Gerald Laing: Abstract Sculpture 1965-1973

In March 1965, Gerald Laing was struggling to create an intricately shaped canvas in his New York studio. Frustrated in his attempts to bend the traditional structure of canvas and stretcher to his needs, Laing decided to try a new approach and cut out a long curving shape from a sheet of aluminium. By hinging the bottom portion of the sheet, he was able to reproduce the effect of a segmented canvas. The upper segment he painted in the red, white and blue swirls of a parachute against the sky, familiar from his earlier Skydiver paintings. The bottom section he chromed, substituting this reflective surface for the monochrome halftone dots of his earlier paintings. Laing had been experimenting for some time with silver paint on canvas and woven fibreglass but had not been entirely happy with the effect; now, with these new materials, taken from the world of custom cars, he was able to achieve a more satisfactory silver, as well as having greater flexibility in the shape of his 'canvas'.

Viewed with a hindsight informed by the next half-decade of his career, it is tempting to see this work (Stab One, 1965, 75), as the moment Laing became a sculptor as well as a painter. Laing came to describe his work from the period that followed as 'abstract utopian sculpture', but initially he was adamant that they were 'metal paintings'¹.

From Painting to Sculpture

Laing had always seen his paintings as objects in their environment rather than simply windows into another world. While a student at Saint Martin's School of Art in London, he had hung Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962, 5), depicting a figure seated on a swing, as a swinging canvas, and taken Anna Karina (1963, 9) out onto Charing Cross Road and onto the roof of the school as part of a filmed project². From his time as a studio assistant to Robert Indiana in 1963, he had adopted Indiana's practice of painting around the edges of his canvases, increasing their 'objecthood'. His Skydiver series of paintings (1963–4) had made use of increasingly complicated shapes, joining multiple canvases to convey an illusion of three-dimensionality. For example, the uppermost panel of Skydiver VII (1964, 44), portraying a halftone figure, gives the impression that it might be projecting out from the wall, over the viewer. The shapes and divisions of the canvas were already of equal importance to the painting thereon.

Many of Laing's early abstract works were designed to be hung on a wall, and even when they crept around a corner, slunk onto the floor, intruded into the room or reflected their surroundings, they retained a 'flatness' that was often greater than his works on canvas. When Laing began to prise his works away from the support of gallery walls, their volume was only the bare minimum necessary to make them free-standing (Freestanding Pin, 1966, 133). His Screens of 1966 (155, 156, 157, 165) were formed of flat surfaces, the bends in which allowed each work to stand on its own.

Production Methods and Craft

At first, Laing had his paintings/sculptures spray-painted at a custom car workshop in Queens. The quality of this work, however, soon fell short of the standard he expected. He describes the stand-off that ensued: "This nearly led to an impromptu gang fight, except that the two artist-soldiers who were all I had managed to recruit to accompany me to Queens were obviously no match for the five greasers the opposition brought to the field of battle. It seemed wise to settle it in the civilised manner which was apparently common in the eighteenth century – we counted who had the most support and he was deemed to have won. I paid my final bills to them, took up my work, and walked away."⁴

Thereafter, Laing favoured the hands-on methods of production that characterised his approach throughout his career, building a spray booth in his own loft. Just as his carefully crafted halftone paintings echoed the mechanised commercial printing process, so these new works, which mimicked the appearance of mass-produced items, were crafted by the artist himself.

Even when he began to produce series of small sculptures in editions of ten and twenty-five, Laing soon stopped sending them away to be manufactured, preferring to construct, paint and assemble most of them in his loft. The first of these multiples, Laing named Print (1965, 92), in a conscious challenge to established notions that a print must be a work on paper, just as he was blurring the distinctions between sculpture and painting.

Primary Structures Exhibition

This questioning of the lines between painting and sculpture, and the conversation between flatness and three-dimensionality, was a theme that Laing's work shared with that of many of his contemporaries. A new show at The Jewish Museum in New York in 1966, entitled Primary Structures: Younger American and British Sculptors⁵, was particularly concerned with this issue. Its curator, Kynaston McShine, wrote in the introduction to the exhibition catalogue: "Depending upon the way in which space is used and occupied by a form, the material means, and the artist's intention, as we may understand it, we name the work a 'painting' or a 'sculpture'."⁶ Laing's Indenty (1965–6, 113) and Trace (1965, 111) formed part of the exhibition, being displayed in the underpass that linked the two halves of the museum.

The Primary Structures exhibition quickly came to be seen as the defining moment of the nascent minimalist movement. It showed the work of British and American artists who, like Laing, were engaged in taking a reductive approach to their subject matter. As well as establishing the careers of Donald Judd and Carl Andre, the exhibition also featured prominently the work of Anthony Caro and his students, David Annesley, Michael Bolus, Phillip King, Tim Scott, William Tucker and Isaac Witkin. Thus, Laing found his work displayed with that of a number of his near-contemporaries from Saint Martin's who had formed part of the New Generation exhibitions at the Whitechapel Gallery in London⁷.

As a painting student, Laing had not been taught by Caro – the few sculpture classes that he attended were with Elizabeth Frink⁸. He had, however, attended many of the weekly discussion sessions that Caro held in the sculpture department. Although his sympathies lay with the 'new art', Laing had been disturbed by the intolerance of dissent within these discussions and was deeply suspicious of the dogmatic approach that prevailed. It was not so much the ideas espoused that Laing objected to, as the intransigence with which 'arcane, arbitrary and intolerant'⁹ rules were applied to art, alongside a refusal to acknowledge the validity of other approaches. However, despite his reservations about Caro and his 'school', and though he had lived in New York for several years, Laing's works sat easily alongside the abstract, brightly painted metal shapes of the New Generation artists.

The Hybrid Project

Laing's work was included alongside other artists represented by the Richard Feigen Gallery, including his old friend and fellow New York-based British artist Peter Phillips. While their work was being displayed in one of the most important defining shows of the decade, Laing and Phillips were also showing their Hybrid project (1965–6, 115, 116, 117, 118) at the Kornblee Gallery in New York. Hybrid was one of the most discussed artworks of the year, featuring prominently in the pages of LIFE, Time and Arts Magazine¹⁰. They had formed Hybrid Enterprises the year before to undertake market research among art critics, collectors and gallerists of New York and London, with the goal of tailoring a work of art to match their preferences. The finished objects (which were displayed at the Kornblee Gallery along with research kits, completed questionnaires and blueprints) would not have looked out of place among the works displayed in the Primary Structures exhibition; indeed David Mellor has noted that "generically it was instantly recognisable as an English 'New Generation sculpture'."¹¹ For Laing, at least, the project carried a satirical edge and reflected a jadedness with the commercialisation of the art world in which he was embedded.

Continued Success in New York

If Laing was beginning to become disenchanted with New York, the city's art scene continued to embrace him. The use of new materials and the move towards greater abstraction did not have a great impact upon Laing's career. His work was still exhibited and sold by Richard Feigen; collectors such as John and Kimiko Powers continued to buy it. Indeed the changes in his work kept him in step with a New York art world that was falling out of love with Pop and embracing the 'cool' style of 'hard-edge', 'colour field' and 'post-painterly abstraction'.

