art history as individualised recapitulation

 If all poetry is rebranding as the poet Luke Wright recently suggested, then perhaps all art history is individualised recapitulation, a misplaced narcissism of sorts: Art history as the internalised exemplification of one’s own history. This seems true of criticism at the very least… I’m going to roll with it. 

As with music, what moves one and makes one’s neck hairs stand on end retains a personal significance to be reckoned with later in words and reasoning. When Jo Wiley said in the BBC commentary for the 2007 Glastonbury festival that Brian Wilson’s performance was the first time she had actually felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand up, however, I was troubled. I experience this on a daily basis, and oftentimes with regards to something much less culturally significant than Brian Wilson’s presentation of his opus to a crowd of thousands. My enjoyment and appreciation of “the arts”, therefore, demands an overtly individualised response, frequently backed up by and similarly improved by the patterns of my own biography. 

And so it was that the exhibition of Sir Basil Spence’s architecture, currently on show at the recently re-jigged and re-opened Herbert Art Gallery in Coventry, tickled my nape. As a Coventrian born and bred and a Sussex graduate, my platonic ideals of English modernist architecture are informed largely by the buildings which form the backbone of his career, Coventry Cathedral and the University of Sussex campus, at the summit of which lies the root of my enthusiasm, one might be tempted to hyperbolise. Moreover, in these buildings referred to regularly as the ‘most personal’ of his achievements remains some of the most personal of my experiences of architecture; independently sanctuary like, and home manifest. 

Yet the exhibition was and is so much more than that in my reading of it. Firstly, a wonderful achievement for the city of Coventry which has found itself all but lacking in the cultural expression it deserves and needs for decades, and secondly a reminder of both the metaphoric and the actualised possibilities for reconstruction and rebranding that Coventry possesses. 

“Do you remember the good old days before the ghost town, 

We danced and sang and music played inna de boomtown”

sang the Specials in the eighties. Now, slowly, Coventry is rekindling its former glory. Similarly,  I am attempting to refigure my trajectory having found my designs interjected by misfortune. And as Coventry Cathedral’s construction was plagued by arguments during its design between the need for it to express the city’s loss and subsequent reconstruction as well as the country’s at large, so must I meet the demands of my own expectations and a wider world. 

Spence’s early promise and natural talent is apparent in the works which form the beginning of this exhibition: the early days. A skilled craftsman as well as artist, the curator’s propose his birth in India and all of the cultural lessons that presented to a young man as key in his development. More important from the work they display, however, appears the moment of modernism into which he was born, be it in his early designs for the Southern Motors Garage in Edinburgh imbued with all of the excitement of modern engineering which informed his contemporaries, his designs for the Festival of Britain in 1951 contained within promotion of the contemporary, and even in his brush work in which must be found an enthusiastic rendering of life through the eyes the modernist masters.

 It is here that his work must be placed, with all of the importance of artists who captured separately the energy, the fears, the speed, the size and the possibilities of twentieth century life. In Coventry Cathedral’s entrance screen by John Hutton, bridging the gap between the new and the old,