One day in 1959, the Minimalist sculptor Carl Andre was putting the finishing touches to an abstract sculpture in wood. The work, entitled ‘Last Ladder’, was carved on only one side. When he had finished, Andre’s friend the painter Frank Stella walked in, ran his hand down the smooth reverse side and remarked, ‘You know, Carl, that’s sculpture too.’
For Andre it was a eureka moment. In a flash, he realised that he did not need to carve his sculptures at all. The materials themselves, he suddenly saw, were cutting into space. From then on his sculpture has consisted of materials such as metal plates and firebricks, piled or laid on the floor. Thus began one of the most celebrated careers in contemporary art — or infamous ones, if you are not an admirer of Andre’s ‘Equivalent VIII’, otherwise known as the ‘Tate bricks’ and for a while in the 1970s the most vilified piece of avant-gardism in the world.
It was many years later that Andre happened to be at a dinner party at which Stella was also a guest, and began to describe this hugely important moment of creative illumination. Then he noticed that his friend was struggling to contain hysterical laughter. So, a little annoyed, he challenged him: didn’t it happen just like this?
‘Carl,’ Stella replied, ‘it happened just the way you describe, but you still don’t understand. What I meant was sculpture is not like painting: you have do it on both sides.’ So, Andre concluded — with satisfaction — when he told me all this that his life’s work was based on a misapprehension.
Doubtless he isn’t alone in that. Sheer muddle is an underestimated element in human affairs (as Kingsley Amis observed, unless I’ve misremembered that). Nor is it necessarily an entirely negative factor. Many people have a tremendous aptitude for getting hold of the wrong end of the stick; I speak as someone who is scarcely able to see a sign reading ‘This way please’ without instinctively turning in the other direction. Often, of course, the consequences of getting it wrong are bad, but not always.
A great deal of art history is based, fruitfully, on creative misunderstanding. Take Neoclassicism, that style in sculpture and architecture that so depended on snow-white stone: a total misconception, in so far as it was supposed to be a return to the Athens of Pericles. Antiquity, of course, was gaudily colourful — despite efforts to scrub them into monochrome purity, traces of pigment can be detected even on the Elgin marbles.
‘I am too old,’ the great art historian Erwin Panofsky wrote in 1957 (he was then 65), ‘not to know that error is just as important a factor in history — and scholarship — as truth.’ And he wasn’t wrong there. It is easy to multiply examples. Picasso had not the slightest notion of the meaning the tribal sculptures in the Musée du Trocadéro had for the people who made them, but that doesn’t make ‘Les Demoiselles d’Avignon’ — with its savage, mask-like faces — a bad painting.
Similarly, Gauguin scarcely painted the real life of the South Pacific, despite living there on and off for over a decade. From the moment Europeans encountered Polynesia, they decided — no doubt wrongly — that it was paradise.
Gauguin set out for the South Seas in 1891, with his head full of just such misleading notions derived from a romanticised travelogue by Pierre Loti. Instead of paradise, he encountered a sleazy French colony in which much indigenous art and culture had been expunged by missionaries, and the nakedness of Eden replaced by respectable attire. However, on the whole he didn’t paint what he saw, but what he had set out to find. So his pictures corresponded to the world-view of a semi-lapsed Catholic of increasingly dissolute habits.
However, the results of Gauguin’s distortion of the true nature of 19th-century Polynesian life were fruitful: younger artists in Europe were inspired by the paintings he sent back, with their intense colours and simplified lines. They went into the creative mix of Expressionism, for example, in which early 20th-century Germans presented themselves as ‘primitive’ beings and often naked, much as Gauguin had misrepresented the Tahitians.
Misinterpretation is a major but seldom credited force in cultural history. Thus the Romantics were seriously off-beam about the Middle Ages. The average citizen of the Gothic era was probably not, as the Pre-Raphaelites supposed, lovelorn, chivalrous and inclined palely to loiter. Those Victorian artists were of course not really depicting medieval people, but making images of themselves.
We all do that all the time. It is a safe bet that when one reads a historical novel, the characters — while dressed in doublet and hose, wimple, toga — will have the mental habits and attitudes of the period in which the writer was writing. Thus Conan Doyle’s knights are Edwardian gentlemen in armour.
Of course, none of this matters. Looking backwards in time is a good way of looking in the mirror; similarly, contemplating a distant society, as Gauguin did, is an excellent method of taking a look at yourself. The other advantage of getting it wrong — as Carl Andre found out — is that it helps you break the rules.
Approaching anything the orthodox way is bound to be uncreative. But if you get the rules back to front, you may do something completely novel. This is a principle that could probably be extended. Quite often explorers have set out to discover one place and stumbled on another (Columbus’s discovery of the Americas is just one example). I suspect the same has sometimes been the case with scientific breakthroughs.
Last year, I slipped a sentence or two in praise of error into a book review for The Spectator. The artist Grayson Perry read and quoted them in his Reith lectures (which in turn reminded me of what I’d said). ‘So,’ Perry concluded, ‘art history is a kind of long chain of Chinese whispers and I think that’s the fascinating, brilliant thing about it.’ If I’ve understood that correctly, I think he’s absolutely right.
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