Significant Form

Even the figures most closely associated with the minimalist movement, like Judd, declined to describe themselves as such, and Laing was too much of a romantic to ever have been a true minimalist. He came to see his works, not so much as 'primary structures', but as 'significant forms'. In Clive Bell's writings from 1914, outlining his theory of significant form, he found a resonant description of his own concerns:

There must be some one quality without which a work of art cannot exist; possessing which, in the least degree, no work is altogether worthless. What is this quality? What quality is shared by all objects that provoke our aesthetic emotions? What quality is common to Sta. Sophia and the windows at Chartres, Mexican sculpture, a Persian bowl, Chinese carpets, Giotto's frescoes at Padua, and the masterpieces of Poussin, Piero della Francesca, and Cézanne? Only one answer seems possible – significant form.¹²

Laing's abstract sculpture became, in part, a search for the stripped-back, Platonic essence of significant form. As such, Laing's works, however abstracted or pared-down, still retain a physical presence that speaks directly to the human experience in a manner that goes beyond mere formalism or purely conceptual concerns. The forms that emerged from this process constellated into a number of shapes, which Laing repeated and developed. The initial 'Stabs', 'Traces' and 'Drops' remained clearly linked to the 'Skydiver' imagery from which they drew their inspiration; later, the sculptures such as 'Indenties', 'Pins' and 'Standards' broke free of their figurative origins and explored realms of purer abstraction.

Move to Scotland

The archetypal character of these shapes deepened and grew more evident when Laing abandoned New York City for rural Scotland. His disenchantment with the New York art world, which had been evident since the Hybrid project, had grown into an almost visceral disgust with what he saw as the increasing solipsism, commercialisation and banal excess of the city's art scene¹³. In 1969, he moved with his wife, Galina, to the Scottish Highlands, where he threw himself into the restoration of the ruins of sixteenth-century Kinkell Castle¹⁴, which was to become, for most of the rest of his career, his home and centre of activity.

Transformation in the Highlands

His absorption in the physicality of rebuilding Kinkell Castle and the landscape of the Scottish Highlands had a powerful effect on his work. Laing's work until now had been destined for the pristine whiteness of New York galleries. His quest for purity of environment had even led to the construction of a series of works in formica boxes (Untitled, 1965, 81; Three Falls, 1965, 99; Small Backdrop, 1965, 101; Stack, 1965, 102), isolating them from the contamination of skirting-boards and other domestic clutter.

Following his move to the Highlands Laing began working with local blacksmiths to create huge steel versions of the forms that he had developed in New York. These were placed within the landscape around Kinkell Castle and several were named after nearby places. Big Trace (1969, 266) is a six metre high version of Trace (1965, 111); Milbuie (1969, 268) is a larger, more solid steel counterpart to the Gold Standard series (1968, 229, 239, 240, 243; 1969, 247). Double Free-Standing Pin (1970, 270) reflects the earlier abstract work Freestanding Pin (1966, 133).

Materials, Scale and Archetypal Forms

Working within this context, his previous attempts to purify the environment of his sculptures was futile and Laing's work embraced his surroundings. Placed within the rugged landscape of the Black Isle, the gleaming utopian perfection of his work seemed out of place. The polished chrome and spray-painted finishes that seemed to promise an untarnished immortality gave way to materials that acknowledged the inevitability of time's passage and were more appropriate to such an ancient weathered landscape. Many of Laing's sculptures from this period, such as Callanish (Steel Henge) (1971, 300), Corten Pyramid (1971, 290), Tunnel and Pyramids (1972, 301) and Twentieth Century Monument (1973, 303) were fabricated in COR-TEN steel, a material that is protected and preserved by the very layer of rust that forms in the weathering process.

In order to survive both physically and visually in their new environment the sculptures now also required greater volume and weight. Laing developed the shapes with which he had been working in New York into more emphatically three-dimensional structures. In this new landscape his 'Pins' became 'Biliths', twentieth-century standing stones, and from these developed his even more substantial 'Pyramids'.

The search for archetypal shapes that was implicit in his earlier work with 'significant form' now became more pronounced. Northern Scotland is home to many groups of standing stones and Laing's placement of his sculptures within this same landscape could not help but bring to mind these ancient structures. He named his first major public commission, for the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, after the Callanish Stones on the west coast of the Isle of Lewis and it became informally known as 'Steelhenge'. Laing's modern monuments from this period share a timeless sense of silent authority with their Neolithic predecessors.

Laing created these structures in a range of sizes – from small tabletop pieces such as Small Steel Pyramid (1973, 305), to the five metre-tall Pyramid Folly (1973, 295), which is large enough for two people to sit in. Twentieth Century Monument was built at less than 30 cm high, but he produced a series of drawings of this shape set in the landscape at vast scale. Both the Biliths and Pyramids use symmetry to create a sense of simultaneous connection and separation between their reflected halves. The two halves of the Pyramids in particular, appear to be reaching towards each other but stopping just short of a unifying embrace. Laing's final works of his abstract period, the Anthropomorphic Pyramid series, (1973, 307, 308, 309) draw out the humanity implicit in the Pyramid shapes, the two forms now have faces that stand in mute conversation with each other. These anthropomorphic shapes are the first signs of Laing's disenchantment with pure abstraction and his subsequent embrace of figurative sculpture.

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Prints: 1964 - 2011

As it was for so many of the pop artists, printmaking – specifically, screen-printing – was an integral part of Gerald Laing’s extensive working practice. The commercial nature of the process and the bold, flat colours it produced were sympathetic both to the conceptual and stylistic character of pop art. Elevated from a functional practice to a fine-art medium, screen-printing became an important technique for Laing and his contemporaries in pop art – a movement which defined a generation and still influences artists today.

Laing’s first print, Gold Spin (Pile), was executed in 1965, with the now-legendary Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles. The following year, in 1966, he was asked to include three works in 11 Pop Artist Portfolios. Commissioned by Philip Morris and intended to be an overview of the emerging pop art movement, these portfolios included contributions from eleven of the most important pop artists of the time, including the celebrated North Americans Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Tom Wesselmann and James Rosenquist. Allen Jones was the only other British artist in the group. Laing’s inclusion in this seminal portfolio reflects his place, at the crux of the movement, as one of the pioneers of pop. During the summer of 1967, Laing embarked on three monumental printing projects: Dragsters, Parachutes, and the portfolio Baby Baby Wild Things. Using a home-made press and a vacuum table assembled using parts from his domestic hoover, he printed and editioned the prints himself in his loft on the Bowery in New York City. The prints from this year depict what have come to be known as his seminal subjects – pin-up girls in bikinis, hot rods and skydivers, as well as Brigitte Bardot in an iconic rendition. All of these subjects are based on commercial magazine and newspaper images. The artist’s use of flat planes of colour, floating on areas of enlarged, half-toned dot patterns, reflects the commercial printing process.

Laing’s work, however, moved quickly into abstract form, and away from painting toward sculpture. In the early 1970s, he made a series of prints called Sculpture in the Landscape, in which he combined his newly developed abstract sculptural forms with his continued interest in printmaking. Again, he makes full use of screen-printing and the flat planes of strong colour that the medium allows.

