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Images of God: The Consolations of Lost Illusions
In this powerful argument for a fresh recognition of the role of the great and consoling illusions of religion in man's ethical and cultural life, Peter Fuller ranges from Rouault to Piper, from Ruskin to Roger Scruton, and from the New Expressionism to current developments in the crafts. His flaying of the pretentious invigorates, while his enthusiasm inspires the reader to seek out the unfamiliar and to return to the familiar with new understanding. Peter Fuller has contributed extensively to New Society, Art Monthly, and Design. His previous books include Art and PSychoanalysis, Beyond the Crisis in Art, and The Naked Artist.
326 pages, Paperback
First published June 28, 1990
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March 5, 2020
This is the second book of essays by Peter Fuller I have read. Fuller was a somewhat iconoclastic British art critic – not just strictly an art critic, however, as his essays all appeared to espouse major changes in the way we looked at art and how art was taught and beyond to a greater sense of life fulfilment. Beyond The Crisis In Art covered the late 70s and early 80s. I have yet to read his musings on Psychoanalysis (Art And Psychoanalysis) or his views on the importance of tradition and imagination (The Naked Artist: 'Art And Biology' & Other Essays).
This somewhat dubiously titled book collects his writings for various journals including New Society, Art Monthly, Design, Crafts, New Left Review - all important journals of that period from the mid eighties, mostly in fact from 1985. They offer a continuation to his thoughts from the previous two books and continue his move towards a conservative (definitely small ‘c’) position of criticism. Fuller hates the Establishment, in particular the Art Establishment as much as they probably hated him. He was a gadfly to their views of ‘progress’ and the setting of style(s). He never failed to stand up for his strongly held views against the postmodernists liberal trends in art through the 80s. He hated what he saw as the loss of aesthetic sensibility through the agency of capitalism. His beliefs were forged by the late 60s student unrest and the work of Herbert Marcuse and Louiis Althusser, but were tempered through time by his understanding of psychoanalysis and language. This volume, if it could be summed up succinctly, commonly calls for a return to a sense of the spiritual, though Fuller remained a determined atheist through his life to his early death in a road accident in 1990. The title of the book alone is enough to put one off but it is only in the final essay, ‘The Christs of Faith and the Jesus of History’ that he looks at Christology and the historical context of Christianity. For the rest, throughout the essays there is a strong critique of what Fuller saw as cultural mediocrity and in particular the lack of answers through late Modernism to the historic situation, along with the failure of Marxist ideology and the failure of the Left through concentrating on economic values alone to produce a change in the quality of life for everyday.
This book is split into a number of sections in which the essays gathered under them all have a general theme. The first section, ‘Changing’, looks at the continuations of late Modernist Art and opens with the earliest essay from 1982 ‘Plus ca Change’ in which Fuller, among other things, thoroughly slates the work of Georg Baselitz and Julian Schnabel. I love the way Fuller tears strips off of these luvvies-of-the-art-world as well as the way he gives insights into critical thinking at the time as in quoting Victor Burgin on painting,
It’s not just the Conceptualists that are on the receiving end. All ‘late Modernism’ as defined by Fuller gets a right royal rogering including Markus Lüpertz: Daphne, Brice Marden, Frank Stella, Feltung, K. H. Hödicke: Painting, Sculpture, Film, Bernd Koberling: Stony Road, A.R. Penck: Rites de Passage, Sigmar Polke, Transit, Pier Paolo Calzolari, Sandro Chia, Mimmo Paladino, Francesco Clemente, Wolfgang Salome, David Salle, Davida Allen but he holds a special level of hell for Baselitz and Schnabel .
You get the tone. When you come across more of Fuller’s ‘Letting Rip-isms’ they are a hoot in a sea of constant moaning about the lack of tradition and the divorce of craft and skill and technique from Art. Sometimes I feel I am channelling Fuller with my own indignation at the utter pish emerging from Art Teaching Institutions. But if you disagree with Fuller, and he is HIGHLY polemical, then you have to countermand his argument with one of similar power and logic. This is what makes all Fuller’s writing at least interesting as well as an insightful intro to the period it covers. Some of his counterblasts would include...
• Blind following of style as an act redolent of a disjointed modern culture
• The dearth of any sense of anything in postmodernism
• Taste –v- Kitsch
• Kleinian psychoanalysis
• Auerbach –v- Clemente –v- Bacon –v- Kossof (this was not a tag wrestling match)
• Market, popularity, culture and fortune
There is a need to keep Fuller’s views at a certain distance with a sense of circumspection despite the virulence and hilarity of his attacks. At times he can waft into the same kind of Art Bollix he condemns when discussing and comparing artists or their art work, an art bollix so beloved of the critic and art snob intellectual. Some of it is merely Fuller’s own prejudices coming to the surface, his PERSONAL adjunctions, PERSONAL evaluations. But Fuller pontificates to such a degree that it is as if in writing his views, they are to be seen as verifiable objective facts rather than mere opinions. At times Fuller becomes a caricature of ‘Disgusted of Bexley Heath’, a Python-esque blending between Cleese’s Frenchman on the castle telling les rosbifs that he 'farted in their general dee-rec-tion' and the Boring Yorkshire man saying ‘And you try telling the young folk of today that, AND THEY WONT’T BELIEVE YOU!!!!!’
