TWO & A HALF CHEERS FOR CHRISTOPHER HEATHCOTE

TWO & A HALF CHEERS FOR CHRISTOPHER HEATHCOTE!


Christopher Heathcote popped in to the Bookshop recently, as he does, with photo-copies of his latest articles for Quadrant magazine, namely 'How Ingmar Bergman Filmed Munch' (April,'13) & 'Kenneth Clark and the Exodus of the Modernists' (June, '13).   Previously I've read & enjoyed 'Did Grace Cossington Smith Read Virginia Woolf' (November, '11), 'When Antonioni Met Rothko' (January/February, '12), 'John Brack & the Allegorical Still Life' (April, '12), 'Albert Tucker and Existentialist Paris' (July/August, '12),  & 'When Beckett Commissioned Giacometti' (January/February, 13). His penchant for quirky equations, as these titles demonstrate, proclaims the lively mind of a raconteur, which is precisely why I welcome his visits & commend his articles to readers at large. 

Not the first place one would look for art commentary but, as I understand it, author & editor have struck a chord and so the articles flow. The opening paragraph of the Cossington Smith piece might offer a clue to Christopher Heathcote's & Les Murray's accord. "Did Cossington Smith read Virginia Woolf? It's a question that has niggled me for years. The art history profession tends to tackle visual art as if it is an insular, self-absorbed activity with only direct creative influences coming from other visual works. Paintings are shown to beget more paintings. But artists not only go to exhibitions. They listen to music, they watch movies and television, they attend various forms of theatre performance, and they read magazines and books, sometimes even novels touching on art."  Indeed : art & artists not in the ivory tower but necessarily the swim of life, the informal song & dance. By the way, the Cossington Smith article is informed by an artist's practical facility; Heathcote's erudition regarding implements & application enhances the critique.

I should have anticipated the disappointment I otherwise keep at bay while reading Heathcote's account of my favourite period of modern British art, after all the "exodus of the modernists" refers to the idea that Britain via Kenneth Clark, as champion of the provincialism (read philistinism) underscoring its mid-century production, "had just had its chance to embrace the international vanguard. There had been a genuine opportunity to establish London as the artistic capital following the fall of Paris : Paris was no longer the centre. But the innovators [C H mainly refers to Mondrian though the innovation of the locals is his more substantial issue] had been repelled. So they went to New York, taking the prospects for modern art with them." Heathcote's analysis of Ben Nicholson's fraught relationship with Kenneth Clark is disturbing in terms of patronage & the potential for tyranny, even so it's unfortunate that he's so amenable to the conspiratorial reading : Clark as malevolent influence upon English art which, but for him --oh yes, he admits there was also the Blitz --would have followed the International Style down to the last Modernist letter…

For my part I'll always contend that Modernism's glorious adventure is misrepresented if denigration of the contraries manifests as the attempt to expunge from any of its territories a national accent or locality (either as idiom or character after Paul Nash's famous  quip, quite properly quoted by C H, "whether it's possible to 'go modern' and still 'be British' is a question vexing quite a few people today"). Besides being a doomed project (as though, for example, modernist art in France & the USA isn't also French or American respectively), where else but the local does Australian art (of which Heathcote is a keen supporter) reside? And why should Australian or British art, under consideration here, be exempt from the respect each deserves & the pleasure & inspiration each confers? No doubt at all in my mind that the relationship of local & international (or global as that conglomerate's currently appreciated) is the all pervasive cultural & economic & political discussion of the day.

It occurs to me that Christopher Heathcote writes as a modernist partisan, thus the palpability of his evocations & cited history; but I wonder why he doesn't avail himself of a typical post-modernist second look. How about a reconsideration of "sentimental figuration" & narrative, even that which he derides as "illustrative, cheerful and quaint"? And where to now the notion "progressive"?

That said, his suggestive & instructive details & sub-plots, elicited from exemplary wide reading, confirm what I call scholarship. These rich details both stem from insight & facilitate it. Take, for example, his superb paragraph about Henry Moore's drawings of the people in the war-time London tube. "What his abstract drawings were about was the pity of war. And he conveyed what no photograph could by using the organicist forms of biomorphic surrealism. Building up the weird bodies from clusters of undulating lines upon darkened grounds, Moore suggested several things at once. His cocooned figures are civilians sheltering in tunnels, and corpses laid out in murky catacombs, as well as worm-beings in a stifling burrow : they are the vulnerable living, yet also potentially the massed dead, and creatures of a ghastly underworld."

It's commendable that he's a readable critic & commentator, eschewing jargon, using the intellect & senses possessed by anyone willing to contemplate a subject. I imagine his Quadrant articles one day making an excellent book. With the greatest respect, then, two & a half cheers for Christopher Heathcote!