After his move from New York City to northern Scotland in 1973, Laing’s focus shifted away from printmaking for the first time, and it would be thirty years before he enthusiastically returned to the medium, in 2002. With newfound vigour, he began making screen prints again at this time, with an interest in combining the visual language of pop with the contemporary starlets and celebrity of the twenty-first century – those who had quickly attained iconic status at what was the start of the current reign of social media. He chose for subjects Victoria Beckham, Kate Moss and, most importantly, Amy Winehouse, who appears several times in Laing’s work from this period. Winehouse’s tragic celebrity, combined with the graphic appearance and vintage styling of her monochrome wardrobe and unusual, beehive hairstyle, made her an ideal muse. His prints of Winehouse – including The Kiss, Domestic Perspective and Belshazzar’s Feast – are all based on images of Winehouse that he found in the press. Other prints from this period look back to earlier work; these include screen-print editions of the paintings Anna Karina and Lincoln Convertible. Another important facet of Laing’s later printmaking practice was digital printmaking, used to reproduce a series of his contemporary paintings about the Iraq War. Deeply concerned with political issues, Laing was outraged by Britain’s involvement in this war and felt very strongly about promoting this group of works, all of which were, again, derived from contemporary images in the press. He chose to make them into digital prints, as he wanted the images to be easily affordable and readily available to as many people as possible.

Throughout his career, Laing made radical changes in his work and his output may, at first, seem perplexingly varied. However, closer inspection reveals a consistent, overriding interest in precise geometry; elegant, distilled forms; and bold, flat colour. Prints were a natural choice and an important tool for Laing in exploring these concerns. Looking at his print output as a whole, as illustrated here, foregrounds his recurring interest in form, colour and the aesthetic of commercial printing. The combination of this technique with a personal commentary on culture, celebrity and politics, made through the careful selection of images from the 1960s onwards, has positioned Laing not just at the forefront of the British pop movement, but also within the canon of the most influential international pop artists.

Lindsay Ingram

Pop artist attacks ‘disgraceful’ price inflation

Interview with Jill Spalding of Clocktower Radio

23/07/07 July 2007

Host Jill Spalding in conversation with guest painter, sculptor, and Pop Art legend Gerald Laing. His exhibition, Sex and Speed, was on view in 2007 at New York’s Mary Ryan Gallery (30 minutes).

Pop Art Uk

Space, Speed, Sex

2006

An extract from the catalogue for the exhibtion Space, Speed, Sex: Works from the early 1960s by Gerald Laing at Hazlitt Holland-Hibbert, London, 2006.

Drag racers, film starlets and skydivers were subjects I found very useful at this time, because they were all excellent example of individuals formalised and rendered heroic by their accoutrements.
Gerald Laing quoted in exhibition catalogue, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art

It was perhaps inevitable that Gerald Laing should have moved to New York after his graduation from London's St MArtin's School of Art in 1963. He had shown a profound interest in the subject matter of the American Dream and the popular imagery that attracted his attention was indeed more closely associated with AMerican rather than British Pop. His depictions of female starlets and bikini babes, male astronauts, skydivers and racing drivers represented the spirit of the time and it was a change of attitude that revoltionised his paonting from 'the peeling stucco of wartime neglect'. These images derived from mass-media sources that were pure Pop.

However, although his Pop phasecoincided exactly with the years that he ws living in New York, Laing was always a British Pop artist. America might have been the catalyst but Laing's inclusion in an exhibition of Contemporary British Painting and Sculpture at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, in autumn 1964, confirmed his close association with the London group of artists, that included Boshier, Hockney, Jones, Kitaj, Philips and Tilson. These young contemporaries shared a common approach to a movement that was both exciting and 'of the moment' and this was depicted in a subject matter that often overlapped with each other. Laing's works might resemble the 'Ben-Day' dots and enlarged half-tone reproductions of Roy Lichtenstein but his black dots, which were painted and not stencilled, juxtaposed with areas of flat colour were entirely independent and generated in London. If anything, Laing's link with American Pop was more relevant to the silk-screen paintings of the media-consumed stars that were later produced by Andy Warhol.

The title for this exhibition, Space, Speed, Sex, derived from the name of a performance event that the artist put on at the Slade in 1964. It summed up the age and happy-go-lucky attitude to everything sexy and everything fast. The work matched the cultural impact of the early 1960s and acted as a perfect counterpart to what was happening at the time.
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James Holland-Hibbert

Gerald Laing on Drawing

2010

I began seriously to draw while I was still in the army, in Munster in 1957. I found a teacher by enquiring at an art supplies shop. His name was Herr Brucke, and he was a retires art professor from the University. He lived in a modern purpose-built studio in the city, a small genial rotund man with a short green horn-buttoned Jaeger jacket. He was attended by his calm and capable wife whose grey hair was coiffed in one of those complex coiled and plaited arrangements which were fashionable in Germany in the 1930s. Often when I arrived HerrBrucke would be resting on a couch in a curtained alcove off the studio; she would be sure not to disturb him until he was ready. Herr Brucke was a very competent figurative painter, his style precise and accurate, his preferred medim tempera. On carefully prepared panels he painted arcadian scenes full of birds with exotic plumage in a manner which had no doubt been approved during the previous regime. In spite of the fact that he spoke no English, and I only that soldier's German more usually employed to buy a drink, a meal or a car, or enter into the most basic communication with the opposite sex, he was a brilliant teacher of exactly the type I rquired at that stage in my development, when I was so anxiously searching for clues and so vulnerable to seduction by the slight or ephemeral effect. I attended a life drawing class he gave in his studio twice a week. The other students were two middle-aged employees of the Bundesbahn. I was treated with distant respect; communication between us was carried out mostly in sign language. In spite of these difficulties Herr Brucke, living up to his name, managed to instil in me a fundamental idea of drawing which served as a basis for all my later development. One remark in particular has stayed with me verbatim, and has become a sort of mantra on the importance of looking at the subject without prejudice or preconception. One evening Herr Brucke leaned over my shoulder, pointed at the ear which I was attempting to draw, and said simply, "Das ist keine Ohr. Das ist die Heinkel von ein Kaffee Tasse."* I think of this every time I draw or model an ear. * "That is not an ear. That is the handle of a coffee cup."

Gerald Laing

The Lineout

28th May 2010

Gerald Laing’s speech at the unveiling of The Line-out sculpture at Twickenham.

