interpretations. Even at its inception art is addressing transitory issues; Gillick
doesn’t need to reinforce this in the thinness of his sculptural installations.
Perhaps the idea of utopia would seem more palatable if one considered it as
a drive rather than a place. (The word itself, of course, means non-place.) The
fact that utopianism locates its quest for perfection in the material world puts a
nice brake on tendencies to idealize or systematize it - material eventually
breaks down, literally and figuratively. Art's utopian function could be similar to
its critical function: to be different enough from the master narratives of culture
and its bureaucracies that alternate possibilities become apparent. Art objects
could be seen as representations that evoke future experiences, even as
substitutions for the impossibility of utopia itself.
The utopia that interests me is borrowed not so much from modernist theory
as from pragmatic philosophy; simple as it may seem, culture can be seen as part
of an endeavour to make life better, and art as an imaginative creation driven by
a desire to improve things.’ We still talk about art’s power, whether it be its
ability to synthesize ideas, to mediate between cultures, or to stimulate
criticality. People still want a singular, powerful experience from art, one that
draws together separate parts of their intellectual, political and social lives. We
look for this in art that seeks to understand itself as it produces itself. This is a
perennial, and the rest doesn’t matter.
1
T.J. Clark, In Irad union', in Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a Histoiy o f Modernism (New
2
'[.iam Gillick in conversation with Catsou Roberts and Lucy Steeds’, in Liam G lü c k / Renovation
1
See the philosopher and social critic Richard Rorty's 'Relativism: Finding and Making'.
Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1999) 7.
Filter: Recent Past and Near Future (Bristol, England: Arnolfini, 2000) 24.
Philosophy and Social Hope (New York: Penguin, 1999) xxxiv.
Alison Green, ‘Utopias and Universalst Art Monthly, no. 265 (April 2003) 7-10.
Hari Kunzru
I See the Sea: On Paul Noble//2008
[...] It’s clear that Paul Noble’s aesthetic inversion of values, his many dealings
with high and low, black and white, up and down, are both ethically and
politically driven. Likewise his persistent focus on memory, what one might
punningly call his ‘monu mentality’. Noble’s involvement with a campaign
against the Mil motorway link road in Leytonstone, East London, focused on the
community that was being destroyed to build the bypass. Like the artist Gavin
Turk, he détourned the blue heritage plaques that mark the homes of London’s
famous dead. Unlike Turk, who used his own name as part of his ongoing joust
with art-world celebrity, Noble commemorated the buildings themselves, and
the uncelebrated families who had lived in them.
Likewise, Noble’s carnivalesque seems to be aimed, in a Bakhtinian fashion,
at the builders of self-aggrandizing monuments, the emperors who preside over
our swarming networked world. Acumulus Noblitatus, an area of Nobson
Newtown [the utopia-allusive imaginary space explored in a series of Noble’s
works], spells out the words of the English civil war Digger leader Gerrard
Winstanley: 'And the nations of the world will never learn to beat their swords
into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks, and leave off warring,
until this cheating device of buying and selling be cast out among the rubbish of
kingly power.’ In his 2004 Whitechapel Gallery show, alongside several Nobson
Newtown drawings, Noble exhibited Egg, a large sculpture whose white surface
is inscribed with a kind of Sadean vegan hell, in which cartoon turds torture and
vivisect animals. It’s a sort of scatological horror show projected onto a big
clamped-open eyeball, a riff, so Noble has said, on Peter Singer’s 1975 book
Animal Liberation. The egg, an ancient symbol both of new life and of the soul,
appeared elsewhere in the show, filmed and projected in inverted negative,
emerging from a female anus. Birth or defaecation?
It is clear how the ocean, a threatening remnant of the Flood, came to inspire horror,
as did the mountains, that other chaotic vestige of the disaster, which were ‘pudenda
of Nature', ugly, aggressive warts that grew on the surface of the new continents.
This repulsive interpretation was in keeping with the certainty that the world was
in Decline. No matter how zealously they worked, men would never be able to
recreate the antediluvian Earth, on whose surface the traces of earthly paradise
could still be seen,
- Alain Corbin, The Lure of the Sea
2 18//UTOPIA AND ITS (IMPOSSIBILITIES
Kunzru//! See the S ea//219
The French historian Aiain Corbin traces what he terms the ‘invention of the
seaside’, excavating the layer of mediaeval terror that lies beneath our presentday enjoyment of the various sensations of the beach. Health, aesthetic pleasure,
social spectacle, sexual excitement - all this, he argues, is a gradual cultural
accretion, sediment laid down over a primal scene of disgust. Whitley Bay, with
its arcade and its art deco houses, is a product of a historical process that has
been underway for about three hundred years. Ά full size golf course has been
built over the site of an opencast working'.
We Moderns, garden city planners, rational makers and collectors, inhabitants
of Villa Joe [drawings, 2005-6], with its plate-glass wunderkammer, and Paul’s
Palace, with its various amenities for civilized Noblife, find ourselves forever
staring out to sea, always examining the ground beneath our feet, trying to join
the dots. Around Villa Joe, the rocks seem to form the shapes of constellations, a
protolinguistic tracery, geological jargon. The schizophrenic asks: 'Are these
things random, or have they been arranged?' This is a suspect landscape,
constantly threatening or promising meaning without finally revealing it.
