PANIC IN THE STREETS
I spent much of my art school time between 1968-70 walking the streets of London and even with a destination in mind, the endlessness of streets and terracing removed not just any understanding of a horizon but any understanding of what was real. Travelling by tube was no better. Perhaps it was something about being underground. Perhaps it was the tiled surfaces on the platforms. The map above my head didn’t help either. The stations seemed close together but that was just an illusion as the train noisily rocketed down lengthy tunnels and I anxiously counted the minutes. Then was the Stones in the Park concert that I could hear but not reach. Everything was elsewhere and never where I was standing. The sense of disjointed reality was palpable. And then I saw Blow Up in a tiny cinema. When Antonioni took over and directed Blow Up with its fantasy and profound feeling of alienation it accented why I was so troubled by London. The disillusionment with not fully understanding what I was seeing or feeling, the fragmentation of societal norms of a boy from the country, the disjointed narrative of living in a city at odds with itself reflected my growing uncertainty of what was real and what was not. It should have been the inspiration for art but it was not.
Even though London had its moments such as the riots in 1976,1978 and 1980, I was there when the much-vaunted culture of peace and love was all over the papers. If you had the money you could participate and clothe yourself courtesy of Carnaby St and if not, it was the cheap end of the fashion stakes at Kensington Market that allowed for entry level fashion in the form of tie dye and sheepskin. However, it was the feeling of being perpetually on the outer that pervaded the experience.
Perhaps it was also the revolving door of ideas and people that permeated the studios of the art school that generated such disquiet. Such art as was discussed was all American – British art barely existed beyond Moore, Hepworth and Francis Bacon and no one was going down that path when soulless abstraction was available to hide behind. One student of my year level even practised endlessly his art signature for when he became famous but he wasn’t alone. The very fact of being in an art school at that time engendered alienation when the need for protected originality pervaded relationships. I saw very little originality but an awful lot of walled enclosures.
That feeling of enclosures wasn’t limited to just the streets or the studios. 19th century architects and planners wanted to alleviate the all-pervasive gloom of brick and stone by inserting small areas of fenced trees between buildings. There were of course bigger areas such as Hyde Park and Hamstead Heath, the former often filled with Londoners soaking up what passed for sunny days, but the ones I remember were hidden away in corners. As an artist I was attracted to the contrast. Often there was no sound and no people. When David Hemmings ventured into just such a park in Blow Up with its high hedges and vistas truncated by trees, he expected to find no one so the dancing couple were a surprise. I didn’t discover any such dancing couples. No doubt these spaces were intended to provide respite or a reminder of what had been lost as London spread inexorably outward but there was always a threatening emptiness to the parks I ventured into as though the rest of the world had simply vanished and no one had told me.
Few artists have mentioned city green spaces in their work other than as romanticised places from whence they came, such as a remote rural village in an area of Russia that no longer existed in the case of Chagall or as stultified theatre in the case of Seurat. Picasso, for his part, loved Paris but it found little foothold in his work. For Warhol, in complete contrast, it was New York itself that created the basis for not just his hedonistic, celebrity-seeking lifestyle but the anti-art, art, that drove him. Neither had use for green spaces. In Central Park I was conscious of two things – the perimeter of tall buildings and a solitary saxophone player under the bridge. As the rain came down I retreated to the doors of the Guggenheim only to be met by three bus loads of tourists with umbrellas jamming the entrance. The sound of that melancholy sax still reverberated. He played but there was no one to hear him. I’d heard a similar exponent years before with a solitary player on the concrete concourse of the Haywood Gallery south of the Thames river. It was dark and raining then as well. There was a stifling sense of enclosure, that all-pervasive sense of alienation of an Antonio moment where nothing is real. I never lived in a city again.