My Time in Space (6 page)

In those years when mass assembly seemed to be the art form most deeply concerned with great issues and our weekends were spent shouldering each other forward in Trafalgar Square and Grosvenor Square, watching the dreamers in Hyde Park give flowers to policemen, or suffering incomprehensible harangues on the Dialectics of Liberation in the Roundhouse, I frequently found myself caught up in the art-world’s own little
demonstrations
. When the Conservative government was proposing to force the public galleries and museums to charge for entrance, a protest campaign was organized by a couple we knew who lived in a pop-art style flat, every surface densely covered in a collage of heterogeneous images, over the vegetable market in Camden.
They had hired a double-decker bus to tour the capital and
advertise
the cause, but before they had finished pop-arting the bus their spies tipped them off that Lord Eccles, the Minister for Art, was entertaining Princess Margaret to lunch at the Tate Gallery. Pamela phoned me, I dashed down to Camden where I found her hastily sticking shiny stars all over the interior of the bus, and with a few others we jumped in and careered off to confront the
villain
; one or two hopeful passengers hopped on at traffic lights and found themselves being whirled along for free, not necessarily to where they wanted to go. A number of reporters were staking out the Tate when we arrived and were hopeful that we would cause a row; a glamorous woman journalist well known at that period suddenly turned the rays of her charm on me – in fact I was tempted to tell her that the pupils of her eyes were like black
saccharine
tablets – but lost interest when it became clear I was not going to throw myself under the Princess’s hooves. In the event the Minister emerged alone, a stately figure with the glow of a freshly cooked ham. We rushed up and informed him of our undying hostility to entrance fees and everything else he stood for; he remarked loftily that he had been collecting art before we were born, and departed unmoved and unedified.

Another rally, in the name of what cause I cannot now remember, also took place at the Tate Gallery. When I arrived a small knot of people in the windswept portico were trying to hold a discussion, the import of which was drowned by traffic noise. After a while I piped up with the suggestion that we might ask the Gallery to give us a room. They all turned round to see this new Robespierre suddenly arisen in their ranks. ‘Great idea!’ they said; ‘You go and ask them!’ So I marched in and politely put our request to the girl at the reception desk, and after a few minutes
of disconcerted trotting to and fro behind the scenes a
conciliatory
, smiling, functionary appeared and led us to a distant and unfrequented gallery, where we sat on the floor for an hour or two and debated the perils of being ‘absorbed by the System’.

Perhaps it was as an outcome of this occasion that a
better-attended
and officially tolerated meeting later took place in a
conference
room at the Tate. Gustav Metzger, a small, wizened and fragile-looking man with a shy little voice and, as I learned later on, an ego of iron, was among the speakers. (Gustav had fled to Britain from Hitler’s Germany, found refuge as a gardener on the Harewood Estate in Yorkshire, and then in London attracted a degree of notice among the avant-garde for his ‘auto-destructive art’.) His proposal for advancing our cause was that we should demand that the Tate exhibit a work by Gustav Metzger; I forget its nature but it involved huge piles of old newspapers he had accumulated over many years. Nobody was very interested in this suggestion and it did not come to a vote before we broke off for lunch. We drifted back from the cafeteria rather at our leisure; only four or five people were in the conference room when I came in, and Gustav, with the committee skills of a Lenin, was prevailing upon this ‘quorum’ to vote through his proposal. I was delegated to write to the Tate about it, and, dragged along by the democratic imperative, agreed to do so and actually had one or two sessions with Gustav drafting the letter, until reality broke through again and I abandoned the task.

Sometimes these meetings generated a moment of drama, a twinge of paranoia or spark of violence. I attended one in a
London
art school, where forty or fifty artists were assembled in a
lecture
hall to discuss our relevance or irrelevance to the affairs of the world. At one point of the tedious day I spent some time in a
corridor 
outside the lecture room telling an art critic what an image of bureaucracy the conceptual artists were unwittingly projecting, with their filing cabinets of documentation and their printed notices directing one to do this or attend to that. Then I went to rejoin the main debate, and the instant I opened the door I heard Gustav cry out ‘Tim! He’s attacking me!’ and saw him in the grips of a wild-looking young man, surrounded by apparently paralyzed observers. Having had no time to think, I was not paralyzed, and dashed to the rescue. Fortunately as soon as I grappled with him the wild man crumpled like a cardboard box and sat down
apologetically
, explaining that he was terrified of going to prison; it appeared that Gustav had been listing the names of those present, and this person had panicked at the thought that the list might fall into the hands of the police.