The villa’s precinct and the little driveway decorated with a proud faecal
menhir are surrounded by debris, by the ‘pudenda of nature’. These cleared
spaces are the only blanks in a palimpsest-landscape, an archaeological rubble
of intentionality. The large rocks surrounding the villa are ground down toward
the edges, becoming progressively smaller, until they are mere specks, pinpricks.
Nature or culture? Impossible to say. As we look out from Paul’s Palace, behind
us on the cliffs is a pile of humanoid fragments, artistic wreckage blocking the
way to a Renaissance fantasy summit. On the other sides, the cliffs themselves,
like most natural phenomena in man-made Nobson, are bursting with forms, the
recognizable biomorphic forms of the arch-modernist Henry Moore.
business, involving a sort of total cosmic identification between artist and
form, a heroic struggle to dredge the correct shape out of both the material and
the subconscious.
Look again at the rocks in Nobson. Are they heroic sculpture? Or are they just
rocks? Random or arranged? If they’re sculpture, can we forget and look at them
like rocks? If they’re rocks, can we look at them like sculpture? And what does
it mean to be an artist, if what you're doing is this heroic work of ingesting the
flow of nature, digesting it with your archetypes, and excreting your humanized
version in front of Lincoln Center? Are you a hero? Or just a guy pooping on
a plinth?
Moore’s fame increased during his life to the point where another of his
many admirers, the aristocratic British critic Kenneth Clark, could announce: 'If
I had to send one man to another planet to represent the human race, it would
be Henry Moore.’3 Noble's enormous Monument Monument (2007), a drawn
agglomeration of all the pieces illustrated in the six volumes of Moore’s
catalogue raisonné, is less homage than an insult to this strongest of ‘strong
fathers’. This enormous faecal pile, with its various folds and protuberances,
acknowledges the ubiquity of Moore’s work, all those organic forms standing in
all those plazas and campuses, outside all those bank buildings and embassies
and arts centres. And yet it reverses the public spectacle of their various
unveilings, the moments of civic pride and corporate self-congratulation.
Like Nobson, ‘an exercise in self-portraiture via town planning',4 Noble’s
Moore seems to be both a person and a place - in this case, a battlefield on
which a conflict is being fought between form and formlessness, carnivalesque
freedom and ascetic rigour, social conscience and global capital, art as liberating
free play and art as the excrescence of monstrous monuments.
In all his work Moore is not only a humanist, in the sense that his work is
intricately related to the human figure; but also in the wider sense of a man who
has an acute awareness of the vital process itself, a feeling for organic form
whether manifested in man, or animals, trees, plants, shells, fossils - whatever
has been formed by the life-force in its endless procreative process.1
... a term serving to demean, implying the general demand that everything
should have its form. That which it designates has no rights in any sense, and is
everywhere crushed like a spider or an earthworm. For the satisfaction of
academics, it is imperative that the universe take on a form. The whole of
philosophy has no other goal: it’s about putting a frock coat on that which is, a
mathematical frock coat. To affirm on the contrary that the universe doesn't
resemble anything and is nothing but formless amounts to saying that the
universe is something tike a spider or a gob of spittle,5
That’s Moore's great champion, Herbert Read, articulating his hero’s vitalism, his
ability to channel nature’s fecundity and excrete it as sculpture. Moore, who
famously refused to read a Jungian analysis of his work in case a rational
apprehension of his motives blocked his ability to sculpt, had a sense of himself
as a conduit for archetypes. 'There are unusual shapes to which everybody is
subconsciously conditioned and to which they can respond if the conscious
control does not shut them off.’1 In Moore's conception, sculpture is a serious
220//UTOPIA AND ITS (IMPOSSIBILITIES
Georges Bataille's dictionary definition of the informe captures precisely the
nature of Noble’s insult, his relegation (déclassement) of Moore, These
monuments are above all individual, erected on their plinths, lauded in humanist
terms as triumphs of the artistic spirit. To shove them back together is a perverse
Kunzru//! See the Sea//221
revaluation, a comic denial of the academic demand for form. To do so with such
skill, such intense, concentrated labour, is to exalt the informe, the flow of the
undifferentiated real, to bring the high low and raise the low on high. Monument
Monument, and the six individual Volume drawings are writhing biomorphic
orgies, cluster-fucks. They are quite gloriously obscene.
