EDITORIAL: THE ART ISSUE

In his introduction to a gathering of short stories written by visual artists, The Alpine Fantasy Of Victor B (Serpent’s Tail, 2006), George Szirtes notes that a long tradition exists of artists creating poems and fictions, with William Blake, Michelangelo, David Jones, Paul Klee and Leonora Carrington all having straddled the divide. Yet Szirtes also suggests that the recent embrace of art by theory has driven a wedge between visual culture and its own literary traditions, and offers an explanation of how the divide came about in the modern era: “A copy of a book is just a copy…the words transferable from one sheet of paper to another”, Szirtes notes, going on to add that works of fine art have more invested in what Walter Benjamin called the ‘aura’ of the unique, original work. Visual artists, says Szirtes, often fear “the charge of mere ‘illustration’: illustration being considered a minor, somewhat corrupt art”.

Yet in severing its ties to literary culture, much visual art has altered not the fact that it illustrates, but only the body of work it illustrates. Where Victorian artists took widespread sustenance from Arthurian legend, The Arabian Nights and the works of Tennyson and Sir Walter Scott, our own contemporaries are trained to consider concerns with myth, poetry and narrative as somehow less pure than the production of illustrations for the theories of Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, or whoever it might be, artists and critics alike often remaining oddly blind to the ironies of a situation where blunt renderings of bullet points from works of institutional critique and political philosophy are considered more sophisticated than, say, Christopher Le Brun’s series of semi-abstract paintings based on Robert Browning’s Childe Rowland To The Dark Tower Came.

In truth, though, the theoretical dominance of the visual arts has always been less secure than recent discussions among both supporters and detractors of theoretical approaches might suggest, and for a major figure like Louise Bourgeois, her cryptic writings and personal history seem inseparable from her sculpture and installations, the meaning of her works rooted in a deep subjectivity. It’s not wholly surprising that Bourgeois should have become such an exemplary figure in recent times, since her roots in the Surrealist currents of the interwar years also connect her to a sensibility where the literary, visual and political were given equal weight as tools for the excavation of reality and experience, and in which the writings of Benjamin Peret, Andre Breton and Louis Aragon were as – if not more – important than the (now) better-known paintings of Salvador Dali, Max Ernst and Joan Miro.

Indeed, any perusal of the history of twentieth century art reveals close connections between artists and writers, whether Guillaume Apollinaire’s role in shaping the modernist sensibility of Cubism, the manifestos and poetry of such Italian Futurists and British Vorticists as Paolo Buzzi and Percy Wyndham Lewis, or the German Expressionist and Russian Constructivist writings of Georg Trakl and Vladimir Mayakovsky. Dada produced Hans Arp, Kurt Schwitters and Tristan Tzara, while Negritude and the Harlem Renaissance saw poets such as Aime Cesaire and Langston Hughes keeping close company with artists like Romare Bearden and Jacob Lawrence. If the post-war years saw both art and writing become more fractured, as the various disciplines seemed to splinter into discrete academic specialisms, the impression of a separation in the aftermath of 1945 is not fully supported by the evidence. It’s certainly arguable that the plethora of cross-fertilisations that characterised the pre-war years was not continued at the same level as before, but, even so, examples abound of writers and artists swapping hats, and drawing sustenance from each-other’s activities.

Frank O’Hara’s role in the New York School of painters is one well documented case, and the Beat movement offered a broad church in which writers such as Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and Gary Snyder may have dominated the public profiles, but where artists and underground film-makers like Edward Keinholz, Bruce Conner and Kenneth Anger were also notable presences in its margins, and their influence had its inevitable effect in Britain’s art schools, where the 1950s and 60s saw painters, writers and musicians – from Christopher Logue and Adrian Henri to Peter Blake, Jann Howarth and The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown – forming any number of temporary alliances, many of which continue to echo through popular and high culture today.

The sense of shared purpose in that era is outlined in Bomb Culture, Jeff Nuttall’s revealing (if bleak) memoir of his own time in the nascent underground , and while some of the results remain trapped in their own time, much else from this ferment remains to be properly appreciated. Yet it’s also the case that much of the material from the last phase of close contact between art and writing is once again finding its way into wider consciousness. Unclassifiable works such as Tom Phillips’ A Humument – in which the artist paints over the pages of an obscure Victorian novel by William Hurrell Mallock, isolating small drifts of words like abstract comic book frames and creating his own, unsettling poetry – have recently returned to print in revised editions, while the techniques pioneered by Louis Aragon and Andre Breton in such 1920s texts as Paris Peasant and Nadja have been retooled for the new millennium by Iain Sinclair, whose psychogeographic wanderings in London Orbital and Hackney: The Rose-Red Empire have become unlikely bestsellers.

With roots in the urban flaneur traditions of Baudelaire, the Situationist derive and the more traditional Ghost Walk and Guided Tour, the blurring of fiction, history and poetry with art and performance is becoming an increasingly visible template for new art across many mediums, and often the boundaries between different arts become blurred. Contemporary artists such as Roma Tearne and Olivia Plender create fictions and investigations that invest objects with narrative purpose, or spin open ended stories from board games, while poets such as Pascale Petit – herself a sculptor by training – draw on the methods and work of visual artists in her own writings.

