Sorcha Dallas

The exhibition The Dark Monarch: Magic & Modernity in British Art at Tate St Ives is an ambitious show both for its content and scope of some 160 works. It is a refreshing curatorial attempt to redress the over-emphasised view of St Ives and West Penwith as a colourful location with special qualities of light – as an ideal holiday destination. Furthermore, it is a refreshing attempt to examine local and British modernism not as exclusively rational artistic expression but in its darker aspects. And yet the title, ‘The Dark Monarch’, taken from Sven Berlin’s infamous 1962 book, brings an anticipation that the exhibition would be of his work, an expectation that is frustrated from the moment one enters Heron Hell. There the visitor is faced with a ‘unicorn’, its horn and hooves gilded, encased in a formaldehyde bath – the signature ‘framing’ of Damien Hirst. While Sven Berlin belonged to the group that defined itself as the ‘Moderns’ during the 1940s in Carbis Bay and St Ives, Hirst comes from the YBA stable, a London-based, urban postmodern group.

What about redressing the dominant narrative, one might ask? Sven Berlin is the least exhibited significant St Ives artist and sadly, despite appropriating his title, only ten of his works are included in the exhibition.

With its mix of the popular and famous, the show looks less like a redressing of narratives and more like indecision. The exhibition claims to be about a very wide range of metaphysical expressions of myths, cults and landscape.

The dramatic contrast between Patrick Heron’s stained glass window and the morbidity of Hirst’s unicorn in ‘The Child’s Dream’ [2008], epitomizes the whole exhibition. Postmodern mythic morbidity is juxtaposed with decorative optimism. Simon Periton’s black wall painting in the stairwell is equally dramatic. In flat, stark monochrome he combines his depiction of natural forms found in English fairy tales with urban futuristic details which give the impression of creeping overgrowth viciously destroying the wall. Painted shapes end in thin, sharp extremities, looking like deep cracks in the wall, creating a Gothic mood.

These two works act as an introduction to an exhibition of two unequal parts: landscape painting in Gallery One, which is mostly of figurative modernism; and the rest of the galleries where there are works covering all kinds of arcane practices and appropriations of, mainly, contemporary postmodern artists, with a few modernist works serving as points of reference.

Without reading the rhetoric justification for the works selected for the show and their intended themes, the curatorial intention might be missed. For instance, why is the landscape room given the title ‘Rocks and Stones’? Possibly in order to merge representations of prehistoric sites with the melancholic zeitgeist of the Neo-Romantic art of the 1930s and 1940s. Does prehistory fall into the category of the arcane or ‘modernity’? Gallery One includes the works of St Ives artist Peter Lanyon, who had a passionate, insider notion of the lands, its antiquity, its primordial power. During the 1940s Lanyon wrote embittered letters to the local press bemoaning his wartime fight against fascism only to return and find his hometown colonized. Lanyon’s indigenous sentiments were exquisitely combined with probably the most astute understanding of modernism. His ‘Construction for ‘Lost Mine’’ [1959], is one of many of his works about the harsh and tragic reality of Cornish lives lost in mining disasters. His is a humanist modernism of proud indigenous identity. His ‘local knowledge’ compared with that of various outsider-artists is list in hanging his work as undifferentiated, articulated as belonging to the ‘hold-all’ category of Neo-Romanticism. In effect, individual differences of identity, intentionally and period-specificity are glossed over by the attempt to conjoin artists as diverse as Lanyon, Sutherland, Wynter and Weschke. Both Wynter and Weschke came to Cornwall seeking refuge after the Second World War but had very different experiences – Wynter was British and Weschke, German.

An interesting relationship of degrees relationship of degrees of ‘othering’ emerges as inintended sub-text. Local knowledge is pitched against British Modernism; while British Modernism is presented without reference or connection to European Modernism. For instance, ‘Landscape with Watery Moon’, [1946] by Bryan Wynter recalls Max Ernst in style and theme, of the aftermath of wars as well as in the depiction of thing observed while in a state of hallucination. In depictions of landscape, modernity merges with modernism, and nationalism with culture.

Work exhibited in the rest of the galleries are related to magic, occult, and all things arcane, mainly by current artists with some modernists functioning as points of reference. Adam Chodzko enjoys the greatest number of works (20 in total) despite his recent extensive show here. Ithell Colquhoun, an exquisite modernist artist, is a most apt representative for her artistic and personal commitment to occult. Both her watercolours and library are highpoints of the exhibition. Colquhoun’s work transgresses divisions of inanimate and animate matters, and notions of gender wither as differentiated or as hermaphrodites are repeated explore in her art. But gender as a theme is ignored in the exhibition.

Linder’s commissioned live performance of ‘Your Actions are my Dreams’ (curated by Martin Clark) on the 31st October, offered an alternative to the imported but popular Halloween rituals. Combining a revival of druidic ritual with contemporary performance, it contained both mythic and vernal elements in sound, dance and costume. It was a feminist voice and as such included the whole community who actively claimed the space of the space of the town, the museum and the beach. It merged the old with the new, through choreography and electronic music especially composed for the event.

With the absence of many St Ives Modernist artists in the sections of arcane and ‘magic’ art, the true scope of their interests in various sets of belief remains unexplored. Some of the absences include Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth as followers of Christian Science; of Gabo and his deep belief in telepathy; of Mark Tobey and Bernard Leach and their Bahai following; of Allan Davie and his imaging of occult; of the Cornish born Margo Mackelberghe, who paints both the drama and mystery of the moors as well as the tragic myth of Atlanta; and of Louise McClary’s numerous angels and powerful abstractions.

As for Sven Belrin, the exhibition is a missed opportunity to considr his art and writing, and what indeed was and could be meant by his so haunting title ‘The Dark Monarch’. True, there were many disclaimers in print and orally, but they do not resolve the issue of misrepresentation.

Among other unintended themes to emerge were several sets of ‘Otherings’ relating to nationalism, gender and commitments to faith outside that of institutional monotheism. In terms of display there is the misinformed way of hanging without differentiating works by insiders versus outsiders – either of identities or of practitioners; local versus incomers; or practitioners of occult versus artists for whom the occult is a signifier of curiosity and appropriation.

The exhibition intends to show “…the influence of folklore, mysticism, mythology and occult on (sic) the last 100 years of British art. With a focus in the landscape and legends of the British isles, the exhibition considers the development of Modernism, Surrealism, and Neo-Romanticism in the UK and the reappearance of romantic and arcane references in contemporary art practice.” Forget about curatorial intentions; go and look at the art.