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Joe Tilson |
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Joe Tilson and the Fundamental Interconnectedness of all Things Joe Tilson is often categorized as a Pop artist by those who delight in pigeon-holes. It’s not a particularly helpful designation, particularly as Tilson originated his own version of Pop Art to suit his own interests. As Michael Compton, one of the earliest historians of the movement, has noted: ‘Tilson’s Pop hardly ever reflects the excess and ephemerality of the public media.’ He goes on to remark: ‘In fact, Tilson’s was probably the least ironic of all Pop art. It was a celebration of the possibility of freedom...’ That impulse has remained at the centre of Tilson’s activity ever since, and has been increasingly apparent since he made a deliberate break in 1970 with the world of events. That abnegation of our consumerist society has led him back to a contemplation of previous cultures, and particularly to the classical civilization of Greece and Rome. It has led to a deep involvement with myth. His work has subsequently been less overtly political, and more concerned with the underlying forces that shape the world’s destiny. The concern with myth is crucial to an understanding of Tilson’s aims. Myth is the eternal present; myth does not mean ‘lie’ (as in the slangy way of decrying something patently untrue as ‘a myth’), it signifies rather a deeper truth; it is a way of thinking about reality, a way of rediscovering one’s relation to the world. Myths are, in the Japanese phrase, ‘not created but summoned’. And as CH Sisson has said: ‘The poet... does not choose his meanings: they are given, as something involuntarily collected in himself.’ ‘Our imagination must be geared passionately to the universe - to nature - nature including human nature as an indivisible part of the process’, says Tilson. In pursuit of the truths available to man, he began an exploration of universal structures such as the stepped pyramid or ziggurat, the shaped tray, the ladder and the box, which still informs his work today. He became involved with games and puzzles, and the concept of ‘play’ and its many meanings was never far from his thoughts. From very early on in his career Tilson placed considerable emphasis on sections and compartments within the artwork, thus stressing the fundamental relatedness of part to whole. Hence the poignant use of the printer’s case for holding type, a divided tray which yet has an inbuilt unity. There is always a unifying structure, force or logic to Tilson’s work. His art is not ‘compartmentalized’ as we sometimes speak of someone’s life being, when it is rigidly kept in resolutely separate boxes, so that different interests (or people) have no chance to meet or overlap. Quite the reverse: Tilson’s, in fact, is an art of connections and cross-references. Italy is Tilson’s lodestone - its landscape, art and architecture, its very culture and physical presence. ‘Le Crete Senesi’, a superb series of recent works literally shaped like the beautiful bleak hills around Siena, or like cathedral domes, or Renaissance altarpieces, pays especial tribute to the country he has made his second home. Tilson taught himself Italian whilst doing his National Service (1946-9) and first visited the country immediately after, spending three months there looking mainly at Giotto and early Italian art. Between 1955 and 1957 he lived in Rome, having won the Rome Prize, and it was here he met his future wife Jos, who was studying with the sculptor Marino Marini. They lived together in Sicily and married in Venice. Italy played a central role in their early lives together and has continued to exercise a benign influence. In 1972 they were finally able to buy a house near Cortona, to which they have returned every year to spend several months, living and working. In Tilson, the response to a particular place is sharpened by a pattern of absence and return. Each time he arrives back in Cortona the familiar is re-appraised, and the landscape and culture of the region are re-absorbed. Like the continual topping up of a drink, the effect is intensified. Tilson marinates in Italy and all things Italian, whilst musing upon the great modernist poets - Yeats, Pound, Eliot - or the medieval and Renaissance alchemists such as Raymon Lull or Paracelsus. The range of his reading is impressive: from Dante to Rilke by way of Elias Canetti. This erudition is lightly worn but deeply felt. There is nothing casual about his love of learning, nor about his passion, for instance, for the dual translations of the Loeb classics. His work is saturated with references and cross-references to the texts he has read and considered, but the ordinary viewer of his pictures need not be aware of these different levels of meaning. They are there to provide a richness and resonance for the artist himself, a loam in which the visual image is planted and may send forth roots. In the same way, the viewer may enjoy the painted appearance of a pomegranate without having to know its symbolic meaning of death and the attendant promise of resurrection. For the last decade, Tilson has been working on a ramifying series of paintings known as ‘Conjunctions’. These works have a certain formal unity, inasmuch as they all consist of a pair of canvas-covered panels set into a larger panel with rounded corners. But the format varies widely, from square to horizontal, as do the dimensions. The notion of ‘conjunction’, the act of joining, is a fundamental one. (‘Only connect’, as EM Forster urged.) Tilson, of course, trained first as a joiner at Brixton School of Building (1944-6) and has always been an artist at home with carpentry, ready and willing to craft his work. (Curiously, the primary meaning of the Greek word for ‘artist’ is ‘joiner’.) Tilson first used the title ‘Conjunctions’ in 1965, at a time when he was building ziggurats in wood relief, taking the name from a poem by WB Yeats. (It begins: ‘If Jupiter and Saturn meet,/What a crop of mummy wheat!’, and is printed on page 333 of my edition of the ‘Collected Poems’. For an artist as interested in number as Tilson, this must surely have significance.) In 1994 Tilson made the first of his current series of ‘Conjunctions’, a free-wheeling sequence of meditations on the nature of reality - of man’s encounter with his environment, of the relationship between culture and nature. The connotations are manifest: ‘bringing together’ in the sense of juxtaposition in the cause of beauty or enlightenment (vide the surrealist approach to collage); ‘joining’ also in the sense of ‘let no man put asunder’ - ie marriage, of the body as much as the heart and soul. (In this instance, it is pertinent to observe that Tilson’s conjunctions are always diptychs within a larger whole, or two individuals united by an indivisible bond, and as such may be taken on one level to be autobiographical, Joe and Jos having been married for nearly 50 years.) The diptych format also resembles the double-page spread of an open book, while a further meaning of conjunction refers to the alignment of astral bodies and the putative influence on the character of men. Tilson keeps a series of sketchbooks which actually serve a wider purpose: part journal, part repository of ideas for new work, part photographic record of work done. They might contain layouts for pictures, quotations from current reading, sketches from nature or copies after Old Masters. Tilson says they are ‘like recipe books for a cook’. (Interestingly enough, elsewhere in his notes he pairs ‘cookery’ with ‘apocalypse’. First things and Last things?) In their pages you might find details from paintings by Caravaggio or Duccio, acrylic studies of grapes, figs or pomegranates, peaches, cherries or red chillies. Figures alternate with fish or swallow-tail butterflies. There is always a time-lapse between an idea appearing in a notebook, and its final manifestation as a painting. This is part of the deep continuity within Tilson’s working practice. For instance, the curved corners of the ‘Conjunctions’ do suggest the shape of playing cards, and have something of the same talismanic function, but they also relate to the format of the slide transparency, first explored by Tilson in ‘The Five Senses’ of 1968-9. Within his oeuvre, echoes abound. Similarly, the works on paper evolve in series, exploring the same rich preoccupations, executed in acrylic paint on old hand-made Fabriano paper, bought in bulk some 25 years ago. Tilson’s pictures are really more objects than paintings. They are carpentered, heavy constructions of wood and canvas, laying much emphasis on tooth and texture. He uses modest materials - sheets of pine and sometimes for the more intimate paddle-like panels, each called ‘Tavola’, pieces of chestnut, the local wood of the valley where he lives in Italy. These small panels resemble kitchen implements - chopping board or bread board - for Tilson likes ‘the idea of making objects that could have a use’. Their distinctive, satisfying shapes are arrived at through drawings in the sketchbooks, the panels lovingly formed and smoothed and stained with linseed oil, then pierced to take the rough string by which they are hung on the wall. Here a panel is painted with a large eye, there with a circle divided into the four elements - earth, air, fire and water. Another tall narrow panel is ravishingly painted with a golden ear of wheat on a cornflower blue ground. The ‘Conjunctions’ employ different backgrounds against which to present the diptychs - for instance, the distinctive triangular or square patchworks, in the familiar livery of Tilson’s bright palette, dominated by primary colours since the 1960s. (This high-pitched, full-throated colour sings as much of the early Sienese painters as it does of Matisse, and particularly the work from the latter’s foray to North Africa.) A different background is based on the black and white swirlings found in marble in the Museum of Naples. Look at the way separate sections abut but don’t match in ‘Conjunction Melograno, Varro’ or ‘Conjunction Homeric Hymn to Demeter’. Once again in Tilson’s work there is a meeting and mating of word and image. In each diptych the right panel is devoted to something from the natural world - mostly fruit such as cherries, grapes or olives - but in one case a bird. The left hand panel is always reserved for a word or name. Here Tilson explores the structure of Greek and Latin words and how their letters are drawn. Across the top of each board is a number in Roman numerals, denoting the order in which the panels were begun. The combination of densely-focused interior diptych (with colour spilling over its sides and staining the containing panel like a halo) and loosely decorative ground (clouds or flags or a zigzag pattern) is a sustaining one. These images seem to connect with ancient truths, as valid and as full of mystery as a Byzantine mosaic. This group of recent works are like votive offerings, made to fulfil Tilson’s determination to improve our relationships with ourselves, with others, above all with the society in which we live. Their sensuality and clarity, their evident optimism and assured grace are vibrant with hope. Like all good art, Joe Tilson’s pictures propose new strategies for living; new ways of looking; new energy for old ceremonies; and offer renewed understanding of the world around us, its past, present and potential future. Andrew Lambirth London: August-September 2004 |
Public Collections National Gallery of Australia, Canberra,
Australia.
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