From Here to Apostasy

April 1999

Gerald Laing reflects on the fluctuating fortunes of his career from star of Pop Art to the recidivism of casting bronze figures.

Mine was the first generation of young artists of whom some were lionized immediately after leaving art school. This was a matter of luck, timing and social climate; it had nothing particularly to do with extraordinary talent or skill. Art seemed suddenly to be both profitable and sexy; and therefore it gradually ceased to be an area of interest for a comparatively small proportion of the population. It suited the zeitgeist of the 1960s and was no longer ignored or treated with disdain.

Just as we were the first to receive early adulation and reward, so we were the last to go to art school with no such expectations. Our predecessors never experienced such pumping; a photograph of John Bratby and Derrick Greaves at an opening of the Zwemmer Gallery in the 1950s shows them in corduroys and tweed jackets with leather elbow patches, clutching half pints of beer. This is in marked contrast to an opening of, say, the Saatchi Gallery nowadays, with its black-clad throng of hopeful acolytes resembling nothing so much as the three-eyed toys in Toy Story, hoping against hope that they will be chosen by the Claw which hovers above them - hoping that they can do what has never been done, win what has never been won; meanwhile life goes on all around them. (Apologies to Bob Dylan.)

What each generation forgets - and it is human nature so to do - is that only a tiny proportion will be chosen; and like as not these select few will have careers like a boxer, perhaps glorious but necessarily brief.

My unsuspecting generation suffered this fate. We were not ready for the event. We had the rest of our lives to live, years of work ahead, but we were expected to be fully formed before we were properly out of the womb.

The current state of affairs is very confusing. It seems to be a matter of hysteria. I have sat on art committees myself and watched the group as a whole, endorse work which no individual member of the group would support. I am, albeit reluctantly, forced to conclude that the same number of truly art-literate people exist as in the 1950s and earlier, before commercial techniques were brought so blatantly to the promotion of art. I am certain that a good patron is more rare than a good artist.

Ambition of the type which feeds on contemporary notions of fame is not relevant to the making of art. An artist must have skills; his standards of expertise must at least be comparable with that of a doctor or an engineer or any other professional. And because of the special nature of the creative act, he has to be his own chief critic; he cannot expect significant moral and critical endorsement from anyone, nor can he rely upon their opinion. By choosing to be an artist, he or she has chosen to stand alone.

Whether or not the groups of young artists, including my own, who have been subjected to early promotion have been ready and able to sustain and exploit such advantages throughout the length of an entire career, is debatable. The typical pattern is one of short-lived high-pitched success followed by comparative oblivion. Whether or not this is the case depends ultimately on the staying power of the work in its own right once the props of publicity and promotion have been, inevitably, removed.

Certainly I was not prepared to remain permanently in the mould into which I first was cast, that of Pop artist. I was a core member of the group of British Pop artists, yet I produced work of this type for only 3 years (1962-1965). In 1965 1 began making works which were abstract and cut out of metal, but which referred to the formal elements in my earlier ‘Skydiver’ series of paintings. Several of these were included in the first and defining exhibition of Minimal Art (Primary Structures, Jewish Museum, New York, 1967) - though I did not completely accept the theories of the hard-core Minimalists such as Judd and Flavin. In 1965 1 made a multiple which I called Print in order to propose that such an art object did not necessarily have to be a work on paper. I believe this to have been the first of this type of work which was later to become a popular manifestation. In 1965-6 Peter Phillips and I produced Hybrid which is regarded as the precursor of ‘Process Art’ by people who are interested in such things.

Later, after moving from New York to the North of Scotland in 1969, 1 produced properly volumetric sculpture intended to be placed in a landscape - by ‘landscape’ I meant any real open environment, either urban or rural. This was a contrast to my last New York works, which were highly finished and intended to occupy a pure white space which was otherwise empty and sterile.

