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The Consuming Image - by Ralph Rumney
Art criticism is a minefield. Art history is boring to those who are not devotees. In essence one can only say "I know what I like", attempt to explain why, and then situate this subjective opinion in a system of cultural and antropological references which may reassure those readers and gallery-goers (and purchasers) who are short on moral fibre.
William Longden was born in 1952 and from the age of four he claims to have become an artist. At any rate he appears to have been well supplied with materials from an early age and his whole education seems to have been art oriented: private tuition with a 'beatnik' (sic), Manchester High School of Art, Bristol College of Art, Manchester College of Art, Wolverhampton College of Art, Canterbury College of Art, Olaria Ceramique, Portugal, Goldsmiths' College and London University! With occasional pauses the process seems to have gone on for twenty-four years. In my experience few people could have survived so much art education intact. Yet its effect on Will Longden is almost imperceptible. Like Alfred Wallis in St.Ives, the tutors and artists he met seem to have done him little, if any, permanent damage. (I met him in Canterbury). It is possible to see in his work affinities with artists and tendencies which have been current during the present century, but in conversation he appears genuinely unaware of them. I doubt if he has read Huizinga's Homo Ludens, yet he embodies in full its meaning for the artist. He seems to have preserved intact the qualities that made him decide he was an artist at the age of four. I suspect that Dubuffet would have welcomed his work into the 'Art Brut' collection on the same terms as art by lunatics and children, the Facteur Cheval, Pic-Assiette and the many child-like but extraordinary artists to whom he has drawn our attention. The distinction is that the ludic and scholastic nature of Longden's work is not unsophisticated. He is part of a tradition including Arman, Paolozzi, César, Tinguely, Spoerri and many others including most of the rest of the French Nouveaux Réalistes, whom, I suspect will one day be seen to be more important than Pop-Art. (...) Running through Longden's work is this element of subversion (and an artist is not an artist if he is not a subversive); there is the ludic element (and play is not a play if it is not subversive); and a strand which I can only describe as occult. This causes me some trouble as I like to think of myself as a rationalist; I have however read widely in alchemic texts and I am aware of the theory of resonances, now updated by someone I regard as charlatan, to be called morphic resonance. If there are Ley lines of the soul, Longden is mapping them. Ralph Rumney 1989 |