There’s a naughtiness to all this, the humour of a saucy seaside postcard. Noble
shows a photograph of a solemn Moore looking up at one of his heroic creations,
an outsize humanoid form, in which he has excised the work and replaced it with
a soft-porn image of a naked arse and a pair of legs in stockings. So much for the
grand, ineffable ‘mystery of the hole’. Noble is not the first artist to engage in an
Oedipal battle with Moore. From Bruce Nauman’s lumpy, string-tied package,
called Henry Moore Bound to Fail (1967-70), to Bruce McLean’s Pose Work for
Plinths 3 (1971), an action satire on Moore’s Falling Warrior (1956-57).6 Younger
artists have taken on the old modernist master in various ways. His former
assistant Anthony Caro once said in an interview that ‘my generation abhors the
idea of a father-figure and his [Moore’s] work is bitterly attacked by artists and
critics under forty when it fails to measure up to the outsize scale it has been
given.’' But of course, Caro is himself a father figure now, and so Noble has taken
him to the seaside too, using a distinctly Caroesque girder to support a version of
a classic seafront entertainment, the board with a hole through which you can
poke your head to see your face on the body of a fat lady or a skinny man. In this
case, sure enough, you find yourself emerging from a porn star’s bum.
An agonistic relationship to tradition, a penchant for dirty jokes, a relentless
interrogation of the boundary between the natural and the cultural - Noble’s
weird brew of ideas and emotions reaches its peak of sophistication in a series of
ceramic works that take the elements of Moore sculptures and use them as
modules, arranged in various combinations, glazed and presented on beautifully
carved wooden stands, like Chinese scholars’ stones. Scholars’ stones are found
objects that have been appreciated by collectors for well over a thousand years.
An aesthetics of the scholars’ stone was codified as early as the Song Dynasty
(960-1279), by collectors such as the statesman, calligrapher, drunkard and
obsessive hand-washer Mi Fu (1051-1107). Mi Fu (known as ‘madman’ for his
various passions) is said to have disrupted a ceremony at the Imperial court by
turning his back on the dignitaries assembled to greet him and bowing instead to
a particularly beautiful rock, which he addressed as his teacher.
Mi Fu and his fellow rock fans based their aesthetic judgements on such
qualities as shou (slenderness), zhou (wrinkles), Sou (channels), and tou (holes
and openness), the last particularly significant when thinking about them in
relation to Moore. Scholars’ stones became art because they were appreciated as
art. They were mounted and displayed. They were, above all, individuated,
222//UTOPIA AND ITS (IM)FOSSIBILTriES
separated out from the formless flow of nature by the connoisseur's academic eye.
Noble is performing a complicated riff on this tradition. By presenting elements of
Moore’s art in this way, he is once again crossing and recrossing the boundaries
between the natural and the cultural, the formal and the formless. By
appropriating Moore’s terms as modules, relegating them to the status of
prefabricated elements in a construction kit, he is pitting one kind of modernism
(architectural and utilitarian) against another (psychological, asocial) in a game
that both are bound to lose when faced with the infinite fecundity of nature. 0
rock, my true teacher!
The ceramics are, it should be said, very beautiful, glazed in ways that suggest
the Japanese ceramic tradition brought to Europe by such students as Christopher
Dresser and Bernard Leach. Their hardwood bases bubble and ripple. These
objects are not only the physical instantiation of the precious collection housed in
Villa Joe, but also of the boulders surrounding it. They are Moore’s monuments
reduced to the status and scale of ornaments, relegated to the devalued aesthetic
territory of the decorative arts. They are forms that insult the pretensions of formgiving, the ultimate efflorescence of a body of work that seems to be concerned
above all with reminding us of our place in the world, telling us that for all our
grand projects, our desire for aggrandisement or liberation or domination, we are
human-scale creatures. We live in the world, and it lives in us.
1
[footnote 10 in source] Herbert Read, Henry Moore: A Study o f His Life and Work (New York:
Praeger, 1966).
2
[11] Henry Moore, 'The Sculptor Speaks’. The Listener, 18 August 1937.
3
[17] Kenneth Clarke, quoted in Harriet F. Senie, ‘Implicit Intimacy: The Persistent Appeal of Henry
Moore's Public Art', in Dorothy Kosinski, ed., Henry Moore: Sculpting the Twentieth Century {New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2001).
4
[13] Publicity material for Noble’s 2004 Whitechapel Gallery show.
5
[141 ‘...u n terme servant à déclasser, exigeant généralement que chaque chose ait sa forme. Ce
qu’il désigne n'a ses droits dans acucun sens et se fait écraser partout comme une araignée ou un
ver de terre. Il faudrait en effet, pour que les hommes académiques soient contents, que l’univers
prenne forme. La philosophie entière n’a pas d’autre but: il s’agit de donner un redingote à ce qui
est, une redingote mathématique. Par contre affirme]· que l’univers ne ressemble à rien et n’est
qu’informe revient à dire cine l’univers est quelque chose comme une araignée ou un crachat.’
Georges Bataille. ‘L’informe'. Documents, no. 7 (Paris, December 1929),
6
[15] See Dorothy Kosinski. ‘Some Reasons for a Reputation1, in Henry Moore, op. cit.
7
[16] Quoted in Harriet F, Senie, ‘Implicit Intimacy', in Henry Moore, op, cit.
Hari Knnzru, extract from Ί See the Sea', in Pju ! Noble {New York: Cagosian Gallery, 2008)7-12.
Kunzra//! See the Seet//223