Published in Art Monthly, no. 36, May 1980
WHEN I SAW DENNIS CREFFIELD'S paintings at AIR recently I knew at once that I had not often seen contemporary work of such quality. I felt able to say with conviction, ‘These are good’. But how do I make judgements such as this? There are those who say that aesthetic judgements are quite arbitrary, questions of personal taste. Others claim to be basing them on purely visual or 'formal' elements. Alternatively, there are those (like Victor Burgin) who deny the existence of aesthetic response as anything other than ideology. An art historian holding this position recently wrote, 'aesthetic effect is none other than the pleasure felt by the observer when he recognises himself in a picture's visual ideology.' I hold to none of these views and yet I consider that it may be possible to indicate the material basis of aesthetic judgements in a way which reduces them neither to variations of in- dividual whim, nor to questions of 'pure form', nor yet to sheer ideology.
Elsewhere, I hope to write at greater length on Creffield's paintings: here, I want to use them as an example which, I hope, will help to clarify the way in which I am currently approaching and writing about works of art. (This seems to have angered some and to have confused and misled others: in part, this may be because the 'theoretical' support has largely been elaborated in lectures, the texts of which have not yet been published. They will, however, appear in my two forthcoming books, Art and Psychoanalysis, Writers and Readers, June, and Beyond the Crisis in the Arts, Writers and Readers, October).
What then are these Creffield paintings like? They are in some sense 'about' the artist's response to human bodies, or, more exactly, his feelingful experience and imaginings of others in their nakedness. One series was called The Lovers; these were based on the figures of two girls embracing. Others were concerned with pregnancy: the artist has described how these works began as an interest in painting a single pregnant girl, but gradually evolved to become a traditional subject, The Visitation. This theme refers to the time when the expectant Mary visited Elizabeth, also pregnant; when they met Elizabeth's child (John the Baptist) ‘leaped in the womb’. A third group is based on 'dreams of fair women', the artist's fantasies experienced between sleeping and waking.
These paintings certainly make use of perceived elements: Creffield has demonstrated that he can produce masterful drawings from the object. But his works do not have much to do with the attempt to constitute the objective appearance of the other. He seems interested in the way in which he encounters and experiences the other at levels 'below' those of language, or culturally determined 'signifying practice'. For example, through some of his images he sets up and explores a 'potential space' between two figures: he expresses both their autonomous individualities, and the ebb and flow of those emotions of mergence and separation which unite them and keep them apart. (It is no accident that his exhibition was dedicated to 'all mothers'.) Creffield's paintings are thus haptic (concerned with the sense of touch) and affective, or feelingful. The paint marks in his best works are expressive of emotions in the sense that a caress, touch or slap is so expressive. (The paradigm of expression in painting remains physiognomy).
I am not saying that Creffield is expressionistic: he touches on the nuances of affect with a tender precision. The intimate feel of any one painting is distinct from that of any other. The artist has explained his position clearly: "The unifying thread of the exhibition is that though subject and mood may vary each image is shaped from a physical sense of the event. They are not anecdotal, descriptive, or abstracted but are embodiments of sensed tactile perceptions - naked gropings - through the paint with whiskers, nose and body all alert.'
There was one work in the exhibition called 'Artemis – Goddess of Childbirth': here, admittedly, the expression was largely classically conceived. The charcoal face was expressive of its subject, through depiction of observed facial features, rather than of the artist, as subject. On the day I saw this exhibition, I read a report from Cambodia by Anthony Barnett, in The New Statesman. After describing the tragedy of that country, Barnett wrote about his visit to a hospital there: 'In the maternity ward a woman had just successfully delivered twins: the aura and exhilaration of childbirth was about her, it seems universal.' Now it is just that 'aura of exhilaration' that Creffield expresses through the smile on the face of his Artemis. This look (or expression) is equally perceptible in the luxuries of the London Clinic's maternity wards and in Kompong Speu hospital, which lacks mechanised water delivery, let alone running water. The experiences expressed through the best Creffields are, I would argue, common even though they are not necessarily always fully realised, recognisable or accessible. They belong however to what it means to possess human being, which are occluded, eclipsed or distorted even if they refer to aspects of that being by ideology, social convention, or historical circumstance.
I am not, however, implying that it is the area of experience to which Creffield's paintings refer which validates them and makes them good. (There must be many bad drawings of Artemis's smile.) It is rather the way in which that area of experience is expressed through the particularities of a specific material practice – in this case painting – that counts. Creffield has both mastered significant traditional conventions of painting and become versatile in his handling of the physical elements of the medium. No doubt, in any extended text on Creffield I would also voice my reservations: nonetheless, it is in and through his transforming work on the materials of painting (both conventional and physical) that Creffield is able to bring (insofar as he does) content and form into an inseparable unity, which creates that aesthetic effect which challenges me and which, as receptive viewer, I acknowledge as good.