[13/7 - 12/8/13]

MORE ART CRITICISM : ON CHRISTOPHER HEATHCOTE'S KIND OF BLUE

CHRISTOPHER HEATHCOTE, Kind of Blue
Gallery 101 [Ground level, 101 Collins Street, Melbourne];
November 4-28th, 2009

At Christopher Heathcote's opening the other night at 101, red in hand & generously at hand, the trio smoothly dipping in & out of Coward, Brubeck, Monk, Miles et al, not yet 'playing the paintings' as I fancied could be done when we first noticed the adjacency of jazz band to paintings --Mondrian/Malevich topographies but just as likely musical staves--, I deliberated with Stephen McLaughlin on how many local art-writers also painted & actually exhibited? Jeffrey Makin; Robert Rooney for a long time; Bernard Smith? --but not too many more (that's a statement not a plea). We did see an exhibition by Bernard Smith? I say to Retta, doubting myself --she nods in the affirmative, yet for some reason Tucker's in my mind now --portraits after photographs? --or Smith's portrait of Tucker, or vice versa? --golden opportunity with McLaughlin & Heathcote both in the room to corroborate, but we're having a conversation, folks, not writing a thesis!
I remember Christopher telling me the show had been hung according to palate, and perhaps the groupings & progressions did peg back the large white, albeit divided, space to a series of harmonic clusters, which is what the paintings are. A moot point, I suppose, whether there's greater or lesser aesthetic coherence in studio or gallery (or do I mean 'explication', implying that the environment for the art's literal making is the fuller context)? Telling, though, that Christopher's invitation is a photograph of his studio in the Nicholas Building, and one can imagine that the pipes & windows opposite his studio, through his similarly partitioned window, is the model for the canvas on the floor leaning against the sill. There too are his brushes, a painting on an easel, objet d'art, two small framed portraits, &, instructively, piles of books propped against which is a Readers Feast shopping bag bulging, probably, with recently acquired booty!
He's a scholar-writer, a reader-painter. Expect correspondences, then, between the monographs he's written --in recent years there's Roger Kemp & Yvonne Audette --& his own painting? Well, the references exist, but no should or shouldnt about it. To converse people employ the same language, simple as that?
Exhibition launching, as with book launch & reading, is sometimes like the mega-, meta- artefact often promised. For me, Christopher Heathcote's 'artist reception' was the expanded painting --jazz trio fulfilling the paintings' jazz titles (Around Midnight, Twentieth Century Blues, Kind of Blue), encouraging one to see the paintings' grids as fretted with the whimsical points & angles which have denoted City & its Sounds since ever art made virtue of the naturally traducing popular culture!
I recall looking back down the room, to the right of the gallery entrance, at a particular work which then opened up to me as red base (the painter getting down his initial energy & excitement), overlay of grey squares (reflections : thinking aloud the problem of what to say), gathering details (or story subsumed to & expressed as pattern). Generalizing, I could say Heathcote's paintings elicit ideas from emotions, ultimately presenting or, dare one say, expressing a state of mind, a mood, a kind of blue! According to the notes, the paintings have accrued over a long period of time spent in the inner city, and maybe that explains their combination of movement & tranquility --both states rely on repeated signs & lines for their effect.
Writing these words, Ben Shahn is suddenly in my head, --exemplary of a calligraphy that's also choreography. Shahn & Saul Steinberg both? 50s, early 60s motifs, decor, design... And confirmed easily as I turn up the copy of Perspectives (Autumn, 1952) which my late uncle Dennis gave me, my last family summer holiday before I came away to Australia, first as a one-voyage mariner then an assisted passage migrant,1965 & '66 --a magazine which introduced me to Shahn's pictures &, as it happens, W C Williams' poems & prose, & much else besides, Rexroth, Barzun, Jarrell, Dahlberg --resonating forever after!
There it is : Shahn's Composition for Clarinets and Tin Horn (1951), in which a figure of anguish, face hidden in bent fingers & forearms, & mocked by the clown face on the horn, might even be missed in the strong line of instruments, which almost indicate a kind of grid. And grid it is that's foremost in Paterson (1950) & World's Greatest Comics... Selman Rodman commented, "Shahn has not been unaffected by the drift toward nonrepresentational abstraction in the past decade. The emphasis on background pattern in such transitional pictures as World's Greatest Comics (1947) and Convention (1948) has assumed a dominant foreground position in the more recent May 5 and Paterson. The latter picture was inspired by a passage celebrating 'invention' in William Carlos Williams' strictly 'nonrepresentational' poem with the same title and has been criticized by some of Shahn's admirers as 'arid,' 'empty,' and 'too abstract.'"
I'm not sure if the discussion around abstraction & realism that Rodman reports of 1952 is or isnt passe in 2009. Certainly no reference to Ben Shahn in Heathcote's exhibition note, though Leger's La Ville, Wyndham Lewis's The Crowd, Mondrian's Broadway Boogie-Woogie, & architects Van der Rohe & Gio Ponti are all acclaimed. And the jazz goes without saying.
In the exhibition note, Christopher Heathcote doesnt talk about abstraction or at all abstractly --quite the opposite. And he could easily share Shahn's axiom that form is only ever an expression of content...
Resoundingly then, a cool event, a cool show; two weeks left to dig it some more!

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--Kris Hemensley,
November 6th-15th, 2009--