Tony Baker: Pauline Boty becoming posthumously angered by the marginalisation of women artists in the History of Art Top Twenty: Digital print
Yesterday I went over to Dean Clough in Halifax to visit the posthumous exhibition of Tony Baker's work. Tony was one of those artists who for many years devoted most of his energies to teaching and although we were never friends, I was very aware of his presence as a fellow art tutor in a small city, whereby students often went back and forth between institutions. In particular we had both 'taught' Tony Tomlin and many of the students that benefitted from Tony Baker's input moved on to study at the Leeds College of Art, so we were in some ways art education world travelling companions.
Tony had been a fine art student at Leeds Polytechnic and was making a type of post-punk body of work there during the time I was already teaching at what was then the Jacob Kramer College.
His 'How to make modern art' being typical of an artist who was rarely irrelevant but was often irreverent. Like so many young artists of this time, art was itself subject to analysis. I had made my own forays into this territory as a student and therefore recognised his early work as having a similar love/hate relationship with a discipline that offered so much, but which at the same time seemed to erect almost unsurmountable barriers to a young artist who might be thinking of entering the hallowed lists of blue chip artists. If you weren't going to be accepted as an addition to the gallery canon, perhaps you could at least pull the rug out from underneath the complacent holders of the keys to the entry doors.
Above all Tony seemed to stand for the fact that art was something available to everyone and that it came in a variety of forms, from popular music to graphics, from collage to conceptual art. Whether it was printed on a 'T' shirt or painted on a canvas; it was whether or not it communicated something that seemed to matter. Often his work was very targeted, but then he might well decide that it was about nothing and that meaning didn't matter, a stance that was itself meaningful. Printmaking. especially digital print seemed to become a medium of choice as he got older. This fitted his egalitarian viewpoint, and I readily agreed with his decision; who understands the subtleties of etching or lithography, beyond etchers and lithographers?
Tony Baker: Red spot
Tony Baker: Digital prints
Tony introduced himself to his website visitors in his own unique way and I cant better it. In the section that stated 'About' he put this:
'There's no such thing as art - there are only artists' E H Gombrich
In 1976, Tony Baker took it upon himself to call himself an artist - since then he's never looked back (apart from when he was being pursued by a bull whilst walking through a field in Ireland).
Working on the premise that anybody can produce stuff, but it's only artists that do, and seeing no delineation between the various art forms at his disposal, he's been happily crossing disciplines like there's no tomorrow, combining traditional techniques and sensibilities with the potential that digital technologies has to offer.
Born in Birmingham, in the year that Heartbreak Hotel hit the charts and when Grace Kelly married Prince Ranier of Monaco, he has since been dabbling in whatever he can lay his hands on. Galvanised by the experience of his art education in Leeds, which at the time was described by Patrick Heron as being the most cutting edge Art School in Europe, he has worked in everything from print to rock 'n' roll (something that has always laid at the heart of whatever he produces).
Tony has left a wonderful legacy and the exhibition at Dean Clough is a tribute to his ability to construct powerful images, as well as his humour, intelligence and invention. His exhibition is asking yet again questions as to what makes good art and who gets to be celebrated as artists, especially those artists who spend their lives outside of the art gallery system, but who nevertheless make cogent and meaningful work. I thought it a pity that the Leeds City Art Gallery wasn't the institution hosting this exhibition. Dean Clough is in Halifax, not far away but not the city where Tony worked for most of his life. Surely there is a place in a city art gallery for the celebration of work by local artists who have done so much to raise people's awareness of art's potential to make change or at least to flag up the need for it. Too often I see exhibitions by artists coming into the city that I really do believe could have been eclipsed by well curated shows of artists who have made the city of Leeds their homes.
Portrait of Tony Tomlin
Tony Baker's 'Portrait of Tony Tomlin' is both about raising awareness of the Windrush Scandal, whereby British Subjects of Caribbean descent were wrongly detained, denied legal rights, threatened with deportation, and sometimes wrongly deported from the UK by the Home Office and a celebration of Tony Tomlin. Tomlin was an artist that most of us teaching art in Leeds had had to sometimes accommodate, sometimes be threatened by, sometimes to love, sometimes to be awed by and always to be energised by his constant ability to be inventive and to tell stories about a life that asked serious questions about what life was about. After studying for three years on the Fine Art and Craft course at the then Leeds College of Art, Tony began to spend more and more time in the studios of City College (an amalgam of all Leeds further education provision that included Park Lane and Thomas Danby). Eventually he became a fixture there and was given time and space to make his work. The fact that he was supported in this way was testament to a certain spirit of anarchy that the Leeds City College art provision still managed to maintain, even when faced with the managerial culture that most educational institutions were having to cope with. Although I spent nearly all of my working life teaching at the Art College, I was always aware that good things happened elsewhere, especially in the places where the disadvantaged and discouraged ended up. Park Lane and Thomas Danby in particular had a reputation of continuously supporting people to enter into a serious engagement with education. They were both friendly and exciting and as Leeds City College came into being, it carried that ethos into its new art provision included in their very ambitious new build, I would hope that even though people like Tony are no longer teaching there, that the spirit of the staff that made the place so vital, will remain.
Tony Baker's work is still available to look at online:
Blog Artystuff
Browse through his various manifestations and enjoy his irreverence and playful responses to life's vicissitudes. If you have time do go and see his exhibition at Dean Clough.
The exhibition will run from August 6 to October 22.
Watch
Tony Tomlin and Me A film by Dave Peel
See also:
Hardeep Pandhal The anarchic spirit that can still come out of Leeds
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