Art
Stylish
John McEwen
Art is a constant recycling of ideas, and even the best and most generally acclaimed artists have found it difficult to sustain the volution of even one of these inspirations OF the length of a career. The idea becomes their style, the style becomes a handwriting, and the handwriting becomes their livelihood. The great majority of people who Practise art never succeed in fishing out an idea at all, but in order to do so it helps if You have an obsession. Certainly if you are to sustain the evolution of that initial inspiration it is essential. Ivor Abrahams (Mayor till 23 June) is obsessive about certain features of English gardens. He likes ancient hedges and ruins and suburban grottoes, preferably padded with moss or Partially hidden by some other kind of overgrowth, to such a degree that having se.en his work it is difficult to pass a day Without thinking of him, so cunningly has he SPrung the trap on a particular aspect of British .1Jstalgia. The Secret Garden
remains after all, despite every industrial effort to the contrary, our best-selling chil dren's book. This shock of recognition was what first gave Abraham's garden pieces their novelty and he enforced it with a no less original use of that cosy and evocative material, flocking. But the representational accuracy of the flocking eventually began to get the better of the work, making it look both arch and stagey. Now for his latest pieces he has used bronze, obviously to return to more sculptural principles. In this he succeeds. And the drawings too demonstrate a new harshness and lack of whimsy.
But in casting out whimsy he forfeits the humour and charm of the best of his previous work. It represents a new start of sorts, a new and interesting severity, but it is too early to say whether his theme is worthy of its high intentions.
Jeffery Camp (Serpentine till 11 June) is similarly obsessive about Beachy Head.
Almost all his paintings deal with its land scape in some way or other, though, since his wife also appears in almost every paint ing, it could be said that he is actually preoccupied with her. The great thing about CgAmp's work is that it conveys his delight.
Camp uses every means to capture his visual experience of the place, shaping his canvases to accentuate the breadth of the sea or the depths of the cliffs or the swing of the sky. Most are triangular, some are oblong, one is cruciform, their nature further heightened by emotive but non representational borders that frame and intensify the action. These borders and shapes can be a bit twee at times, as can the occasionally too illustrational and falsely naive representation, but for all his airiness Camp is a grammarian, and at best his paintings have a strength and sophistication that matches their exuberance.
Bryan Kneale has a selection of work from 1967 to the present both inside and out (Serpentine until 11 June) and four new wall pieces (Redfern till 31 May). Suitably enough the Serpentine exhibition has been selected and presented by Bryan Robertson, who gave Kneale his last major public show, at the Whitechapel, in 1966. Kneale is above all a maker, an engineer rather than a modeller, and too often the outcome is more noteworthy as a demonstration of skill than as a sculptural statement. It blinds him to the banality of some of his forms and also encourages fastidiousness to degenerate into fiddliness. He is at his best when most pronounced or, on a small scale, at his most simple. Recently these small works have included a fine variation on a very simple card-house shape that enables him to deploy his eye for structure and his subtlety of finish to the utmost. His wall-pieces at the Redfern however show his tendency to over-elaborate creeping back. Outdoors at the Serpentine he is not represented by his best work. Kneale shares his Redfern show with Alf Dunn, who has some new prints — decorative and abstract works that defy the laws of fashion by rehashing some midSixties trends.
Jeffery Camp and Bryan Kneale have both allied themselves to the Academy, which promises some hope for the future of the Summer Exhibition, now with us once again (Burlington House till 13 August). Both have work in the present show and Bryan Kneale as a full academician has selected and placed this year's sculpture. The main sculpture room accordingly is the most interesting of the exhibition. Elsewhere some lamentable hanging does little to enliven the overall mediocrity of the send-in, but sales are apparently (and as usual) unprecedented. An etching entitled 'Harvest Mice at Nest' seemes to be the top seller!
Two Arts Council photography exhibitions should also be mentioned. 'Open Photography 1978', also at the Serpentine (till 11 June) and 'Pictorial Photography in Britain 1900-1920' (Hayward till 11 June). It is difficult to come to either of them with a fresh eye without having been surfeited by the exhibitions alongside them, but even without this disadvantge neither is particularly memorable. The 'Open' fails to throw up anything startling and the work of the established names, for the most part, is what catches the eye in the rather too specialist show at the Hayward.
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