Art Criticism: the Mediation of Art in Britain 1968–76

Art Criticism: The Mediation of Art in Britain 1968–76 J.J. Charlesworth A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the Royal College of Art for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy April 2016 Copyright Statement This text represents the submission for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the Royal College of Art. This copy has been supplied for the purpose of research for private study, on the understanding that it is copyright material, and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. 2 Abstract This thesis studies the changes in the nature of critical writing on contemporary art, in the context of the British art world across a period from 1968 to around 1976. It examines the major shifts in the relationship between the artistic production of the period and the forms of writing that addressed it, through those publications that sought to articulate a public discourse on art in a period where divergent accounts regarding the criteria of artistic value, and the terms of critical discourse, came increasingly into conflict. This thesis takes as its main subject a number of publication venues for art-critical writing of the time, and their responses to the rapidly changing scene of artistic production. It examines the forms of writing that attended emerging artistic practice and the theoretical and critical assumptions on which that writing depended, highlighting those moments where critical discourse was provoked to reflect self-consciously of the relation between discourse and artistic practice. By tracing the repercussions of the cultural and political revolts of the late 1960s, it examines how the orthodoxies of art criticism came to be challenged, in the first instance, by the growing influence of radical artistic practices which incorporated a discursive function, and by leftist social critiques of art. It explores how, in the first half of the 1970s, radical and political artistic practice was promoted by a number of young critics, and sanctioned by its presentation in public art venues. Examining the history of magazines such as Studio International and a number of smaller specialist and non-specialist magazines such as the feminist Spare Rib and the left-wing independent press, it attends to how debates over the cultural and social agency of art began to draw on continental theoretical influences that put into greater question the role of subjective experience and the nature of the human subject. It examines how this shift in the relation between practice and discourse manifested itself in the editorial and critical attitudes of publications both from within the field of artistic culture, and from a wider context of publications embedded in the radical political and social currents of the early 1970s. It gives particular attention to the careers of a number of prominent critics, while situating the later reaction against alternative artistic practices in the context of the politically conservative turn of the end of the decade. 3 Table of Contents Introduction .................................................................................................................................... 7 Chapter 1. Towards the New Art: Studio International, 1968–1970 ............... 44 Chapter 2. Art criticism and the alternative press 1971-73 ................................. 81 Chapter 3. Looking for the subject: Peter Fuller and the new critics, 1970-76 ......................................................................................................................................................... 115 Chapter 4. Young Conservatives: from ONE to Artscribe, 1973 – 1976 ....... 146 Conclusion .................................................................................................................................. 175 Bibliography .............................................................................................................................. 180 4 Acknowledgements My principle thanks go to my supervisors at the Royal College of Art; to Jonathan Miles for his early enthusiasm for this thesis, for his illuminating conversation and patient and lucid encouragement throughout; to Dr Lucy Soutter for her generous support during the last months of completion; and to Prof Neil Mulholland of the Edinburgh College of Art, as supervisor in the first years of my research. I am grateful for the convivial insights of a number of critics and artists I approached in the course of my research; my thanks go to Andrew Brighton, Richard Cork, Matthew Collings, Caroline Tisdall, Barry Martin, James Faure Walker, Adrian Searle, John Stezaker and John Blandy. At the Royal College of Art, I would like to thank Martina Margetts, Juliet Ash and Joe Kerr. I would also like to note the inconspicuous generosity of the late Al Rees, for handing over boxes of old art magazines he said he didn’t need any more. My thanks go also to my colleagues at ArtReview, for putting up with my periodic absences from the business of making a magazine of art criticism in the present, to write about the art criticism of the past. I gratefully acknowledge the support of the AHRC’s doctoral award, without which the period of research for this thesis would not have been possible. Lastly, my profound gratitude goes to my wife Jennifer Thatcher, for her love, kindness and infinite tolerance over years of slow and often halting progress in putting this thesis together – and to our daughter Anaïs, for turning up in the midst of it all. This thesis is dedicated to my parents, Françoise and Joe. 5 Author’s Declaration During the period of registered study in which this thesis was prepared the author has not been registered for any other academic award or qualification. The material included in this thesis has not been submitted wholly or in part for any academic award or qualification other than that for which it is now submitted. Signature: Date: 6 Introduction When I returned to London in 1977, after a year spent living in New York, I was asked to speak at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in the context of a three-day conference on the ‘State of British Art’; I was told that the conference was to be a response to the crisis in British Art... I never did learn what the ‘crisis in British Art’ was; nor, I suspect, did anyone else. In retrospect, some ten years on, I now see the ICA event, the brainchild of three British art critics, as a textbook example of what psycho-analysis terms projection: the crisis sensed by these critics was not in ‘art’ but in criticism itself.1 This thesis takes as its subject the culture of art criticism in Britain during the period 1968–76. It makes an account of the history of a range of publications that emerged, failed and succeeded during the 1970s. Through the example of those publications and the writers who contributed to them, it examines the theoretical frameworks and cultural assumptions that underpinned the production of these publications and the critical writing that went into them, and sets these developments in relation to a number of important changing contexts: the history of Britain during a decade of political, cultural and economic crisis; the cultural and social changes set in motion by the radical events of the last years of the 1960s; and the assimilation of theoretical developments occurring both within Britain, as well as those coming from the United States and Europe. While the decade has become the subject of growing historical study, much of that has, perhaps understandably, focussed first on the artistic practices of the period. Since the end of the 1990s, artists who had established themselves in the 1970s, but who had become marginal in art-historical accounts of the period, became the subject of more sustained interest. Simon Ford’s 1999 Wreckers of Civilisation, made a historical return to the controversial performance art group COUM 1 Victor Burgin, ‘The End of Art Theory’, in The End of Art Theory : Criticism and Postmodernity (London: Macmillan, 1986), pp. 140–204 (p. 140). 7 Transmissions.2 The Whitechapel Gallery’s 2000 Live in Your Head: Concept and Experiment 1965-75 was an early survey of the heterogeneous range of conceptualist, performance, film and sculptural activities that took shape across the turn of the decade.3 John A Walker’s historical survey of radical and left-wing artistic currents during the 1970s was published in 2002.4 A notable aspect of research on the art of the period has been the volume of research presented as exhibition, rather than publication. The death of John Latham in 2006, and the establishment of his home, FlatTime House, as a study centre, has been a catalyst for publication of research around his work; the Artist Placement Group (co- founded by Latham) was the subject of a significant exhibition at Raven Row in London in 2012;5 the broader field of sculptural activity in Britain in the 1970s has been represented by historical exhibitions of the Systems group and the Henry Moore Institute’s larger 2012 research project United Enemies.6 And notable among this form of exhibition-based research is the programme of exhibitions staged at the Chelsea College of Art’s exhibition space (among these Dematerialised: Jack Wendler Gallery 1971 to 1974, curated by Teresa Gleadowe, and historical retrospectives of work by Bruce McLean, Stephen Willatts and Shelagh Cluet, all curated by Donald Smith). However little work exists on the specific history of art publications during the same period. Jo Melvin’s

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