I made each change in my work because it seemed at the time the logical, relevant, indeed essential course to take. At the same time a common thread runs through all of it; there are no sudden seismic shifts. The main themes are twofold: formal concerns of line and volume, and literary ones of context and meaning. The relevant proportions of these two ingredients create the major differences between one work and another.
After spending time with writers and engineers and others whose creativity I admired, but who could not, with the best of will, get as much from my work as I could from theirs, I had to face the fact that my system of communication was at fault. I realised that if I was not to be marginalised then I must make fundamental changes. An epiphany occurred when one dawn in 1973, after a long party, I found myself standing contemplating the Royal Artillery Memorial at Hyde Park Comer in London. I realised then that no abstract art could contain a fraction of the love, passion, pain, pride, sorrow, beauty and acceptance that this great work of art effortlessly projects. It is intricate and grand, of its time and timeless, so abstract and formal, so realistic and human, sprung from the great tradition and yet new-born.

At last I understood that the process of creation, the aesthetics of form and composition which give this monument its strength and staying power are the artist’s essential tools. They are the means by which these qualities are achieved to make concrete and convincing the content of the work; they are not an end in themselves, but their quality governs the quality of the work. They are the artists’ business, or rather it is the artist’s business to master them; but they need not necessarily even be apparent. It is the re-stating by each generation of the same truths and perceptions which must be the main purpose of an artist’s endeavour, so that in each generation they are once more accepted, and the fact that this has been done repeatedly is understood and becomes a source of comfort and a means of orientation, a lifebelt in the chaos.

Carefully and slowly I returned to the human figure, discarding fabrication as a process and instead modeling in clay. By this simple move I increased to infinity the vocabulary of form available to me. The earliest figures I made are quite subjective. They still utilise the geometry which was the main part of my abstract sculpture; the difference is that because they have the human figure as their subject, they have gesture and emotion as well. Some people think that the changes in my work show me to be travelling backwards from abstraction to an objective figuration. The implication is that abstract art is ‘advanced’ and figurative art ‘old hat’. I cannot subscribe to this linear view of art history in any case, but in fact at the time I knew that I was making the most radical move that I could possibly make, simply by following my conscience. This was confirmed for me by the fact that immediately my work was deemed by my peers to be completely unacceptable. No dealer would look at it - it was figurative, it was cast in bronze, for goodness’ sake! It just wasn’t groovy. My income took a complete nosedive, my career was in ruins, and for four years I couldn’t sell a thing. My debts shot up, I was in despair. I took the family back to America, where the smell of panic and failure which I seemed to be emitting made people run for cover. They don’t like losers in America - they think that they are infectious. I spent a frightening period in a beach house in Amagansett in the offseason, at that time a deserted and icy cold windswept resort, subsisting on the charity of friends. Eventually I was evicted, together with my wife and children. A year’s Visiting Professorship at the University of New Mexico enabled me to survive (just); then, with a very small amount of cash in hand I returned to Scotland, determined to cast as much bronze sculpture as I could before I was forced to sell up and leave. It was a very difficult part of my life, one in which everything seemed to be disintegrating; but I had brought it on myself I had blasphemed against the canon, and as my daughter said at the time, I had become apostate. I looked up ‘apostate’ in the dictionary so as to be sure that it meant what I thought it did; at the top of the next page my eyes fell upon the word ‘artless’.

Gerald Laing

Gerald Laing: An Introduction

1993, {publication}

Gerald Laing and I first met when we were both at crucial stages in our lives. I was a National Service second lieutenant with an honours degree in English literature and a passion for jazz. Gerald was a full lieutenant who had gone through Sandhurst with the intention of making the army his career. He was a romantic with a passion for heraldry, but two years of professional soldiering had knocked the stuffing out of his military idealism, and he was beginning to question everything. It was also dawning on him that he had other talents and interests which could perhaps find expression only in some different way of life.

Gerald Laing and I first met when we were both at crucial stages in our lives. I was a National Service second lieutenant with an honours degree in English literature and a passion for jazz. Gerald was a full lieutenant who had gone through Sandhurst with the intention of making the army his career. He was a romantic with a passion for heraldry, but two years of professional soldiering had knocked the stuffing out of his military idealism, and he was beginning to question everything. It was also dawning on him that he had other talents and interests which could perhaps find expression only in some different way of life. He had had little opportunity to meet artists, musicians and writers or anyone who had links with that world and so his inner debate had been going on in a vacuum until my arrival in April 1957 when I joined the First Battalion of the Royal Northumberland Fusiliers in Belfast.

