Interview with Alexander Stoddart
Image of Alexander Stoddart supplied to Manner of Man Magazine
by Alexander Stoddartfor exclusive use and may not be reproduced
without written authorisation.
Photo copyright John McKenzie.
All rights reserved.
As it surely is
not as simplistic as it may seem to some, why did you become a sculptor?
I became a sculptor for no
reason; that is to say, the imperative that drove me to this strange profession
was not hypothetical (an “if/ then” imperative) but something in fact
categorical (that is according to a feeling that I “ought” to do and be this,
regardless of the outcome). This is an important distinction of motivation for
it comes to shed light on why it was that the Monument became such an important
form in my life. It was all born in an overwhelming childhood conception of
“duty discharged” which alighted on me at exactly the same time as my first
aesthetic feelings arose. So you might say that as a child I had innocent
experience of the link that Kant talks about when he shows that beauty rhymes
with duty; that aesthetics and ethics are not merely allied, but perhaps even,
at kernel, the one thing.
The strong sense of the artistic and the good being connected was really brought to the fore in my infancy by the existence of a small monument at the foot of our road in the Renfrewshire village of Elderslie. This little structure stands at the site of the birthplace of the national hero of the Scots, Sir William Wallace, Guardian of Scotland and Knight of Elderslie (c.1274-1305). This is a memorial not to the rough fellow known in the cinema as “Braveheart” but rather to a petty-nobleman, probably of Welsh extraction, who rose to oppose a tyrant and fought not for the interests of any particular House, but for a broad idea embodied in the Scottish Crown. This purpose was always a fascination to me, for it was vague and very generalist; not what the Americans would call “instrumentalist.” At this time I began to picture Wallace not as a figure naturally seen on the battlefield, but rather pictured in the sequestered grove by an evening light, in deep repose – a typification I much later discovered I shared with Robert Burns in his imaginings of the hero. Thinking of Wallace in this way is an old-fashioned thing to do. Nowadays one is required to think of this extraordinary individual as a forward-looking thruster fully committed to the multiplication of wind-farms over the Scottish Borders and never tiring of punching the air – which is to say that the contemporary view of him is deep-fried in philistinism. Sentimentality, said Oscar Wilde, is the bank-holiday of cynicism. The modern picture of Wallace is thus corrupted.
I became a painter first,
because I discovered that my aptitude for music was on the back foot owing to a
difficulty reading music, the sight of which I loathed. This difficulty
evaporated when I was about twenty years old, so that I became a rather capable
sight-reader on the piano in due course. Not so in childhood. I turned to
painting because of a rather sudden and powerful growth of interest in Paris
and the demi-monde of the late 19th century. Shortly I forgot about the context
(the idea of the bars, brothels and studios) and became enchanted with the
pictures, so I took to painting out of doors in Paisley, trudging the length of
it looking for views that looked marginally “Impressionist.” One afternoon,
while painting in a field next to the main road, a man standing in a small
crowd at a bus-stop shouted over to me “On yer’sel’ Vincent!” which, to
translate from the Paisley tongue means “Carry on doing as you are, in full, if
unacknowledged, justification, Vincent!”
At art school in Glasgow I
discovered that the painting department was run by a tyrant called Donaldson –
a heavy-hander unlikely to be kind to my burgeoning desire to paint like Ingres
– so I entered the sculpture department since it was widely held to be the
easiest-going. Then I felt that childhood surge again, and recovered my
interest in the Monument. But it was to be a very long time before I was asked
to make one, and when I was it turned out to be a disaster!
What I loved, and love, about the Monument is that its subject is not “now”, but “then”. And the Monument survives all the “nows” it goes through to exist in many other “thens”, extending into the very distant future, far away from us. It links the past with the future and in the process demonstrates the strange fatuity of the “now”. This is why the Monument was much castigated in the recent past, and it also explains why political leftists (left-liberals) have such a dyspeptic attitude to the Monument or statue. It refuses to take part in the “dialectic” but rather postulates something immutable and lasting. Its mind, so to speak, is concentrated on the distance, which is blue in colour. But contemporary art is focussed on the near-to-hand, which is the colour of blood. Because of thoughts like these; because I had a tendency to look to the distant hills, to imagine the struggles of eight hundred years before as more real than the concerns of the present, and because I instinctually pictured a warrior at rest rather than in action, I feel it was dispositionally necessary that I became a sculptor of monuments, and that the classical tradition of sculpture should rise, eventually, as my guide and master.
Can you describe
the day you realised Contemporary art was a complete waste of your time, a one
trick pony, nothing more than junk?
I remember a particular day
when I realised I had done something wrong in the art line. It was at art
school.
I had completed an abstract
composition made of pop-riveted sheet steel, as part of my course in the second
year. Anxious to please, I had expended some time on this thing and believed
myself to be thoroughly whacked as a result of the full week’s working on it.
My tutors gave it a resounding cheer and were absolutely thrilled with my “almost
arch-like” “piece”. (Honestly, arched pieces are ten-a-penny in art schools,
still to this day, as are face-casts of poxy students’ backsides and circles of
sand disposed upon the floor. And when one hears a new cacophony bearing a
wistful title like “Outreach” freshly commissioned by the BBC from some young
composer, it is invariably described as being in the form of an arch. The arch
is favoured because, as the old Hindu proverb says, it “never sleeps.” An arch
stands because it is perpetually falling, and this makes it greatly appreciated
in modernity, with all its thrust-imperatives. Similarly, while trabeated
classical architecture is forever suspect – on account of its stillness –
Gothic styles are more generally excused, and this is because the struggle to
stand is so evidently written all over their structures. The buttress is always
appreciated; the flying buttress positively adored – because we like to fly. In
America there is a great love of the arch in conservative circles, and this
worries me, I must say. The great Glasgow architect Alexander Thomson indicated
that the arch is the embodied form of a cruelty of outlook, which is why the
Romans loved it - but then they also had the self-knowledge to employ it in
serried rank in the cruellest building they ever constructed – the Coliseum. I
digress!) My pop-rivet job thrilled them, thrilled me, and we were all thrilled
with ourselves. Then, on the way home to thrill my parents with the news of my
success, I paused in front of the cast, near the entrance of the GSA building,
of the Apollo Belvedere. He was seen there, recast a thousand times, stalking
through the ether, his nostrils flaring in a barely suppressed anger; the
purest object one could conceive and as such a perfect anomaly in the canon of
Occidental sculpture. He had just slain the python, which could be seen
tightening itself around the tree-trunk by his leg, and was thus showing how
the Patriarchy was now established and the present vanquished – for the Python
represented the old Matriarchal order – of immense duration – to which we have
now almost returned; the Occident was something that lasted about four thousand
years and has finished in our time. And as I looked at this object I began to
thrill in a new and upsetting way, so that I felt not only uncomfortable being
so impressed, but also rather ashamed at my having been so recently impressed
by something of mine own – a small thing, to be sure! The god seemed to be
saying to me “Try me! Your accomplishments so far are beneath contempt.” I
think that was the first time I experienced this tremendous jolt of objective
understanding in the art line. It was the voice of an inner daemon, which the
moderns would call conscience. In any case, it was the very opposite of
“self-empowerment.” I was slaughtered on the spot. Shortly after this I had the
first of the Great Depressions that have been such a pest in my life and
career. There was no alternative but to attempt to work towards this manner of
sculpture and to abandon what I appeared to be good at. So you could say that
my disillusion with the contemporary in art was a sudden seeing of self; I saw
myself before that image and the prospect was not good. Interesting that it
should have been an image of Apollo; on the lintel of the Tholos (his temple)
at Delphi there is inscribed the words “Know Thyself”. He is the deity of
Enlightenment.
