Christina J. Faraday on the Elizabethan penchant for writing messages on artworks and objects
only in his. The more you consider Blake’s multifarious collages, in two and three dimensions (Fig. 1), and incorporating everything from lead cowboys to cupboard doors, the more you realise how fundamental the principles of assembly and collage are to art in general.
With hindsight, a great many 19th-century paintings have a vague look of the Sgt. Pepper cover – and that’s no accident. It’s because they were, so to speak, painted collages: created by fitting together a mosaic from photographs and sketches. ‘Pre-Raphaelite paintings look like collage,’ Blake points out, ‘because they are very photographic, aren’t they?’ There is indeed a Pre-Raphaelite aspect to Blake’s career. In 1969, he left London for an old railway station in Somerset and became a founding member of the Brotherhood of Ruralists, a group of urban artists who retreated to the countryside and rejected the ‘new media’ of the ’60s and ’70s in favour of traditional skills such as painting. ‘We’d all come through the ’60s and survived. I’d never done any drugs so with me it wasn’t a matter of physical damage, but people were tired. It felt like the end of something that was going wrong, a party that had gone on too long.’ This was the era of The Good Life; and the Ruralists’ echo of the PreRaphaelite Brotherhood was doubtless conscious. Once again, Blake was both against the times and of the moment.
He’s stayed like that. It is true, for example, of his use of media. He has persisted with scissors, glue and paint, but also added 21st-century techniques. ‘I always used to say that you could only make a certain kind of magic in painting. There was no other way of doing it. You could juxtapose certain things that you couldn’t put together by any other method. Now you can. Now a computer does it very well and does exactly what I was trying to do then.’ So, like his old friend David Hockney, in works such as the The Butterfly Man series (see Cover) Blake has taken to digital media. ‘The process in making my recent collages is that I sourced the image that I want to be the background, the scene as it were, usually from old postcards, scanned it, blew it up to the size I wanted it to be, and printed it as an ink-jet.’ He continues: ‘So the background of the collages is a piece of paper with an ink-jet image, sitting at the top. Then I invent the ground, the actual earth. Then collage on top of that. In some of the old postcards you’ve already got a collage, you’ve got images put together. So in the finished work there’s a double element of collage.’
Indeed, the whole medium is double in a way. There are two collage traditions, and Blake belongs to both: the high-art line of Cubist papier collé and another mode, rooted in a popular Victorian pastime of sticking bits and pieces of cut-out imagery together. It is the latter strand to which Dadaist and Surrealist collages are connected, because as Blake puts it, for them the medium is a means of generating, ‘dreams, stories, and impossible situations’. Blake loves those. He relates with glee how, in his Marcel Duchamp’s World Tour series, ‘Marcel Duchamp meets Elvis Presley and the Spice Girls […] you could only tell that kind of non-possible story in art.’ This is of course a funny idea, as well as one that makes you ponder just what Elvis and Marcel might have had in common.
It’s the same with Blake’s habit of working on, and exhibiting unfinished pictures over long periods of time. It makes you reflect on art in general. True, other painters put things aside, then pick them up years later – though the 54 years of
Battle’s evolution must be a bit of an art-historical record. But Blake is also making a comment on the much-discussed subject of what it means to finish a picture. Blake isn’t usually thought of as a conceptual artist, but there are many ways to be ‘conceptual’, of course. The story of the Battle’s first showing, in a group exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in 1977, brings this out: ‘Everybody got a separate booth. I was between Michael Craig-Martin, who was showing the glass of water – “Is this an oak tree?” – and Barry Flanagan, who was showing his early sack pieces: incredibly inventive conceptual pieces. I thought, well I’ll try and fit in here. So I showed a group of paintings including Battle, then I added ten garments, hung in a row, from my collection of clothes: a pearly king’s suit, and I think an Indian robe. It was my attempt at conceptualism, but nobody noticed.’
That was typical of Blake: side by side with other more fashionable artists, keeping pace, parallel to but not quite in the mainstream. But, of course, it’s not true that no one has noticed. The more time goes on, the more notable his achievement seems. ‘At the moment,’ Blake says of
Battle, ‘I’m trying to finish things off generally.’ But he’s also carrying on, just as he has for the last seven decades, following his own idiosyncratic path and inviting us all along on his magical mystery tour.