ART: The emperor's 1960s-retro-chic clothes
Bridget Riley at Tate Britain
Man is, among other things, a pattern-making animal. A preoccupation with the creation and distruption of regular patterns is the common thread connecting music and history, dance and poetry, architecture and a great deal else. We see it everywhere, from the Homeric tropes to the design of the London tube map, from the Islamic and Chinese calligraphic traditions to a country barn-dance, from games of chance to the visual cultures of sub-Saharan Africa, from the need to 'make sense' of, say, Hitler to the unforgettability of a good Kylie single. Other than a generalised yearning towards God, indeed, it is hard to think of any other impulse so general across all times and cultures, and obviously pattern-making and religious practice are themselves closely interconnected. At the same time it is equally true, though — and obvious, incidentally, in all the examples above — that patterns serve purposes and make little sense as ends in themselves. And that, ultimately, is the central problem with the new Bridget Riley show at Tate Britain.
The Riley retrospective is the latest in an ongoing programme of monographic shows at Tate Britain featuring Britain's own 'modern masters', so that Riley finds herself sandwiched in between last year's Lucian Freud retrospective and a forthcoming exhibition devoted to Sir Anthony Caro. The choice, whatever else it might be, is hardly surprising. Lucian Freud and sometime Angelino David Hockney excepted, Riley (born 1931) is one of the very few living British artists of her generation still in possession of a trans-Atlantic reputation. In the US, anyway, this rests largely upon "The Responsive Eye", a show presented in 1965 by the Museum of Modern Art which managed to group together with a young and beautiful Riley artists disparate as Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland, Frank Stella and Ellsworth Kelly, Josef Albers and Ad Reinhardt under the catholic banner of an interest in 'optical effects'. Needless to say, Greenberg & Co were furious at this association of what they regarded as gimmicky rubbish with the high formal seriousness of colour field abstraction, but the media — having at last latched onto something modern and 'cultural' that both photographed well and did not seem to require much explanation — loved Riley's work and launched it on a responsive public under the brand-name of Op Art. That love came at a cost. Dress-fabric, wallpapers, tableware and much else were made up in designs based on Riley's bold, memorable black-and-white compositions. They sold well. Riley, sensing a credibility problem, retreated into her studio in the Vacluse, although she has continued to work and exhibit extensively to the present day, was awarded a CBE in 1972 and has served as a Trustee of the Tate since 1981.
Amongst the minor failings of the current retrospective is the fact that it gives so little sense of how this much-lauded painter ended up being shown at the Museum of Modern Art in the first place. The first work in the exhibition, the 'breakthough' painting Movement in Squares (1961), was executed by her assistants (all Riley's paintings are executed by assistants) when Riley was 30 years old — in other words, more than a decade into her adult artistic career. Whereas from this exhibition one might struggle to realise that Riley grew up in Cornwall, that she studied at Goldsmith's College of Art from 1949-52 and then at the Royal College of Art from 1952-55 alongside (inter alia) Peter Blake and John Bratby, and that between that time and the "Responsive Eye" show she taught painting at several British universities. From the exhibition one would realise nothing about her relationships, her politics, her miscellaneous preoccupations. Indeed, the sparsely-hung white walls remain grandly untroubled by interpretive texts of any kind — the only aids to understanding are minimal labels identifying the exhibited paintings, together with a gallery guide made up of quotes from Riley interspersed with sympathetic accounts of her ongoing 'dialogues' with various formal concerns. Contrast this with the Lucian Freud show, or even the Michael Andrews one before, both of which showed a good deal of early, not to say juvenile attempts at art-making. One has to wonder why the decision was made to present Riley's work as arriving on the scene fully-formed, with no false starts, no stylistic reversals and few tangible influences.
