Trafalgar Square and Grosvenor Square, watching the dreamers in Hyde Park give flowers to policemen, or suffering incomprehensible harangues on the Dialectics of Liberation in the Roundhouse, I frequently found myself caught up in the art-world’s own little demonstrations . When the Conservative government was proposing to force the public galleries and museums to charge for entrance, a protest campaign was organized by a couple we knew who lived in a pop-art style flat, every surface densely covered in a collage of heterogeneous images, over the vegetable market in Camden.They had hired a double-decker bus to tour the capital and advertise the cause, but before they had finished pop-arting the bus their spies tipped them off that Lord Eccles, the Minister for Art, was entertaining Princess Margaret to lunch at the Tate Gallery. Pamela phoned me, I dashed down to Camden where I found her hastily sticking shiny stars all over the interior of the bus, and with a few others we jumped in and careered off to confront the villain ; one or two hopeful passengers hopped on at traffic lights and found themselves being whirled along for free, not necessarily to where they wanted to go. A number of reporters were staking out the Tate when we arrived and were hopeful that we would cause a row; a glamorous woman journalist well known at that period suddenly turned the rays of her charm on me – in fact I was tempted to tell her that the pupils of her eyes were like black saccharine tablets – but lost interest when it became clear I was not going to throw myself under the Princess’s hooves. In the event the Minister emerged alone, a stately figure with the glow of a freshly cooked ham. We rushed up and informed him of our undying hostility to entrance fees and everything else he stood for; he remarked loftily that he had been collecting art before we were born, and departed unmoved and unedified.
Another rally, in the name of what cause I cannot now remember, also took place at the Tate Gallery. When I arrived a small knot of people in the windswept portico were trying to hold a discussion, the import of which was drowned by traffic noise. After a while I piped up with the suggestion that we might ask the Gallery to give us a room. They all turned round to see this new Robespierre suddenly arisen in their ranks. ‘Great idea!’ they said; ‘You go and ask them!’ So I marched in and politely put our request to the girl at the reception desk, and after a few minutesof disconcerted trotting to and fro behind the scenes a conciliatory , smiling, functionary appeared and led us to a distant and unfrequented gallery, where we sat on the floor for an hour or two and debated the perils of being ‘absorbed by the System’.
Perhaps it was as an outcome of this occasion that a better-attended and officially tolerated meeting later took place in a conference room at the Tate. Gustav Metzger, a small, wizened and fragile-looking man with a shy little voice and, as I learned later on, an ego of iron, was among the speakers. (Gustav had fled to Britain from Hitler’s Germany, found refuge as a gardener on the Harewood Estate in Yorkshire, and then in London attracted a degree of notice among the avant-garde for his ‘auto-destructive art’.) His proposal for advancing our cause was that we should demand that the Tate exhibit a work by Gustav Metzger; I forget its nature but it involved huge piles of old newspapers he had accumulated over many years. Nobody was very interested in this suggestion and it did not come to a vote before we broke off for lunch. We drifted back from the cafeteria rather at our leisure; only four or five people were in the conference room when I came in, and Gustav, with the committee skills of a Lenin, was prevailing upon this ‘quorum’ to vote through his proposal. I was delegated to write to the Tate about it, and, dragged along by the democratic imperative, agreed to do so and actually had one or two
Another rally, in the name of what cause I cannot now remember, also took place at the Tate Gallery. When I arrived a small knot of people in the windswept portico were trying to hold a discussion, the import of which was drowned by traffic noise. After a while I piped up with the suggestion that we might ask the Gallery to give us a room. They all turned round to see this new Robespierre suddenly arisen in their ranks. ‘Great idea!’ they said; ‘You go and ask them!’ So I marched in and politely put our request to the girl at the reception desk, and after a few minutesof disconcerted trotting to and fro behind the scenes a conciliatory , smiling, functionary appeared and led us to a distant and unfrequented gallery, where we sat on the floor for an hour or two and debated the perils of being ‘absorbed by the System’.
Perhaps it was as an outcome of this occasion that a better-attended and officially tolerated meeting later took place in a conference room at the Tate. Gustav Metzger, a small, wizened and fragile-looking man with a shy little voice and, as I learned later on, an ego of iron, was among the speakers. (Gustav had fled to Britain from Hitler’s Germany, found refuge as a gardener on the Harewood Estate in Yorkshire, and then in London attracted a degree of notice among the avant-garde for his ‘auto-destructive art’.) His proposal for advancing our cause was that we should demand that the Tate exhibit a work by Gustav Metzger; I forget its nature but it involved huge piles of old newspapers he had accumulated over many years. Nobody was very interested in this suggestion and it did not come to a vote before we broke off for lunch. We drifted back from the cafeteria rather at our leisure; only four or five people were in the conference room when I came in, and Gustav, with the committee skills of a Lenin, was prevailing upon this ‘quorum’ to vote through his proposal. I was delegated to write to the Tate about it, and, dragged along by the democratic imperative, agreed to do so and actually had one or two
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