On some things he is just plain wrong. His interpretation of Francis Bacon's work seems to miss the point that the subject matter in all Bacon's paintings was Bacon’s interpretation and it was about stripping away the pretense of social mores and approbation. Bacon sees it all as a game. Fuller cannot take Bacon’s view on both Life and Art so lightly because Fuller is hooked on his jag of the void of spiritual internal vacuity of modern life. For Bacon it is the tension between the conscious and unconscious that drives his paintings. It is simply the Human Situation as seen by Bacon. Fuller cannot accept this. His critique becomes to be less about Bacon-the-artist but rather about Bacon-the-person and takes on a preachy tone like a pastor delivering a sermon. Nor could I believe in his hyper-inflated view of the importance of the Sublime as equating with a need to merge with the Godhead - but Fuller's view comes as a consequence of his understanding of painting lacking any statement to help the present precisely because of it's emotional and spiritual vacuity. Sometimes he descends to the level of a pissed middle class intellectual expounding to a rapt audience in an Islington pub, a descent into the yearnings of an agnostic (preaching aetheism) combined with half-digested psychoanalytic heehaw.
So there you have it. A How-We-Got-Here-From-There crossed with a conservative view of painting and pedagogy, full of almost slanderous attacks on stuff he doesn’t like along with some quasi-religious / spiritual guff and some pie-eyed wonderment. It’s a decent read and well worth keeping notes. Fuller always liked a challenge. We could do with a few more like him fighting in Art’s corner.
This somewhat dubiously titled book collects his writings for various journals including New Society, Art Monthly, Design, Crafts, New Left Review - all important journals of that period from the mid eighties, mostly in fact from 1985. They offer a continuation to his thoughts from the previous two books and continue his move towards a conservative (definitely small ‘c’) position of criticism. Fuller hates the Establishment, in particular the Art Establishment as much as they probably hated him. He was a gadfly to their views of ‘progress’ and the setting of style(s). He never failed to stand up for his strongly held views against the postmodernists liberal trends in art through the 80s. He hated what he saw as the loss of aesthetic sensibility through the agency of capitalism. His beliefs were forged by the late 60s student unrest and the work of Herbert Marcuse and Louiis Althusser, but were tempered through time by his understanding of psychoanalysis and language. This volume, if it could be summed up succinctly, commonly calls for a return to a sense of the spiritual, though Fuller remained a determined atheist through his life to his early death in a road accident in 1990. The title of the book alone is enough to put one off but it is only in the final essay, ‘The Christs of Faith and the Jesus of History’ that he looks at Christology and the historical context of Christianity. For the rest, throughout the essays there is a strong critique of what Fuller saw as cultural mediocrity and in particular the lack of answers through late Modernism to the historic situation, along with the failure of Marxist ideology and the failure of the Left through concentrating on economic values alone to produce a change in the quality of life for everyday.
This book is split into a number of sections in which the essays gathered under them all have a general theme. The first section, ‘Changing’, looks at the continuations of late Modernist Art and opens with the earliest essay from 1982 ‘Plus ca Change’ in which Fuller, among other things, thoroughly slates the work of Georg Baselitz and Julian Schnabel. I love the way Fuller tears strips off of these luvvies-of-the-art-world as well as the way he gives insights into critical thinking at the time as in quoting Victor Burgin on painting,
...the anachronistic daubing of woven fabrics with coloured mud...as well as introducing his own views which themselves form quotes for further generations and snapshots of the mid 80s. One view of History is of course this continuous single line congruency and in trying to understand where we are now it is important to understand how we got here and as such Fuller’s views on the mid 80s are one strand from one viewpoint from a critic who always shook up the steady state as well as the self-alleged avant garde. The metaphysicians of conceptualism still rule the teaching delivered in Art Colleges and Institutions. The academicisation of art has come at the expense of the displacement of technique, craft and tradition. Fuller was aware of this in the mid 80s. It did not stop then but its continuance has come about through the abandonment of anyone that could deliver technical ability and craft as essential tools in the language of an artist. These were and have been deemed to be non-essential in the promotion of ‘soft’ arts. The house has been taken over by art historians, art academics and curators. The production of a PhD and the writing of academic papers are considered more important than the ability to teach and a knowledge of craft. The knowledge of the BACKSTORY is now more important than the aesthetic of the work of art. What painting is NOT is words and writing (though it IS a language). Art and Art Teaching have become subverted by non-artists who, because they have no craft or sense of tradition or technical value or merit, have had to redefine what constitutes Art to ensure their own validity. It is the Kingdom of Art Bollix with a court comprised of middle class Jeremy’s and Jemimah's who have produced a repertoire of approved thought and approved art.