My tutors were very alarmed
that I should try to make sculpture so backward-looking, but they were kind and
even conscientious people and so I was not positively obstructed in the
impossible task I had set myself. The obstruction came later, once what I was
doing was beginning to stick. But I quickly noticed that the act of making a
figure in any continent (that is un-distorted, handsome and proportioned) way,
with any evidence of technical skill (not to speak of symbolical meaning) was
likely to draw adverse comments. At first I thought this was simple resentment
– that someone in the “club” was inclined to betray the imperium of mediocrity
by doing something well, according to standards up to which none could
reasonably be expected to match. Such standards were to be dismissed as
“irrelevant” because they were in the past. But for me these standards
were a kind of reproach. “What’s the ‘Resident Sculptor’ up to today?” sneered
an astoundingly attractive female student one morning, as I was wrestling with
a superior iliac process. Then some toilet graffiti appeared advising Poland to
watch out, since “Sandy’s coming.” It was a time when no Student Representative
Council was happy unless it had some Nazis near to hand. There being few to
appear in Glasgow they had recourse to turning upon a feeble, specky, nervous
wreck in the sculpture department of Glasgow School of Art! It is true that,
far from modelling myself upon Engels, Marx or Lenin, I had rather chosen the
attire, manners and enthusiasms of the only proper King of his century, Ludwig
the Second of Bavaria (God rest his soul) – yet this seemed extreme. I was at
the time attempting to sculpt a little like Rodin, the Frenchman’s style being
manageable and careless. If one could not manage a hand, or an arm, one simply
truncated the work at that point! It was the kind of sculpture that would have
gotten me into a camp – but it smacked of the West, still, and this as
enough to turn the Soviets at the GSA against me.
It was not, however, just
“simple resentment”. A great friend of mine, the greatest living architectural
historian Professor James Stevens Curl of Hollywood near Belfast, once asked me
in a moment of despair the no-doubt rhetorical question “Why are Modernists all
such odious people?” I was in no condition to answer this, being terribly drunk
at the time, but the query stuck, and over the years I’ve gone some way, in my
thoughts and digressions, to account for this effect – of the seriously
obnoxious, contemporary-art-type person. It has become a cliché, and as such must
be attended to – for the cliché is a kind of smoke to indicate fire. (In the
same way we have to ask why it is that the clichéd image of the scientist – a
kind of “Brains” type , with a certain look, a spectrum of manners and
tremendous, if unexpected sexual ambition – has such a strong hold over the
popular imagination.) Why are modernists such odious people? I have come
to see, quite clearly, that the reason for this is to be found in the field of
metaphysics. It is a startling effect to see how, when metaphysics is even
mentioned, there arises a sort of world-scale shuffling in the seat and an
awkward protestation of hurry to get on elsewhere, or an altogether too quick
burst of dismissive laughter, or even a flat refusal of any further talk in
this line. This must be because something about the world is in danger of being
said, when metaphysics is the talk. The same thing happens when religious
questions arise.
Religion is only metaphysics
illustrated for children. Yet metaphysics are interesting, especially to young
men. The question (Berkeley’s single idea) as to whether there is a sound in
the forest when a tree falls unobserved is often the single most compelling
conundrum that many a boy of fourteen hears, but his wonder at this is quickly
stamped out and he will be observed positively giving up on it, or developing
an actual detestation of the enquiry and a shame at ever having made it. With
brusque tones he will command himself to “get real.” If he gets a girlfriend he
will learn that nothing is more liable to bring out the rolling-pin than such a
line of speculation. But I believe that the problem of the typical disposition
of the Modernist can be accounted for in respect of this. A traditionalist is
someone who never entirely gives up on the “no object without subject” line of
epistemology (no sound without a listener). A Modernist is one who cannot abide
the implications of this, for it gives rise to a suspicion that the world,
which includes as a kind of central sun the material being of the subject, is
in fact an illusion. Modernists like the world to be real, for they want to
“intervene” in it. If it were a phantasm, they cry, then to what avail my
projects? But traditionalism, or in its social manifestation conservatism, has
a proper and scrupulous pessimism about the world, as a Veil of Maya (illusion)
concealing the noumenal truth that can only be perceived once the conditions of
time and space have been abolished. To put this more clearly, the Modernist
loves life and believes the world good. The traditionalist sees life as a
gigantic error of judgement but admires the way that culture has come,
over the few millennia in play, to mitigate the forms of this ghastly cosmos in
institutions of dignity and compassion, in established manners, cultivations of
all sorts, restrictions upon behaviour, self-denials in every field of human
and inter-species intercourse - and of course the pursuit of the redeeming
redundancies, by which I mean academic study, scientific enquiry (compromised
owing to its applicability) and above all art. Modernism is to be
understood as art in an optimistic guise. But art itself, if it were proper, is
life-denying. This is an extremely hard idea to accommodate, since we
are indentured to life and think very highly of it (it must be good since we
are in it). But there is absolutely no doubt that the young men gathered in a
threatening mob can be more easily dispersed by the simple playing of Mozart at
them than the work of any water-cannon can do, and this effect is only a
demonstration that the Will-to-live, which runs strong in young men, feels
itself dwindle and weaken in the face of such beauty, and so this same Will
draws the youths away from this threat to its dominion as a matter of urgency.
Art works upon the Will-to-live as Kryptonite works upon Superman. The
Modernist dreads the narcosis of art, so he made a simulative alternative to
its heady potion during the last century; something whose ugliness would
forever prevent it having the sedative effect of the Great Tradition, whose
position it came, so thoroughly, to usurp. Modernism is a sign, then, of
Health; a dialectical-materialist doctrine with which Nature (who conceived and
sustains it) is very proud.