He had a lot of charm and cut a dashing figure, but his disillusion had given him a wit as acerbic as that of any Elizabethan malcontent. He seemed to be living at fever pitch with a voracious appetite for experience, knowledge, books and literature, and he was crazy about women. He had acquired a pair of ballet shoes from ballerina Belinda Wright which he kept as a talisman. His early (and suppressed) talent for drawing and painting was beginning to resurface with a potency that would not be denied. He was in a state of crisis which had him perpetually considering what he should do with his life, how to live and what to live for. I saw at once that this was not some self-dramatising parlour game - the dilemma was real and the endless discussions we had were vital to his wellbeing and also to mine.

Little did I realise that this kind of crisis, though perhaps less extreme, would recur at intervals through subsequent decades always in the form of self-posed questions: What ought I to be doing? How should I be living? Of course, Gerald’s deeply ingrained selfquestioning habit is one of the main reasons why his huge body of work is so dynamic. His apparent weaknesses - uncertainty and self-doubt - are his great strengths as an artist. He has never been afraid to tell himself unpalatable truths, to look at himself with a merciless, critical eye, and so his vision has never been clouded by complacency or arrogance. In addition, the never does things by halves; once he is convinced something is right he gives it one hundred per cent commitment. He had given his all to the army until his desire for drawing and painting became imperative after which he devoted all his spare time to these pursuits. He took regular painting lessons in Belfast with Boyd Morrison, an elderly artist who was a friend of Gilbert Spencer (Stanley Spencer’s brother), and who had had some vague connections with Wyndham Lewis and the Bloomsbury Group. Then in October 1957, when the battalion moved to Munster in West Germany, Gerald continued to take regular painting lessons from Herr Brucker, an elderly German artist, and he spent more and more of his precious spare time working at what was clearly becoming the main focus of his life.

In September 1958, 1 was demobilised in Germany and began an indefinite period of ‘bumming around’ Europe. One month later I was staying in Nice in the south of France and, Gerald came to visit on three weeks leave from the army. I found him cheap lodgings in a local peasant’s house, and this may have been his first taste of the bohemian existence. He did a massive amount of painting and drawing during these three weeks and he explored his ideas through continued discussions with our acquaintances. He had arrived like a disoriented lion but ended his stay like a highly focused lamb, as if he had found an inner certainty and become more at peace with himself. By 1960 he had left the army and was studying painting at St Martin’s in London, and I was back in the UK determined to devote myself to trumpet-playing and jazz.

By 1963 we were both living in London’s East End - he was at 12 Fournier Street and I was at number 9. With Gerald’s old school friend, the architect Terry Stewart, we collaborated on ‘Travail d’équipe? for the 1963 Paris Biennale, jointly deciding on the grandiose theme of ‘Birth, Life and Death’. Gerald and Terry constructed the maquette which had a blatantly uterine inspiration, while 1, with bassist Jeff Clyne and drummer Laurie Morgan, created a suitably anguished musical accompaniment for each of the three phases. The taped music and the maquette were taken to Paris by Gerald and Terry who were photographed there with other luminaries including David Hockney and Peter Blake. In 1964, Gerald went to live in the United States where he enjoyed considerable success. He returned to the United Kingdom in 1969 to live in Kinkell Castle which he bought as a ruin and lovingly restored.

By the end of that decade, Gerald had also created a considerable reputation as an abstract sculptor, but during the 1970s, after another of his bouts of selfquestioning, he renounced abstraction and turned with total commitment to representational sculpture - a volte-face that was to become fashionable some ten years later. He had an exhibition at the 1978 Edinburgh Festival, and asked me to compose music for four sculptures (‘Conception’ [19761, ‘American Girl’ [19771, ‘Ecce Domina’ [1977] and ‘The Human Condition’ [19781). My four compositions were put on tape and played during the exhibition. The collaboration and the sculptures acted as a powerful inspiration and resulted in some of my finest music which was released in 1979 on an LP entitled ‘Out of the Long Dark’ - the title of my composition for the sculpture Gerald called ‘Conception’. Collaborations of sorts and our dialogues about life and work have gone on through the decades and still continue today.

