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Laing has never been able to resist a challenge.
Versatility opens the way to ingenuity and Laing has both qualities
in spades. When I later visited him at Kinkell Castle, the medieval
home in Scotland he painstakingly restored in the mid-1970s, his
sculptures had already grown substantially. Earlier, the major piece
'Division' grew until it appeared on site at Cleish, near Edinburgh
- all five metres wide of it. It began at Kinkell as a superb shade
of yellow; wild Michaelmas Daisies then sprang up just beside it.
It seemed like a gesture from nature.
Now Gerald Laing's exhibition in Edinburgh focuses
in part on the Iraq war. Laing is not currently an official war
artist - although Iraq has produced a few - but he should be. His
perceptive, considered range of scepticism merges with his sense
of contrasting colour to pick at the raw nerves that most artists
half his age have felt unable to expose.
'Are we all Republicans now? Aw Shucks', parodies
Dubya dramatically. Another large painting, 'Only one of them uses
Colgate', mocks effectively the confrontation of Western consumerist
dreams set against Iraqi debasement. The corruption and moral collapse
of the great American dream as a result of current policies indicates
how insidious and continuous has been our descent into sloth. Laing's
own brand, blending cynical critique with a formal clarity of image
and line, stands out for the courage of his longheld convictions.
As Christopher Finch wrote in his 1968 appraisal:
Pop Art: Object and Image, (Studio Vista/Dutton)
Gerald Laing, in his pictures of skydivers, dragsters
and pin-up girls, simulated the tonal structure of newsprint photographs
- building up each image from a mass of hand painted monochrome
dots. This can, in fact, be seen as a variation on the exploitation
or exploration of the tensions set up between the mechanically
reproduced image and the manual gesture which we have already
seen in Rauschenberg and Hamilton.
In Edinburgh, where Laing still exhibits from some
kind of historical loyalty, the still prevalent apathy and ennui
of the struggling modern gallery world reflects a reluctant citizenry
where little account can be taken of the cruel world outside.
Laing's name was made some 40 years ago. In this
year's Tate Britain 'Sixties' show his painting, 'Wedding Jump'
stood resplendent among his contemporaries. The technical mastery
of his technique, using a pointillist system of black painted dots,
survives today as in 'L'apres midi d'un Faune', again
a searing critique of Iraqi developments, as in the haunting imagery
of the defiant couple in 'American Gothic'. To paint like this,
you have to know and have loved America.
In the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art there
is good reason now to include one of the larger Gerald Laing master
paintings, so that we do not forget. If Alan Davie could be incorporated
here, and allowed to epitomise the wider contemporary world, then
so too could Gerald Laing. Apart from his paintings, his other life
working commemorative figure sculptures has long fulfilled the needs
of a niche market for such public and private commemorations. In
that life, Laing now, at 67, seems to have reached a point of rare
fulfilment.
As in all things touched by Laing's meticulous craftsmanship,
the restoration and conversion of his northern fastness at Kinkell,
on the Black Isle, and its subsequent documentation by him in a
book, tells one much about Laing's individual skilll in making
and mending. In the 1970s Kinkell had been a derelict shell. But
by 1980 it gleamed like a gem, overlooking the Cromarty Firth, and
is now an 'A' Listed Building. One is reminded of a recent appraisal
of Norman Foster's St Mary Axe building in the City of London (The
Gherkin) winner of the 2004 Stirling Prize: the reviewer rightly
pointed out that today's art lies increasingly in the work
of architects, not of artists. Not for nothing was the sculptor
Antony Gormley on the jury. Likewise Kinkell remains today, another
life of Laing, and is now the home of his own Charitable Trust where
he applies for the benefit of students those carefully honed skills
grown over many lives.
Michael Spens
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