Before I ask you to come forward to look more closely at the sculpture, I must express publicly my gratitude to all those without whose hard work and devotion it would have been impossible to create. First I must thank my two eldest sons, Farquhar and Sam, who as well as working hard and long on the physical construction of this great bronze, have also unstintingly provided me with moral support throughout all the ups and downs which are inevitable in the creative process. Farquhar leads the matchless team from his Black Isle Bronze foundry where the work was cast, and their expertise and devotion to their work ensured that my concept was accurately translated into metal. I also appreciate the contribution of the technicians who made the digital enlargement of the sculpture from three quarters lifesize to its present scale of twice life size, which saved us endless time and work. I should also like to thank Joe Worsley, whose assistance was invaluable in the solution of positional and technical matters at a crucial point in the composition of the group. And of course, I thank the Rugby Football Union, who had the courage and conviction to commission the sculpture. The Athlete in the Stadium is one of the greatest themes in the history of sculpture. So it was with great pleasure and indeed a certain sense of fulfillment that I accepted the commissions for sculpture from such an eminent authority on sport as the RFU, first in 1993 and then again in 2009. I consider it a great honour to be so employed by such a distinguished patron. Ever since I completed the first four figures for the Lion Gate, I have wanted to be given the opportunity of making a sculpture of a Lineout. The Lineout is a particularly dramatic moment in what is the most dramatic of games. The combination of the powerful upward thrust, the tension, and the focussed chaos combined are a gift for a sculptor. Last summer I spent five months working exclusively on the three quarters scale clay maquette. I leased for this purpose a wonderful and historic studio in Tite Street in Chelsea, one which had been used by, among others, John Singer Sargent, Whistler, and Augustus John. I do not think that I am being over dramatic when I claim that the shades of these great fellow artists seemed sometimes to be evident, and certainly my awareness of their example in their work improved my game. When you work for an extended period of time on a large and complex task there is plenty of time for meditation and for the discovery of greater depths of meaning in the work. Rugby is a game full of extraordinary dramatic moments, set piece compositions lasting only for a split second, which then dissolve and rapidly re-form in infinite variety. Common to them all is the single focus on the ball. In the Lineout that necessary obsession becomes particularly evident, as the ball arches over the players who strain to reach it. In my mind the ball became, as it were, the Holy Grail. In the Lineout sculpture in front of you, the uppermost figure, the Catcher, might therefore be seen as Parsifal. He was the only knight of the Round Table pure enough to be vouchsafed the Grail. In the situation before you, we shall never know whether or not he actually attains it, balanced as it is on the tips of his finger. The five core values of Rugby reside in all of my figures, in differing proportions. They are after all the basic necessities of good play, and without them you are diminished. The Catcher cannot not fulfill his ambition unaided. He needs the selfless assistance of his two lifters. One is a battered and ancient man at arms, showing wounds sustained in many a friendly battle; perfectly reliable, always present where he is most needed, perfectly loyal, and content to act in the supporting role. All of this makes up for his apparent lack of grace. The other lifter is younger, neater, faster, very competent, and much more nimble. The failed Catcher, swinging up the side of the main figure group,has lost control of his moves and shows a bit of panic. His powerful but flailing attempt to achieve the ball has been unsuccessful, even though it was his team which had the throw in. One of his lifters has been left behind; the other has swung away to the side, looking in his relationship to the whole group much as Alexander the Great looked as he tried to control his wild steed Bucephalus. In the next instant, if there was to be one, this scene, now frozen in time, would disintegrate, and a new panorama of passionate strife would take its place. What comes next is a subject upon which you yourselves may care to speculate. I should now like to invite you to come forward to walk around and through and under the sculpture, and look at it more closely. You may touch it if you wish. The sculpture has left the studio and the foundry where it was conceived and born. Now it must survive in the world. I hope that you will join with me in wishing it a long and useful life in its permanent home at the heart of Rugby Football.

Gerald Laing

Scotsman Interview

17 April 2010

Gerald Laing experienced an epiphany when he moved to Scotland, ditching pop art for sculpture and setting up home in a castle.

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The Spectator - Space Invaders

24th March 2010

Gerald Laing calls for greater intellectual rigour in the commissioning of public sculpture.

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Pop Art For Star Amy - BBC Interview (video)

16 October 2008

Gerald Laing talks about his new exhibition New Paintings for Modern Times and his paintings of Amy Winehouse.

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Clearances statue replicas plan

13 April 2008

Replicas of a memorial statue to those affected by the Highland clearances by Gerald Laing could be erected in other countries.

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A Life in the Day: Gerald Laing

17 February 2008

A leading British pop artist of the 1960s, Laing, 72, lives with his dog, Asgard, in Kinkell Castle in Ross-shire, Scotland, and has a home in London. He has been married three times and has six children

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How Pop Changed the Portrait

19 October 2007

Nowadays Pop Art is the new Impressionism - the lowest common denominator of modern art and a surefire way for galleries to up their visitor count. Despite this, Pop Art Portraits is a well-chosen and spirited show that occasionally falls victim to its own enthusiasm.

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Gerald Laing: Art that commemorates the brutality and horror of war

02 October 2007

Gerald Laing’s War Art is finally being exhibited in London. He spoke to Anindya Bhattacharyya about the show.

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Army Museum Shows Art linking 7/7 to Iraq War

02 07 2007

The National Army Museum is at the centre of a political row after it acquired a painting that pins the blame for the 7 July bombings on the Iraq war.

The decision by the museum - which is funded by the Ministry of Defence and is the foremost keeper of the Army's history - will be regarded as a snub to the Government, and former Prime Minister Tony Blair in particular. The painting, by leading British pop artist Gerald Laing, will be unveiled tonight, five days before the second anniversary of the suicide attacks that killed 52 people. The work shows US president George Bush alongside a burning Baghdad at the height of "shock and awe". But as the viewer walks past the painting, President Bush morphs into Mr Blair and the Iraqi capital becomes the shattered No 30 bus that was blown up in Tavistock Square, killing 13 people. Many anti-war campaigners have blamed the 7/7 attacks on Mr Blair's decision to invade Iraq, claims the former prime minister has always denied. The painting is called Truth or Consequences - a reference to the claim Mr Blair lied about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. Mr Laing, a former Army officer, said: "Everybody believes there is a connection between the invasion of Iraq and the 7 July bombings, only Mr Blair doesn't seem to think so. "I'm very impressed that the National Army Musuem is prepared to show this painting. We have an amazing situation now where even the Chief of the General Staff Sir Richard Dannatt is prepared to criticise the war, because he is interested in his men and how they are used. "There is a tremendous amount of unease about the Middle East and the museum is reflecting that." A source close to the artist added: "The work is a scathing critique of Tony Blair's foreign policy. It is a controversial painting, but the museum believes it is the job of art to challenge people." However, John Taylor, whose 24-year-old daughter Carrie was one of the seven people murdered in the Aldgate Tube blast, condemned the Chelsea museum's decision to display the work. Mr Taylor, a security officer at Tate Britain, said: "It's not the job of the National Army Museum to mix art and politics in this way. "It's claptrap to blame US foreign policy for the 7 July bombings. I agree that Iraq has fanned the flames, but it started long before that. Our soldiers are fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan to weed out the sort of people that killed my daughter." Labour MP Eric Joyce, himself a former soldier, added: "The artist is of course free to paint what he wants, but I've never seen the mission of the National Army Museum as that of making controversial statements about foreign policy. "Are they being controversial for the sake of it, to get people through the front door?" Dr Peter Boyden, director of collections at the museum, said: "It's one of a number of paintings dealing with contemporary military activity. The NAM does not have a view on any link between Iraq and 7 July. "We are here to present different views of the military's activity to the public and to allow visitors to make up their own minds."

