The Death of Chatterton: Henry Wallis: 1856
The painting 'The Death of Chatterton' by Henry Wallis highlights the idea of the artist as a martyr of society. The torn sheets of poetry on the floor represent the struggle an artist has to tap into his (and in this case it was nearly always his) inner soul, that intangible something that provided the spark of genius that could ignite great art.
When I was at school one of our set books for English literature was 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man' by James Joyce. The book recorded the psychological journeys of Stephen Dedalus as he progressed through life; from naive boy, via intellectual student to artist, and because he was a Catholic, from sinner to saint and from saint to sinner, the guilt trip goes both ways. Eventually as he overcomes these struggles he can butterfly like emerge from his earlier life and become an artist, leaving his old home behind as he sets out for wider and wilder shores. He was leaving Ireland to 'forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race'. The lesson wasn't lost on myself and I, like I suspect so many other boys, saw a life role illustrated in those heavily thumbed pages of a Penguin Modern Classic. A model that was romantic, that led away from a provincial life in a small town like Dudley and which was very influential on my decision to become an artist. Stephen Dedalus was another Chatterton, this time shaped in such a way that his fictional life reflected the morphing of the model to fit an early 20th century Ireland. Jackson Pollock was the myth carrier who took the idea on into the 1950s and for myself into the 1960s, when as a young adolescent I was beginning my own journey into art. Pollock had the aura of an existentialist hero and he was understood by myself as a lonely, sensitive, and misunderstood genius, which back in 1965, was what I thought I was too. His contemporaries were movie idols like Marion Brando and James Dean, and like Dean, a tragic death in a car crash served as a romantic apotheosis that fixed his mythic stature and assured his place as a sacrificial icon. It felt as if artists had to prove themselves through some sort of agonising struggle with life. I also read Colin Wilson's 'The Outsider', a book that seemed to me at the time, to tell it like it was, and the difficulties that I had with my father and his not understanding me, were heightened and twisted into an existentialist angst, that set my young artist soul at loggerheads with school, Dudley, life in the midlands, and everything but Bob Dylan. Boys and girls of my generation in England also had to endure years of Sunday school, and having drilled into their heads the importance of Christ's and various saints martyrdom. Pollock's parents were Presbyterian, so it is very likely that he would have had a similar experience as a boy.
The myth isn't one just for men and boys. Anais Nin had this to say; "Permit yourself to flow and overflow, allow for the rise in temperature, all the expansions and intensifications. Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them."
A more realistic take on the idea, is the artist as a constant worrier. A niggler, a person preoccupied with themselves and their role, someone never quite sure of their position within society and whether or not they have any value to others. This approach begins to deflate the genius myth, to reduce martyrdom to a type of annoyance with one's lot. As an antidote to the testosterone fuelled male myth of the artist, I would therefore recommend you read the artist Anne Truitt's 'Daybook', a sensitive journal about how life seemed to her as an artist. She covers many of the issues I'm sure many artists face as they develop a career in a profession few really understand and even fewer have been able to articulate what it is like to be juggling all the different balls of creative expectation, whilst walking the tightrope of authentic expression. Truitt states; “Artists have no choice but to express their lives.”
In her diary Truitt explored aspects of her own personality and how her various personal issues had shaped her creative impulses. I was when rereading her book recently, now much more interested in her idea that art was concerned “with the limen of consciousness, with the threshold at which experience becomes just perceptible.” She was first of all trained as a psychologist and this standpoint gave her a self-awareness inaccessible to most of us, and which is I now realise very important in relation to how my current work is progressing.
In July 1974 she wrote:
'I do not understand why I seem able to make what people call art. For many long years I struggled to learn how to do it, and I don’t even know why I struggled. Then, in 1961, at the age of forty, it became clear to me that I was doing work I respected within my own strictest standards. Furthermore, I found this work respected by those whose understanding of art I valued. My first, instinctive reaction to this new situation was, if I’m an artist, being an artist isn’t so fancy because it’s just me. But now, thirteen years later, there seems to be more to it than that. It isn’t “just me.” A simplistic attitude toward the course of my life no longer serves.
