(please click this link for the Italian version)
Exhibition at Galleria Six - April 2025
This show has been curated by Sebastiano Dell’ Arte. In the main, he has chosen such that the show divides around works from the late seventies and the eighties on the one hand, and on the other hand, a selection of some works from the ongoing series of works I am currently working upon – the series titled the
FRONTISPIECE WORKS. These latter, ongoing, as I have just stated, have a particular provenance, some details of which I will attempt to recount further on in these remarks.
First a set of remarks on the older works – moving title by title, so to write.
1 Drinkers drinking to the health of imperialism, marchers marching towards its upkeep. 1979
2 Non-ideological French Lieutenant puking across a piece of hardboard (made in Sweden) and upon his guard. 1980
These works, both made more than 45 years ago, belong to a series of works now known as the WORLD WAR 1 WORKS. Both the above named works were produced late in the series. The thinking concerned with producing the series between 1974 and 1981 was an attempt to come to terms in some sense with the relation between my own estimate, not least my childhood memories of the impact of World War 1 on both the family and community social intercourse within which I was raised in South Yorkshire in the forties and fifties, and my growing awareness in adulthood of the wider national and international consequences and repercussions of World War 1 – not least its ongoing entanglements and the way its effect was transported through the twenties and thirties coalescing in 1939 into the direct connection between the settlement at the termination of World War 1 in 1918-19 and the outbreak of World War 2 in 1939.
I was born in July 1939.Some of these effects and outcomes are perhaps worth listing here, even if the compacting of these events misses out much of the significant detail.
A 1917 The first entrance of the American military presence in Europe and the outbreak of the Russian Revolution. These events were an initial blueprint for the primary event that dominated both my generation’s and my own life from 1945 until 1991 – the Cold War.
B Every city, town, village in Britain, exactly like the cities, towns, villages across much of Western Europe memorized World War 1 in the shape of war monuments – dedicated to what in English, is called some such as the community of ‘the fallen’. Like most Western European childhoods, my own was unavoidably intruded upon by the constant presence of such monuments and plaques. Such emblems turned out, by the early 1960s to have a direct resonance into my art practice. The two works heading this section, were products of my second art practice sortie into the subject of World War 1. During my first years at the Slade, 1961-63, I produced another earlierseries of works using the subject of World War 1.
C No 1 above, Drinkers drinking the health of imperialism, marchers marching towards its upkeep, is an attempt to jack up a more particular British history. Namely, the historical episode of the British Empire, both its hegemony that was still sort of holding on in the years 1914-18, and its upcoming contraction and demise, nowhere earlier and more clearly indicated than in the absolute requirement and enlistment by the Western Allies, Britain, Italy and France, of the entrance of the American military on the Allied side in 1917. Less than thirty years later, by 1945 Western Europe was bankrupt and American finance and military power, one of the most iconic examples being the Marshall Plan used by the Americans in the last half of the 1940s to ensure a capitalist reconditioning of the emergent West German state, was the new imperialist master. India had gained its national sovereignty from Britain in 1947. Britain could literally no longer afford to run its one time financial/military imperial rule there. In the fifties, and especially the early sixties, many of Britain’s imperial overseas colonies, not least in Africa, cast off the shroud of British imperial rule, as Britain’s debt to American finance soared to hitherto unimagined heights. The US is now the nonpareil protagonist of imperial ambition (Madeleine Albright’s notion of the US as ‘the indispensable nation’), a prominent symptom of which is the destitution of and the compensatory fully paid up role of the British political class as a US votary. In contrast to the political class, the British financial class are the successors to the old hegemony of their nineteenth century imperialist ancestors. Tax havens of which the City of London has, since the 1970s, conducted a master class in the creation of such havens, ensures that a portion, the wealthy portion, of British society, is the successor to and continuation of their nineteenth imperialist capitalist barons through their ability to harbor and channel American investment operations.
D No 2 above, Non-ideological French Lieutenant puking across a piece of hardboard (made in Sweden) and upon his guard belongs in a sub-genre of the WW1 works. These works take WW1 as the subject but cross-reference back into the materials from which the work is made, in this case the Swedish hardboard on which the image is, in this case, painted. For example another work in this sub-genre is a 1980 drawing from the series titled Betting and Trying titled Betting and Trying 11: 3 British Infantrymen walking under an Anvil Mamma cloud formation and across a piece of Rowney’s drawing paper. These works attempt to reflexively build into the title the material base of art production itself, associating both historical subject (in this case, WW1) with the necessity of a material substrate.
3 Stonetouchers 3 1985
The Stonetouchers series of works also have an obvious but, hopefully, cogent connection to World War 1. All the works use as subject, the emplacement of images of our two daughters, Ruby and Amber, in the settings of World War 1 cemeteries in Northern France, both Allied and German cemeteries. So some of what is stated in A, B and C above can be applied to these works. But the focus here is more on the relation between domestic and public arenas of the consumption of the event of World War 1.