During the real dog-days of
my career, when official oppositionism to what I was doing was at its most
vicious, I noticed that the really grave crime that I seemed to be committing
as a representational artist consisted in my attempt to imitate not only styles
of the past (I am an avowed eclecticist, working in many different idioms, just
like an architect), but in fact more generally because I was trying to do work
that was “figural” as it is called in America. Even today I am often presumed
to be in alliance with artists who are routinely described as “figural”, simply
because they paint or sculpt in observational reference to the human form, or
to forms visible elsewhere in the world. “Figural” is often opposed to
“Contemporary” as a matter of course. I encounter many pple making the most
atrocious figure-sculpture who believe themselves to be quite on my side where
in fact I should rather bed down with Donald Judd than be counted one of them.
But this ignorant confusion, and also the censure that the representational
artist will still encounter if he brings his work to any level of
accomplishment, actually indicates something interesting about a primal anxiety
circulating around the question of imitative art, as it also goes some way to
explain the rise of abstractionism around a century ago.
Well before Socrates, the
philosopher Heraclitus said something, which we can recover in a fragment – one
that, of all his fragments, gets the least attention. For me it is the most
profound thing he ever uttered, and it simply was this: “Nature loves to hide.”
Everybody ran off in a froth to expand upon “The Road Up is the same as the
Road Down” (wow!), “War is King and Father of All” (yes, and?), and “One cannot
step into the same haircut twice.” These flip assertions dwindle into
insignificance in comparison with “Nature loves to hide.” Now Popper traces a
line of mischief extending down from Heraclitus to the dictators of the
twentieth century in his “The Open Society and its Enemies” and on that line of
disgrace we find Plato firmly established, with his Republic – originally a
postulation of experimental tone, but one latterly brought out like a beast
nearly to destroy civilisation. In that Republic there is a proscription of
imitative art as a kind of lie about a lie (according to the Theory of Forms,
where what appears in Nature is a poor representation of the Ideal). Plato, as
Bertrand Russell said, is “Quite at ease on Zion,” and so it is through the
Academy that the first link between the iconophobic cultures of the Middle East
and the Western tradition is formed. We had, in Sparta, a little balsa-wood
model of what such an art-free society might amount to, and Plato admired the
State of Lycurgus as any malcontent admires the “other.” He couldn’t have coped
with an afternoon there, not least because of the absence of the very thing he
most treasured in fact, which was, indeed, art. And then there were the hard
beds. Throughout the run of theoretical Puritanism, right through the Middle
Ages, the Reformation, the Enlightenment (to some certain degree), into the
epoch of abstractionism and now into the zone of Science-worship, there has
been as a constant idea that the artist who paints or sculpts in imitation of
Nature is somehow either mad, bad or dangerous to know, and that he must
necessarily experience “struggle” and hardship, and end in penury and suicide.
It seems that there is an industry of dissuasion surrounding him; his
typification is resoundingly negative. A mother bites her nails to hear of her
son’s intention to become a painter; a father threatens to cut the boy off to
save him from this fate worse than death. Again, the cliché is informative. I
faced great disapproval when I tried to model continent images of the human
form, back in the 1970s; some people actually pleaded with me, for my own good,
to turn to the abstractionist side. Whence this wringing of hands?
The answer comes from a
story told in the Second Sura of the Koran – and more commonly encountered, in
our culture, in Exodus. Here, prominent in Hebrew mythology, is the episode
that really explains the entire matter of Modernism’s triumph during the
closing years of Western Civilisation.
After much wandering in the
wilderness, Moses (an Egyptian, incidentally; Freud’s “Moses and Monotheism”
shows this - a really very brilliant book which ought to be disentangled from
the psycho-garbage in the rest of his oeuvre) – Moses halts at the foot of
Sinai to go up to speak to God. The poor Children of Israel, marched to and fro
by this terrible individual in a perpetuum of movement, are glad to find ease
and so seek first of all to build a little altar. They put down foundations.
Then they seek to adorn this with a form – of a Calf, cast from molten metal.
You know the story. Then, because they are pleased and somewhat astounded to
see something so lasting and still after all the forward-going – and what is
more, able to show a moving thing ( a calf) standing absolutely motionless
- they seek to celebrate this by dancing around it in a circle. Moses
comes down the mountain, sees this and commands his enforcers, his Levites, to
arrest the dancers, to force them to grind the calf into dust and to make a
soup of it for them all to drink (you had better believe this!). Then Moses
orders the slaughter of the three thousand of them. For it said on God’s fairly
restrictive brief that one was to make no representation of any living thing.
Three thousand men, women and children. All because of a sculpture.
Furthermore, away down the list of the Commandments there is the small matter
of the sixth; “Thou shalt not kill.” This proves that making sculpture is worse
than murder – to the Mosaic mentality! Given that this is all symbolical, how
then do we read this strange story? Here goes: God is Mother Nature. He loves
to hide (Heraclitus) because he declines to give his name when he ‘phones Moses
from the Burning Bush, merely saying in that annoying way some of your friends
employ at the start of a call, “Hello, it’s me.” Bossy people, short on
compassion and especially wilful children just cannot get the hang of saying
their own names for, as solipsists, they believe names to be things merely for
the labelling of others. They themselves they believe to be fundamental. “I am
that I am,” say God to Moses. Nature loves to hide. Moses, symbolically, is
Mother Nature’s avatar. Life, as Aristotle said, is primarily embodied in
movement, and it is the motive aspect of Moses that makes him God come down to
earth, specifically to walk on earth. He dies before the Promised Land
is reached – most importantly, for he cannot be suffered to become settled. He
is like a pop song that stands shy of the concluding tonic chord, but seeks to
fade out instead, giving the impression of perpetuity. The grave of Moses (it
exists somewhere) is a concept that is extraordinarily hard to entertain. In the
story, the Children of Israel stand as incipient full-humans, constantly in
danger of lapsing into civilisation and settlement, from which fate they must
be saved. The calf is their lotus, the dance their distraction. When dancing,
one cannot speak, so now they are dumb-struck, so next the dialectic is
silenced in this voodoo. All very dangerous. Next they will be giving up on
procreation and becoming like the noble Panda, or choosing to stay indoors to
practise piano-scales, rather than play football outside with their chums. But
above all the purest outrage is that infernal Calf. How dare they show
nature? How dare they look long and hard at it, prosecute and discover things
about it, fix and typify it, clinch and reproduce it! You know, I am not
making this up, Nic. Having made many a portrait bust of many different sitters
I occasionally come across one who, at the end of the job, turns terribly
nasty. Carlyle did it to G.F. Watts and Napoleon did it to Canova. One can
always predict who is likely to turn this way, simply from the cool observation
of their type. It also is a reaction, controversially to say, that is heralded
in their facial features. And the better the work the more the fury.
