Bruce Robbins

‘Beyond the Pale’. by Bruce Robbins and Jo Baer, Real Life Magazine, NY, Published Summer, p.16-17

Jo Baer and Bruce Robbins started working together in

1978. Before this (in 1975 and 1976 respectively) they had

changed the formal content of the work that they were

previously associated with (Minimalism from the early Sixties

in Baer’s case, Conceptualism from the late Sixties in

Robbins’). In the summer of 1982, they moved from Ireland,

where they had been working in collaboration for four years, to

London, where they are at present continuing to work. The

move from comparative rural isolation to an urban setting

afforded the opportunity for questions on their work,

reasons for changing, the nature of collaboration and thoughts

on living in Ireland. The following remarks were in answer to

such questions.

Partial figures (being partial to parts of figures) abound.

Figures that occur as part swift and part powerful haunch,

turning haunch and turning hand, hung in flight, swimming

fur; figures that occur as part twisted iron, coiled skin, cut

wood; figures that arise as arched female of the night, the

bending dragon-lady of the day; that are as diagrams from

carved stone or curved sky. The objects are useful and

unmediated. The animals are familiar and unfamiliar. The

women bridge continuity. Drawings gather these into coherence, the space where the winds meet.

The winds meet in a classical place where structure is of

more interest than style, where there is stillness and

contemplation is beyond contempt. The common ground… a

particular use of space, a space which is not an illusionistic

paint-space but alludes to a painted space, not a pictured space

nor a fantastic (dream or nightmare) space nor a fractured

(cubist) space. This is established by or combined with

particular colour; of light and less light, of transparent seas,

one stained light and delicate in appearance, but hard and

bruised in application, the other, a hard, glazed light, dark and

sombre in appearance but applied with a gentle and bleeding

hand.

A severed hand… an island is a good place from which to

judge distance: how far the American supermarket? How near

the Continental graveyard? How close is Britannia’s empire?

Moreover, how far popular expression, how near the national-

istic expression of indulgence, how close the Philistine? An

island where far off is overheard the cries of the wounded, the

grunts of that mating of the individual to the nation, the lonely

sighs of the self-abuser. On this island the severed hand saw

and heard all of this yet could move with impunity, and from

this hand falls the spawn of internal dialogues, external

debates and the conversation between created objects, get

which are now abroad.

Other generations: the notated eidolon from afar is not

prohibited from being contemporary unless it is stolen as an

antique. And sentimental time is not important but time to

look at the trees and to watch the fire is. Connected with time

is a feel for scale and scale is framing which is relational. Birth

and death are always the same, never history despite being

recorded, always framing, sometimes ostentatious, sometimes

hidden…as subject matter gender is a more precise measure

than sexuality. Matriarchy and patriarchy determine culture

more than fucking ever did.

Salmon leaps or Utopian plunge? Steeplechasing from point

to point: from razor cut to smudge, open to closed and close to

open, titanium to mars, opaque intellect into sensual clarity,

dragon’s teeth fabeled suspention to Cadmus’s sowing the dragons teeth.

These are workaday oppositions, take off and landing points from which to make saltatory leaps lacking illusions of continuity. Alternatively, the idealistic plunge replete with diving heroes: romanticism projects a state with

the unfortunate belief that it can break free from its own

mortal place. And equally all at sea is the materialism that has

forgotten its birthright: its heritage of depth in favour of either

the flotsam of its objects or the jetsam of its ideas.

On offer, classicism…always a prisoner of a state, unfor-

runate, but none the less true. Turn and turn again, all that’s

left is to turn under by fooling with the footing.

Beneath the feet of a statue is not only a pedestal but the

notion of a real woman inside the cast. In objects more

contemporary than statues of the goddess there is still thought

to be the nonfictional structure of the world enclosed by or

encased in the cube, square and circle. Most recently, it is

thought that using identifiable consumer objects and images

(whether consumed or consummated) maintains a reality

borrowed from those represented goods. This belief in

verisimilitude is inherent in literal representation. It is a use of

language which is always nonfigurative and a use of figures

that are never used figuratively. Things and events in

themselves cannot be repossessed; they can only be alluded to

for art is a deception, not an illusion, a pleasure and not a

purchase. And what better way of dealing with deception than

by using that which is illusion…  Painting, the many-husbanded Queen.

In 1978 a new and an old world accent repaired to the third

world to learn songs of The Internationale in a Pan-Atlantic

dialect; that is, the raven and the panther entered into

intercourse and interchanged. Shifts of figure and space

spinning between equivalence and correspondence are bound

to be a proper subject for painting.

London, 1982

R E A L  LIFE  17