Perhaps the most striking thing about Gerald Laing is the humanity which informs everything he does - the human condition is his concern and inspiration. This lies behind his wide reading and knowledge, his love of music, his concern about how to live, and his sheer integrity as an artist. His visual sense and his conception of life and art are all-embracing -inclusive rather than exclusive - which is why Kinkell Castle has become such a benign living environment. It was created by a man who responds to people, the human form, landscape, architecture and design. He involves a whole spectrum of experience in his vision: from ancient history to modem machinery; from old masters to cars and motorcycles - all are icons in his eyes, emblematic of the mark of humankind. His vast body of work is a trail blazed by a pluralistic but single-minded odyssey.

Ian Carr

Swift Passages and the Monumental Imagination

1993 1993

David Alan Mellor looks at Gerald Laing’s work from 1963 to 1993.

Systematic, monumental, disciplined: but also caught up with the instability of the world, the flickering of time and sight and presence. These opposing positions, these two separate metaphysics, have occupied Gerald Laing throughout his career as an artist. He has addressed historical example from the outset and not just latterly. This was implied, for example, at the very beginning of his career, when he told Mario Amaya, then writing the first survey of pop painting in 1965, that his major influence was Paolo Uccello. Here he indicated an orientation towards the body systematised in action, styled in fashionable dress, at once heraldic and modern. It was Baudelaire who had stipulated in the 1850s that modernity would be framed by uniforms, glamour and leisure iconography; he prophesied that profane edge to modernism which was constantly disavowed, but which forms such a distinctive element in Laing’s productions. It may be that Laing’s perception of the heroism of modern life stems from the conceptual horizons of a certain masculinity which was unchallenged in the 1950s, but which has fallen under siege since about 1969. His position within such an economy of meaning was contradictory. It was rooted in the culture of ‘the angry young man’ (he saw the original production of Look Back in Anger while still a soldier), while simultaneously in a fascination within ballet’s management of the body.

The contemporary human body was being redefined by the technologies of politics, space exploration and leisure in the late fifties and early sixties. This was Laing’s moment of entry into the art world and, given this cultural environment he endeavoured to create a system which would enable him to trace - as Uccello had done using single-point perspective in the early fifteenth century - the dramas of public life and civic identity, newly clothed and in the postures of the moment. Laing’s ‘Souvenir of the Cuban Missile Crisis’ (1962), painted at St Martin’s School of Art, tricks the viewer’s eye to read either Kennedy’s or Kruschev’s portrait depending upon whether they are situated to the left or right of the work, thus suggesting an allegory of political ‘perspective’. Viewed from the centre, the picture reads as a pattern of vertical flickers and optical interference - a device which later in his career would resolve into the banalities of desire in another optical experiment, ‘Love Machine’ (1965) which can be compared to the work of US pop artist Robert Indiana.

But, earlier than this, in the harsh winter of 1962-63, Laing pioneered a grid of representation that engaged more directly with the mass media. He mimicked and enlarged the screened dot systems of halftone photo-press images found in newspapers and magazines in an oil-paint format. This crucial innovation was independent of Warhol’s movement into silk-screened images as well as Roy Lichtenstein’s annexation of the ‘Ben Day’ graphic process, and Sigmar Polke’s later giantist half-tone images. (The ultimate precedent perhaps lay in the photo-realist canvases of Sickert between the end of the twenties and his death in 1942.) Laing’s interest in fixing the spectator’s body proximate to an image which was at the point of its own dissolution (atomised in the halftone screens) was partly derived from his student fondness for going up too close, beyond a comfortable viewing distance, to the photo-advertisements on the walls of the London underground. (A parallel might be made here with Rosenquist’s enforced myopia when painting advertisements.) What may have further focused Laing’s exploration of modernised photo -mechanical vision as a resource for painting was the teaching of Richard Smith in the Painting School at St Martin’s. Recently back from New York, Smith offered the prospect of mapping the simulated world of promotional selling and publicity in his ICA lectures and film screenings in the autumn of 1962. This anticipation of deconstructive formal strategies which dismantled the devices of the media spectacle was supplemented by the graphic caricaturism and figuration of the younger Royal College of Art pop painters who had graduated that previous summer. These artists which Smith applauded included Derek Boshier, David Hockney and Peter Phillips (who later collaborated with Laing in New York).

