-1ART HISTORY FIELDWORK REPORT

JOHN A. WALKER (COPYRIGHT 1978)

North London. A Spring Sunday during the Easter vacation. With a borrowed

camera I go in search of community murals for a lecture to be given to fine art

students in the Summer term. I take the tube to New Cross Gate in South London.

This area is a shambles. Once the London docks were full of ships, goods and

dockers. Now the docks are deserted but people still live all around them. As the

tube train emerges from its tunnel under the Thames, I see railway embankments,

used car dumps, lorry parks, the remnants of old terraced back streets, various

council housing developments, tall schools dating from the turn of the century,

travellers living in caravans among rubbish tips; in short, the backside of the

capital. I arrive at my objective: the Milton Court housing estate, a new council

development. with concrete tower blocks, three-story flats, multistorey car parks,

old half-demolished streets, and a red brick shopping precinct with a pub. Although

the flats are fully occupied, work is still in progress everywhere: paths being laid,

housing developments being completed, rubble, mud, building machines and

materials in all directions. The heaps of sand, stones and bricks by the paths

inevitably remind my art-educated vision of Post-Minimal sculpture with its 'anti-

form’ aesthetic. Children play with these materials giving them some order; in

contrast, discarded card board boxes at the rear of a shop are being torn to pieces.

Milton court is an exceptionally rich environment - perceptually speaking. The

layout of the buildings seems to me, a stranger, chaotic, the architectural styles and
materials employed multifarious. Everything within sight has been designed by

somebody but as a totality it makes no sense - no structure, just an accretion of odds

and ends. Murals by students from a local art college adorn (if that is the right

word) the external walls of the ground floors of the tower blocks and their entrance

hallways. (This area includes Goldsmith’s College of Art.) Each of the blocks has

been given a name: Hercules, Pegasus, Archer, etc; often the themes of the murals

relate to these names. For example, Archer tower has an image of a Robin Hood

type archer at its base. The tower blocks are harsh. Their bases are particularly

unattractive therefore the murals function as a face lift for the architecture.

Pictorial cosmetic. (After thought: will painting and architecture ever work together

in harmony again?) In terms of content the murals are irrelevant to the problems

and issues confronting the inhabitants of the blocks. Let us be frank. This estate is a

ghetto for the working class and the lumpen proletariat. Among the population

there appears to be a considerable number of West Indian immigrants and their

British children. I note a number of anti-National Front graffiti and fly posters.

However, the vast majority of the figures in the murals are white. One mural depicts

the inhabitants of the block in question and shows an image of racial harmony - two

children, one black and one white sitting close to one another. But in another mural

there are black figures disporting themselves in a tropical paradise replete with

sandy beaches, cool rivers, and waving palm trees; an image straight from the travel

adverts and a vestige of the era of colonialism with its myth of happy savages. For

those that work in factories, offices, shops, at home in the kitchen, the two weeks

annual holiday 'away from it all' are a compensation - for those that can afford it - -
for the other fifty weeks spent in the inner city. To place these images of escape at

the foot of these concrete boxes adds insult to injury.

At last the sun emerges. There are now blue skies over Milton Court. Boys are

playing football in a concrete area enclosed by wire mesh and short brick walls.

These walls are covered by paintings of children, dogs, plus lists of names, all

produced by children. A boy of about ten insists that I photograph the painting of

the dog. He, it seems, is the artist and proud of his work. (I am happy to do so

because I think his schematic, colourful canine has more energy and decorative

impact than the murals by the artists.) I ask the boys what they think of the artists’

murals as compared to their own. They immediately acknowledge that the artists’

murals are better but it turns out that this refers primarily to their greater technical

skill. Actually, they prefer to do their own art rather than having it done for them by

outsiders. But would they, one wonders, have done any paintings at all without the

stimulus of the artists?

The Japanese camera I am using is expensive - the kind with a built-in light

meter. What you see in the viewfinder is what will appear in the slides. All I really

need to adjust is the focus. What a sense of power the camera imparts. Nothing

could be easier than to press the button and appropriate the appearance of the

world.

I realise that the nature of my project - to record the murals photographically -

implies that I am using the medium transparently, as if photography was a neutral

channel capable of transmitting the first order media (architecture/painting)

without alteration. These thoughts trouble me but since I cannot see any immediate
solution I continue to take photographs: selecting a motif, framing it, deciding

camera angles, editing in camera. The decisions are made quickly, mainly in

response to the character of the motif. The mental computations seem almost

unconscious, even though I have not taken enough photographs for the process to

become automatic. (These words on the page, are they transparent too?)

Back to New Cross Gate station. I take the train to Wapping on the North bank of

the Thames and walk towards Cable Street, the Commercial Road, and

Whitechapel. Jack the Ripper's old hunting grounds. (How is it that with the

passage of time this destroyer of women has become a picturesque character.) Dock

walls as tall as cliffs line the street (built to protect the merchant's goods, to keep

thieves out and the dockers in). Huge, empty warehouses interspersed by several

varieties of council housing developments (the sign of a dozen initiatives that petered

out). Streets have names redolent of London’s golden age of trade with the colonies:

Penang St, Cinnamon St, and so forth. (That wealth, where is it now? Who has it

now? Not these people sitting in the sun on their back steps). I am a stranger with a

camera. The locals ignore me and head for the corner pubs for their Sunday

lunchtime pints.

Around Watney Market I search in vain for a mural. It has probably been

demolished. Community murals are ephemeral. My slides will probably outlive

them.