The only occasion on which I myself precipitated a jot of physical aggression was during one of Joseph Beuys’s day-long performances at the Tate. On entering the gallery I found a dense throng at the far end of the main hall, with a disembodied, prophetic booming alternating with weedy squeakings arising from its midst. A disgusted leftist heading for the exit said to me: ‘Beuys is in there explaining the Liberal Party manifesto!’ By degrees I worked my way forward till I could see what was going on: a question-and-answer session, in which Beuys took care to retain control of the hand-held microphone, which he would point towards his interlocutor from a distance that made any voice but his own sound feeble. Two assistants on a platform were
filming
his every move. When I felt my hour had come, I stepped
forward
and held out my hand so purposefully for the microphone that he had to hand it over. I asked if he thought that every work of art implied a vision of society. That was a proposition he could
hardly disagree with, given his own philosophy. I pointed out the impression of exclusion given by the present work of art (for these performances were supposed to be such), the wall of backs one encountered on entering. I can’t remember his replies, but he was rattled, and at each interchange I made him give me back the microphone. I explained how oppressive it is to feel oneself part of someone else’s work of art; I pressed on with
uncharacteristically
confrontational intent, until some more demonstrative
radical
than I was moved to leap into the arena, grab the microphone from Beuys and fling it aside crying ‘Let’s get rid of the
technology
anyway!’, at which point I retired triumphant into obscurity. In the coffee shop someone said to me, ‘You went on so long I thought you were in charge of the event.’ And towards the end of the afternoon I heard a well-known critic feeding Beuys a string of fawning questions agreeable to the expected answers; so my intervention had hardly perturbed the proceedings. It would perhaps be salutary to see what the film camera made of it.

‘Outside the Gallery System’ was the title of an article Peter Joseph and I published in
Studio
International
in 1969, partly as manifesto, partly as prelude to the installation of two outdoor works in the grounds of the Iveagh Bequest at Kenwood on Hampstead Heath. Both of us were moving away from paintings on canvas at that time; we wanted to use wider dimensions that would implicate the viewer’s or participant’s own location and movement. The Heath, and Kenwood in particular with its fine art collection and its eighteenth-century parkland, was very
familiar
to us; we had walked and argued and agreed there countless times, but it was still a surprise and delight to us when we approached the curator, John Jacobs, that he so readily fell in with our plans and saw the proposal through his committee. Peter’s
contribution consisted of three flat discs about eight feet in
diameter
, of a pure bitter yellow, to be propped against trees, several hundred yards apart, in an open area of gentle slopes; they were, I wrote, ‘signals that conveyed nothing except their own position’. Mine was called ‘Four-Colour Theorem’ after the famous and then still unsolved mathematical problem in topology; it was a
collection
of about a hundred pieces of hardboard, from eighteen inches to four feet across, of four different shapes and colours, laid out on a large lawn in a walled garden, to be rearranged at will by whomsoever chose to engage with them. The exhibition attracted a good deal of notice and, as we had hoped, the people who
interacted
with these creations were largely non-gallery-going,
dog-walking
, hand-holding, icecream-eating happeners-by. However, interaction steadily escalated into destruction. Young anarchs
discovered
that my pieces could not only be set side by side in the two sober dimensions I had allotted them but upended and driven point-first into the lawn, or sent sailing through the air. After a Bank Holiday weekend we found that one of Peter’s discs had vanished from the glades and my theorem had been sacked by skinheads and thoroughly disproven.