The first fruits of Laing’s stylistic revolution were evident in the exhibition which he held at St Martin’s in March 1963 called ‘Paintings from Photographs / Photographs from Paintings’ - a show whose significance can now be fully recognised. Laing assembled an array of French nouvelle vague film actresses, as well as Brigitte Bardot, to represent peculiarly removed stars, objects of desire to whom access would be forever barred by photo-mechanical distance. Presciently, he reserved Godard’s fascinating, head-on sphinx, Anna Karina, for his biggest, twelvefoot high essay in this advertising-hoarding format. In the light of his later public sculptures such as ‘Sherlock Holmes - The Conan Doyle Memorial’ (1991), it is probably important to note that Laing made a film documenting the activities of himself and his colleagues taking ‘Anna Karina’ onto various locations in the Charing Cross Road and watching its effect on passers-by as a piece of temporary street sculpture.

Laing is a phenomenologist: he charts certain (often extreme) bodily states, sensations and experiences in remarkable ways, reproducing them through bodies such as the tumbling and ascending angels of ‘Axis Mundi’ (1991) or the digitised pressure bearing down and disintegrating the images of his astronauts, racing-car drivers, drag racers and sky divers in his paintings of 1963-64. The existential thematics of instability and risk shade into a new mythical heroism which had become operative in the mass culture; or so proposed Richard Hamilton in his text ‘Urbane Image’, published in June 1963 in Living Arts.’ Hamilton nominated the astronaut as the successor to the ancient heroes of Graeco-Roman mythology, beings who could, therefore, populate a truly renovated, modernised classical iconography. The issues of gravity, its absence, and the orientation of bodies and paintings preoccupied Laing as much as Hamilton during this time.

After sharing Robert Indiana’s studio at Coenties Slip in New York in the summer of 1963, Laing returned to London for his final year at St Martin’s. Here he painted the NASA astronaut Alan Shepherd shuddering into sight through the capsule’s time-lapse camera, and Jim Clark pushed by G-force to the picture frame’s edge, as he cornered his Chapman Lotus at Indianapolis. Two bodily states arise from these epic and poetic paintings - acceleration and deceleration - energies which continued to haunt his work over the next three decades. Plummeting, speed, and an arrest which can end in apotheosis are further explored by Laing in his current proposal for a triumphal monument to Jim Clark to be built in the market place in Duns.

The Clark project belongs to one of Laing’s central achievements: it is part of his tracing of that diminishing zone of tragedy left in modern life. He had noted the powers of mortality pitched against those of exultation in 1964 when he scribbled across a US leisure-magazine photograph of a couple of sky divers a caption recording their later, unimaginable, deaths following their jump to their wedding reception. Between free fall through life and a final arrest in mortality lay a fundamental dialectic which Laing found paralleled in the Venerable Bede’s Ecclesiastical History (11) from the eighth century. Bede compares ‘the present life of man’ with ‘the swift passage of a lone sparrow through a banqueting hall’ before vanishing into oblivion once again. Laing’s tragic tenor reckons with Bede’s conviction that ‘man appears on earth for a little while’ and this has increasingly attracted him to entities of stability: to bronze, to long traditions, and to his castle, Kinkell, which he began restoring in 1968.

