My Time in Space (8 page)
Authors: Tim Robinson
Another factor that made these new paintings things in themselves rather than depictions of (abstract) shapes, is that the forms within them were partly outlined and defined by the edges of the canvas. Retrospectively, I see this as the shedding of the last traces of anthropomorphism (teratology, I should say, in view of the
Viennese
nightmares), for in the preceding paintings even the purely geometrical elements – circles and the sums or differences of
overlapping
circles – were shown as if arrested and observed in their interactions; they were protagonists. Paradoxically, this step towards the sculptural led to another, in its way a reversion to the painterly, which was to cut out the forms in board and let them find their bearings and interrelationships on a wider ground, the ground itself This was the internal genesis of the ‘environmental’ artworks of a hundred or more flat pieces I created in the walled garden at Kenwood and in the Camden Arts Centre. In evolving the shapes of these pieces I played around with circular arcs of
various
radii drawn within a basic square until I found four that formed a geometrical family; because of their internal relationships an indefinite number of theorem-like arrangements can be found when the resultant shapes are laid down next to each other. I incorporated many of these configurations in a drawing which was later turned into a screen print for me by Kelpra Studio. For the real-life version, ‘Four-Colour Theorem’, shown at
Kenwood
, I scattered the pieces on a smooth lawn as an invitation to direct participation:
At first they lie at random, a field of colour into which the spectator walks, and then, as people begin to rearrange them and discover their
interrelationships
, areas of order spread, merge, clash and dissolve. The activity, the building of a landscape, rather than any end-product, is the art form.
That was the theory as I expressed it at the time in an article for
Studio
International,
and to a degree it worked. Guy Brett wrote:
Timothy Drever’s are unusual shapes arrived at by simple and logical geometrical decisions, and their colours are unusual too, not merely
wholesome primaries. If you move them about on the grass you find that they do not lock together to form any final solution: their ‘order’ is something more tenuous and subliminal (and therefore probably more open to individual invention). I noticed that few people cared to arrange the whole number, and if you stepped back and treated the painting as a spectacle you could see various small areas of decision left by different people.
Later in that year came the long evening of the first
moon-landing
, seen on TV as a dreamlike series of unstable and almost incomprehensible black-and-white images. From these visual impressions a new version of the work was born, as I described in an article for the special ‘moon’ number of Miron Grindea’s
Adam
International
Review:
Lunar paradoxes: one flies towards a symbol of inconstancy, ambiguity and madness, to alight upon a surface of weatherless scientific candour; after the longest voyage one steps from the space-craft into an indoor
environment
, that of the hermetically sealed, soundproofed, sterilised
laboratory
; the first exploratory step alters what is to be explored more than a million years have done.
‘Moonfield’, an environmental work, is an indoor version of a work called ‘Four-Colour Theorem’ which was exhibited on a lawn in the grounds of Kenwood last May…. This work had a brief and eventful life; after weathering a week of storm and sunshine it was smashed by a bored bank-holiday gang. The roughly painted white undersides of the pieces were left showing here and there among the fragments. Later, brooding over the death of this work, I found that image of its destruction merging with the memory of the strange white night of the first moon-landing. Thus when the opportunity arose of making a large indoor work for the Camden Survey ’69 show, a link had already been effected in my mind
between the lunar surface and the ghostly remembrance of the Kenwood project, between the Sea of Tranquillity and the protectiveness of an indoor environment. The work had to be rethought. In the open it had been colourful, extrovert, intimately reactive to every change in the sky; the new version would be stark, calm, mysterious, precise, withdrawn.
‘Moonfield’ uses the same four geometrical shapes as the earlier
project
, but now the pieces are black on one side and white on the other. The floor is black, and the lighting so subdued that when the pieces are black side uppermost they can only be found by touch; they can be lost and
rediscovered
– visually they are recreated by being discovered. Each person entering the dark gallery finds a new surface, at first unintelligible, which is the record of his predecessors’ explorations and will be recreated or
annihilated
by his own investigations.
Lurking in the darkest corners of the gallery, hoping to discover what it was that I had made, I watched people at work with ‘Moonfield’.
Little
children and civil servants pieced together flower-shapes of greater or lesser elaboration. A critic perched on the edge and sighed, ‘If one had the energy….’ A religious maniac constructed gigantic jewelled Byzantine crosses and immediately destroyed them. A group of art-students heaped the pieces layer upon layer in a glimmering confusion, a nebula which the next comer dispersed into geometrical constellations. Another group
abolished
the whole field by turning all the white sides down. At first I was critical of some of the effects produced, but that of course was to look upon the work as a ‘participational’ piece in which I abdicated the artist’s right to choose to the spectators. Finally I would like to see it as a work the medium of which is people’s actions, structured and rendered symbolic by the structure of what they handle. The ‘states’ of ‘Moonfield’ are not works of art, they are momentary records of people’s visions, timidities, urges towards symmetry, towards chaos. The ‘work’ has its being in a structured flux of activity; it is the process of exploration.