But let us now shift from the specific to the general. Much Marxist aesthetics – both of the classical 'Socialist Realist' variety, and more recently in its Althusserian or structuralist variants (e.g. in the writings of Burgin, Mary Kelly, Griselda Pollock, Tagg, etc.) – makes the mistake of equating a 'materialist' theory of art with the reduction of art, in theory and practice, to ideology. But it is precisely this position which I am presently challenging from within the Marxist tradition.
Neither aesthetics, nor these specific material practices – painting, drawing and sculpture – can truthfully be characterised as ideology, tout court. The attempt to do this leaves us with the sort of anaesthetic items of structured ideology posturing as art which were so favoured by the institutions in the 1970's. I have in mind such forgettable work as that produced by Art and Language, Victor Burgin, Mary Kelly, Simon Read, John Stezaker, Stephen Willats, etc. It also leaves us with certain insurmountable problems in theory. If art is just ideology, then how is it that we can take pleasure in the art of the past or of cultures quite other than our own? At a recent conference on 'Art, Politics, and Ideology' I asked Griselda Pollock – an anaesthetic structuralist art historian – how we knew that the Laöcoon was in pain. She replied, 'Because we have studied the mode of production prevailing in Greece at the time it was made and the signifying practices to which it gave rise.' To which I said, 'But Griselda, he is being strangled by a sea monster.' Her immediate response was, 'Yes, but just by looking at the sculpture we have no way of knowing whether or not he is enjoying it.' She was not joking: indeed, the attempt to locate the material basis of aesthetic within the flux of changing ideology will inevitably lead one to such absurdities.
There is another way of approaching this problem: I am suggesting that it is expression in art which gives rise to aesthetic value and that expression is constituted through specific material practices, such as painting, sculpture and drawing. Expression is realised through the transforming work which an imaginative human subject (an artist) carries out on and through materials (both conventional and physical) which are given to him through the tradition of that specific practice within which he or she is engaged. Of course, this necessarily involves the use of historically specific (or ideologically inflected) conventions and devices; however, in great art, authentic art, the forms thus produced are expressive of elements of human being and potentiality which are not so much historically specific as 'relatively constant'. (It is in this way that we can begin to account for the singular fact that although Vermeer may have made uncritical use of 'signifying practices' and representational conventions peculiar to the 17th century Dutch petit bourgeoisie, his work is in no sense – except the most trivial and superficial – equatable with the ideology of that class).
This way of doing aesthetics has a long history within the Marxist tradition – although, admittedly, it is a history which has recently been obscured in Britain by the Parisian provincialism of the academic left. This has led to a tendency to elaborate theories of art from pot-pourris of elements extracted from the quasi-theological systems proposed by Althusser, Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, Kristeva, et alia. However, Max Raphael is just one Marxist art historian who would have had little patience with this sort of ultra-idealist reductionism. Max Raphael insisted on the need to attend emphatically to the work of art in its physical materiality, its specificity: whatever we may say or discover about the work we must also learn, as he put it, the task of grasping the work of art as a work of art.' He realised that it was the artist's transforming work on his materials that enabled us to do that: art, Raphael said, is 'an ever- renewed creative act, the active dialogue between spirit and matter; the work of art holds man's creative powers in a crystalline suspension from which it can again be transformed into living energies.'
There has been a tendency in recent theory to reject the concept of 'man' as an ideological figment: according to those who hold this view, 'man' is an invention of the bourgeoisie. They maintain that there is no such thing as individuality, but only specific modes of individuality which are historically determined. Thus they say that the subject is no more than an effect, or shadow of a structure outside of himself: in many formulations, that structure is 'the mode of production'. Hence, according to this view, the subject is constituted within ideology: what we are is made up through the 'signifying practices' and representational and social conventions into which we are born. Against this kind of thinking, I am asserting that before we enter into social life we must exist as psycho-biological, human beings, subject to a 'relatively constant' underlying human condition.
This depends upon the possession of a body which remains essentially the same from one culture to another, and from one moment of history to another. As a result, as the Italian Marxist Sebastiano Timpanaro puts it, 'man as a biological being has remained essentially unchanged from the beginnings of civilization to the present; and those sentiments and representations which are closest to the biological facts of human existence have changed little.' Of course, our experience is always mediated by social variables; but as Timpanaro rightly points out, 'to maintain that, since the "biological" is always presented to us as mediated by the "social", the "biological" is nothing and the "social" is everything, would once again be idealist sophistry.'