One important point to raise
in this area is the question of the Commandments themselves. As Schopenhauer
said, “the word is the handmaiden of the concept”; so it is that this story of
the wrath of Moses also tells us something profound about the central position
of Conceptualism in the second-wave Modernism of which I am so critical. For in
the story we encounter a model of art being opposed by text, in the most
explicit manner possible. This is merely an image of conceptualism squaring up
to perceptualism; conceptualism defying art, in fact. Also, what Moses is carrying
in his tablets is terribly “issue-based”; finger-wagging, proscriptive and a
general pain for the most – and where it can be accommodated in decent society
we see ample transgression of its precepts everywhere to hand amongst the
Elders whose names and deeds are recited in Church, of all places. Then one
final, allegorical detail; the question of the Horns that are supposed to be
seen rising out of Moses’ head as he descends the Mountain in his rage. Now,
although these have been airbrushed out of scripture and no end of philologists
and etymologists have been hired to insist that a mis-translation of the
original Hebrew made “horns” out of “rays”, yet I am unimpressed by this
– for the presence of horns upon the head of Moses makes perfect allegorical sense
in the circumstances. For just as Moses is seen opposing a work of art with a
screed of text, so he is seen opposing sculptured horns (on the calf) with real
horns, sprouting from his head. This goes a long way in explaining the
relationship in conceptual art to the cult of the found object (as opposed to
the depicted object, in a fine still-life, for instance, or in a careful
sculpture). Recently, when looking at a very lovely picture by the alcoholic
Glasgow painter Stuart Park, a thundering philistine Yorkshire woman came up to
me and protested that, if she wanted to see ‘ydrangea she’d want ter see in
‘gaaden. (To translate from the Yorkshire – “If I wanted to see a hydrangea I’d
want to see it in my garden.”) And King Agesilaus of Sparta, trying to revive
the Institutions of Lycurgus in the late years of Spartan decline, refuses to
hear the performance of a man who has come to the city to perform his
imitations of bird-song. “Why should I listen to a buffoon when I can hear the
nightingale herself?” he grumbles.
What I have been trying to
demonstrate in the above tower of words is that the fundamentals of what we
call Modernism are to be found in the primal story of Western culture – and it
is all about opposing representation. But the actual triumph of Western Culture
was achieved in defiance of that clampdown and from this, we can describe
Modernismus as in reality a real Teacher’s Pet and Traditionalism as a Right
Royal Rebel. I mean, there is reason to regard the official art of our time as
very tame indeed. It seeks to collaborate with the primal tenets of Nature’s
plan as laid down by Moses, where art (on the other hand) is like Steve
McQueen; never out of the Cooler (and also tremendously cool).
Which is a
little more about public art. It is a phenomenon of the second half of the
twentieth century, and it always means art of a certain type. For instance,
no-one ever refers to the “public art” we find standing in Florence in
Orcagna’s Loggia, nor to the “public art” we see among the ruins of Delos or
Athens. Public art is, in fact, a form of the private art of the contemporist
imperium simply foisted upon the unhappy populace. It is naturally caged up in
the white-wall gallery penitentiary, such as we find down by the Meat-packing
district of Manhattan, or in those slim loins we call Cork and Bond Streets in
London. In the 1970s, I suppose, the contemporists got restive because their
war on culture was not being won, and they wished to make a greater impact.
They began to arrange for their private works to be let out into the public
realm. With the growth of motorways and by-passes, there arose a great many
places where this rubbish could be sited – places we pass through at speed and
don’t care about ruining. So far so good – yet in the ‘90s these “interventions”
began to close in on town centres. My own town of Paisley suffered terribly
badly from this. Horrible glass panels with embedded skeins of thread were
placed at “strategic” points throughout the centre which had been “identified”
by a squad of public-art promoting mandarins from Edinburgh – during a
morning’s visit. This rubbish went up and proved, so the mandarins and some of
their dupes in local government insisted, that Paisley was “forward-looking”.
But the general public, knowing that this sort of art goes up in places we
don’t care about (see above) assumed that there was, then, no longer anything
in Paisley centre for which to care – and so the moral and fiscal decline into
civic chaos got its final effective shove. I have been trying to reverse this
for twenty years, but working in Paisley is harder than working in central
London.
You must be
certain that by “public", in “Public Art”, I mean not something
locational, but rather something to do with sensibility. In Ancient Greece,
where the social foundation was fundamentally consensual and everything was
done in some sort of agora or other (everything male, that is) the notion of
privacy was reserved for the shameful and the idiotic (and, unfortunately, the
female; the Greeks made their women wear the burka, never forget.) We have a
surviving sense of this in the use of our word “idiosyncratic.” It means
eccentric and belonging to one alone, rather than being “ours.” This is why, on
a level of etymology, it is so criminally inappropriate to describe something
by Richard Serra, for instance, or Claes Oldenberg or Duane Hansen as being
“public” simply because it exists in a place passed through by the people. It
is (I mean IS in an existential way) purely as the outcome of an individual’s imaginings,
calculated to be unique, instantly identifiable as to authorship and to not
belong. In this way it makes its impact, much as a demented person makes his
impact on a bus queue or other location where people are trapped. These kinds
of work are strictly idiotic, in the Greek sense, because they are private to
the artist concerned; his business alone. When, of course, the time comes to
make a sale, then many people claim it is their business too! And on hearing of
the colossal sums of money that are raised in homage to these pauperous objects
and effects, many other people join in the business and follow along like
groupies in the wake of the Rolling Stones during their vitality. But a truly
public work, like the Apollo Belvedere for instance, exists in the large world,
authorless except for the guiding hand of tradition and valueless because
priceless; any number of dollars attached to it would be nearly a “modal
irrelevancy” as Michael Oakeshotte (check the spelling here) put it. In
contemporism, and in Public Art, the money is fundamental, either in the proof
of a work’s worth, or in the fury expressed at its erection. Shortly everybody
will be talking about kidney-machines, and the argument will be forgotten in
the cash-accountancy.