The drive which made him, when he was thirteen, seek out the Garter King of Arms to enquire how he might become a Herald, now drew him to the contemporary pop heraldry of the dragster racers: ‘dragster racing is like jousting’ he said recently, ‘and, like knights, the drivers are richly caparisoned’. (footnote 2) The bodies of these heroic figures - racers such as Big Daddy Garlits and the anonymous sky-divers behind their goggles and helmets - are screened, interrupted, discontinuous bodies at one with the turbulence of their speed. In Laing’s work of 1965 these figures begin to cede their ground to the patterned body shells and insignia of racing cars. Laing was adept at recording the progressive techno-colonisation of the body in this period. Similarly, the ‘heraldry’ of leisure and sexuality laps over and invades the bodies of his ‘beach girls’ - those recruits from contemporary surfing mythology and their endless summers - in his bikini paintings and prints. These pin-ups come before us in the guise of modernised vanitas images, figures of startling display, vectors of alluring artifice. The stress on artifice and on surface is evident, too, in the growing role of what he called ‘perfect finish’ in his increasingly abstract paintings and constructions.

At this time the boundary between painting and sculpture was being challenged by new initiatives then taking place in British art: Caro painted his welded sculptures and Richard Smith had begun to shape and give volume to his canvases. Laing looked to tradition and to craft: he utilised the skills of surviving local artisans from clock manufacturing in the Old Street area when he returned to London in 1965; similarly, he employed auto-motive chrome and paint specialists from ‘Little Italy’ in New York to work on his canvases.

His position of scepticism towards a prevailing rapid turnover of art styles and their marketing in New York in the high years from 1964 to 1968 found expression in his collaboration with Peter Phillips on the project entitled ‘Hybrid’. Again motifs of transience, turbulence and vanity are engaged by Laing in this considered satire on the ‘swift passage’ of art fashions. Aping (and mocking) the devices of consumer surveys, Laing and Phillips questioned a large cross-section of art professionals in New York and London - critics, gallerists, collectors and curators - to discover their preferences within a range of certain formal solutions, colours and finishes that would create an optimal artefact which was geared to art-consumer choice. The main-frame computers at Bell Telephone’s headquarters were brought into play to ‘crunch the numbers’ for the project and construct the elusive dream object of the contemporary art scene. The result - a plastic, wavy lined, translucent sculpture, together with questionnaires and documentation - was finally exhibited at Jill Kornblee’s gallery in New York in 1966.

We might see in Laing’s cynical, satiric ‘Hybrid’ a reflection of some of his own doubts about the growing formalism of his not altogether dissimilar painted sculpture productions. But now, in retrospect, they appear perhaps as a confident minimalism that carries the verve of the ‘man / machine’ paintings and concentrates upon that growing territory of metal and patterning which appeared in the racing and diving paintings. The body reasserts itself in a coded anthropomorphism: Michael Fried, referring to Caro’s sculpture of 1961-63, imagined a dancer dancing the movements and pacing of the welded metal. Likewise Laing’s ‘Loop’ (1965) and ‘Indenty’ (1966) are full of Baroque shifts which run laterally and vertically through the application of acrylic lacquer, metalflake and chromium which adom the flat forms. This flatness is their key characteristic: they are zig-zagging silhouettes, as thin as a ballet dancer frontally addressing an audience, like Laing’s self, risen as the sculpted dancer in his ‘Adam’ (1986). The overlay of painted curvilinear patterns renders the implacable surface of aluminium (in ‘Loop’, for example) ambiguous and playful. ‘Trace’ as a general term covers, for Laing, this group of sculptures of the second half of the sixties. If they trace anything it might be imaginary bodies suggested through a subsumed male presence, a rising totem, an erect phalli-form which often, at its base, becomes a site of softer, more cursive geometries - as with ‘Slot’ (1965) and ‘Trace’ (1965) - where localised allegories of a female-gendered morphology seem sited. This was a rehearsal of that juxtaposition of the masculine heroism of the sky diver above and the collapsing parachute below, which was found in the ‘Sky Diver’ series of the previous year. Here was a spectrum of basic signs, like Allan D’Arcangelo’s super-highway landscapes, flat and immaculate, but inflected instead towards an irreducible content of sexual difference. Concurrently, Allen Jones, with his ‘falling women’ paintings, camouflaged the female forms with colour bands and phallicised his ‘female spears’, literalising this vocabulary of gender difference.

