Bronzes And Drawings
by Gary Watson

Lisson Gallery, London 1985

Edward Allington's work raises questions about some of our society's most    fundamental presuppositions. Although at times, however, certain criticisms are implied, the tone is never didactic: rather it is tentative, subjective and open-ended.
The presence of some form of critical intention is most readily discernible in the pieces for which Allington is probably so far best known, the cornucopias of 1982-4, in which delicious-looking fruits appear to flow from gilded shells in cascades of plenty. Behind the superficial attractiveness of these images, it is neither hard nor unreasonable to see an ironic comment on consumerism - not least in the fact that the fruits, which were bought rather than made by Allington, are plastic and hence both inedible and sterile. But two things soon become clear: firstly, that consumerism is being treated not as an isolated phenomenon but in relation to a wide network of cultural factors; and secondly, that insofar as it is being criticized, this is not from any pre-conceived moralistic standpoint, whether in the guise of simple anti-capitalism or anti-materialism. Something is being offered which is much deeper than social satire and more sophisticated than sermonizing.

Both capitalism and materialism need to be understood in the whole context of European history starting with ancient Greece . Allington's interest in ancient Greek culture began when he was still a child, and references to it have occurred frequently in his work. In particular he became interested in Plato, about whom however his feelings are very ambivalent. His Ideal Standard Forms of 1980, which played with the idea of giving tangible material form to certain simple geometrical shapes which he felt were dominant in his own mind at that time, implied an evident reference to the Platonic-solids. Ever since, a major element both in his sculpture and his drawings - two activities which he sees as of equal importance - has been a sort of teasing meditation on the impossibility of any absolute standards of what is 'true', 'authentic' or 'real'. In many of his sculptures, this has been effected partly through the extremity of his juxtapositions of kitsch with high classical allusions, and of trompe-l'oeil with obvious artifice. If all art is artifice anyway, how is the situation altered by the inclusion of (real?) plastic fake grapes? What it means to call something 'fake' is endlessly called into question. His drawings have tended to be more reserved; but the shapes in these too began with the 'ideal standard forms', and here the uncertainty of their reality-status is increased both by the fact that they mostly hover in space (this is a motif which has occurred in some of the sculptures too) and that their shadows, which are on the floor, are endowed with a partly independent life of their own and are arguably as real, if not more so, than the hovering 'solids'.
Intellectually stimulating as these ontological considerations might be in themselves, however, they would ultimately be of little more than academic interest if they were not linked with issues of more vital significance for how life is actually experienced and lived.
Some criticism of Allington's work has concentrated on the direct link between, on the one hand, his ontological concern with reality versus counterfeit and, on the other, his evident interest in modern technological society's vastly increased ability to re-produce and to re-cycle objects, images and information. But while the very fact that society has this ability is extremely important, to dwell on it alone, to the exclusion of any consideration of the content of what is being re-produced and re-cycled, is still to remain on an essentially formal plane of interpretation. Allington's recognition of society's ability is not really where his contribution to an understanding of the invisible sub currents of modern culture cuts deepest. To see where it does, we must return to Plato.
Allington charges Plato, and the kind of thinking which he represents, with seeking to extirpate a whole side of human experience which, as Allington believes, needs to be recognized and understood: behind ontological absolutism he finds ethical rectitude. As he said in an interview with Stuart Morgan on the occasion of an exhibition of his work to which he gave the richly resonant title "In Pursuit of Savage Luxury":
My strongest objection to Plato is that he was always trying to bury ... the cult of Dionysus ... Reading about it or gazing at dislocated fragments in museums, we can catch a glimpse of another way of living which was orgiastic and physical, even almost bestial. What we need now is a new understanding of what was lost then.(1)
The attempt to bury the Dionysian spirit was of course successful, at least in the sense that the forces to which it gave expression have been banished into the unconscious. Whether this would have taken place in any case can only be speculation, but historically the victory of this repression in Europe is due principally to the victory of the Christian Church, the influence on whose doctrines of Platonic idealism is generally agreed to be great. But the collapse of Christian theology has not brought with it a revival of due recognition being given to the Dionysian. On the contrary, the modern cult of technological progress, in both its capitalist and Marxist forms, has definite roots in Christian, and specifically Protestant, ethics. A case could even be made out for seeing some of the most puritanical and flesh-denying aspects of Protestantism as among the major, obviously unconscious, determinants of current political thinking, from all points of the conventional political spectrum.