Letters

Structures, Buildings and Art At first sight, Mr. Ernest Smith's 'art bank' offers some assured sales of at least some of their work to at least some of our younger artists. Potentially more explosive are the prospects of what effect, if any, will the thus amassed works have on ways and means of bringing art to the public. One seems to get a glimpse of a moderately vast art library on wheels, a central clearing house for recent, meritorious, but probably unsaleable art works, distributed nation-wide on a borrowing basis. But when Mr. Smith speaks of art which is no longer 'confined to canvas and fixed walls and sculpture-pedestals', this image of a vanful of tangible art products tends to dissolve into the rarefied air of the intangibilities of 'conceptual' art fostered recently by him and a few artists and art critics, an artistic activity which has precious little to do with sales and storage and lendings and suchlike material things. So the art bank is to sponsor these too, on an intangible financial basis. The matter becomes positively baffling when Mr. Smith mentions, as a prop for his proposal, the Centre Nationale George Pompidou pour l'Art et la Culture which opened last year in a flurry of controversy in Paris. (The controversy centred, however, not on the purported aim of the Centre to become a forum for the frontiers of artistic expression. The fight was about the artistic expression of the building itself.) In what sense do the Art Bank and the Centre Pompidou relate to each other, and to the needs of contemporary art life, in Paris, or here, or in Timbuctoo in the Chad Republic? On its first two floors, the Centre Pompidou building houses a concourse, offices and a huge walk-in abstract; on its top floors an overspill of the collections of the Palais de l'Art Moderne, until recently in the Rue President Wilson. In between there are ample areas for ad hoc art activities, which may be travelling exhibitions as easily as scenes for some of those intangible happenings. In the large open-air area to the west, there are ready-made platforms for discussion groups, and such-like spontaneous and/or pseudo-spontaneous stage events and similar Hyde-Parkiana. These are clearly visible, though of course quite inaudible, from the indoors areas of the Centre, the vista filtered through the screen of structural and/or pseudo-structural goings-on of the building. In the Paris climate, these outdoor facilities are unlikely to prove half as good an invitation to dance, symbolically speaking, as all the other streets and squares of the City on July 14th. Of course there are vast crowds of sightseers every Sunday: but is this the dawn of a better age for art-to-community relationships? My impression was that these visitors are good little bourgeois who just love to be 'épaté' by the outragistic architectorings of Messrs. Piano & Rogers, the designers of the Centre. Some say that the crowds are there and behave in such gloriously informal fashion because they feel they are 'active participants' in the new communal art life. When I was there, there was no special event to participate in: but people were still gaping, joking, and generally behaving with true Parisian irreverence. Delightful as always, but nothing new. But to record my own reactions, and I am sure many share them: even the strong stuff of giant Cubist sculpture was out-dinned, out-visualized by the unrelenting technocrato-visual din of the building and its 'functional' parts. I felt that to enjoy more contemplative forms of art, one has to run miles, many miles, from the Centre Pompidou. The Centre Pompidou was meant to be a focus of artistic activities for Paris and even France, and to bring it into a 'communal' setting. But being such a pinnacle affair (and of such exhibitionistic architecture to boot) it will inevitably polarize these artistic activities out from the every-day life of local communities (or tend to do so: its success is not assured). Polarize art out of life, and you have decay. All such polarizations through history - whether by splendid specialist buildings or spendthrift special organisations - confirm this. The best Greek plays were written long before the best Greek theatres were built. None of the art-rich Medieval cities had anything like an art gallery; and the artists of Florence in its creative heyday did not even have a guild of their own. Such parallels won't of course solve our problems, though they may show the direction in which salvation does NOT wait. And it would also mean putting the horse-cum-cart syndrome the wrong way round, if we were to tackle our problems from the fulcrum of the artist so miserably misunderstood and more miserably paid. The key factor in art life is neither the artist, nor the art recipient, but the relation between the two. Mr. Smith asserts repeatedly his faith in decentralisation. I am fully with him in this. But art banks, I take it, need art-bank-managers. No matter with what great liberalism this art-bank-manager approaches his task to delegate his purchasing powers, three hundred thousand is a modest enough sum to provoke dogfights between prospective recipients for the meagre bone. And it would ultimately put tremendous central power in the said art-bank-manager's hands - a power that would as surely corrupt the top as it would debase those who should rather be exalted, at the bottom. So what price decentralisation? Not to speak of the need of a central warehouse as shunting-yard for this new sort of art traffic which would be nothing like the Centre Pompidou in its function, though probably quite similar in appearance. Would the public have even passive and spectatorial access to its riches, or would it have to wait until shunting is done and items numbers such-and-such have duly reached outlets numbers such-and-such? I have no confidence in great centralized art structures, be they centres a la Pompidou or art banks a la Smith, or even arts councils a la Reine. I pin my faith to a situation in which every teacher in his or her particular way is an art teacher, every pupil and student a budding artist, every parent an art critic - with the walls of homes as exhibition areas, and public buildings large and small the final resting place (or activity stage) of their art. Only in such an environment will the really able come forward for specialist training, which they of course need. Only in such a grass-root 'structure' will the specialists be assured of sympathetic understanding by the multitudes who are not specialists. Their understanding may even secure for them, and for the private dealers who exert themselves on their behalf, a living wage. I.V. PORSOLT Auckland's Verandahs I'm sad to see that Michael Pritchard disapproves of Auckland's verandahs. I've always thought them eminently practical in a climate where shoppers frequently have to contend with driving rain or sizzling sun; and I was not at all surprised to see that a canopy had been erected belatedly on that unpleasantly verandahless corner outside the A.N.Z. Bank building in Queen Street. I remember struggling with umbrellas in London, dashing from doorway to doorway in New York, wilting in the heat in Rome - to me our verandahs make good sense. Mr Pritchard himself admits that without them we would have 'wet customers' and 'sun-damaged goods' - does this not suggest to him that the verandahs should be retained? Let's accept the fact that our shop verandahs are practical and distinctive. Then let's ask our architects to make them beautiful as well as practical, so that they enhance our buildings and harmonise with our surroundings. Or does Michael Pritchard think our architects are not equal to the task? ELIZABETH CALLIS