What's her art about, then — those famous eye-churning monochrome designs, those colourful stripey expanses like Paul Smith carrier bags writ large? Strangely, the exhibition takes two contradictory lines about this. The first is the familiar argument in favour of abstraction: roughly, that trying to paint a representation of something else (say, a landscape) simply provides a defective second-hand account of seeing that other, absent thing, whereas an abstraction provides the viewer with an immediate, real experience of seeing something. Perhaps more strangely, though, no reference is ever made to the identity between the image and the surface of the picture plane, which is central to Riley's work, and would certainly have seemed like much of the point of it at the time she locked onto the manner that would make her career — surely, Riley and her acolytes aren't still harbouring a grudge against Clement Greenberg? Instead, every effort is being made to present as something fresh a particularly dated and derivative line of argument. Yet at the same time there are also insistent, rather nervous claims — claims of the sort no responsible colour field painter would have been caught making — that her work is both somehow connected with the experience of nature (largely, I guess, on the basis that one looks at nature, too) and, perhaps strangest of all, that it has expressive qualities as well as formal ones. The organisation of the exhibition is chronological, charting Riley's successive stylistic phases from 1961 up to the present. And everywhere, by the sheer fact of showing this art in Tate Britain's main exhibition spaces but more explicitly still in the gallery guide, there is the implication that Riley is an extremely important artist with a good deal to say about movement, light, colour and something called 'the act of seeing', which is accorded a great deal of importance here.
And this, really, is the problem. Riley's work has a fair amount going for it. Some of it is interesting. Some of it — especially the most recent work — is even rather beautiful, in a radiantly empty, inconsequential sort of way. But there is no way that these paintings can sustain the pressure of the commentary imposed upon them by the artist, curators and some critics. As patterns, the visual appeal they possess has nothing to do with these grand assertions, and everything to do with the sorts of accidental historical associations that Riley, and her curators, have so carefully banished from the show.
As for the claims, either they do not hold up, or they are in themselves as vacuous as Riley's worst work. Take, first of all, this whole 'act of seeing' business. It is perfectly true that good art can make the viewer look more closely and consciously, and see the world differently afterwards. But that is as true of art that is at some level representational — perhaps even more so — as it is of art that seeks to be wholly abstract. Personally I think most people are bright enough to understand that a landscape is just a two-dimensional recollection of something three-dimensional and elsewhere — just something painted on canvas — and also to understand that an abstact painting is a two-dimensional image of something that doesn't exist in the world of experience, also just painted on canvas. In other words, it is hardly as if a 'realistic' landscape were in any serious way passing itself off as real life. Even very stupid people can tell the difference between a painted landscape and an actual real-life view. So to claim some sort of virtue in creating a 'real' experience of seeing is, frankly, just nonsense. A canvas is a canvas is a canvas. Nor — and if critical theory has sent art a single clear message since the 1960s, it is this one — are abstract paintings somehow free of history, politics, ideology and all the other burdensome stuff so long and so easily attributed to representational work. Indeed, the differences between a 'realistic' painting and an abstact one are pretty minor, all things considered, with no monopoly of ability, aspiration, honesty or 'meaning' on either side. All of which renders the rigidly formalist presentation of these paintings a bit of mannered historical play-acting which might be charming were it leavened with even the softest whisper of irony, but played straight comes across as something else altogether.
Admittedly, the formal arguments are made to coexist with the frankly contradictory claim that this art, while abstract, is somehow based on on nature. 'Though her mature work does not proceed from observation, it is nevertheless connected with the experience of nature' — or so the gallery guide claims. This would simply be meaningless, I suppose, were it not for one illustration in the catalogue — sadly, the work is not included in the exhibition itself — showing a pre-1961 Riley canvas that, leaning heavily on the pointillist work of Seurat and perhaps Van Gogh, depicts a perfectly recognisable tree in a stylised, faintly abstracted way that, in its rhythmic use of blocks of solid colour, seems to point insistently towards her more recent painting. Riley now congratulates herself on working with 'movement, light and space', which clearly exist in nature — but the fact remains that it is perfectly possible to attempt to produce such effects in more 'realistic' work, too. Therefore one is left wondering whether the decision to strip down her visual vocabulary so radically was based on anything other than lack of representational aptitude or a fortuitous intuition as to the whereabouts of an art-historical niche that, however small and cramped it might be, she could make her own.
