at paintings.

I've noticed that there's been a recent flurry of books by some of the bigger publishers, Dorling Kindersley for one, providing a good popularist background to the history of painting. The guys at these publishing houses don't do this sort of thing unless they think they've spotted a trend.

And perhaps tv producers have spotted the same trend. As a painter, I hardly need say that I would find this a Good Thing.

Au Café

Long ago, in a life far away, the Frootbat and I hatched a plan for the establishment of Café Society. We both harboured a Romantic vision of those days at the beginning of the last century when poets, writers and artists would hang out in the pavement cafés of Paris, discussing matters Cultural. Political and Philosophical. In the rosy days following our escape from the Office, we intended the coffee-houses of Newcastle to be the stage where we would put the world to rights over cups of good strong black coffee, Gauloises staining our fingers.

Except he would take cream with his coffee and neither of us would smoke.

The plan got off to a good enough start, with a session or two at Boskoops, at the time the only real coffee shop in town. On the first floor we could drink our coffee and look out over Old Eldon Square, where the Punks, Goths and Layabouts drink cider and throw beer-cans at the pigeons round the War Memorial. But things fell apart, the Heat Death of the Universe and that sort of thing, and once I started my University course, coffee days receded once more into the realm of Plans for the Future.

There came a point one summer when I felt we’d got back on track. We had a good two-hour long, two 4-cup cafetière conversation in the new upstairs lounge of Costa, on the corner of Grey Street (where the Peaches & Cream fancy underwear shop used to be). As the sound of pneumatic drills rattled in through the open window, we talked about whatever came to mind. Music: the latest tape-loop had just arrived from Buddy K that morning. Literature: the Frootbat had just finished The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists and I was part way into The Songlines. The Internet: neither of us connected, neither of us convinced of its current usefulness as opposed to its potential. Greg Dyke’s plans for the BBC: sacking middle management to save money to make programmes seemed a good idea; making dumbed-down “popular” programmes for BBC1 and ghettoising more demanding programmes on BBC2 (where they could be dropped because they didn't achieve good viewing figures), more worrying.

Like all good days, of course, it couldn't last and when the conversation descended to the construction and state of our trouser pockets it was clearly time to go. The Frootbat set off to collect his wife from her IT course and I went to the Grainger Market to buy the last few items for the gumbo I was concocting that night. Sadly, that was the last highly caffeinated afternoon of the year. By the time holidays were out of the way, I was due back at University.

A lot of things have changed since then. We're both on-line and devoted to the miracle of broadband. Greg Dyke is fading into history. I've graduated and am now a full-time artist. The Frootbat's time is increasingly taken up with more pressing matters, including grandfatherly duties.

But I still believe the world may hear of Café Society again.

My brain hurts

Despite the bit of the strap line that reads, "...blogger by night," you can't expect me to sit here blogging to you all night. Especially when there's a movie called The Beast in the Cellar about to start on BBC1. I think it's the one where Flora Robson keeps the brain of a serial killer in her cellar, but meanwhile, out in the shed.....

Hot News!

While helping CJ get rid of the Too Much Work Blues (ah, how I remember those) at the Sicilian restaurant, Pani's, tonight, I found myself with a face full of buccatini and no-one to talk to cos she'd gone to the loo. Looking up I found I was watching the "Hit Channel" on some Italian broadcast service. While a guy rattled on incomprehensibly over a video of some squawking bimbos, a banner ran across the bottom of the screen. If my Italian hasn't totally failed me, it seems Zak Starkly (sic), son of Ringo Star (sic) has joined Oasis and makes his debut with the English band at Glastonbury. Not hot news, huh? Do I care? Naah. I think it'll take more than Zak Starkly to pull their chestnuts out of the fire.

[Chestnut cliche provided by Over the Moon Services]