'Survey ’69' presented the work of four artists interested in exploring the idea of a 'new space,' and the relationship their work has to the external environment.
This exhibition was formed in a new way. Four areas were allocated to four artists well in advance of the exhibition. This was necessary because a certain kind of art was being conceived. It was work which requires a complete three dimensional volume for its operational space because of its environmental relationship to the spectator. The four artists in this exhibition shared this approach. For a number of years their work had been real space that confronts the spectator, rather than passive illusion. This kind of confrontation led to extensions into other public areas. The artists in this exhibition were given materials for their large-scale projects for which the galleries and gardens were treated as complete entities unbroken by screens. It is a world-wide phenomenon, with some countries paying artists to work on such a scale for exhibitions, and can be related to the rapid growth of knowledge about the planet and ourselves.
To the nomad of the Australian desert, painting is not limited to its material area, it is a part of a larger space imbued with life. For us, with our new mobility and ease of communication, the space between one thing and another is now less real and needs definition in art. Architects, sculptors, engineers and painters are breaking down the more absurd barriers that have divided them, and are working together, with the realisation that the whole new environment, like the magical world of ancient man, is a space for creation.
In his paintings Timothy Drever is concerned with such elements as the division of flat space in a geometrical way. They have been successful when shown on the walls of a gallery, but were constrained there by limited public involvement. It was when seen in an outdoor context that the flatness, divisions and colours assumed a new importance. The flat surface was in contrast with the three-dimensional space of objects in a street whilst the shapes within the canvas were in harmony with those of nearby leaves. It was a significant occasion. At Kenwood, in May 1969, Drever made a large work on the surface of a lawn. A number of painted boards in four different colours and shapes were left on the lawn for the public to arrange. A development of this in interior terms was made for the small gallery floor in this exhibition. Virtually the entire 46′ x 31′ area was covered with hardboard, painted matt black. A set of loose shapes, painted on both sides either black or white, was left on the surface for re-arrangement by the public. The total area was thus entirely a flat black ‘field’ or a black field deepened by white shapes. As this floorwork could be walked on and handled, there is a physical involvement with the shapes and the two surfaces. The implications of this use of the floor, the most public area of any, were immense. It is real space both in philosophic and social terms.
Peter Joseph also made environmental work in the temporary scheme at Kenwood which he and Timothy Drever shared. This consisted of three wooden discs seven feet in diameter placed in relation to each other across a huge field. It was the culmination of a continuous development of his painting through several years towards a more direct confrontation with the public. Joseph’s paintings are in fact already very much ‘face to face’ with the viewer. Their perfectly balanced areas of flat colour do not contain any illusion of depth, and relate to the world around them. In 1966 he made a 32 foot wall painting ‘Colour Continuum’ for Signals Gallery which was also shown at the Camden Arts Centre in Survey ’67. This was, as the title indicates, a painting in which the colours did not divide the space unduly. They were all reduced in tone and the whole painting remained unified. In the large gallery in this exhibition he was given the space of the 76 foot long wall for a single work which was alone in the vast room. If this has the same non-illusory effect as his preceding work it will invite people not to look into it, because what it is is already there, but to be with it, with the painting in the same room. His work is not just a proposition of existence. It does, by virtue of its combination of extraordinarily pure colour and shape, exist for us, both physically and emotionally.
In the public open space at the rear of the Camden Arts Centre there was, on the eastern slope, a new work by Ed Herring. This consisted of twenty boxes submerged at soil level and packed with different kinds of chemical. These reacted to water which was channeled through them by a drainage system. Through this reaction the chemicals became coloured. Condensation and possibly ice crystals formed on the surface of the perspex which covered the boxes. There was, therefore, a situation of visual and structural change caused by weather variations. Herring was working in a quite radical way. His open-minded attitude about the scope of art, combined with a deep interest in the character of materials, has resulted in a series of very original schemes. The Tea-Bag Piece which was located on the moors near Belmont in Lancashire throughout the winter of 68-69 was one of several highly varied experiments in the outside atmosphere. The effects of condensation, evaporation and frost produced varying kinds of structure and light effects, which were photographed on visits to the area at different times.
For the 1969 summer exhibition Environments Reversal, at Camden Art Centre, Herring made two works, a 1000 foot canvas strip which connected with the garden, and an area of square shaped deposits of bird seed on the grass, forming a grid pattern. The canvas strip was walked on in different degrees over a month and sustained variations of wear and tear. The bird seed grid was eaten and had to be replenished more frequently as the news got around. The custodian of this ecological scheme was a large cat. In the context of etching, with which his training has made him familiar, it is the nature of change which is vital to the process. In effect he has extended this process beyond the confines of the copper plate. The universe is now the space, and provides the mutable material for his work in extensions of meaning.
On the flat, lower area of the garden at Camden Art Centre, David Parsons placed three structures. Their grid forms disciplined the space around them. Like the other three artists, Parsons discovered the relation his work has to external environments. When he took his grid structure out into the hilly country of Heaton Park near Manchester he found, as he says, that ‘flatness became a proposition’. The environment, therefore, includes the properties of the mind. For such a concept to be laid bare by this work is an indication of its power. This sense of reality is taken further in the relation of the grid to other man-made structures. Visually this is due to the architectural form of the grid and in a tactile sense to the industrial finish of the surface. This experience has led Parsons to the third structure, which is actually a small floor with right-angled sections.
Placed in the public open space at the Camden Art Centre these three structures emphasized both flatness and gravity. Their mute stability was in poetic contrast to the noise and movement of the neighbouring six-lane road. Thus they gave a new formal discipline to the environment, and the opportunity to see this over 24 hour periods of extreme light change.
Excerpt by Peter Carey, Manager of Visual Arts at Camden Art Centre, 1969.
