My Time in Space by Tim Robinson Read Free Book Online Page B

of the heap, propping them up in a row, discussing them at length and going off with their selection under their arms. Towards evening a man arrived on a motorbike, gathered together the remainder and roared off, and then, mysteriously, half an hour later returned with them and carefully snapped each one across his knee before replacing it on the heap.
    When it became clear that if I was to pursue the career of an artist it should be in a more challenging and future-oriented environment than this self-devouring city, we turned our minds to London. First I paid an exploratory visit, and called on some of the Bond Street galleries with a bundle of paintings and a letter from Herr Fuchs introducing me as a ‘phantasmagorical artist’. One gallery owner studied the works for some time before announcing: ‘You paint a world of which I want no part.’ An official at the Arts Council counselled me to go away and study the paintings of Mark Vaux (whose abstractionism, as discreet as abank-manager’s suit, appealed to me then as little as it does now). Undiscouraged, we removed to London and found ourselves a flat in West Hampstead.
    The year was 1964. The ascendancy of Pop Art concerned me as little as the other manifestations of Swinging London, but there was some intelligent painting on show that appealed to me ( Bridget Riley, for instance, beginning her dazzling career), as my own work was reverting to the formal and abstract. One ofmy ongoing series ‘The Dreams of Euclid’ was accepted for the John Moores Biennial in Liverpool, a competitive exhibition that had established itself as a rite of passage for up-and-coming artists; the American critic Clement Greenberg was among the adjudicators and evidently set the tone that year. The painting attracted the notice of Guy Brett, art critic for The Times, and of Signals Gallery in Wigmore Street, London, which invited me to participate in a group show to be called ‘Soundings 3’.
    Signals was the standard-bearer for avant-garde work at that period. Paul Keeler (or his father, of the chain of opticians) supplied the money and David Medalla the inspiration. Medalla was a young Filipino ‘elemental artist’ whose career was already the subject of myth. His bubble-machines oozed mounds of foam, his bread-making machines excreted yards of dough, and his talk was so overwhelming that when he described his ‘Homage to Kurt Schwitters’, a collection of flying robots that had foraged over Japan and brought back their finds to his windowsill – a bus ticket, an article off a washing-line, etc. – which he then made into a collage, he convinced us momentarily that such a work existed. Among the artists hanging their work for the Soundings show I noted a man of sombre and reserved mien who seemed to hold himself at the same angle to the excited chatter as I did myself. Hiswork, a thirty-two-foot-long painting constructed of ten or so panels in different colours, was by far the most distinguished contribution ; ‘a precise spectrum of cool summer’, was how I described it later on. Peter Joseph became my closest friend and associate in the art world. Otherwise Signals was more loss than profit for me. Half an hour before the opening of that exhibition the artist Li Yuan-Chia decided to polish up a metal relief by Mary Martin that hung next to my paintings; he gave the can a good shake and it exploded; I came into the gallery at that moment to hear him screaming ‘It’s all right, Tim!’ But the paintings were spotted all over, and I had to dash home and fetch replacements. After the show Medalla told me that a film company wanted to borrow my works to furnish a set; his mesmerizing babble left me with the flattering impression that the film was to be Antonioni’s Blow-up ,but in the event it turned out to be a romp with Max Wall, and the paintings were returned the worse for wear. Compensation – of a couple of hundred pounds – was agreed, but then Signals Gallery closed