Peter Davies interview: the provocative bits...

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'St Ives 1975-2005: Art Colony in Transition' is a lovely looking book that came out last year, published by St Ives Publishing. It was criticised a little on this site, partly on the forum and partly in a separate article.
I think one criticism was around the idea of there being a 'colony' any more in St Ives particularly as the term itself seems problematic. The other criticism was the fact that there was little recognition of 'new art', or 'postmodern art' (ie photography, video, installation, performance) in the book. Taken together there is the potentially harmful impression that art in Cornwall hasn't changed in 30 or more years. Would you like to respond to this?
 
We need to get this straight. My successful new book was not primarily a book about St. Ives art now; three quarters of it was about St. Ives in the 70s, 80s and 90s. Now the 1970s is already art history, enough time has elapsed for us to look objectively and impassively.
There may well be a pluralism in St. Ives now, but I still think that the coherent colony you refer to is intact in terms of a younger generation who, consciously or not, develop the styles of their post-war predecessors. Take the following as examples: Antony Frost following his father, Henrietta Dubrey drawing on Lanyon, Hilton etc., Jason Lilley using Nicholson's and the unrated David Haughton's architectural skyline, Patrick Haughton and Morag Ballard (below left and on the cover) following John Wells, Clive Williams and Larr Can influenced by their teacher Alex McKenzie, Linda Weir working in the tradition of fellow Mancunians Alan Lowdnes and Fred Yates. The list goes on and on. If this is not evidence of a coherent colony, or school, on going and flourishing, then my name is Alistair Campbell.

Regards the quip that there was little recognition of new art, or multi-media post-modern art, I would argue that this is a parasitic and odious development that does not belong either to St. Ives or the west-country scene in general.

The said developments are decadent, dumbed down, a symptom of deregulated neo-liberal Britain and America. Deregulate the economy, and you deregulate social principals, morals and ethics and aesthetic standards. Julian Spalding, formerly head of Sheffield, Manchester and Glasgow art galleries, wrote a compelling book called "The Eclipse of Art" (Prestel, 2003) which goes into all this. Julian wrote to me from Edinburgh congratulating me on my attack on Tate St. Ives' dreadful exhibition "Real Life" calling my article in the St. Ives Times and Echo "rousing stuff".

Julian, however, also warned me that those in positions of power would be deaf to my views, and he himself found himself outlawed for daring to suggest that the art establishment had gone wrong. Timothy Clifford, the outgoing supremo of the entire museums of Scotland, told me that Julian wouldn't get another major museum job as a result of his outspokenness. He's a hero in my book. Sven Berlin once said to me, when I was a rookie art writer, that whatever it costs me, I should keep true to my beliefs, and I'm proud to have, more or less, done that.

 

'Real Life' was the video art show of 2002 wasnt it? It included work by eg Sam Taylor-Wood and Mark Wallinger (below)
Yes.

Some of the early conceptualists were original and important artists, Eva Hesse for example. But what we have now is an anti-art bandwagon, a celebrity culture freak show, that bypasses any grasp of the language of fine art. I'll have nothing to do with it. Like surrealism, the legacy of conceptual art is often best when it is integrated into traditional fine art practice, i.e. painting and sculpture. I particularly like a conceptual approach to subject matter in more recent trends of figurative painting or American photo realism or New Image Painting. I'm interested in photography as an art form and own a Lee Miller war time snap.

But installation, video and performance are not fine art - they are rather third rate theatre or film, and therefore should confine themselves to populist entertainment centres, rather than high-jack serious art galleries, like Tate St. Ives.

 

But these are modes of artistic practice that are not new. Indeed they have been accepted as aspects of fine art for 30 or 40 years...or more. Arguably, as soon as sculptures are taken off their plinths they become installations. Anthony Caro, who you've already praised, was one of the first installation artists in this sense. Performance and artist's films have been around even longer: since at least the 20s. I can understand that you may not like these forms of art, that's fair enough. But to deny them their status as art seems a step too far: a step that for many undermines your position as a critic, and therefore does a disservice to the artists that you write about.

Not only Anthony Caro, but my friend the late Michael Kenny (below right) placed their sculpture beyond the plinth, using the floor, wall or even ceiling of the surrounding architectural environment as part of the overall context of the sculpture. Kenny, I wrote a book on in 1997, and in it I emphasised the important relationship between the illusionism of drawing or the painted mark, and concrete free-standing full-in-the-round. As I’ve argued earlier the use of conceptualism or, in this case the environmental aspect, added to the successful outcome of Caro’s or Kenny’s sculpture. Paul Mount in St. Just also places his sculpture in relation to architecture. The two fields clearly overlap. The problem with installation work per se, however, is there’s often no syntax, no plastic discipline and no tight or vital tension within the work. It depends more on sociological interpretation, and so falls down as a formal statement.