At this more mainstream end of the spectrum, it’s true that many writer and artist collaborations have tended to be less boundary-pushing, leaving the art and writing differentiated, but that’s not to imply that genuine collaborations haven’t been plentiful in number, and often richly layered in effect. Ted Hughes’ Crow and Cave Birds sequences are hard to imagine without the Leonard Baskin engravings that coloured and inspired their imaginative worlds, and his work with photographer Fay Godwin, Remains Of Elmet, is a sequence diminished by the removal of the atmospheric monochrome images against which the poems test themselves in their original volumes. Paul Muldoon’s recent Plan B (Enitharmon) weaves his own oblique poetry and Norman McBeath’s evocative photography into a rope stronger than either might seem in isolation, while the poems of Alice Oswald’s Weeds And Wild Flowers (Faber) seem inseparable from the Jessica Greenman etchings that give her botanical subjects much of their strangely powerful presence in the book.

All of which is really another way of saying that this issue’s desire to explore connections between the activities of writers and visual artists should be placed in the context of a long history, where writers such as Edwin Morgan and Graham Rawle have crossed the wires between visual and literary expression, relationships between writers and artists are commonplace (think, for example, of Ezra Pound’s support for Henri Gaudier Brzeska, and the reverse influence of the sculptor’s work on Pound’s poetry, or more recently, the ongoing collaborations between Jeremy Hooker and Lee Grandjean, or the novelist Gordon Burn and Damien Hirst) while for their part, artists are taking up a variety of media to weave narratives and performances into their bodies of work in ways that suggest a renewed – rather than new – embrace of the old connections to storytelling and literary experimentation.

There’s certainly a powerful strain of poetic fiction in the art of Cornelia Parker, and in this issue’s interview – conducted on the eve of her Never Endings exhibition at the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, in the autumn of 2007 – she elaborates on some of the myriad influences on her work, while another artist featured here, Ellen Bell, draws on crafts, conceptual art and concrete poetry in a manner that echoes the work of Ian Hamilton Finlay in the pieces created for her Hard Words exhibition at London’s Air Gallery in 2008. With Nottingham painter Mik Godley’s use of painting to explore his family’s roots in his ongoing Considering Silesia project, and Simon Withers’ occasionally Pythonesque micro-narratives, the artists featured in this issue use very different approaches to obtain effects that are united in being ‘literary’ in the broadest sense. Errol Lloyd takes things even further in No Place To Hide, bringing a singular fictional creation to life, and offering his own take on another creator’s vision in a playful tussle between the real Lloyd, the fictional V.R. Da Firenze, and the late E.A. Markham that has something of the head-spinning complexity of a Charlie Kaufman script.

For the writers’ part, some respond to works of art directly, some use artists as characters and others offer everyday incidents catalysed and shaped by art. Mark Czanik’s The Secret explores a relationship shaped by a cache of stolen comic books, Mel Fawcett tells the story of a builder turned unusually focused painter in The Gift, Tim Love enters the mind of an Egon Schiele-obsessed voyeur in Muses and the protagonist of Michael Law’s Street-Walker executes a protest that seems as much a step into the realms of performance art as a personal transformation. Barbara Cumber imagines herself into the mindset of Richard Dadd in her poem ‘The Fairy Feller’s Master Stroke’, Fawzia Kane looks at Arshile Gorky, Robert Vas Dias offers an update of cubism at 32,000 feet, Rory Waterman presents a series of poetic snapshots from the Faroe Islands and Cherry Smyth draws inspiration from the Musée D’Art Brut, Lausanne, founded by Jean Dubuffet.

It’s worth noting that this issue’s theme was also conceived as a means of celebrating an extraordinary upsurge in activity in the visual arts regionally, with the new Nottingham Contemporary building approaching its final stage of development, the Stand Assembly studio group taking full possession of the new Moot Gallery space inside the former Boots factory at One Thoresby Street, and the old Moot premises on Sneinton’s Dakeyne Street receiving a fresh injection of activity in the form of a new artist-run space known as Backlit. The recent move of Surface Gallery from its basement beneath Mansfield Road to expanded premises inside a former photographers’ studio on the edge of Sneinton Market, and the exhibition programme at the Tether group’s Wasp Room on Huntingdon Street all suggest a local scene in a state of rapid development. With the New Art Exchange already well established, offering a strong programme of exhibitions and events on Gregory Boulevard, the next few years are looking like exciting times for art in Staple’s home city.

Yet it’s not just Nottingham that is taking off. The activities of Derby’s QUAD, Leicester’s City Gallery and Loughborough’s Radar, among others, suggest that the upsurge is not confined to a single location. For the reasons outlined in this editorial, we hope that Staple’s desire to celebrate this upsurge of energy in one art form through its relationship with another – that of writing in all its forms, currently undergoing its own renaissance in the region, with a proliferation of festivals, events and ventures – should seem natural, especially when the links between visual and written culture have been more or less closely intertwined from the earliest days of both. It might be stretching things to compare this issue to an Illuminated Book, an Aztec Codex, a scroll painting from West Bengal or a narrative frieze on an Athenian Black Figure Vase, but all are manifestations of the same deep-rooted impulse to bring word and image together and keep the doors of mutual influence open.