The vast majority
of the works I have made in my long and catastrophic career exists in streets
and squares, in lobbies or on the facades of buildings. They are passed by
every day by perhaps tens of thousands of people. I try, as best as I am able,
to make these things terribly discreet, so that they are hardly noticed, and
nothing gives me greater pleasure than to stand incognito (italics) and watch
people hurry past them on their way to work, or to whatever deed of compassion
or wickedness they are intending, paying them not the slightest regard. For
there is a happy symmetry at work here; they pay no attention to the statue
precisely as the statue pays no attention to them. In this tremendous nexus of
oblivion a real treasure of conduct is to be found. Our age is so revoltingly
agglutinative and horribly “interactive” that it emerges as a blessing to find
one area where a hi-five cannot obtain nor any group-hug be properly
consummated. The analogy is to be found in the conduct expected in a
gentlemen’s club in St. James’ or Pall Mall. I try to make my statues behave
like new members, careful to come attired properly, according to the standards
and conventions of the establishment. I mean them to be thus radically
conformist. They join, or are admitted, on the grounds of their capacity to
pipe down. They speak not of work but of amateur matters – and no conversation
is closed to any member; a private club in which privacy is forbidden. Voices
are seldom raised, or never. In this way my works seem to advocate a kind of “civic
sleep.” Nothing is more noble or dignified than the sight of a man, in his
club, splattered upon a leather armchair after lunch snoring with his companion
in the prandial fray in a perfectly unconscious performance reminiscent of that
famed number in the Pearl Fishers. I try to make my statues conduct themselves
thus, for the edification and guidance of the broad masses, who are terribly
overstimulated in this time of caffeine, coke and Kardashian. I detest what
they call “civic vitality” and have nothing to do with “vibrancy” In short, I
try to make sculpture that has all the retreating discretion of an exposed
politician tendering his cabinet resignation in the 1950s.
There is reason
to believe that my statue of John Witherspoon sited on the Campus of Princeton
University has become something of a favourite there. It stands with many other
works of sculpture, of course, but it is different. As a meeting-point it has
gained a certain currency; there is a Henry Moore further along which is also a
great rendez-vous. With the Moore piece, people say to one another “I’ll meet
you at the Henry Moore.” But if they need to meet nearer the Chapel, say, they
will not say “I’ll meet you at the Alexander Stoddart.” They arrange to meet
“at the Witherspoon statue”. This is terribly important to note, for it tells
of the fundamental difference between the normal piece of Public Art, and the
Monument (which is the opposite of the Public Artwork.) The Monument is
configured in its subject, where the Public Artwork is a matter of its author.
Can you tell me, straight off the top of your head, who was the sculptor of
Mount Rushmore, or the Christ at Rio, or even the Statue of Liberty? You
cannot, and this is because the monumental imperative drives away the name of
the maker in these wonderful cases. But that enlarged Baseball Bat? That
Curtain of fabric slung across a canyon? That bird-man standing in the North of
England? They are, above all, an Oldenberg, a Christo, a Gormley. Thus public
art is not only private in truth, it is also highly egotistical. These things
do not belong to culture, but merely to that thing which culture,
unfortunately, has come to mean – which is “creativity”; a kind of arty itch
that is scratched for relief but to no avail and maintains what they call,
today, the “cultural industries” as a widening wound, festering. Monuments, and
the remembrance of the Dead is the answer, and even the cure. As I always
conclude, everything wretched, foolish, ugly, devious and selfish is at kernel
an expression of the Will-to-Live. Everything noble, self-less, distinguished
and kind; everything decorous, slow and peaceful; everything backward-looking,
dun in colour, light in touch and not clumsy in manner; all church-music this
side of a thousand guitars and “keyboard”, every objective glance and
invitation declined, every march written by Elgar, every good thing – is
at kernel an expression of the denial of the Will-to-Live. This is not
my idea, but that of the philosopher Schopenhauer, whom I cannot thank enough.
But I tell you, to accommodate the Copernican Shift of his thinking in that
instance – to embrace the counter-intuitive horror of confessing the essential
futility and even ignominy of existence, I had to brace myself. In the 1950s
there were some pilots in England who thought they might try to break through
the sound-barrier using the dive from a gigantic height. They found that time
after time these young men were crashing their machines right into the ground ;
not oming out of the dive, or not being able to. The radio contact was always
so poor that no accounting for the effect could be managed. But then one of
them who had been in a Spitfire in the Second War mentioned that once when he
had been in a dive in a dog-fight situation he had the unaccountable urge to
reverse the action of his joy-stick to bring himself out of it; that is to
push, rather than pull the stick. The steering had become bumpy and undefined
and he thought he was a goner. He got out of it by orthodox means and lived on.
He wondered, now, if there was some mechanical reversal necessary to make the
plane respond in the sound-barrier spectrum, and so, very bravely, he elected
to attempt the dive, break through the sound barrier (as his comrades had all
done before impact) and then push the stick forward at the critical time. He
did this, mustering all his power of self-command and against every indication
– and lo! up pulled the aircraft, in the nick of time. It took them some time
to figure out the physics of this, but it became orthodoxy. In a somewhat more
hair-raising way one has to reverse the joy-stick when reading the Sage of
Frankfurt. You go through a barrier with a terrible bang, then you either drive
a hole into the ground twenty feet down… or you come up with the air of the world
crackling around you in a perpetual, following boom. It took me twenty years of
reading, and re-reading, to do it. I mean, guys, can either of you ever imagine
yourself saying, in defence of Manner of Man Magazine (as you go to the Bank
Manager, for instance) “Manner of Man is a great thing Mr. Madoff! It sure
denies the Will-to-Live!”
“It denies the
Will-to-Live? Well gee, fella, here’s a couple of million to set the ball
a-rollin’!”
Not likely – but
I say that about my sculpture. This is something I ought to clam up about; I
ought to agree that it’s all so life-affirmative. But art stills the Will, and
the Will is, in its most vivid objectification, the Will-to-Live. Art opposes
life. I’m sure I’ve said something like this above, but it seems so long ago!
During your
career, you have made a number of profound statements; one that stands out is
that “…memorials are often hastily erected.” You are known to always
speak the truth this notwithstanding, it is indeed a harsh reality, please
explain your position.
I always dread
the death of others who, in Scotland, are cursed with something of a profile,
for there is so commonly the immediate effect, following their decease, of a
noisy journalist telephoning me up when I am trying to force my second Martini
down at the end of a tiring day with the “question” of a statue. It is hard to
hear what he is garbling to one, in a crowded bar in Glasgow, and often as not
the subject, being a sportsperson, will be entirely unknown to me. They will,
they say, ‘phone me again tomorrow, and when they do I am in a rough mood and
apt to speak my mind. So it happened that a couple of years ago a commentator
called Bill McLaren, who specialised in Rugby (a game involving much pushing
and grunting over a testicle-shaped ball) at last died after a long career with
a microphone up his nose explaining with the crude instrument of the word just
how – and even perhaps why – such antics were being rehearsed, time after time,
on the various dismal parks of the Scottish Borders. We listened, from time to
time, on the radio; he was “the voice of Rugby.” And because footer fans of all
descriptions cleave unto these sports owing to a surfeit of sentimentality in
their generally blameless hearts, and because the motivation to pay the extreme
levels of attention to this, such as they failed to pay to the conjugation of
French Verbs, for instance, is so much connected to their need to find a place
to park their instinct to self-pity, it is a matter of inevitability that the
Sports-deceased and the Statue will come together in a head-on collision on
many an occasion. It invariably happens that, while all the occupants of the
Statue are mashed to a pulp, those riding on the Sports-deceased get off with
light bruising.