Periodisations can always be contested, but the diaspora of a metropolitan London avant garde into the countryside in 1967-68 could be taken as one indicator of the end of the myth of the sixties. Richard Smith, Peter Blake and Howard Hodgkin all relocated, during this time, into rurality. Laing decided to move from a culturally centrifugal New York to Kinkell in northern Scotland, and there to embed himself in the long-term continuities of rebuilding a dilapidated castle. At first he continued to produce versions of his ‘traces’ but bigger still and built with the help of the local blacksmith in Dingwall in the Black Isle. Another inescapable cultural influence of this time was the psychedelic mysticism of the occult mythology of lost civilisations whose traces, in the form of prehistoric structures, could still be discerned across the landscape. Alfred Watkin’s ‘The Old Straight Path’ (1967) and John Michell’s ‘The View Over Atlantis’ (1969) indicated landscapes containing ancient symbols through alignments of megalithic structures, roads, churches and castles. (It is also hard to untangle, for example, the work of Richard Long, which emerges at this time, from such a context.) From the time of Paul Nash, in the early thirties, the notion of modernity as accessing the significance of megalithic monuments as a resource had been established. In addition, Laing had left the United States at the moment when sculptural interventions in the landscape by artists like Smithson and Heizer were occurring. Now, for the first time, Laing’s sculptures took on substantial volume and were attached to a specific (almost exclusively rural) location. Recoiling from the connotations of a functionalist world of technological forms, he refined and expanded the ascending pin forms of 1966 by appropriating the megalithic to build initiatory monuments of fertility and seduction, such as ‘Follow Me’ (1970) and ‘Bilith’ (1970).

His ‘Pyramids’ (1970-72) become formidable markers of a reasserted notion of gravity; even when split and divided (‘Bifer’) they indicate the heavy weight of authority and custom. The patriarchal phallus that rose from his constructions in the mid sixties was steely, fashionable and stylishly rationalised in its industrial references. With the ‘Pyramids’ it had become aligned with more ancient patriarchies. (In terms of Laing’s biography we should not fail to record paternity as also playing a part in these developments.) His search for authenticity had put in place a time-sanctified home and a scattering of monuments across the land. But Laing now began to profoundly doubt the efficacy of abstraction as a still viable language of modernism. A parallel can be drawn here with Wyndham Lewis in 1919. Lewis’s abstract vorticist forms were, he felt, failing to answer to postGreat War cultural meanings: they ‘needed filling’ with a more figurative, overtly representational content.

Laing’s growing crisis over the merit of persevering with geometrical abstraction was suddenly resolved through an epiphany. One summer in the early seventies Laing recalls heading across London in a taxi at dawn after a party in the East End. When he reached Hyde Park Corner he stopped, on a whim, at the Royal Artillery Memorial (1929) sculpted by Charles Sergeant Jagger. He was fascinated by the monolithic emplacement and the scrupulously reproduced machinery of the Howitzer, recalling his own intricate representation of dragster engines. But it was the overall legibility of Jagger’s heroic naturalism in the bronze statues and the relief which seemed most compelling to Laing. He was ‘so moved by it, as it conveyed the immense tragedy [of World War 11 - it was so grand, so clear, that it made what I was doing with the pyramids seem half cocked.’ (footnote 3) The historical example of Jagger acted as a rebuke to Laing’s vanguardism, presenting instead a figure of authoritative tradition that far outweighed his earlier enthusiasms for Uceello.

This dawn revelation of the authenticity of a disregarded heroic sculptural tradition was a moment of fundamental reorientation for Laing. Yet from the point of view of cultural history this was not an exceptional incident at this time. His redirection towards more apparently conservative neo-classical modes was indicative of a wider crisis within modernism at the end of the sixties which was carried through to the mid seventies. The period saw the development of forms of post-modernist classicism within architecture which ranged from the work of Robert Venturi to that of Quinlan Terry. The citation and reinterpretation of tradition and its lost forms of authority were perhaps the most striking features across the entire intellectual landscape of the seventies. We might now see Laing as part of that larger conceptual restructuring. He had contact, in this period, with individuals such as Paul Johnson who were challenging the received wisdom of consensual progressivism in the sphere of political thought. More recently Laing has executed a bronze portrait head of Johnson, presenting him as an Arno Breker-esque incarnation of that flamboyant, radical conservatism which first declared itself in the late seventies.