And the, finally, there is the bizarre idea that Riley's art is somehow expressive. According to the gallery guide, 'The effect [of Riley's work] is to generate sensations of movement, light and space: visual experiences which also have strong emotional and even visceral resonance'. It has, for instance, been suggested that Movement in Squares (1961) is somehow 'about' the end of a love-affair. At one level, these claims are interesting mostly for the anxiety they betray. Perhaps it would be a very bad thing if a woman made paintings — or had paintings made on her instructions — that were simply cold-blooded formal exercises? But on another level, they are actually pretty annoying. It may well be that Riley herself associates some of these works with what was going on in her life at the time she arranged for their creation, but if so, the association is hermetically sealed within her own consciousness, and in no way conveys itself onto the surface of the works themselves. I suspect that anyone who had actually suffered some sort of loss and came to this exhibition looking for solace or there merest twinge of human sympathy would leave it feeling all the worse for the experience. This is, ultimately, art that does not give a toss about the world or what goes on in it, and it shows. Any warmth or life or humour to be found here has to be projected from ourside onto the work, and the exhibition takes every possible precaution to prevent this sort of thing happening at all.
Instead, what we are given is a purely formal progression — and one that does not even progress very far. In the first room are pure black-and-white monochromes, in which Riley is getting to grips with making patterns out of shapes. By room two there is a bit of tonal messing about. By 1967, Riley apparently feels ready to use colour — but apparently only 'with some trepidation' — poor thing!) In any event, for the next seven years or so she restrains herself to a palette of three colours only, while abandoning more interesting shapes for stripes. There are many claims made for the 'long edge' of stripes and the way they make colours relate to each other, but frankly anyone who thinks this sort of stilted visual vocabulary is necessary in order to create striking colour relationships really ought to get out more. Riley's own claim takes some beating, though: 'I don't paint light. I present a colour situation which releases light as you look at it.' To which I can only say, there are Gainsboroughs hanging not fifty feet from her retrospective which demonstrate the almost insane preciousness of this sort of language. By room four, though, she has got the lines curving again, although still only with those three wretched colours.
Room five provides a bit of a break from all of this, as it is devoted to Riley's working methods and shows what it is, exactly, she brings to these works which she does not, herself, execute. Oddly, or perhaps not oddly, some of the most attractive works in the exhibition are here, if only because their occasional smudges and moments of indecision suggest the presence, somewhere, of a real human consciousness, giving them a warmth otherwise absent. But by room six, we are back in the apparently endless boring tale of Riley's progress — in this case, the amazing realisation, which apparently required spending a whole winter in Egypt, that it is actually possible to use colours (not many though) other than red, green and blue. Room seven sees the introduction of — wait for it — lozenge shapes, while the final room introduces curves and increasingly sweet colours. Some of these most recent works are, as mentioned, attractive enough — yet far too slight to merit the buildup this strangely pondrous, po-faced exhibition spends so long in creating for them. The result is unpleasantly akin to being made to sit through an endless and repetitive fashion-show of the Emperor's illusory new clothes — while having to pretend that while these clothes may have looked new and fun in the 1960s, they owe much of their appeal these days to whatever period charm might still adhere to them?
How did we get to a point where the more ridiculous claims made for Riley's work are taken so seriously? Well, it has everything to do with exactly the sort of 'act of seeing' — the thought that mediates pure sensation — that Riley seems to want to wish away, and also with the point about pattern-making with which this review began. As much as people enjoy patterns, they cannot help investing them with meaning, even if it has nothing to do with what the pattern-maker may have intended.
Even for those who were there at the time — as I wasn't — it is obviously impossible to reconstruct how a painting looked even 38 years ago. All the same, I suspect that part of the appeal of Riley's paintings lay less in the claims that were made for them, than in everything they were not. In Britain, for instance, it would have been clear that they had nothing to do with the gloomy sensibility and austerity-colours of Ben Nicholson, or the lurid smeary poly-perversity (or Picasso backwash) of Francis Bacon. In America they provided both a demotic retreat from the intellectualised experiments of Rauschenburg and Johns and Oldenburg, and a feel-good aesthetic a world removed from junk sculpture, the Hairy Who, happenings or the pretty but strangely prickly world of Warhol. And everywhere where anyone knew anything about recent art history, in their remote-control facture and hard-edged iciness, Riley's paintings would have come across as yet another assault on the much-assaulted if still-warm corpse of America's one great imperial style, Abstract Expressionism, whose earnest gestural anguish they contradicted at every turn — while at the same time complicit both with AbEx's (disingenuous) appearance of political disengagement and its claims to high cultural importance.