“No,” I said to
the journalist, next morning. No, I wouldn’t be making a statue of Bill McLaren
who was, as I learned, hardly cold in his morgue-drawer. The Nation of Scotland
was in one of those “outpouring of grief” states; people on their knees before
the gates of Murrayfield and Interflora working 24/7 to hire sufficient numbers
of dumpers to pile the sacrificed flora before the national “Shrine of Rugby.”
“Why not?” asked the journo, with a rising tone of indignation – as
though I had a duty to “cast this great man in bronze.” “Casting
anything in bronze is the job of the foundry,” I replied. “I am a sculptor, and
that involves, exclusively, papping huge tonnages of clay on to mighty
armatures of welded steel
and trying to
make a shape of it. The casting, or the carving, comes later. The job of the
sculptor is to manipulate wet, cold, silent, “feminine” clay into shapes. I
won’t make a statue of McLaren because it is not in my line.”
“What is
in your line, then?” said the journalist.
“My line (I had
to pause here, for I was suddenly uncertain what, if any, line I might be able
to claim) – my line is in the making of monuments to people… who have risen
against tyranny, salved the bleeding wounds of humanity, explained to us the
workings of the outmost parts of the Universe, brought the Ixion’s Wheel of
Willing to a grinding stop, made a thing of beauty. For every Sportsperson who
gets a statue, so a poet is left unrepresented by this noble art.”
“Is Rugby not a
thing of beauty?”
“Certainly not,”
I responded. “If all modern art is uniformly ugly then there is no question
that Rugby, Football, American Football, Ice-Hockey, Hockey, Golf, Darts and
every sort of game must be a decided affront to the Muses Nine as they shield
their eyes on Parnassus. I make,” I added, “an exception for Hurling since it
receives a noble mention in the Irish literature from antiquity. But the rest
is a festival of kicking and biting. Can you honestly equate, in terms of
silent control, purity of outline and just disposition of mass the Three Graces
of Canova with the shit-smeared hurdies of a twice life-size, tooth-spitting
Orc from Peebles who has difficulty seeing his compatriots owing to the fact he
can hardly see over his own collar-bones.”
You can imagine
that the patience of the interviewer was running a little thin. “So you’ll not
be making a statue of the most beloved man in Scottish history?” accused the
journalist. “You’ve hit the nail on the head,” I told him – and then I made the
mistake of driving the argument home. After he had recorded this in the newspapers
I quickly became, for a few days at least, the Most Hated Man in Scotland.
Here is what I
said: The erection of statues in indecent haste is a sign of a society sunk in
sentimentality and cynicism. Although I am a great believer in expedition when
a decision is made, yet I loathe the reflexive zeal with which the idea
of the statue is instantly aired – for this conceptualising is nothing other
than a representation of the incapacity of the advocates to accommodate
themselves to the fact of the death of the subject. They seek a statue (or at
least talk of a statue) in a futile effort to make it so that Bill (first-name
terms, you see) is “still with us.” They think of their statue (it is always
their’s, never the sculptor’s) usually set at ground level so that it will be
“of the people” and able to be pawed by the pilgrims in adoration. Next they
will imagine themselves lined up beside it, hugging its turd-coloured
shoulders, larking about as their photographs are taken in its company. On
parting they may dispose of their chewing-gum upon its nose, for their
appetites have been sated and their attention is drawn to the next piece of
stimulus. They speak and rage about this statue most vocally when the subject
is still unburied (or burned) for it is not a proposal of distinction but a cry
for help. It is part of the fear and loathing of the state of non-being which
is characteristic of Barbarian peoples but nowhere to be encountered amongst
the truly civilised peoples of the world by which I mean principally the
Buddhists and Hindoos. They know, and they are helped in this by their saints
and detailed scriptures, that not-being is our natural state. They make
statues, just as the mighty Victorians did, to fix the subject not in a pseudo
life, but in death – and this is why taste abounds there. But when we want to
make Bill to keep him “in among us” – then we get kitsch, and kitsch (America
take note) is the curse and plaque of modernised culture.
“So one never
erects statues to people alive or recently dead,” I told the journalist – but
he was already typing up his copy and paying scant attention to these niceties.
Yet I went on, and this is where I went wrong.
“One ought to
wait at least thirty years until a statue is even considered. This is done for good
reason – for the raising of a statue should not be done on our decision,
but rather by the command of posterity. Those who seek a quick statue do
so because posterity cannot be trusted to effect the memorial. Statues
of the living, or the recently dead, are done by people of dubious culture who
cannot conceive of themselves as represented in those yet-to-be-born, and thus
rush forward, in their individualistic isolation, to acquire the effect (the
statue) for the titillation of their own eyes. They cannot begin to appreciate
that their eyes, if they have culture, are present in those to come. Thus,
because they are selfish they are also not nice. You see how ethics and
aesthetics converge? Kant told us this, and all children do too when they like
to be baby-sat by a pretty teenager. A terrible fact, in fact.
Now the
journalist is itching to get off the blower, leaning on his desk in despair,
periodically making chat-chat gestures with his fingers to his grubby
confederates in the smoke-free office and rolling his eyes northwards. “In
fact, “I continue, “one can be certain, from the statue-test, of a man’s claim
to proper old High Church Toryism by his attitude to the statue and its
timing.”
Those who put up
statues of living subjects are found in the regimes of horror, from tin-pot
dictators in Arabian States, to Stalinisers and monstrous North Koreans. We
also find it in liberal democracies where the present is valorised and the past
deplored. Fascinatingly, however, we find it very hard to imagine a full-size
statue of the worst of people, Adolf Hitler. In this (horror of horrors)
perhaps we detect a modicum of taste in the Paradigm Devil. But it is terribly
indicative of a truth about a certain lady that she did not baulk at being
present with (and even I believe unveiling one of them) a statue of herself –
with which single gesture Margaret Thatcher excluded herself from the
description “Conservative” – either with a small or a large C. Nelson Mandela
was also guilty of this; unveiling his own statue. What depths has our time
sunk to, when a subject sees his own monumental image. What possible expression
can be admitted on to his face as the veil falls? Surprise? Pretended modesty?