Patrick Sawer

A dotty neglect of a Pop artist

18 November 2006

Virginia Blackburn on a British artist whose iconic Sixties work is set for a fab revival

Pop Art is commonly recognised as one of the most important movements of the 20th century, with its leading artists — Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein — enjoying the status of household names. One Pop artist, however, has not received the recognition he deserves. Gerald Laing, born in Britain but resident in the United States in the 1960s, is often thought of as an American artist and, since the heyday of Pop Art, has been shamefully overlooked.

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Iraq torture inspires pop artist

19 February 2005

A “pop” artist has decided to come out of retirement to exhibit controversial paintings from Iraq.

Gerald Laing’s pictures are on show in England for the first time at Kings College in Cambridge.

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Bourne Art Gallery, Edinburgh

30 November 2004

Artists have only one life - yet Gerald Laing seems to have nine. During one of Laing’s previous incarnations, this reviewer met him up in New York State on the tip of Amagansett, in a summerhouse he had rented for winter. This was in the 1970s. He was already working on a series of sculptures, in a challenging mode. The wild Atlantic, the beach and the dunes made Hopper’s environment seem benign.

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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

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

An Interview with Gerald Laing by Giles Auty

1993

Gerald Laing in conversation with Australian art critic Giles Auty about his transition to figurative sculpture. 1993.

AUTY: For some time now I have felt our culture is going through a period of significant and very radical reassessment. In a strange way this sea change echoes something which has happened in your own professional career; after all, you began with a strong involvement with the art modes of the sixties but have removed yourself gradually from engagement with any artistic movements and fashions. You seem to have renegotiated a pact with a longer term artistic heritage. At the same time I sense your art has become more genuinely personal, being much less about other people's idea of you as an artist as you explore your own vision of art.

LAING: At first I seemed to be confronted with an infinite range of possibility which threatened to overwhelm me. The two big questions I had to answer resolved themselves simply into 'What shall I paint?' and 'How shall I paint it?? Under such circumstances the only way to arrive at a clear idea of what one might do is to limit the possibilities. In the early sixties there was a general feeling of optimism fuelled by our emergence from the post-war period - remember that rationing only ended properly in 1957 - coupled with a belief in the ability of technology to solve our temporal and perhaps even our spiritual problems. This change in attitude seemed to call for a new art, one which was precise, methodical, clear and uncompromising, one which could be glimpsed as one sped past on one's way to the airport in the City of Tomorrow.

My earliest paintings responded to these demands. They celebrated an ideal version of our own time. They have a strong relationship to the work of my peers because it is natural for young artists to consort together, to exchange ideas and information, and to have similar concerns and expectations.

Later, my ideas diverged progressively from those of my contemporaries as the result of my taking what I thought to be the most significant and useful direction in my work.

AUTY: We are much the same age yet seem to have arrived at our present strong measure of agreement about what really matters in art by travelling widely divergent routes. I suppose both of us deny, in our own ways, a determinist view of history. I did not enjoy the sixties or feel at ease with its novel culture which I saw as largely superficial. For you, on the other hand, the energy of the era was a liberating force which helped shape your subsequent career. Thus you have more cause to be grateful to the sixties than I do. You may have outgrown many of the attractions of the time while still feeling nostalgia for others. What do you see now as the real strengths of sixties culture? Will any of these endure?

LAING: It is a mistake to think of the sixties as one homogeneous and undifferentiated period. For me the decade has the structure of a tragedy, with the optimism of the first two or three years succeeded by the hubris of radical politics, sexual freedom, drugs and moral relativism, and the nemesis of dislocation and disease. Catharsis has been a long time coming. I look for it in the intellectual discipline and creative humanistic achievements of the past.

Of course many of the freedoms insisted upon in the sixties were without doubt necessary and just. At the same time some of the consequences have been surprising. Some solutions bring greater problems in their wake. The origin of taboos, which once seemed arbitrary, is now quite clear. By this I mean that rules of behaviour usually have some essential imperative, often to do with survival. When their original purpose has been forgotten they may seem irksome but this does not necessarily mean that they no longer have practical value. The only thing one can be sure of is that every action produces an equal and opposite reaction. We have yet to learn that every freedom won brings with it a new responsibility.

Freedom in the visual arts has resulted so far in an orgy of self-indulgence and the collapse of skill. It has always been true that the artist should be his own most savage critic; the freedom of expression now available to us makes this even more important. We should not forget that the greatest art has, until now, always been produced under strictly prescribed systems of expression. For instance, we probably would not have liked living under the regime of Ramses II but we cannot deny that the sculpture of that time is truly great. What will guide and edit our art, produced as it is under circumstances of total freedom? Only the self. It is a great responsibility for the individual and so far there is not much evidence of it being successfully assumed. There is not even a consensus over what constitutes quality. It is as though the framework was destroyed without anything substantial being put in its place. This has left succeeding generations in rather a difficult position.

No doubt the sixties was a period of liberation but it has left a legacy of dubious value unless it is tempered by discrimination.

AUTY: Although I am thought of now by most people as being an art critic only, I spent much of the sixties and seventies working as a professional painter. In fact, I did not begin writing about art until the end of 1974. Having made things myself, I feel a degree of sympathy for other makers. Although I have never made sculpture, the medium interests me greatly and I can understand the attraction for you of making your early sculptural works which evolved from your paintings. All of your early sculptures which I have seen look well made and I suspect the actual process of making your early sculpture gave you as much pleasure as working out the ideas for it. Did the process of 'making' appeal to an element of the perfectionist in you?

LAING: I have always thought it very important that my sculpture and painting should be well made, first because I would not wish them to be rendered in any way ambiguous by poor execution and second because they are intended to be looked at and must be able to sustain close inspection.

My earliest painting techniques, involving a limited palette, dots on a grid, and absolutely flat colour, allowed no accident or ambiguity. My abstract works were derived technically from the custom-car phenomenon, where personal suburban icons were manufactured by individuals with a devotion, imagination, skill and often sacrifice developed far beyond that commonly found in the visual arts. When I first began to model the figure, quite by chance I met the late George Mancini, who at this time was coming to the end of his long working life in his Edinburgh bronze foundry. He cast my first two or three bronzes. After he retired I realised that the only way I could gather together sufficient bronzes for any exhibition was to make them myself. In addition I wanted to understand properly the medium of bronze casting and its strengths and limitations.

George very generously shepherded me through the techniques of sculpture and bronze casting, giving me the full benefit of his vast experience and of his unbroken link with the methods of the past. His standards were very high indeed, and while I would never expect to emulate them, I am at least aware of what is possible and I have seen how it might be achieved.

AUTY: Yours is a very unusual story in terms of career. In fact you were still serving as an army officer at the moment you decided to become a full-time artist. After a period of study, you became an instant success, notching up exhibitions at prestigious centres and making a large volume of sales almost from the outset. This was an experience absolutely contrary to that of most artists, even very good ones. Did these events make you feel particularly proud or, perhaps, just a little uneasy?

LAING: When I first went to art school in 1960, art was not the fashionable preoccupation which it is now. Neither my contemporaries nor I ever expected to sell a single painting: teaching in order to pursue one's vocation was the accepted norm.

