"Gill was such a bastard he didn't deserve for his
name to live after him, so I'd happily destroy what
makes it do so. So what if it's good art; there's
plenty more."
I'm with Ally most of the way on this one. I am
disturbed by people who want too readily to discount
the relevance of a person's life to an assesment of a
person's art. It bespeaks a failure to see the
material roots of all artistic production - broadly,
to see the fact that art doesn't fall from the sky,
it's produced out of specific socio-historical
contexts. Such a failure is for me exemplified in the
disastrous and false dichotomy of form and content
still wheeled around by many poets, and by the rather
more discredited doctrine of 'art for art's sake'.
Lokking at the life of Gill is all part of the
necessary exercise of putting art in context. That
doesn't necessarily mean we burn Gill's stuff, but
that we try to understand it. From understanding
repudiation may grow as logically as forgiveness (that
all sounds awfully pompous, dunnit?)
Cheers
Scott
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Date: Thu, 13 Jul 2000 17:26:55 +0100
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Subject: Eric Gill
From: "Ally Kerr" <[log in to unmask]>
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Dear Dave Lovely (is that a real name or is it
impolite to ask?)
Of course I'd rather "destroy the real man", be it
Hitler or Gill, than an artefact, but they're both
dead so I'll settle for what I can get. I admit I'm a
reader, not an author, which is maybe why I don't
think all books and works of art are holy and should
be exempt from destruction. The entire oeuvre of
Barbara Cartland, for example, was pure waste of
timber and should be pulped and recycled. Gill was
such a bastard he didn't deserve for his name to live
after him, so I'd happily destroy what makes it do so.
So what if it's good art; there's plenty more.
Ally Kerr
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"Why is it not possible for me to doubt that I have never been on the moon? And how
could I try to doubt it? First and foremost, the supposition that perhaps I have
been there would strike me as idle. Nothing would follow from it, nothing be
explained by it. It would not tie in with anything in my life... Philosophical
problems occur when language goes on holiday. We must not separate ideas from life,
we must not be misled by the appearances of sentences: we must investigate the
application of words in individual language-games" - Ludwig Wittgenstein
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