Meanwhile, in Cardiff, the Association of Art Historians is holding its second

annual conference. No doubt some of my work colleagues are delivering papers and

impressing audiences with their erudition and research skills. Most of them would
not be found dead on the Milton Court estate.

In terms of visual culture, what is common to such disparate districts of London

as Hornsey, Paddington, Tower Hamlets, New Cross and Hampstead? The answer:

a photographic view of Egyptian pyramids with a blazing sun and a gold coloured

cigarette packet - advertising hoardings featuring an image for Benson & Hedges

special filter cigarettes (designed by the advertising agency Collett, Dickenson,

Pearce and Partners). (1) Not all of us are subject to community murals but we are

all subject to the propaganda of the mass media. I photograph the hoardings in

preparation for a lecture on art and advertising.

Asian immigrants are to be found, appropriately enough, in Assam St. Near

Commercial Road the streets become much noisier and busier. Shops are full of

tatty, gaudy clothes and expensive looking radio sets. At noon, I reach my final

destination: the Whitechapel Art Gallery. It features a retrospective of Carl Andre's

sculpture. Outside the pavement is packed with East Enders and the usual male

drifters and winos. Inside, there are only a few people, mostly foreign tourists. On

the ground floor, Andre has a set of floor pieces in metal. (The sculptural equivalent

of Minimal painting but using the floor as a ground instead of a wall.) On the first

floor, there are wood and brick pieces. All very aesthetic. I am permitted by the

young man guarding (!) the arrangements of logs and bricks to take some

installation shots for educational purposes. Photographing individual pieces is

forbidden by owners exercising their rights under the copyright laws. Over coffee

and a scone in the downstairs snack bar I study a panel of reviews and press reports.

No sign of any radical dissent. Why

are the art critics so mealy mouthed. (Two years ago the press was much more

outspoken). (2) I ask myself: what is the connection between what I have seen

outside and what I have seen inside? Compare and contrast. Materially and

formally, there is a resemblance: Andre arranges simple geometric blocks, so do the

local councils of London. Ultimately, their theoretical source is the same: the

ideology of modern architecture and sculpture, pure forms without frills, without

ornament, cheap and functional. But, of course, their functions are different. The

architecture has a content, literally, that is, people; they animate the sterility of the

blocks. They humanise the buildings in spite of the best efforts of the architects.

And, as I have said, theirs is an exceptionally rich perceptual environment, full of

disorder, muck, and half-completed projects. Whereas, in the gallery installation,

the buzz and complexity of everyday life has been eliminated. It is a haven of rest,

pure forms, spaces, and materials. Like a graveyard. In terms of price, in terms of

the education necessary to comprehend its purpose, this sculpture is not accessible

to the people. Yet it is being shown in Whitechapel. The gallery doors are wide open.

There is no entrance fee. Hence, physically it is accessible to them for a month. The

show offers itself to them as a zone of contemplation. Here is a relief from the traffic,

the tawdryness, the litter, the noise, and the frenetic commercialism of Commercial

Road, that is, a relief from the world as it is, 1978, London's East End. Will they

come? No. And why should they? The bricklayer who lives or works on the Milton

Court estate knows more about bricks than Carl Andre. The carpenter also has a

finer appreciation of wood than the American artist. His art, therefore, is for those

that have ceased to work with their hands. Art for the bourgeoisie and the
intelligentsia. The Whitechapel location is a blind. The show is not addressed to East

Enders but to West Enders. Andre's sculpture is thoroughly quietistic. It is suitable

for a religious sect or a hierarchical society in which nothing changes for thousands

of years.

In a handout Andre remarks: ‘Ideas … no, my work has no more idea than

a tree, or a rock, or a mountain or an ocean'. Pure Being (no Becoming). But bricks

and metal plates are not fragments of raw Nature, they are not unmediated, they are

natural materials that have been transformed by human labour and machines to

serve human purposes. Andre wants to deny human labour and purposes, even his

own (that is, the mental labour involved in the artist’s decision making process -

selection, arrangement). He even wants to deny art itself. Art is artificial. It is not a

natural phenomena but, again, the product of collective, human mental labour over

many centuries. Try this as a definition: art is a social institution. Outside the art

framework, whether physical - the art gallery - or mental - the mental set of the

viewer, Andre's bricks revert back to their everyday status as building materials.

Andre intends us to enjoy wood as wood, form as form, space as space. Pure

phenomenology. Sensory perception for sensory perception's sake. Underlying the

work is the idea - philosophically absurd - of a return to things in themselves: 'if

only we could pare away all our social conditioning, if only we could detach the

material, the form, the space from its relationship to everything else, from its

relationship to human needs and purposes, then we could really see it as it is.’

However, if we succeeded in this enterprise then we would be no longer human

because it is precisely those sooia1 relationships and purposes that make us human
and give meaning to our lives.

Today, I have seen and photographed community murals, children's paintings,

advertising hoardings and American Minimal sculpture. Only the children’s work

seemed to offer any example of use for the future: a society is needed in which art is

produced by the people for the people.

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(1) For more on the Benson & Hedges campaign, see John A. Walker, Art in the Age

of Mass Media, 3rd ed ((London & Sterling VA: Pluto Press, 2001), p. 53

(2) In 1976 there was a scandal in the British press about the Tate gallery’s purchase

of Andre’s sculpture Equivalent VIII (1966). The so-called ‘bricks’ affair. See John

A. Walker, Art and Outrage: Provocation, Controversy and the Visual Arts, (London

& Sterling VA: Pluto Press, 1999), pp. 73-78.

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John A. Walker is a painter and art historian. He is the author of Left Shift: Radical

Art in 1970s Britain, (London & New York: I. B. Tauris, 2002).