I believe that the materialist recognition of the underlying biological basis to our human being has enormous implications for aesthetics and the theory of art. For example, as Timpanaro himself points out, love, the brevity and frailty of human existence, the contrast between the smallness and weakness of man and the infinity of the cosmos, are expressed in literary and artistic works in very different ways in various historically determinate societies, but still not in such different ways that all reference to such experiences of the human condition as the sexual instinct, the debility produced by age (with its psychological repercussions), the fear of one's own death and sorrow at the death of others, is lost. One reason why we can take genuine pleasure in the great and authentic art of societies quite other than our own is that such art is expressive of these 'relative constants'.
But this is not the whole of the story. Raymond Williams has pointed out in his exegesis on Timpanaro: 'The deepest significance of a relatively unchanging biological human condition is probably to be found in some of the basic material processes of the making of art: in the significance of rhythms in music and dance and language, or of shapes and colours in sculpture and painting. Because art is always made, there can of course be no reduction of works of this kind to biological conditions. But equally, where these fundamental physical conditions and pro- cesses are in question, there can be no reduction either to simple social and historical circumstances. What matters here – and it is a very significant amendment of orthodox Marxist thinking about art – is that art work is itself, before everything, a material process; and that, although differentially, the material process of the production of art includes certain biological processes, especially those relating to body movements and to the voice, which are not a mere substratum but are at times the most powerful elements of the work.'
My own work can, I think, be situated somewhere within what Williams calls this 'very significant amendment of orthodox Marxist thinking about art.' I am arguing that it is a miserable reduction to attempt to root aesthetics, or art practice, wholly within ideology. Of course I do not deny that even the greatest art is mediated and inflected by ideology. However, in elaborating my theory of expression and value in art, I give full recognition, as a materialist, to the biological basis of our 'underlying human condition' in both its actuality and its potentiality. Furthermore, I emphasise that the production of art – I am talking about great art, authentic art, and not the obsessional neurotic activities of the fashionable salon conceptualists of the 1970s – always involves a specific material process; this process, as Williams saw, includes significant elements of our biological (rather than our ideological) being. I personally have learned more about the material basis of aesthetics from a book by the zoologist, Desmond Morris, The Biology of Art, than I have from the works of Althusser or any of his followers. (This should not, of course, be taken as an endorsement of Morris's crude socio-biological account of culture and society).
Although this kind of emphasis is only now returning to Marxist aesthetics after a sad interlude of rabid idealism (manifest in such texts as Nicos Hadjinicolau's Art History and Class Struggle), it should be stressed that it is not wholly unprecedented: Christopher Caudwell, for example, knew very well that 'great art – art which performs a wide and deep feat of integration – has something universal, something timeless and enduring from age to age.' He wrote, 'this timelessness we can now see to be the timelessness of the instincts, the unchanging secret face of the genotype which persists beneath all the rich superstructure of civilization.' Similarly, Herbert Marcuse saw that 'art en- visions a concrete universal humanity, Menschlichkeit, which no particular class can incorporate, not even the proletariat, Marx's "universal class".'
I hope that it is now clear why I began with the defence of Dennis Creffield. Clearly, he has he has a particular 'visual ideology', a style, which is his inheritance from the Bomberg tradition. But this in itself did not guarantee much; what matters is the way in which he transforms these conventions, just as he physically transforms the substance of the paint, to produce representations which touch upon significant elements of our 'underlying human condition', including birth, love, the sexual instincts, pregnancy and reproduction, and emotions to do with the establishments and denial of the concept of a limiting membrane as a container of the self. But it is not so much the fact that he speaks of these aspects of our underlying human condition as the way in which he does so that counts: and here his grasp upon the material process of painting is all important. This is not just a question of the use he makes of his historically determined conventions: biological elements inform such aspects of his work as its 'haptic' qualities. His expression flows as literally from his touch (to which the way in which the paint has been worked bears witness) as does a caress.
No doubt there are those who will say, 'where does politics come into all this?' But in reply to them, I would refer again to Marcuse. He argues that the critical function of art, its contribution to the struggle for liberation, resides solely in aesthetic form. Or, as he puts it: 'The political potential of art lies only in its own aesthetic dimension. Its relation to praxis is inexorably indirect, mediated, and frustrating. The more immediately political the work of art, the more it reduces the power of estrangement and the radical, transcendent goals of change.' I think that more and more of us are coming to realise that artists like Warhol, Hamilton, Victor Burgin, Mary Kelly, Atkinson, Willatts, etc. were just decadent stylists of Late Modernism. The art of recent years which has the greatest radical significance by contrast often has no immediate political content or context. Furthermore, it contains many stylistically conservative elements - such as a com- mitment to one of the traditional material practices, painting, sculpture, or drawing. The art of the seventies which the left should defend includes, in my view, works by Creffield, Kossoff, Auerbach, Kitaj, the Wimbledon sculptors, De Francia, and yes, even Hoyland at his best. As a critic, I believe that this is some of the authentic art of recent times, the art which comes closest to having what Marcuse called the power to 'create that other reality within the established one – the cosmos of hope.'
Peter Fuller