In the event, and much to my own surprise, I have lived by my art, one way or another, for the past thirty years. It has not by any means been an easy ride, but neither is it what I expected.

My initial reaction was - and continues to be - one of mild disbelief. Certainly, I have never felt 'proud'. I have definitely and frequently felt uneasy. Sometimes, for instance in the late sixties, I have felt a moral compulsion to bite the hand that feeds me. Repeatedly, I have made what, objectively, can only be described as disastrous career moves; but then the life of an artist is not a career, and it is unreasonable to expect that the pursuit of a personal vision will necessarily be rewarded financially at every turn.

AUTY: The sixties were not just a time of social revolution but also one in which certain kinds of utopianism, however misconceived, were reborn. Your earliest paintings were concerned largely with glamorousseeming technologies: films, drag racing, sky diving, space exploration. From these you moved slowly towards highly polished and engineered sculpture which still had something of the glamour of high technology but without such explicit references. This kind of work seems to me to allow greater freedom for poetic imagination. While your early pop paintings are at a great remove from your present, figurative sculpture, your hi-tech abstract sculptural work appears still to belong to the same family - and not simply because it is three-dimensional. Do you feel there is a strong sense of kinship running throughout all your sculptural work?

LAING: I do feel that there is a strong sense of continuity running throughout all my work, though at first glance it seems to have varied a lot. After all, it is informed by the same sensibility which I hope has grown over the years.

I disagree with you that my early paintings are at a great remove from my present sculpture. The paintings are essentially life drawing and portraiture, sustained by a coherent geometry. My recent figurative sculpture has similar objectives and disciplines. The abstract sculpture which comes in between these two contains the bones of both of them, but is concerned more or less exclusively with structure for its own sake, as is often the case with abstract art. This preoccupation with form for its own sake is one of abstract art's inherent weaknesses.

AUTY: Not only has the external structure of your career seemed unusual, but so also has your inward line of development as an artist, especially in view of the directions in which so much other art has been going. Your early sculpture demonstrated purist, if not minimalist, tendencies and shunned obvious allusions to the physical world. Gradually, the human figure returned, first in extremely simplified and stylised form but latterly with the full force of figuration. In this century almost everyone's artistic development has moved in exactly the opposite direction, although some artists, such as Ben Nicholson, who experiment with pure abstraction (as in his 'White Reliefs' from the middle to late 1930s) recomplicated their imagery later on by introducing motifs taken from the perceptual world. What first triggered your own change of direction? Or do you simply enjoy swimming against the artistic tide?

LAING: At each stage one does what one can. As I said earlier, I found it necessary to have clear and limited objectives in my earliest work. Later I felt able to handle more possibilities. It comes down to a matter of the proportion of subjectivity to objectivity used in the process. My early work is the result of a more subjective approach since I have imposed on it more of my own preconceptions. These were generally to do with structure and geometry, elements which have over time become second nature to me, so I do not now feel the need to state them so obviously. Now I feel more able to respond directly and instinctively to the model and work in a less self-conscious manner than before.

My return to the figure was prompted by a number of things. First, I became increasingly aware that most contemporary art was failing to communicate very much to those outside its immediate circle. That which was being transmitted by it seemed to me to be of comparatively small significance; in some cases art seemed to have been relegated to a merely decorative function; in others, which claimed intellectual content as the main ingredient, that content seemed nalve and inconsequential when compared with accepted standards in other fields. It is as though the usefulness of art has been sidetracked and diminished and that, as a result, the world has lost interest in it as a useful and significant tool.

Second, I feel sure that the real strength of art lies in its humanistic concerns which have to be expressed through the human figure. The approach to modelling a figure has become a very confused subject. If art needs constantly to renew itself, then certainly the making of figurative sculpture has been given a completely fresh start, because both the technique and the thought which governs it have been lost. We have virtually to start again from scratch. To us one figure looks much like another, and we have lost the ability to understand what implications one interpretation of the figure might have when compared with another. This seems to me to be both a fascinating area of research and a great challenge - one in which art historians might usefully involve themselves perhaps.

Third, by 1973 1 was becoming increasingly aware of how limited my own abstract sculpture was as a vehicle for communication. At about that time Hugh Fraser suggested that my 'Pyramids' of 1970-72 had a sort of human presence, which had not occurred to me. Once I thought of them in this light, the idea became increasingly attractive, and I tried various means to make this anthropomorphic quality more apparent. After a period of experimentation I realised that what I really wanted to make was the human form, and that the materials I had been using - mainly sheet steel and aluminium - were too limiting, so I began using clay which has an infinite vocabulary of form.

AUTY: Artists who moved as you have, against prevailing currents of fashion, often suffered professional disadvantage, however sincere or far-sighted their motives may have been for making their stands. I can think here of a number of artists whose development failed to follow the prescribed orthodoxy of their time. Many were effectively punished for what amounted to nothing more than independence of mind. Yet there seems great irony here, since modern art prides itself particularly on its attitudes of liberalism and tolerance. Perhaps this tolerance does not quite extend to artists who discard that most basic modernist act of faith - that there can be no 'going back'?

LAING: Paul Valéry pointed out that everything changes except the avant garde. I believe the avant garde is notable mainly for its intolerance and narrow vision. Always there is a received doctrine - woe betide the person who transgresses against it.

But the idea of an avant garde is a comparatively modern one and its true relevance and importance is slight. It tends to monopolise the present through approved doctrines, but it has a short shelf life. Later, if it is valued at all, it is valued because it becomes quaint with the passage of time, even though it may be subsumed into the canon of art.

My own belief is that comparatively few people are really concerned with the visual arts. The flurry of apparent interest in art which has existed for the past twenty-five years or so is really an interest in a more complex agenda than simply painting and sculpture.

In New York in the mid sixties, for example, the arts were seen as an introduction to an alternative lifestyle and the freedoms it promised, sex and glamour, and so on. This is why you now find bankers, lawyers and the middle classes inhabiting the old loft buildings downtown where we used to live in a certain amount of squalor.

Fashionable orthodoxy is autocratic, exclusive and ruthless and failure to stick to its strictures and values really does result in punishment. My own most heinous crime, the one for which I suffered most, was my return to the figure in 1973 - a move so unfashionable that for years I felt professionally as if I had been murdered and buried in an unmarked grave. The fact that all of my activities until that moment had been greeted with approval did not count in my favour at all. The economic effects on me of this rejection were devastating. Had it not been for a small core of enthusiastic and supportive patrons and friends I am sure I would have gone under.

AUTY: A big problem with much of the language used to describe recent art is that it is largely rhetorical. People talk freely about advance and progress, breakthrough and development, as though they were describing a scientific or technological process where such terms might be entirely appropriate, rather than recent art. Throughout its history, modernism has prided itself on its radicalism, on its ability to turn its back on history and to follow new paths. The problem here is that the notion of continuous revolution and non-stop formal innovation becomes in time an orthodoxy in itself so that artists feel free no longer to turn to wider historical contexts for guidance or inspiration. You are rare in having managed to escape from this new kind of orthodoxy. Ironically your determination to go your own way is a true expression of the kind of radical principle which those who may not approve your new directions ought to admire nevertheless. You seem to have seen through the paradox of the changing roles of radicalism and orthodoxy in contemporary art. But I imagine you may feel yourself increasingly isolated as a result?