Soaring transcendence? Vindication? Or the cold stare of art-criticism? And how
does he feel when he thinks, during sudden sleeplessness on a frightful
February night of sleet and wind, of his brazen simulacrum grinning away over
the deserted streets? I’ll tell you how he feels; like the rugby-fan who wants
Bill back, so this kind of imperator takes tremendous comfort to know that,
even at this horrible hour, he is standing watch! For the dynamic type; the
thruster, the innovator, the “creative” forward-looker has one thing in him he
really regrets, which is a tendency to fall asleep. This quasi-death (Hypnos is
brother to Thanatos) is a matter of shame for him, so the statue stands
testimony to his intention, if not his ability, to remain ever-vigilant. Of
course Thatcher was said to be a 3- 4-hour a night sleeper – which speaks volumes
in itself. But all the great minds and all the true conservatives are long and
deep sleepers; the brain is the only organ that requires sleep and if it is so
nourished, so its special functions – to lead the bearer in the paths of
knowledge and righteousness – will be the more effectively discharged.
“So I cannot
bring myself to consider, for a moment, putting the noble art of sculpture to
the service of memorialising, so suddenly, one who spent his life describing
the deeds and concerns of a mob of boys running up and down a football pitch
trying to tear the shorts off one another.” This was a terrible mistake – but I
was warm to my subject, Nic, and in a kind of flow. Thus it spread throughout
the Scottish news-channels that I was an evil beast, and some horrible
communications were received. At no time had I doubted the great talents,
within his field, of the estimable Bill McLaren. I simply found the field
insignificant. And yes, now that some years have passed, there is, according to
the posterity test, no mighty clamour for a statue of this man, as I predicted.
But over a hundred years on a statue of James Clerk Maxwell is undoubted in its
mandate.
Quickly,
however, the journalists (who are at war with each other) divided, and soon I
was being quietly applauded for standing up to the tsunami of schmaltz we are
expected to placate. An online journo commenced with the headline “The Most
Hated Man in Scotland – and Why he should be Cloned.” I was to be replicated
and posted about the various communities of Scotland as a bastion against
kitschy sentimentalism! And then, at a Gala Performance in Edinburgh by the
students of the Royal College of Music and Drama, the then Minister for
Education came
up to me, embraced me in full view of the assembled and suddenly silent foyer,
and whispered into my ear “Sandy, I can’t say this, but Thank You.” Why
couldn’t he say it? We live, in taste terms, in a climate of fear.
What are your
feelings about the current state of art and architecture education?
The thoughts I
have when I think of the current state of art and architecture education differ
from the feelings I have about it. I think there is great trouble in this
sphere – a trouble that might not be rectified; the damage done amounts to an
extinction-event. My feelings, on the other hand, are more simply put. I feel,
when I think of a contemporary Art School, that I cannot eat as much as I would
like to vomit. Let’s return to the thinking.
In the old days,
even up until the later 1970s in this country, one went to Art School to learn
to paint or sculpt, and to draw in the first place, and then draw again.
Drawing was the basic action of the Art School and the floorboards of the
studios were black with a filling of charcoal-dust mixed with erasor-rubber. There
was a perfume of turpentine throughout the building and the aroma of every sort
of tobacco-product imaginable. The janitors smelt sweetly of alcohol and the
place was filled with a “dim religious light” in which the plaster-casts, the
votive focus of the establishment, ruled in silent dominion. It was around
these plaster copies from antiquity that every local and temporal endeavour was
pursued – even if scant notice was taken of them. Some time in the earlier
century their dominion had been set somewhat aside by the growing command of
the living model, and once the Summer of Love was upon us the “nudity
imperative” had gained the day, so that the gods in the cast-corridors became
recessive; their nudity was mitigated by art, and a quest for the real and the
moving was in hand. The Film Societies began to prosper, and the worst students
in the year began to profess an “interest in photography.” Yet the casts were
still respected, if no longer revered, and any student who wished to take a
stool up, and a board, to sit in lengthy study of the great mystery of what
they demonstrated might be still accommodated within the curricular run of
things. He would be increasingly alone, of course, and shortly to be mocked –
but there still existed a level of formalism sufficient to admit that shape was
handsomely controlled in these objects, and even “spatial relationships”
decently disposed. I mean, there was still a “tridentine” understanding that it
was the exclusive responsibility of the artist to take account of the look (the
percept) of the world, and to pay special attention to those who had “looked”
the world fully in the eye in past time, so that their example might be
followed and this crucial prosecution of the appearance of things be continued,
and continued, every day for ever, like the Mass, sung the same in Norway in
1200 AD as in Washington in 1900 AD. People would still, at that time, refer to
past students, like John Byrne for instance, who could “draw like an angel.”
Indeed, this moral dimension to the act of drawing (that it is somehow angelic
and beatitudinous) was not yet a kind of sin to hold to or even contemplate.
Thus Art Schools in the 70s still had that delightful admixture of bohemianism
(modest disruptionism and agreeable-because-mitigated mischief) and
responsibility. It was the tail-end of the long tour of duty that began, in
Britain, with the institution of the Government Schools of Art and Design, set
up by Prince Albert, Victoria’s Consort. His original idea? - that a training
in the fine arts might aid the promotion and refinement of the manufactures of
the nation – and instrumentalist as that sounds, the facts relate a history of
the flourishing of pure, redundant art in the wake of that intention. The
record of the painter Joseph Noel Paton is very telling; he started as a
student indentured to the thread-manufacture in Paisley, designing for the
textile trade in the local School. He finished as Limner in Ordinary to Queen
Victoria, and the grand old man of Scottish easel-painting. His forte was the
depiction of Fairyland.