Laing’s transition to a more representational style of sculpture took several years. In 1973 the US market for his abstract sculptures virtually vanished when his dealer, Richard Feigen, ended his contract with him. The immediate and private co-ordinates of married life - difficult at that time to sustain because of economic pressure - pushed Laing further towards traditions of realism. He immersed himself in an extended study of his wife through a lengthy portrait bust series which ran from the visored ‘Rock Drill’-esque “Galina I” in 1973 to “Galina X” in 1978. The epiphany of the Royal Artillery Memorial had indicated to him that vanguardist models of history - ones of rapid and continuing innovation that broke with historical instances - could be problematic. Laing was prompted by this changed vision of history to embark upon an eclectic, post-modern re-examination of twentieth century figurative styles in sculpture. He reworked the ideas of Archipenko, Epstein (of the pre1914 mechanistic, ‘Rock Drill’ persuasion), Brancusi, Picasso and Gonzalez. On the mid seventies, he said: ‘I found myself running through the history of twentieth century sculpture’.(footnote 4) The scale and subject was intimate, but the ‘Galina’ series was expansive with meaning: it provides a gauge of more than just Laing’s oscillations in sculptural influence. The cloche hat of ‘Galina 11’ (1973), is at once a citation of that height of retro-fashion, Biba’s headwear, as well as being a meditation on Julio Gonzalez’s sheetmetal relief, ‘The Hat’ (1929). A smooth and minimally featured head, coded by Brancusi, has the second skin of a disguising stocking and is situated by its title in that structure of seventies infotainment horror around the topic of terrorism as a ‘Hijacker’ (1978).

By 1977-78 Laing had begun to cast his own bronzes under the patriarchal eye of George Mancini who acted as a link to that golden age of Edwardian sculpture which he increasingly came to admire. At the time of their collaboration, Mancini was supervising the restoration of Alfred Gilbert’s ‘Eros’ (1886). Through the intervention of architect Michael Laird, in 1978, Laing began a series of public sculptural commissions, beginning with the ‘Frieze of the Wise and Foolish Virgins’ (1978). Here a forceful file of more natural (but still helmeted) Galina-types as Wise Virgins are set over against the bizarre, mismanaged bodies of the Foolish Virgins (who include in their ranks the contemporary New York new-wave singer Patti Smith). If there is a break in these civic works it comes after this frieze which breathes the air of the then current Neue Sachlichkeit revival. Jagger’s awesome example, together with enrolment into the métier of bronze working, is (arguably) only fully realised by Laing with ‘The Fountain of Sabrina’ (1980) where, like Gilbert’s ‘Eros’, he intended to animate a figure with the energy of flight. Later, Laing further explored this theme with his virtuoso ‘Axis Mundi’ (1991).

In this last decade a vivacious realism has been used by him to establish a degree of verisimilitude in his portrait heads. This can be linked to what in the late nineteenth century, in relation to the ‘New Sculpture’ of Leighton and Gilbert, was described as neo-florentin style. Some of Laing’s works, like ‘Portrait of Maersk Mckinney Moller’ (1991) and ‘Portrait of Alexander Goulandris’ (1992), make an imaginary contract with that eighteenth century ‘Grand Style’ of civic humanism which flourished in Britain and France in the work of Houdon and Reynolds; others, such as ‘Portrait of Nicola Kinloch’

(1992) and ‘Portrait of Michael Findlay’ (1992), develop from the intimate, late nineteenth century, low relief portrait plaques of Augustus Saint Gaudens, who sculpted the ‘Robert Louis Stevenson’ panel (1887). These are all historicist strategies and Laing uses them freely. Yet, like Peter Greenaway or the later R.B. Kitaj, he is capable of telescoping complex cultural semantics inside the skin of ‘tradition’, thereby renewing the powers of modern allegory.

1 Richard Hamilton, ‘Urbane Image’, LivingArts, vol.1, no. 2 (1963), pp. 44-55.

2 Gerald Laing interviewed by David Mellor, April 1993.

3 Ibid.

4 Ibid.

David Alan Mellor