LAING: It is extraordinary to me that anyone can imagine an idea of 'advance' or 'progress' in any field of creativity. Those who do so must have read very little. Of course there must be formal innovation in art, but only in order to reiterate the familiar truths in a new, immediate and relevant manner, so they will continue to be understood.

When I think what art used to be about, I am ashamed at what we seem satisfied with today - such slight and inconsequential subject matter. It is as though we are afraid to face the challenge of dealing with the human condition and prefer instead to play games. But how exciting it would be if we engaged the big themes once again and tried to make some sense of our plight - or even attempted to describe it. I think the dullest and most pedestrian genre painting contains more useful information and comfort than whole galleries full of conceptual art. I believe it is fear which keeps many artists from displaying themselves or their talent. They would rather hide behind veils of ambiguity and condemn themselves to an existence which is appreciated only inside their own hermetic and artificial world.

The outside world is much bigger, and that is where I prefer to operate. I think of it as the real world as opposed to the artificial world of contemporary art. The outside world is full of intelligent people who have no time for or interest in the arcane manoeuvres of the art world as it is now.

AUTY: Although your return to the major European tradition of figurative sculpture may have isolated you from many of your modernist peers, I believe you feel a sense of belonging even so. The tradition to which you have turned embraces not only nineteenth-century art, say, but also classical antiquity and the art of the Renaissance in Italy. Clearly, the company to which you wish to belong is a very distinguished one which necessarily sustains you by example rather than spoken words of encouragement. By working in the way you do now, you tacitly acknowledge the existence of a great ladder of achievement in figurative sculpture. The company you have chosen is very exalted but at least you have located the ladder. Many contemporary sculptors like to deny that such a ladder of achievement exists at all or that it has any relevance to the current world. Does the knowledge that you belong to a great tradition sustain you now in what you are trying to do?

LAING: Sculpture is an artisan skill with its origins in the stonemason's yard. It is hard and demanding physical work, and requires a practical and methodical approach. I have already mentioned George Mancini who came from a long line of Italian bronze founders and whose techniques, learnt from his father, were archaic and part of a great and largely unchanged tradition. His attitude to his work was a consuming one which seemed to me to have great philosophical depth. Certainly, I felt through him a connection with the past and to the way in which sculpture - the process of making - defines the content in a manner which a sculptor from any time in the past would recognise. I can, because of this, empathise with the practitioners of the past, understand their problems, and appreciate their triumphs. On at least two occasions I have struggled to resolve some difficulty and then recognised later the way in which similar conclusions to my own have been reached in the distant past. So naturally one feels part of a great and ongoing tradition, both practically and aesthetically, although today there is a great deal of lost ground to be made up.

Humanity may have been mislaid in abstract art, but equally those abstract qualities necessary to figurative art are often absent in the examples which we see being made today. This lack has resulted in a proliferation of bad figurative art in public places.

The manner in which the human form is presented must always be considered in depth. It is an immensely complex subject. For instance, Rodin is admired because he provides an obvious link with modernism, particularly in his influence on the early imagery of Picasso. But although Rodin's modelling is both fluent and apparently passionate, his particular reinterpretation of the human form is somewhat arbitrary and clumsy. I prefer the work of his contemporaries Dalou and Carpeaux, whose interpretations are much less histrionic. Carpeaux's marble group ?Ugolino and his Sons' (1863), which is in the Metropolitan Museum in New York, is not only a magnificent tour de force of carving but an absolute masterpiece of figure modelling. At first the figures seem entirely realistic, but closer inspection reveals they have a formal organisation which is not found in nature. It is as though they have been slightly reinvented, so they become a metaphor for reality - albeit a metaphor based on a complete understanding of anatomy and composition and relentless empirical observation.

If you continue to gaze at this sculpture, the chests of the figures will, almost imperceptibly, appear to rise and fall as though they breathe, so that they seem imbued with life itself through the sculptor's recreation. Mere imitation cannot produce this effect - a fact amply demonstrated at Mme Tussaud's for instance.

AUTY: Seventeen years ago you learnt how to cast properly in bronze and then set up your own foundry in Scotland. At one time a sculptor's training automatically included learning traditional techniques but in recent years I have met only two young sculptors who understand casting fully. One was trained in India, the other in Croatia. I believe art schools should teach students skills rather than attitudes. If a painter or sculptor leaves art school fully equipped in skills he or she can at least exercise free choice in finding the medium most suitable for personal expression. Indeed, this is what you have done finally yourself. What are your own thoughts on the continuing value of traditional training for artists?

LAING: It is sad how little which can be taught is actually taught in art schools. Art is an elusive quarry; technique is not. Without technical skill the gap between what the mind requires and the hand delivers remains unacceptably large. Drawing, painting, modelling, casting and so on can all be taught and they leave students with basic skills which they can employ in a variety of ways. On the other hand, fashionable ideas, which often seem to be the main items inculcated in some art schools, are ephemeral. For a while they can engage the student and may even give him or her gainful employment. But when, as is inevitable, their popularity ebbs away and they are replaced by something else, their adherents will be left flapping on the beach, prisoners of their own limited technical abilities.

However, some efforts are being made to remedy this. The problem is to find teachers who are properly trained themselves and who are capable of imparting this sort of knowledge. The New York Academy, founded in 1983, teaches according to the Beaux Arts tradition and its chief academic partner is, interestingly, the Moscow Art School, which has never given up such a system.

Most of the skills which I now employ are ones which I have had to learn wherever and however I could, according to necessity. I studied painting at St Martin's, but even if I had been in the sculpture department I doubt I would have learnt very much of use to me since the department, under Anthony Caro, was already pretty well fully committed to the welding of steel. I did attend many of the sculpture department's weekly discussion groups but it was quite apparent even then that any departure from the departmental orthodoxy was frowned upon.

Caro said in 1961, 'I realised I had nothing to lose by throwing out History'.' I fear history will prove him wrong.

AUTY: Some of your abstract sculpture from about twenty years ago forms a very interesting formal reaction with landscape and looks as though it was conceived specifically for outdoor sites. Henry Moore helped a number of his large pieces to sit more comfortably in their settings by piercing his forms and using highly polished materials. In other words, we can look through these pierced forms to the surrounding landscape, while the polished surfaces of his sculptures pick up and reflect the colours of the surroundings and sky. Now that you have made a number of large commissioned works, do you have any innovations of your own for helping locate them happily on site?

LAING: My abstract sculpture of the 1969 to 1973 period was made in direct response to the landscape of the Highlands of Scotland, where I had arrived after some years in New York. The forms were derived from my New York work, but their scale, volume and finish looked slight and flimsy in the rough grandeur of the landscape. What suited the pure gallery spaces of the city seemed naturally somewhat effete in this new environment.