Perhaps worth noting here are a couple of the particulars of the provenance of these works. For example, this whole chain of ideas and associations was triggered by a chance incident, as follows. On one of our statutory summer holidays in France we were driving through the region of the cemeteries in Northern France and decided to take a look at some of these cemeteries. Purely seprendipity, the first cemetery we visited turned out to be a South African cemetery, South African soldiers enlisted on the Allied side. This chance encounter not only raised the notion of the Commonwealth (Canadian, Indian, Anzac and South African for example) but the detail of the South African role in supporting the UK forces puzzled our daughters - this was 1984-85. South Africahad high visibility at this time through Apartheid, Mandela et al. High enough for it to have registered in the case of both our daughters - Ruby was 10, Amber was 6 – as something of a puzzle but it was also a resonant demand by our daughters to explain ourselves as parents. Both daughters asked questions, mutually reinforcing their curiosity and puzzlement about the event with which they were immediately confronted - South Africa as an ally of the UK. This exchange was a kind a lesson for Sue and I, something like, try not to expose your kids, either by accident or design, to some thing or event you are not prepared to attempt to explain.
To try and keep the remarks on the Stonetouchers concise, this accident of the connection of the graves of South African soldiers supporting the allied World War 1 cause to their perception of the disapproval of the then current UK (in which they lived and had been born into) of the then current South African Apartheid state, acted as a trigger for me eliciting the idea of a set of paintings using images of our daughters to attempt to provoke questions of historical connections between the domestic role and the public arena – not least of nationalism, patriotism and imperialism. This was at the height of Thatcherism, which administration had revived the public phenomenon of UK patriotism in conducting the Falklands war. This series of works were made both at the time of the defeat of the Miners strike in the UK (the ‘enemy within’ as Thatcher called it) and in the midst of the Provisional IRA campaign of violence, not least within the UK mainland itself. With the Provisional IRA campaign it was more difficult to decide whether the ‘enemy’ was within or without, or both. And, in any case, the historical relation between Ireland and the UK is one of the most vehement and ferocious historical examples of imperialist dogma and nationalist striving.
This series of works also posed for Sue and myself the general matter of using one’s kids as motifs in a politically infested and engaged art practice. But in the end they are OUR kids and not YOUR kids. The matter of domestic possession is not without both its obvious and subtle implications, not least the public rulings of what is and what is not domestically acceptable.
I guess too one of the fallback positions on the general matter of a politically engaged art practice is precedent, of which it seems clear to Sue and I there is no shortage of examples, Breughel, Bosch, Goya, David, Blake, Courbet, Kollwitz, Kahlo, Dickinson, Brecht and Melville, for example. Obviously, this is a far from exhaustive list.
4 Easter Lily Booby Trap connected to Irradiating Inscriptions of the Names of Votaries x-rayed into the Wall of the Bunker 1986
This is a pastel from the IRISH WORK series. There are over a hundred of these works nearly all pastel on black paper. Ireland was the political drama and struggle as near to home as it could be for an English artist – from the start of its long history to 2005, it literally historically encased Britain in one of its most flagrant and long-running colonial hazards and imperiled both Ireland and Britain in a ferocious and racist/antiracist imperialist struggle. Along with the Cold War, my generation in Britain witnessed another twentieth century event that ran from 1969 until 2005 – to be an Irish catholic in Northern Ireland during these years was to be a recipient of the oppression generated by an apartheid state. My wife was 23 and I was thirty, and staying with Christine Koslov and Joseph Kosuth in New York in 1969, when the civil rights marchers approaching Derry were violently attacked by the B-Specials. The fact that our first media exposure to the start of this latest episode of Anglo-British adversarial conflict was via American media rather than our customary British channels did emphasise a different view. A view held by significant sections of the populations of cities such as New York, Boston and Chicago that was certainly likely to be sympathetic toward the Irish point of view in contradistinction to the view of any British administration since partition in 1921.
This distinction had been, not least, heavily disguised by the reflex ingrained since 1941 by the roles of the British and Americans as allies in WW2. In short, my wife and I realized through being placed in this temporary New York domicile that the term ‘Brit’ used by, for example, a number of New York street orator-advocates of the Irish cause, was used as a pejorative term. Such oratorical feats set off almost immediately a whole chain of serious attempts by us to understand what was now an openly hostile confrontation in Northern Ireland. One of the first things we discussed was the fact that our parents and ourselves had been paying taxes some fraction of which helped pay for the maintenance and continuation of an apartheid statelet in Northern Ireland. It was this kind of ongoing experience throughout the 1970s, as the PIRA escalated the campaign of violence against the British state, that acted as foreground in the production of the IRISH WORK series in the first half of the 1980s.The media, designs and motifs I used in the IRISH WORK series I will list for the sake of keeping this commentary concise.