You mention artist films: do you mean Andy Warhol’s films? I think Warhol’s films are really good: they have a freshness, originality & possibly humour. The problem is the bandwagon that follows taking the original statement out of context and usually debasing it.

To deny performance and film as an art form does not, as you suggest, undermine my position as a critic. On the contrary, it strengthens it and I take quips about my being a reactionary as a compliment. Performance is just that – a pseudo-avant garde branch of the performing – as opposed to plastic – arts.

 

Is it wrong that art should be subjected to a sociological interpretation? 

You also say that multi-media post-modern artworks are 'decadent; dumbed down; a symptom of deregulated neo-liberal Britain and America'. What many like about St Ives modernism is the fact that it reminds us of another era: an era before post-modernism, before the consumer boom, before the class-less society, before feminism, before colour TVs, computer games and Amazon.com. But if multimedia art is a reflection of now, surely that’s a good thing? Or are you suggesting that it is better to cling to the past, to the old hierarchies, as a way of denying the present?

No, I am not suggesting that it is better to cling to the past, to the old hierarchies, as a way denying the present. What I am suggesting, however, is that the achievements of the St. Ives school - shall we say between 1939 and 1995 - are timeless. The expression of the modern movement was not wasted on the incidentals and superficial distraction of 'modern life' during that time - though obviously such things peripherally infringed on the work. Rather, the great art spoke of, and reflected on, the human condition, the rebuilding of a war-ravaged world, the meaning of life and of existentialism etc.

Once again I have to re-iterate because it hasn't yet sunk in that multimedia & high-tech art is not fine art and, for the most part, should be shunted off to populist art centres. Then serious museums can be given a deserved rest from these aesthetic Visigoths.

 

You're therefore also saying especially in relation to video/performance and installation, that the art establishment (eg Tate) has got it wrong. That is a daring position to take and if nothing else I congratulate you on your boldness.

You also imply that modernist art as it was in the 40s, 50s and 60s was OK, but then at some point it all went wrong. In art history terms when was this in your view? Would an artist like Andy Warhol symbolise the moment when things changed: his interest in celebrity, his films, his interest in 'mass culture'? Or was it perhaps the conceptual artists, and Fluxus artists before them who were not interested in aesthetic or beautiful objects that could be bought and sold?

Like Hilton Kramer and Julian Spalding quoted above I think it all went wrong during that malaise peculiar to the later 1970s, when late modernist movements like Abstract Expressionism, Pop and Minimalism ran their courses. I’d personally also link the problem to Thatcher and Regan when monetarism and all-out commercialism took hold at the expense of social, cultural and aesthetic value.

As regards Fluxus, it was an intellectually interesting movement with probing philosophical meaning, which is not to say that I necessarily liked the end product. I have mixed feelings, for example, about Yoko Ono, not least because I am, if you couldn’t guess, a Beatles fan in general and a John Lennon fan in particular.

I can see a certain likeness in your photo! (above)

Art did become extremely pluralised in the late 70's. Picking up on another comment but moving the discussion on: describing eg video art as 'a parasitic and odious development that does not belong either to St. Ives or the west-country scene in general' seems to suggest that art from St Ives or Cornwall should be different from that elsewhere. This plea for 'localism', if that's what it is, is appealing and one to which I am sympathetic. 

Actually I’m not suggesting art from St. Ives and the West Country should be different from elsewhere. Rather I’m suggesting that the glorious 50-year old fine art tradition in the West Country (which, arguably, is centred on St. Ives) is an entity with is own distinctions and characteristics. Obviously, there has been osmosis between Cornish art and that of the equivalent art at Corsham, Bristol, Liverpool, Newcastle and London.

And, of course, the St. Ives middle generation corresponded with the New York school, so we have transatlantic couplings like Wynter and Tobey, Lanyon and de Kooning, Heron and Francis or Louis, Frost and Gottlieb or Motherwell etc.

But the anti-art instincts of post-modernism run against the achievements of great mid-century art. It is why Hilton Kramer wrote his book “The Revenge of the Philistines”, a copy of which this eminent writer gave to and signed for me.