The new sculpture was indebted to the prehistoric standing stones and alignments which are such a significant feature of this landscape, punctuating it with authoritative evidence of a continuous human presence. For a few years these fascinated me but in the end their enigmatic quality frustrated me, and the fact that their true purpose and meaning would never be revealed became unbearable. I abandoned my preoccupation with them, retaining only an awareness of how brilliantly they are sited.

In an urban context one is obviously more constrained but, as it is frequently pointed out, it is essential that architect and sculptor should work together from the beginning of a project so as to avoid the 'cap badge' siting of sculpture which occurs when the sculpture is brought in at a late stage of development and has no integral role to play in environmental design.

AUTY: In recent years you have made a number of portrait heads and busts in bronze. Many of these are of international figures and, from what I gather, were well received. Here is an art form with a very long history Do you feel your range of experience in working in entirely different materials and manners has contributed something new or special to your understanding of this age-old medium?

LAING: I discovered an aptitude for portraiture almost by accident when, about twelve years ago, I suddenly saw a way in which I could make a portrait head of my eldest son ('Portrait of Farquhar Aged Ten' 1982). At first I thought of this skill mainly as a breadwinner - as artists have done traditionally - but over the years it has developed into one of my main areas of interest and I have travelled widely through Europe, the USA and even Africa to make portrait heads for a variety of clients.

Portraiture must be the most objective of sculptural techniques, because it is based on a very close observation of the subject. It is a process which can result in a particular intimacy, because the subject will seldom have been examined in such detail before. I have been fortunate in my subjects; they have all been people who have led interesting and often exciting lives and one is able to share in these to some extent in the creative process. In return the portrait endows the sitter with a certain permanence. It is a slap in the face of mortality. The Romans believed that the portrait embodied the presence of the person represented so they tended to eliminate imperfections in the pursuit of the ideal - but I suppose portraiture is always a negotiation between literal likeness and idealisation. A clear understanding of the forms which compose the head functions both as a clarification of reality and as a life-imbuing technique similar to that referred to in my earlier discussion of Carpeaux. There is no doubt that to be worthwhile a portrait must be able to stand alone in the form of a sculpture, even if the identity of the sculptor becomes lost. To achieve this, the sculpture must have abstract qualities to sustain it, as well as the narrative of individual psychological and emotional expression.

AUTY: Without my intending it to do so, this dialogue seems to have gone round in something of a neat circle because I spoke earlier of your renegotiating a pact with a longer term artistic heritage. As a critic, I am convinced we are going to reassess a lot of the art of recent times quite radically, probably before the turn of the century. Alexandr Solzhenitsyn wrote recently: 'For several decades now, world literature, music, painting and sculpture have exhibited a stubborn tendency to grow not higher but to the side, not toward the highest achievements of craftsmanship and of the human spirit but toward their disintegration into a frantic and insidious novelty. To decorate public spaces we put up sculptures that aestheticise pure ugliness - but we no longer register surprise. And if visitors from outer space were to pick up our music over the airwaves, how could they ever guess that earthlings once had a Bach, a Beethoven and a Schubert, now abandoned as out of date and obsoIete. (FootNote2)
Changes in your own art may well be a foretaste of a movement, which will gather increasing force, of artists rethinking their personal pacts with our previous cultural history. I think the language of earlier great art is formidable, easily capable of treating and describing the current human condition. For those who cannot help thinking in rhetorical clichés, I describe the process I foresee as one of reaffirmation rather than reaction. But how do you foresee the immediate future yourself'?

LAING: I certainly hope you are correct in foreseeing a period of great change, but I am wary of making sweeping and general predictions because these must always be linked with the whole political situation. We seem to have identified our current problems; they are those of technocratic consumer society which has lost its religious and social controls and is consequently unstable. Contemporary art, with its feverish market ing initiatives and ethical vacuity, seems appropriate to our current situation, which is driven by economic rather than moral forces. The reaffirmation which you propose will have to be linked to a further evolution of society, when society has matured to a point where it recognises that consumerism fails to satisfy its more profound needs. It is factors such as this which will contribute to a general rethinking of art and its purpose. Sooner or later, I think this is bound to happen.

1 Caro in interview with Lawrence Alloway, Gazette, no. 1 (1961), p.l.

2 Text of the acceptance speech of Alexandr Solzhenitsyn when receiving the Medal of Honour for Literature of the National Arts Club in New York, January 1993.

Sherlock Holmes - A Memorial to Sir Arthur Conan

1989

Gerald Laing writes about his sculpture of Sherlock Holmes, sited at the birthplace of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in Picardy Place, Edinburgh.

The Conan Doyle Memorial consists of a 7' 6" bronze sculpture of Sherlock Holmes on a 6' high sandstone plinth. The sculpture weighs about 750 lbs and it was cast in my own bronze foundry in the north of Scotland. It is sited at the birthplace of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in Picardy Place, Edinburgh and it was commissioned by the Edinburgh chapter of the Federation of Master Builders to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the founding of the Federation. It is also an important feature in the scheme for the rehabilitation of the Picardy Place roundabout and its adjacent landscaped areas.

Holmes is shown meditating on the death of his author which, to a fictional character, is tantamount to the death of God. His pipe has the words 'Ceci n'est pas une pipe' inscribed around its bowl as a homage to Magritte and in recognition of the surreal quality of this commission. On the base of the sculpture is the enormous footprint of the Hound of the Baskervilles.

The image of Sherlock Holmes has been altered and embellished by the input of all those who have interpreted him in the years since Conan Doyle first described him. We find it rather surprising that nowhere in Conan Doyle's original text is Holmes described as smoking anything other than 'a straight briar pipe'. He most often wears a 'long grey hooded travelling coat' with his deerstalker hat. Very occasionally in the contemporary illustrations by Sydney Paget for the Strand Magazine, he is shown wearing an Inverness cape, invariably topped by a bowler hat rather than a deerstalker.

Watson describes Holmes as '... rather over six feet, and so excessively lean that he seems to be considerably taller. His face was a narrow one, his forehead large, his hair black, his brows dark and heavy, his nose thin and firm. His eyes were grey and particularly sharp and piercing, taking on a faraway and introspective look when he exerted his whole powers'.'

This earliest Holmes has been modified by numerous later interpretations of the character, the most influential of which have been those by the actors William Gillette and Basil Rathbone. William Gillette portrayed Holmes in various plays between 1900 and 1929, and Doyle saw and enjoyed them. John Dickson Carr captures the magic of Doyle's first meeting with Gillette in the following way: 'out of the train, in a long grey cape, stepped the living image of Sherlock Holmes. Not even Sydney Paget had done it so well in drawing. The clear cut features, the deep set eyes, looked out under a deerstalker cap.' (FootNote2)

Basil Rathbone, whose Holmes is probably the most familiar to us, seems to have based his character on Gillette's interpretation as much as on the original text.

In any interpretation of a mythical figure, one is obliged to select and indeed create the details which make up the whole. My own version of this most famous figure in all of literature has been composed in this manner. Sherlock Holmes is by no means the only icon which has evolved, and indeed continues to evolve, to suit the conceptions and requirements of different times.

1. Stanley Mackenzie in a letter to the artist, 13 May 1989.

2. John Dickson Carr, The Life of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, John Murray, London, 1949, p. 147.

Gerald Laing