The “just me” reaction was, I think, an instinctive disavowal of the social role of the artist. A life-saving disavowal. I refused, and still refuse, the inflated definition of artists as special people with special prerogatives and special excuses. If artists embrace a view of themselves as special people they necessarily have to attend to its perpetuation. They have to live it out. Their time and energy are consumed perpetuating the role, decisions being made in terms of a role defined by others, and serving to illustrate their theories of the artist as outsider or genius. The Renaissance focused this social attention on the artist’s individuality, and the focus persists today in a curious form that on the one hand inflates artists’ egoistic concept of themselves and on the other places them at the mercy of the social forces on which they become dependent. Artists can suffer terribly in this dilemma and find it hard to maintain a view of themselves that is realistic.' Anne Truitt
It was such a relief to hear her state that, 'I refused, and still refuse, the inflated definition of artists as special people with special prerogatives and special excuses.' With these words she was able to resolve my dilemma, the one that so many male artists of my generation had, which was how to get past the inherited myths that we were shaped by during our time of becoming artists. Readers might be surprised at this and be mystified as to why all those feminist books and arguments and in particular the ones set out in my adopted city of Leeds by Griselda Pollock, hadn't been able to dismantle the romantic myth for me well before Anne Truitt's book came out in the 1980s. I think it was because Truitt actually seemed to write about making art as if she made it and at the same time writing about family life as something happening at the same time. No disrespect to more academic writers, but those with an intellectual grasp on the situation, were often writers and not makers and Truitt spoke my language. There have been of course others since then, but her voice is still one I return to whenever I need to be reminded that what I do is something defined by my particular entanglement into life, and that a role defined by others is always going to be what they need you to be and not what you are.
Anne Truitt
Clement Greenberg on Anne Truitt (Who's work he liked)
Being in your body is central to an understanding or appreciation of Christina Quarles’s paintings. Her bodies contort with paint. They set up a dance that is partly the need to be humanoid, even when twirled into impossible positions and partly the need to express the world view of paint. Composite limbs and torsos are constructed using saturated, tints and blends of colours, and are as much abstractions as figuration. These bodies are inhabited with an awkward sensibility to what they are as sexual beings and what they are as meat, as well as what they are as paint. Her paint drips are also tendons, when she paints a rainbow it is both colour organisation and the three dimensional form of a leg. She seems to hold within her work all those old arguments about abstraction and figuration and at the same time re-energise debates in relation to the idea of the 'macho' painter via a much more flexible gender narrative. It would be interesting to have her diary of what it is to be an artist available to compare with Anne Truitt's. I wonder how many what were 'fixed' cultural codes would be shown to have already been consigned to history? I find echoes of George Condo in her work but also of the cartoonist Don Martin. The idea of beauty she represents in her work becomes a subversive beauty, an opportunity to multiply the representational possibilities available to artists and viewer alike.
Even the way she is photographed in the studio has resonance. She stands at her work, hand on hip, a no nonsense pose that suggests that she really has gravitas and that unlike the male figures who back in the 1950s aspired to being 'tough' guys, she really is a tough woman.
Bearing all this in mind, I've just come back from a visit to London. In The Tate Modern I was looking again at the work of Christina Quarles, whose 'Casually Cruel' of 2018 was being displayed as part of the new curatorial policy of showing more women and people from alternative backgrounds and traditions. Every time I come across new work I have to re-digest myself as well, all the time having to reframe what is part of an ongoing need to constantly re-evaluate what is important and what is becoming less so. I could of course decide to just put a halt to this process, but it seems to me that as soon as I do, I become a fossil rather than an old man. At the moment old and new experiences blend and mingle, so there is enough stimulus to make sure my brain still engages rather than being set in stone.
Christina Quarles: 'Casually Cruel' 2018
Christina Quarles had been exhibited at the Hepworth in Wakefield at the end of 2019 and I had been to see her work then. In fact some of the work I saw then was I thought better than 'Casually Cruel' but even so the work still fascinates me and I think she is making important images, so perhaps I ought to look at the work in more detail.
Casually Cruel: Detail
Christina Quarles
Every generation needs its myths about what it is to be who you need to be, and perhaps the contemporary equivalent book to Colin Wilson's 'Outsider' is 'Glitch Feminism' by Legacy Russell, a book that argues that the divide between the digital and the real world no longer exists, and that in order to find out who we are within this digital era we need to create our own spaces to explore the shaping of our various identities. Both books are centred on how identities are constructed and although there are over 60 years between their first publishing dates, perhaps society has not changed as much as we think it has and that for those of an artistic temperament there is always a need to define oneself as an individual that is slightly different, at odds with the mainstream and in defining self, you in some way help to define the society you exist within.
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