Glyn Thompson’s lectures

Back on the subject of complementary studies.

Derek’s complementary studies text brings to mind perhaps one of the most vital contributions to what went on during the mid 1970s and on through the 80s; Glyn’s lectures. Glyn was a force to be reckoned with and still is. One of those forceful intellectuals who are able to compress vast amounts of information into a short sentence and cross reference all the threads back through history and into the future. Sometimes on Foundation back in the days before we had to put things down on paper there were rumblings amongst the studio floor staff that art history should be taught on the studio floor and that Glyn wasn’t playing the game. The game as I read it then was that art history was, when it was on the studio floor, art appreciation, and only art history in the lecture theatre. However as nobody really knew what was going on in the lecture theatre, (the studio floor staff would rarely go to lectures) I decided I would sit in on some of Glyn’s lectures and get a flavour of what he was doing. I already had a good inkling of this, because my tutorial group were always puzzled but fascinated by his lecture programme and when I had tried to unravel this with them realised that these lectures were spreading all over history and culture, threads and directions being found that for many students were obscure, difficult and arcane but also weird and wonderful.

The first thing about the lectures that hit you was their pace. Glyn would deliver short sharp sound-bites with a rapid fire patter. He used a stack of old fashioned filing cards to keep track of where he was going and just let rip. Using two projectors, side by side, Glyn would engage with images colliding and interrogating each other. The nearest I could give as an example would be Robert Smithson’s work. If we take Smithson’s collage ‘St. John in the Desert’ whereby an old engraving of St John is surrounded by collages of electrical diagrams, force-fields and other technical readouts from science manuals and place it next to his essay on Robert Morris and think of these two visual/written texts flowing between each other, you can get a general idea of how Glyn worked.

Smithson was someone I could emulate with and I had been interested in his work when I was at college. This is a short extract from Smithson’s essay on Morris.

Descartes' cosmology is brought to a standstill. Movement in Morris's work is engulfed by many types of stillness: delayed action, inadequate energy, general slowness, an all over sluggishness. The ready-made are, in fact, puns on the Bergsonian concept of "creative evolution" with its idea of "ready made categories." Says Bergson. "The history of philosophy is there, however, and shows us the eternal conflict of systems, the impossibility of satisfactorily getting the real into the ready-made garments of our ready-made concepts, the necessity of making to measure." But it is just such an "impossibility" that appeals to Duchamp and Morris. With this in mind, Morris's monstrous "ideal" structures are inconsequential or uncertain ready-mades, which are definitely outside of Bergson's concept of creative evolution. If anything, they are uncreative in the manner
of the 16th-centuary alchemist-philosopher-artist. C.G. Jung's writing on "The Materia Prima" offers many clues in this direction. Alchemy, it seems, is a concrete way of dealing with sameness. In this context, Duchamp and Morris may be seen as artificers of the uncreative or decreators of the Real. They are like the 16th-century artist Parmigianino, who "gave up painting to become an alchemist." This might help us to understand both Judd's and Morris's interest in geology. It is also well to remember that Parmigianino and Duchamp both painted "Virgins," when they did paint. Sydney Freedberg observed in the work of Parmigianino, if not in fact, at least in idea.

There was a sort of ‘hippy’ feeling to all this, a feeling I recognised. That desire for everything to be joined up, for an invisible universe that lay behind this everyday world to be revealed in all its complex glory. I don’t think people going into education today have this same yearning, or perhaps I’m just getting old. We move in Smithson’s essay from Duchamp (always there waiting in the wings), through Descartes, touching on Jung and use a late Renaissance painter as a touchstone into alchemy. Smithson goes on to examine the nature of thermodynamics and then reflect on the structure of time. Glyn’s lectures were similar collages of connection. On the left hand screen might be Chartres and its stone labyrinth inlaid into the floor, on the right Duchamp’s chocolate grinder, then a quick flick to Courbet and back again to Carnac via the Albigensian heresy. Mondrian’s connections to Theosophy might be revealed to be a reinvented form of spiritualism and a close second cousin to Navajo sand-painting. Times and cultures would collide, patterns revealed and broken, ideas raised up as truths only to be brought down again as other disciplines took stage and new readings emerged. An interest in puns and word play driven by Glyn acting as a type of Duchampian prankster circulated and played itself out as all was revealed as a cosmic confidence trick, orchestrated by Glyn and his filing cards. It was all in there somewhere and as a student you were either totally lost and mystified or fascinated and eager for more.

The problem was no one was making the connections; well very rarely. At times Glyn would be working alongside everyone else, I remember him making complex drawing frames based on Duchamp’s work, stringing out the changes in viewing point as vanishing points moved further and further away from the centre of vision. This was very close to Patrick’s floorboard drawings, in fact a merging between the two was achieved on at least one occasion. Sheila Parsons, a mature student who went to Cardiff attempting to construct a synthesis between the two if I remember rightly.

Eventually Glyn is pushed out by the new principal Edmund Wigan. As the secretary of the union Glyn became persona non grata and stood in the way of low pay and new contracts. He had himself become a Jungian archetype, in effect Wigan’s ‘shadow’ the thing he didn’t want to face, Glyn represented the complex web of interconnectedness that we all believed was the true wyrd of art education. Glyn’s interest in casting a cup and ring stone on the moors at Baildon (see More thoughts from Derek, 3^rd Dec) typical of that merging of history with geology with myth with art that made it all so interesting and which was going to be pulled asunder by the arrival of learning outcomes, national qualifications, Wigan and health and safety.