BRITISH SCULPTURE: ‘A QUIET REVOLUTION’

“Lookin’ at this ‘ere exhibition makes me wish I could find a deja vu I ‘adn’t already seen,” said the imaginary Miss Liza Malaprop, who sells secondhand articles in Covent Garden.

She was speaking of “A Quiet Revolution: British Sculpture Since 1965,” visiting the Newport Harbor Art Museum through Oct. 4. It was organized by Graham Beal of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and Mary Jane Jacob, chief curator of Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art, while she was with the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.

“You ought to pay attention to that, you know,” observed Miss Malaprop. “It is a circumstance frawt wif symbolical signification. England is like San Francisco or Cheecago, an art center what’s not in the middle of anything. Sort of goes its own way.”

That’s true. Historically, England tends to make art that looks a little out of it, a bit tatty and literary. One is forever on the brink of deciding it just doesn’t quite count until you recall the number of its artists whose originality changed the face of art everywhere: Hogarth, Blake, Turner, Moore, Bacon. In the ‘60s, its Pop Art looked a bit too cozy, but the chances are it appeared before ours. In a day when the public popularity of art counts evermore, we already have David Hockney. Look around for a hero of figurative Expressionism and Lucien Freud was there the whole time.

“A Quiet Revolution” does us the favor of showcasing six sculptors, represented by enough work to give a decent idea of what they are up to. If its catalogue essays tend to be both windy and cramped, they do at least map out the terrain that cultivated these artists. Evidently art schools are important in England. Leading artists teach and the cyclical evolution of styles revolves on generational aesthetic riots where the young generation rebels against the master.

Thus, in the late ‘50s, the sculptor Anthony Caro threw down a gauntlet of Minimalism against the earthy metaphors of Henry Moore. Caro then made his revolution into something of an academic orthodoxy among the faculty at St. Martin’s School of Art, which provoked yet another counterrevolution among the students, producing the generation represented by this show.

They look about as rebellious as milk toast. Four could pass for old-fashioned assemblage artists, one might be inhabited by the ghost of Sir John Tenniel making cast bronze illustrations for Lewis Carroll and the sixth could be mistaken for a stonemason if he’d just use a little mortar.

“ ‘ere, Ducks. You know we like you Yanks but you always fink that we are exactly alike because we speak the same langwidge. But we are different, we are. More subtle and refined like. When we wants to be barbaric we are very civilized about it.”

I’ll say. If you had put this show on in San Francisco in 1959, it wouldn’t have raised an eyebrow.

“ ‘at’s right, mister novelty-nut. It wouldn’t have done. What does that mean?”

Oops, Post-Modernism. These guys have to know what they are doing. If they admit their language is essentially old-fashioned, they’re acknowledging that Modernism’s quest for originality is over and they are using its syntax to say something else. Assemblage is the street language of art. These artists are identifying with the common man. In a still class-conscious England, that may play a lot differently than it does here. They are like throwbacks to the beatniks or the British Angry Young Men. Some of the work is large, but all of it comes across as intimate and poetic.

Richard Deacon’s large pieces are like Minimalist sculpture, high on a hallucinatory drug. They wander around like crazed children’s jungle gyms. “Out of the House” looks like a guitar case made of linoleum and galvanized tin. It has run away from home and is sitting in the gutter with an erection. “The Eye Has It” is a large sperm-form with a gray tweed tail, about to be ingested by an industrial funnel that’s turning into a wooden flower.

“Deacon’s a wittle coy but I wike ‘im. I wike those naughty innuendoes.”

Tony Cragg’s work seems to be about going dotty in a bed-sitter and all the stuff you find in the alley out back. “Shell” is a suite of unpainted shelves united by three large cartoon artist’s palettes. The whole is covered with a layer of plastic, ground up to the consistency of coarse sand.

“Cragg’s a love. One of me best clients. Buys anything plastic off me and does all his own interior decor. I call him Tacky Tony.”

Right. He made a Union Jack out of a myriad of red and blue plastic bits of toys and broken utensils. These guys actually are different from classic assemblage artists, who permanently blended found objects into new images. These men use the randomness of process art. Everything stands in separate pieces that give work a flaky, ephemeral wistfulness. It reminds you of the punk kids in the spiky magenta Mohawks that still hang around Piccadilly Circus. They can’t wear enough studded leather to cover up their moppet vulnerability and their crying need to be noticed and loved.

“Come on. Bill Woodrow is no punker.”

No, he’s not. The work has the air of being made by a guy in anonymous chinos and windbreaker who is completely in the grip of hilarious visual ideas. “Hoover Breakdown” poses an old vacuum cleaner against a strew of progressively larger objects that are obviously going to wreck it. “Twin Tub With Chainsaw” has ingeniously fashioned a saw by cutting it out of the skin of the washing machine. Woodrow recalls the American comic conceptualist Robert Cumming or, for that matter, Ernie Kovacs. There was a Kovacs tribute on PBS the other night that made you wonder if any concept artist ever had the antic originality of that so-called television comedian.

Speaking of that, there’s a large dose of Monty Python in these artists, the same wacky cleverness and sense of hidden motives. The difference may just be in the stillness of the sculpture. It gives you more time to soak up the anxiety behind the entertainment. Woodrow’s “Stone Wall” is just a portal made of piled-up furniture with a stuffed-cloth antelope draped across the top. It just seems wonderfully absurd at first. Slowly a kind of tragedy seeps out of it, and there’s a hint of mourning over the craziness of a British aristocracy that could produce an artist like Sir Edwin Landseer.

Everybody gives human characteristics to animals and inanimate objects, but the British have a real knack for it. Landseer made animals violent and noble in a way they are not. These artists imbue much of their work with a wounded, puzzled humanity that feels close to the bone.

Barry Flanagan has to be one of the most universally perverse artists working.

“ ‘Ere now, you watch your mouth. Barry is one of my favorites. I love his crazy hares.”

Careful, Liza, I almost think I can write the rest of this review without you. Unless you have something particularly penetrating to say, you may get dropped from the script.

“I’ll give you penetrating. Barry Flanagan is a genius.”

A satiric genius, maybe. His “Baby Elephant” is amusing enough to engage a 5-year-old while at the same time it’s a great sendup of Henry Moore’s style of dinosaur abstraction. He takes a swipe at Jacques Lipchitz in “Soprano”--I wonder if any L.A. person will ever be able to go to the Music Center and look “Song of the Vowels” in the eye again. Flanagan is funny the way he turns Claes Oldenburg inside out by carving a soft pillow out of stone. You like him, but maybe the work is a little bitter.

David Nash must have relatives in Texas. His wood-branch pieces like “Three Dandy Scuttlers” recall country-funk artists like James Surls. You’re right, Liza, all these artists who see themselves working in the hinterlands value Bronx-cheer eccentricity, but it always localizes itself eventually. Nash’s “Three Clams on a Rock” gets us back to Lewis Carroll and British music hall comics. Remember the character in “Brideshead Revisited” who says that charm is the fatal flaw of British art? Somehow these guys have never recovered from the Picturesque.

At worst they are treacly. Richard Long at least has some sense of the Sublime. His path of slate slabs makes a road from Stonehenge to D. H. Lawrence. All right, Liza, so he is ponderous and stuffy. Liza?

Gone. Probably off looking for a deja vu she hasn’t already seen. Funny, I’d grown accustomed to her voice.