Modernity, as was.........

An acoustic rehearsal with Comus in London the other weekend. A novelty for me, because I can't remember the last time I had a rehearsal where I wasn't trailing wires and had a mixer patched-up like a pot of boiling spaghetti.

I played the soprano sax and my flootie, and we spent the time working on a new song by Glenn which will probably go on the planned new Comus release in 2010.

Before the rehearsal I had time to wander into Tate Britain. I've not been there for a long, long time, but years ago (long before Tate Mod was a twinkle in Nicholas Serota's eye), it was one of my regular haunts.

I got immediately lost by going in through the unfamiliar side entrance, but managed to retain my characteristic air of cool that transcends the merely modish, by walking briskly and faux-purposefully up the staircase (where the fuck did this come from - I'm sure it wasn't here last time....), and turning left with a nod to the Tate guide who was there to help stupid people who had lost their way. As if!

Crap. I'm in a room stuffed full of olde masters in big olde gilt frames......snatch a Tate map and pause for re-orientation under the cover of assessing something or another on one of the walls with a purse-lipped, chin-stroking air of effortless superiority worthy of the Lord Brian of Sewell himself.

Christ. This place is like Ikea. Would it help if I held the map the other way up? Are there any of those in-betweeny doors like Ikea have that so reminiscent of the secret passages in Cluedo? No. Choke a rising sense of panic, by nodding sagely - but with a aficionado's faint smile - at an imaginary aperçu I pretend to have spotted in the text explaining the olde master in front of whom I was still stranded........

.......eventually, though, through the application of advanced Squarion trigonometry and a dash of low native cunning, I found what I'd come to see; the abstract and constructivist works from the 1950's and 60's.

As an original new-town baby I've a great affection for both post-war new-town planning, and the much-maligned murals that decorated civic buildings. These gave form to the idealism and optimism which was integral to modernity.

The paintings and constructions that I sought out at the Tate are artefacts from that land that time has forgotten, pre-Thatcher Britain. They come from a time before society was shattered into a myriad competing consumer-individual-units competing for the economic advantage of themselves and their family units over all the other competing consumer-individual-units.

They come like Jacob Marley's ghost, to warn.........

I would like to commend the following to your attention;

Alan Davie, Roger Hilton, Mary Martin, Kenneth Martin, Peter Lanyon & Anthony Hill. The list could go on, but here are some pictures that I grabbed off the interweb to whet the appetite;



Patrick's Delight - Alan Davie




January 1964 - Roger Hilton




Expanding Permutation - Mary Martin




Screw Mobile (1969) - Kenneth Martin




Painting - Peter Lanyon



Construction - Anthony Hill


I was particularly taken with Mary Martin's 'Inversions' (1966), below;




It is an example of 'process' art, similar in intent to 'process' music.
For more on this work click here.


Oh yes - Alan Davie was also an improvisor in music, check out this with the great Oxo;