First, almost all the IRISH WORKS are pastel on black paper. Hopefully I chose black paper as a ground for making the pastel more luminous. I took the notion of the Irish being a luminous centuries-long problem to the British as a kind of given theme. Many of the IRISH WORKS are depicted as events taking place in a bunker.
There is a series within the series, so to write, the titles of which use the legend Bunker in Armagh.The bunker is an image I attempted to harness to suggest that both the British and the Irish were bunkered (hunkered) down in their respective historical positions. The ferocious confrontation between the PIRA and the British Army was the upfront contemporary violent carapace, inside Britain filtered by media prejudice, of the historical depth of the hostility between Ireland and Britain. For me, this episode of Irish-British relations was straightforwardly the underwriting of the fact that the last traces of imperial British hubris had become incongruous but remained a vicious reflex.
Flowers too are prominent motifs within the Irish Works – anemones frequently for example. Images of skulls, wreaths, wires, brains appear frequently, many situated in a bunker. A significant input into the choice of such motifs is the example of, for instance, Bosch, Goya, Blake and Melville. Melville’s chapter The Try Works in Moby Dick was often in my mind when making the IRISH WORKS series.
NEW WORK - The Frontispiece Works
The initial triggers for this series of works, still ongoing, are two books. The first is From Humanism to Hobbes: Studies in Rhetoric and Politics by Quentin Skinner, published 2018. The second is The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas During the English Revolution by Christopher Hill, published in 1964. Following rapidly on the heels of these two stimulants is a third, triggered by the device of my introducing a 1964 portrait of myself as a recurrent motif in a number of the works in the series. This essay is T J Clark’s Gross David with Swoln Cheek: An Essay on Self-Portraiture.
Skinner’s book kicked off the idea of the production of the series. Hobbes’ work has sustained and, hopefully, nourished a long time interest. Leviathan is an iconic book for me, I’ve lived my reading of it as demonstrating Hobbes grasping to an image of himself, on the one hand, as a biblical epic champion of authoritarian governance and the significance of sovereignty of one-person rule and, at first inquiry, and, on the other hand, and in the final analysis, issuing a seemingly contradictory warning against the gathering of an excess of power in one person’s hands. This Hobbesian contradictory sustenance is embedded I think in the foreground of my practice. But Skinner’s research and interpretation of Hobbes I judge to have a direct conduit into the development (if such it is) of my idea of a relevant art practice. Consider the following from Skinner:
A number of humanists soon began to develop a further and closely related argument. If, they proposed, these emotional effects can be produced by the creation of verbal images, then an even more effective means of producing the same effects will be to supply our auditors with actual images to accompany the statement of our case. This is the commitment underlying the rise to popularity in the middle decades of the sixteenth century of the new genre of emblemata books or emblem-books. … it came to be recognized that the most compelling means of presenting weighty moral and religious arguments is to put words and pictures together.
Skinner recalls many phrases from the humanist repertoire, for example: the ‘eyes of the mind’; he recalls Henry Peacham’s sentence that to ‘ expresse and set forth a thing so plainly and lively, that it seemeth rather painted in tables, then declared with words.’ Skinner quotes Quintillian’s phrase ‘the eyes of the mind’ and following, Abraham Fraunce referring to Horace’s dictum ut picture poesis, describing poetry as a ‘speaking picture, and paynting, a dumbe poetry’. Hobbes’ Leviathan was fronted by an emblemata, a frontispiece that became iconic – it is used on the Penguin edition of Leviathan first published in 1968. But it is Skinner’s book that acted as the lodestone for the Frontispiece Works, particularly chapter 10, Hobbes and the Humanist Frontispiece.
The works are a mix of certain what I consider to be relevant words and images relevant to the task in hand. The words are frontispiece, portal, threshold, hubris, and maybe some others to come as the series move on. The images , thus far, are photocopies of my two daughters when they were young on a visit to German concentration camp at Natzwiller-Struthof in the Vosges, images from Goya, a portrait of myself, Hobbes’ frontispiece for Leviathan, and a number of other images.I attempt to construct the works not least through resonating the words inscribed on the tableaux - Portal, something you see through or view from; Threshold, something you cross; Hubris – in this case an attempt to maneouvre the concept of the artist as an extreme self-assured projection, the model of the artist as a self-confirming centre of truth. And so on …
The Frontispiece Works shown at Galleria Six are smaller ones. I have a number of others many of them much bigger. However the continuing momentum and impetus of this series is a joint forthcoming project/event/exhibition of these works with the American artist Sam Lewitt, with whom I greatly enjoy working and planning the evolving exchange and exhibition cum book.
Terry Atkinson April 2nd, 2025
GALLERIA SIX -PIAZZA PIOLA 5 -20131 MILANO