It’s not just the Conceptualists that are on the receiving end. All ‘late Modernism’ as defined by Fuller gets a right royal rogering including Markus Lüpertz: Daphne, Brice Marden, Frank Stella, Feltung, K. H. Hödicke: Painting, Sculpture, Film, Bernd Koberling: Stony Road, A.R. Penck: Rites de Passage, Sigmar Polke, Transit, Pier Paolo Calzolari, Sandro Chia, Mimmo Paladino, Francesco Clemente, Wolfgang Salome, David Salle, Davida Allen but he holds a special level of hell for Baselitz and Schnabel .
Take Baselitz, a German, and, by all accounts, one of the best of the new tendency painters. His work is inept: expressionistic though not expressionist, he has made a mannerism and a great deal of money by prostituting an indigenous German tradition. Baselitz’s painting lacks even an echo of authentic experience, let alone achieved technical skill, or ‘working-through’ of expressively original forms. Inflated in scale and price, overweening, ugly, bombastic, vapid, loose, and awash with the sentimentality of borrowed angst, Baselitz paints a sort of seamless Misery Me Gift-Wrap. He suffers from some stultifying occlusion of the imagination, lacks touch and sensitivity as a draughtsman, and possesses none but the most degraded ‘studio’ colour sense. He gives the impression that he has neither looked at the world nor within himself. Indeed his works are so drab and lacking in any painterly confidence that, despite their enormous size, one would hardly notice them unless they were hung upside down – which many of them are.You don’t get many assassinations like that - HOWEVER - “.....Schnabel is a painter so bad that he makes Baselitz look good. . I bet that had them all gasping into their Chardonnay in the mid 80s darn the Tate Private Views – about the time I saw Baselitz’s overblown work in Amsterdam.
You get the tone. When you come across more of Fuller’s ‘Letting Rip-isms’ they are a hoot in a sea of constant moaning about the lack of tradition and the divorce of craft and skill and technique from Art. Sometimes I feel I am channelling Fuller with my own indignation at the utter pish emerging from Art Teaching Institutions. But if you disagree with Fuller, and he is HIGHLY polemical, then you have to countermand his argument with one of similar power and logic. This is what makes all Fuller’s writing at least interesting as well as an insightful intro to the period it covers. Some of his counterblasts would include...
• Blind following of style as an act redolent of a disjointed modern culture
• The dearth of any sense of anything in postmodernism
• Taste –v- Kitsch
• Kleinian psychoanalysis
• Auerbach –v- Clemente –v- Bacon –v- Kossof (this was not a tag wrestling match)
• Market, popularity, culture and fortune
There is a need to keep Fuller’s views at a certain distance with a sense of circumspection despite the virulence and hilarity of his attacks. At times he can waft into the same kind of Art Bollix he condemns when discussing and comparing artists or their art work, an art bollix so beloved of the critic and art snob intellectual. Some of it is merely Fuller’s own prejudices coming to the surface, his PERSONAL adjunctions, PERSONAL evaluations. But Fuller pontificates to such a degree that it is as if in writing his views, they are to be seen as verifiable objective facts rather than mere opinions. At times Fuller becomes a caricature of ‘Disgusted of Bexley Heath’, a Python-esque blending between Cleese’s Frenchman on the castle telling les rosbifs that he 'farted in their general dee-rec-tion' and the Boring Yorkshire man saying ‘And you try telling the young folk of today that, AND THEY WONT’T BELIEVE YOU!!!!!’
On some things he is just plain wrong. His interpretation of Francis Bacon's work seems to miss the point that the subject matter in all Bacon's paintings was Bacon’s interpretation and it was about stripping away the pretense of social mores and approbation. Bacon sees it all as a game. Fuller cannot take Bacon’s view on both Life and Art so lightly because Fuller is hooked on his jag of the void of spiritual internal vacuity of modern life. For Bacon it is the tension between the conscious and unconscious that drives his paintings. It is simply the Human Situation as seen by Bacon. Fuller cannot accept this. His critique becomes to be less about Bacon-the-artist but rather about Bacon-the-person and takes on a preachy tone like a pastor delivering a sermon. Nor could I believe in his hyper-inflated view of the importance of the Sublime as equating with a need to merge with the Godhead - but Fuller's view comes as a consequence of his understanding of painting lacking any statement to help the present precisely because of it's emotional and spiritual vacuity. Sometimes he descends to the level of a pissed middle class intellectual expounding to a rapt audience in an Islington pub, a descent into the yearnings of an agnostic (preaching aetheism) combined with half-digested psychoanalytic heehaw.
So there you have it. A How-We-Got-Here-From-There crossed with a conservative view of painting and pedagogy, full of almost slanderous attacks on stuff he doesn’t like along with some quasi-religious / spiritual guff and some pie-eyed wonderment. It’s a decent read and well worth keeping notes. Fuller always liked a challenge. We could do with a few more like him fighting in Art’s corner.
Displaying 1 of 1 review