Now, though, it is easy enough to see them through a different set of lenses — alongside images of The Italian Job and the youthful Mick Jagger's bad-boy pout, with a backing track by the Kinks and stray shots of Carnaby Street, a few Minis, a few Mary Quant frocks, a few joints, a lot of free love and the whole romantic haze of an era that many of us managed to miss — because as abstract as these images are, they cannot help being connected in our minds with things that are anything but abstract, because that is how the human mind works. Or we can see them, perhaps, in art-historical terms — the influences they absorbed or rejected and the followers they did or didn't encourage — or even as part of a long story about the sort of role artists imagine for their art, and the concerns — expressive, aesthetic, political — this leads them to embrace or abandon. What we cannot do, without being driven mad by boredom or disingenousness, is see them the way Riley apparently wants us to see them, which is as significant in purely visual terms. The fact is, they just are not that interesting. Visually, they do badly things that have been done better. The accidents that left Riley semi-famous, British and an enduring art-world darling should not distract us from the reality that as an artist, she is extremely and painfully limited.
In terms of form, colour, subject and execution, Riley has stripped down her visual language so thoroughly that she cannot say very much at all, meaning that what she does say is extremely repetitive. Where her works 'do' anything, they depend simply on optical effects that may be interesting for a few moments, if that, but that certainly don't develop under scrutiny in the way that, say, an abstract by Rothko or Pollock might do. Often, though, they do not do even that. Unlike the work of more capable abstract artists — one thinks of Nicholas de Stael, Franz Kline, or even Patrick Heron, to pick three random examples — there never seems much obvious reason for her paintings to exist on any particular scale — no reason for them to begin and end at any particular point. And this, in turn, is why from the mid-1960s onward they have been so delightfully successful when translated into fabrics or other forms of practical decoration. There are works here which fail miserably as 'art' that at the same time would be pleasant enough as, say, patterned mugs or duvet covers, recalling a rather glamorous past era in a light-hearted sort of way. And what would be wrong with that? Amusingly, however, a museum that has happily sold mugs based on works by, among others, Sargent and Bonnard apparently cannot countenance anything as transgressive as Riley 'decorative' products. Perhaps that would simply be getting too close to an unpalatable truth for the comfort of either artist or curator? In any event, the chance for a feel-good, happy-go-lucky, crowd-pleasing summer show has been lost amid a slurry of self-indulgent art-speak and panicky special pleading. Personally I'd have loved to have seen these works installed as wall-coverings in 1960s period rooms, with thick pile carpets and television footage of protests in Grosvenor Square flickering on a black-and-white telly nearby, and lots more arcane period detail besides, but obviously I'll just have to wait. In the meantime we are forced to see Riley's paintings not as part of a broader pattern of cultural activity, but 'on their own terms', timeless and eternal — terms in which I am afraid, sadly, that they simply fail.
In the end, the most powerful sensation in this exhibition was one that took place not in Tate Britain itself, but rather as soon as I left the strangely airless, temperature-controlled building. Outside, the sky was blue, the wind was blowing, the air was dense with humidity, the leaves were shimmering and everywhere there was something happening — people talking, cars passing by — all of which could be made into any number of patterns, full of potential meanings and infinitely richer than the white-walled rooms I had only just abandoned. It was as if I had been holding my breath for the last hour or two and then had suddenly come out into real air again. And it felt good. There are, I suspect, various morals here for art, its place in the world and the sort of cases that people make for it, but for the time being I was simply glad to be back in the real, complicated, contingent and inexhaustably rich world.
Bridget Riley's retrospective is at Tate Britain from 26 June until 28 September. Admission costs £8.50 (concessions £6).
Bunny Smedley is ERO's arts editor.
Bunny Smedley, June 24, 2003 09:00 PM