Over the next year or two I conceived a number of large-scale installations, but none were exposed to the light of existence. One of them took the neglected aspect of ‘Moonfield’, the floor itself, and developed it into what I called a ‘structured arena’. I quote from an article I wrote on the mathematics of it for a journal of ‘computer arts’ Gustav Metzger edited:
… This [experience of watching people interact with ‘Moonfield’] led me on to think of ways of creating areas which would impose certain rhythms on anything taking place within them, and on the consciousness of
anyone
entering them. One project I considered was a concrete floor of
regularly
spaced shallow waves, perhaps 4 inches high and just over a stride from top to top; the area covered would be large enough for a specific rhythm to be generated by the act of walking across it. This floor would not be presented as a finished art-work but as an arena for experiment by myself or anyone else. It would be interesting to try different lighting effects, for example; a strong overhead lighting, with the floor painted white, would make the surface difficult to read as one walked over it;
illumination
by a flickering candle down in one corner would turn it into a sea of pulsating shadows. Again, people could explore it and discover its structure by touch, in complete darkness.
On this continuously curved surface one could experiment with
discontinuous
‘additions’; a scattering of rigid, fragile, ‘measuring rods’ would change its character; footballs would bounce on it quite unpredictably;
various
amounts of water would convert it into a series of ponds, and then into a series of islands. Musical, dance or theatrical groups could let the rhythms of their own activities interact with its periodic structure. In
general
the interest would lie in the ‘interference’ of the floor’s stable and coherent wave-structure with the unstable and fluctuating forms of action superimposed upon it.
Another of these unrealized projects was the result of
following
the train of thought, or at least the mathematical doodling, behind my arcs and squares into the third dimension.
Geometrically
it concerned the largest circle that can be drawn within a cube, and constructionally it was to be realized as a ring of
three- or
four-inch steel tubing 30 feet in diameter, exhibited in the smallest cubic chamber that could hold it (which works out at just under 25 feet in each dimension). The ring was to be a deep
Chinese
-lacquer red and the chamber white. Entrance and exit doors were to be arranged so that the viewer had to step through the ring, and before entering, to enhance the element of ceremonial, one would have been given a simulacrum of the ring small enough to be carried in the palm of the hand. Would have been! … I went so far as to contact a steelworks, whose engineer became quite interested in the problem and did some calculations on the
thickness
of tubing necessary for the ring not to sag, but I took it no further.
In truth, although I have traced the evolution of my London paintings and installations as if it took place in the serenity of that ‘preferred territory between aesthetics and logic’, there were emotional forces driving it. One of these was my progressive
disgust
with the commercial aspects of the art world. Whatever art was, I felt (in anti-structuralist mood), it had to be the opposite of money; hence the move from the plutocracy of the private
galleries
to open, public, spaces. However, the public arena too was contaminated by the blurring of boundaries between art and
publicity
, between artist and celebrity. Although ‘Moonfield’ had been well received I felt psychologically unable to set about
persuading
money-men of the worth of these further projects, and they came to nothing. But in any case I was in retreat from such
episodes of public exposure into the silence – sometimes a
contemplative
happiness, sometimes a distraught paralysis – of my studio, and my ethical queasiness was, if not a rationalization – nothing could have been less rational – then a symptom of a deeper unease. For ever since the year of 1968 a wind had been blowing through my mind; it had blown me around Provence in that year, then to Norway to pay my respects to the midnight sun, and soon it was to blow me to the Aran Islands. No doubt the same wind had acted on such artists as Richard Long and Hamish Fulton, and many others who quitted the city for the wilderness at that time. In a recent essay I described that period, and the less than minimal art produced in it, as follows:
During the two years in which I was shrinking myself out of the London artworld, the works I produced became increasingly smaller and more
private
, dwindling finally to dots that even friends visiting my studio rarely noticed. Some of these ‘points’ as I called them were little round objects such as washers dropped in the gutter by people servicing their cars on
Saturday
afternoons, which I noticed, although not consciously looking for them, during the long abstracted country walks I used to take at that time, orienting myself by glimpses of the spires of Kilburn, Cricklewood and Neasden, or by the rumble of trains whose radial escape-routes seem to have determined the layout of the nevertheless hopelessly dull infill of late nineteenth-century housing between the crooked hearts of those onetime villages. I used to try to recover what exactly had been running through my head at the instant my eye was caught by one of these bright
pavement
-flowers, and sometimes back at home I would put the little disc on my index fingertip, add a drop of glue, and affix it to a wall by the act of pointing to the spot it was to occupy, so that it became what some analytic philosopher I was reading at the time calls a ‘point of ostention’, the point
at which a line drawn from and in the direction indicated by a pointing finger first intersects a solid surface. Or I would post one off to a friend with instructions to throw it away somewhere in the house, to forget it, to find it by chance after many years, and to let me know what exactly had been the mental content of that moment of rediscovery. Although I have never received any such reflected gleams from distant consciousnesses, at home I did occasionally notice a visitor’s gaze, idly straying across blank surfaces, suddenly arrested as a reflex of sight focused attention on one of the dots I had set like traps around our rooms; then I would know that a moment had been picked up, salvaged from the blind onrush of time, that an unknown significance had arisen, like the curl of a questionmark from a full stop, out of an event almost as bare and minimal as one of
relativity
theory’s space-time data.