Later that year, retreating to the safety of ‘the gallery system’, Peter and I contributed two large projects to a four-person show called ‘New Space’ at the Camden Art Centre. Peter’s was a
seventy
-foot-long head-high wall of yellow-painted canvas almost bisecting the room it was built in, a severe stretching of the viewer’s kinaesthetic reactions, which achieved the honour of being denounced by George Steiner for its dumb hostility to
language
. Mine, ‘Moonfield’, was based on the same geometrical shapes as ‘Four-Colour Theorem’, but this time painted black on one side and white on the other. Initially they were laid
black-side-up
on a black floor in a blacked-out gallery space; as people found them and turned them over so that they became visible to dark-adjusted eyes, a shifting puzzle-landscape came into
existence
. This show constituted both zenith and moonset of my brief arc across the skies of modern art.

A number of large art-projects occupied my mind over the next year or two; some of these still seem to me worthy of
realization
, but none of them emerged into actuality. What I
produced
tended to the casual-looking – scatterings of wooden rods painted black and white – and even to the invisible – mere dots on my studio walls. Thus my work became an almost totally
private
and meditative activity, and eventually there was so little for anyone to see in it that the move from making visible objects to putting words into a notebook which could be shut at the end of each day was a small one, and my final disappearance to the Aran Islands hardly caused a ripple of talk in circles which perhaps once had had hopes of my career. The last work of those London years was a yard-long white rod that hung vertically in the middle of the studio, suspended by dozens of fine coloured threads. I called in Guy Brett to witness to its existence; then it was taken down thread by thread, and wrapped away for a long time. I left the visual for the verbal, we left London for Aran.

Twenty-five years later, long after we had moved from Aran to Connemara, I thought I would like to have another look at this work, so we put it up again, in a rather low and cluttered space, in which it nevertheless cast a spell. Coincidentally about that time a Michael Tarantino phoned, introduced himself as a
freelance
art curator, and invited me to participate in an international exhibition he was arranging at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, to be called ‘The Event Horizon’ in reference to an essay by
Antonioni. No doubt he had in mind my maps, which he knew of, and perhaps he was rather alarmed when I told him that I had in fact worked in the visual arts long ago and would like to show a piece from that era; but he could hardly withdraw at that stage. So M and I restrung the rod with longer threads, wrapped it up again and carried it to Dublin. IMMA’s spacious halls and
chambers
in the grand neoclassical building of Kilmainham rang with activity; complex and cryptic installations were being mounted: a huge photographic panorama of fashionable young people
behaving
strangely by London’s Sam Taylor-Wood, an array of twelve video monitors showing a flock of sheep by Canada’s Atom Egoyan. We were shown our allotted room; it was large, lofty, bathed in light from a tall window. Deferential assistants stood by with a great scaffolding platform on wheels, ready to help us
create
something of international significance. We undid our small bundle. The threads had worked themselves into a dreadful
tangle
. A needle was sent for, and M picked away at the knot for an hour. Then we gave up, apologized to everyone, retired to a friend’s house, and spent the next day unravelling the mess. Returning to the gallery, we found that the rest of our exhibit had been unpacked and hung. The originals of my three maps
occupied
a side room, and round the walls of the main room were the panels of text I intended should throw some light on the meaning of the installation. This time the hanging rod unfolded its wings and embraced the splendid space with ease and grace. I’m not sure that many people grappled with the post-modern wrap-around of interpretations I’d given this item of high modernism; but who cares? The thing-in-itself was beautiful.

One summer’s evening in my twentieth year as I lay half asleep in a field near Avebury, I watched a painting brushed into being on the black of my interior ground. A honeyed glow, increasing in brightness as it advanced to the left, identified itself as the play of light across the woodwork of an old, varnished, kitchen dresser. The golden brown modulated to a silvery white and then
darkened
slightly around the outline of a head. This was a ‘Last
Supper
’, or (I now think) a ‘Supper at Emmaus’, and the painter was Rembrandt. With full, firm, strokes he put down black with thick streaks of white in it for the hair. Next, the ear: one stroke of the palest ivory composed the rim and lobe, and the rich, dark,
convolutions
within were created with smooth, exact, touches. And all the while he kept up a quiet sing-song chant: ‘This will never do at all! This will never do at all!’