Under the old
system the student learned to paint under a regime of training. This means that
he subjected himself to a rule, extant in the establishment, which was to save
the student from his errors and allow him to become so free from himself as to
permit the emergence, under his own very hand, of visual effects the likes of
which he could not, in his wildest dreams, imagine himself producing in normal,
untrained circumstances. Above all, by the imposition of a strict training
regime he experienced the redeeming sensation of being oppressed by art and
thus made into a man, much as one who enlists in the French Foreign Legion
attains the same moral seriousness through the ritual mortifications employed
by that sterling Force (slow marching, fastidious grooming, the learning of
French as the sole language of communication and enforced song-singing – this
last the most apposite to my line of argument). And at the end of this time of
training the student gets away with a Diploma of Art, a qualification of great
distinction which carries no weight at all, simply because those with a DA did
paintings that were a thousand times more interesting than the two letters ( a
D and an A) which they could clap to the arse of their name if they felt so
vain as to do so. The DA was utterly incidental to their work, which had begun
some time during, or shortly after, their departure from Art School. But in the
modern time, when the great decline started, the Art Student began going to Art
School because there he could attain a University Degree – without having to go
to University. This amounted to a tremendous wheeze, for in this way a real
thicko could be right up there with a preppy Cecil, and with a Degree under his
belt he could then proceed on to get a real job – in marketing for
instance, or in some “outreach” context, or in the Public Sector somewhere,
doing a ton of “enablement” and raising huge amounts of “awareness” of “issues”
where your “rights” are concerned. He never touched a brush again – and he
didn’t much touch it during his student days either, for he was too involved in
the Trotskyite Students’ Representative Council to attend to the
petty-bourgeois displacement activity of drawing and painting and all its
inherent class-betrayal. He was thus spat out of the new system a
highly-qualified duffer unable even to sing in tune, far less paint a picture
worth the candle. Needless to say this state of affairs did not benight the
real Universities – nor indeed the Ballet Schools or the Music Academies. There
you still had to have skill and knowledge.
Soon those in
Art Schools one were increasingly required to be “conceptualist” – and this
meant (and means) having no manual skill whatsoever, no power of representation
by manual means, no capacity to forge the Nature-slaying link between the hand
and the eye, no taste for the symphonic tradition, no interest in the poetry of
William Morris (even William Morris) and only a positive aversion to
becoming conduct of any sort, a loathing of those who can draw and a professed
interest in “technology”. In tandem with this trend there grew up the Son of
Frankenstein’s Monster known as “Creativity.” The C-word was adopted to
counteract the embarrassing anachronism of the A-word (Art). It allowed people
who were very obviously completely talentless and far from art to sit before
computers all day long, as artists of a sort, tapping away about “creative
energy” in Departments set up to foster their ballyhoo and “accessing” various
budgets from local and national government to pay their salaries and pensions.
God knows what, at the end of their lives, these people point to as the result
of their “creativity”. Is there even one sketch – or was it all merely
Activity, loudly protested, funded to the hilt and counted in a fantasy-tally
of “creative industry revenue”? I think so. The most amazing thing about this
caste of “workers” is that, as ideologues and conceptualists, they spend their
days writing; as Schopenhauer said, “the word is the handmaiden of the
concept.” But what they write is all rubbish; have you ever read any of it?
Absolutely astounding waffle. They are told by their professors that they are
doing philosophy, but no philosopher that I know has ever shown the slightest
interest in this genre – for it is beneath contempt. They ignore it quite as
the sounder elements in the Church of England ignore the Christian charismatic
churches, or as physicians ignore claims that a crystal laid on a cancer can
put the blight into remission.
There is an Art
School worthy of the name in Stockholm, Sweden, and one or two elsewhere.
Indeed, there is a growing call for such establishments in which one can
discover how to look and learn; where one can enter hapless and come out
capable of something. The Stockholm outfit has produced draughtsmen of
tremendous capacity, doing drawings you wouldn’t believe could be done still.
There is also a School in New York doing this. As the technical skills are
plucked from the very edge of extinction there is great hope for the future
recovery, too, of the necessary taste and sensibility that cultivates in tandem
with such abilities. As yet I would say that a proper, fully-developed
comprehension of the cultural problem has not been adequately considered
in these admirable establishments. For instance, it is permitted within them
for the students to wear denim and trainer shoes. There is a place for denim –
in a chain-gang in Alabama, but not in an artist’s studio. Think corduroy,
please, and a sound pair of tattered brogues. And smocks are not mandatory, as
they should be. The smock is the single most important piece of an artist’s
kit, for in wearing it he vaults the first moral hurdle – which is to mortify
his sartorial pride, which is nothing less than himself paraded on his exterior
in textile form. When I am doing the finest clay-work I wear a lady’s smock,
the further to destroy any lingering confidence in my tigerly manhood which
might cause pride to surge in my breast and ruin the look of what I’m trying to
make. And I have seen a student from Stockholm drawing superb accounts of
electric guitars. Why did the school not drum into this boy the knowledge that
the electric guitar is nothing other than the tuning-fork of the Devil herself?
So there is some distance yet to be travelled before we can be certain that the
general culture has been set on the path of recovery – but I’m certain that
these small struggling schools are the hope. The drawing is the thing – both
from casts and the living model. They need to learn, however, that when drawing
the living model one must account for the genitalia in very vague terms, if at
all. Too many life-drawings in the modern academies are hyper-gonadal, in that
they record the genitals at life-size and in the tones of life (always darker)
so that these studies seem to “star” the tackle. What the enlightened old
schools did was to let the students understand that the genitals, being the
seat of everything in Nature, require in art to be seriously piped down. This
was not done because the old tutors were embarrassed! They taught their
students the idea of the visual concert, and for this reason also recommended
that the faces of the models were rendered similarly. It is not for nothing
that Mr. Baboon has instructed Mother Nature to paint his face in the same
colours as those which blossom on the business-end of Mrs. Baboon in her
season; there is a Pact of Steel between the face and the fundament which is
the pride and security of the animal kingdom. The short beard, incidentally, is
nothing more than an embassy of the genitals posted out, far to the north, in
an exposed situation. Again, Schopenhauer is very good on this matter; “The
beard, being half a mask, should be outlawed by the police. Further, being a
sexual symbol planted firmly in the face, it is also obscene. This is why women
like it.” But of course women don’t like a beard, so he’s wrong there.
Schopenhauer’s misogyny is the fly calculated to spoil his ointment – so that
his Gospel can be easily ditched, as it has been.
If I ran an Art
School I would set in place the following institution; that male homosexual
students would be forbidden to draw boys, and that female homosexual students
would be forbidden to draw girls. I would forbid male heterosexual students
from painting girls, and female heterosexual students from painting boys.
There. Now nobody would be drawing what they fancy and no study would be
entitled “Xavier”, or “Mandy”. And I should re-institute the jock-strap for
male models as a humanitarian act liable to win me the Nobel Peace Prize.
If I could be
portrayed by any artist, from any time, I should choose Sir George Reid,
who lived from 1841 to 1913. He was a modest, hard-working, superbly
accomplished painter who took up the portrait-painting slack in the latter part
of the 19th century in Scotland. His finest portrait is that of the
scientist Peter Guthrie Tait which hangs in the vestibule of the Royal Society
of Edinburgh. I was looking at it again yesterday and cannot believe what it
does.
The above interview with Alexander Stoddart 2012 ©
Manner of Man Magazine. All rights reserved. Reproduction is strictly
prohibited without written permission.
