Art: Lessons from a past master on making a good impression

RESTORE US AND REGAIN: TOMMY GRACE, GED QUINN, TONY SWAIN

GLASGOW SCHOOL OF ART

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DIRECT SERIOUS ACTION IS THEREFORE NECESSARY

CCA, GLASGOW

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• Joanne Tatham & Tom O'Sullivan's Direct Serious Action Is Therefore Necessary at CCA in Glasgow

Last week I wrote about Whistler's Nocturnes, his wonderful paintings of the Thames in the evening light. He was not referring only to the time of day when he called them Nocturnes, however. He chose the name to associate his paintings with music, and direct our approach to them accordingly. He used other musical titles, too. Famously, for instance, he exhibited, alongside Manet at the Salon des Refuss in Paris, a picture of a girl in a white dress called simply Symphony in White.

In the suffocating orthodoxy of 19th-century art, his picture created a scandal. It had no moral, and having no moral, it looked immoral. But his point was that art does not need justification like some pack animal earning its keep by carrying a load on its back. Like music, it is sufficient in itself. The pleasure it gives is aesthetic, but, as in music, that is not a limitation. It is a liberation. Unburdened by narrative or overt moral purpose, it is free to be itself.

The idea of the aesthetic, the pleasure of looking and finding satisfaction in pure shape and colour, does not seem to rate much in contemporary art, however. The art we are given is always justified in terms of all sorts of contingent qualities, but rarely for itself. We have gone backwards. How satisfying, then, to see the work of Philip Reeves in an exhibition at Glasgow Print Studios.

Like Whistler, Reeves is a master of this music of the eye, but he is also Whistler's heir in a more direct and practical way, for he is a great printmaker. Whistler is credited with restoring the printmaking tradition that led back to Goya, Rembrandt and Drer. There followed a renaissance, but the market for artist's prints collapsed in the last great financial crash. Scottish artists like D Y Cameron and Muirhead Bone had played a central part in this renaissance and a few individuals like Ian Fleming kept the flame burning in Scotland, but in the struggle to restore it to the status it had once enjoyed Philip Reeves was a key figure.

It is in great measure because of him that printmaking is established once again as central to the achievement of artists in this country. More than the art schools, the Scottish printmakers' workshops have been the motor for this.Reeves, with the American Bob Cox, was one of the prime movers in setting up the first of the workshops, Edinburgh Printmakers, in 1967 and then five years later he again played a leading figure in establishing the Glasgow Print Studio. If he is showing there now, the Print Studios are repaying a debt of honour.

Born in Cheltenham, where his father was a printer, Reeves was only 23 when he came to Scotland in 1954 to teach printmaking at Glasgow School of Art. He had just graduated from the Royal College, but he has been here ever since, quietly making a unique contribution to art in this country.

He knew so little about Glasgow and Mackintosh was so little known, he says, that when he came for interview and the janitor said he would take him to the Mackintosh Room, he thought he meant he should take his raincoat. Printmaking was then a humble subsidiary of design, but he gradually worked to improve its position, first in the art school and then by example and through the printmaking workshops in the country more widely.

Reeves is still a master printmaker, but his work in this exhibition includes both print and collage, and the latter is now almost his most familiar technique. Austerely beautiful, his collages are often made from the most humble materials, brown paper, newsprint, packing materials, even the sticky tape on the back of the frame of a picture. He also adds painted paper, cut up and rejoined as Matisse did in his great papiers colls. Nevertheless Reeves is always his own man. Typically, he did not so much turn to collage as a ready-made vehicle, but came to it through his printmaking, experimenting with multiple plates and introducing different things into the press to create textures.

His pictures are always composed with perfect rightness, but also with an unfailing invention that pushes mere rightness towards pure poetry. One beautiful print here is the etching Box. It is perfectly minimal, just an etched rectangle of yellow ochre and a matching area of blank white paper, but both are set off by two tiny grey verticals, apparently collaged on and then printed. It is like a song.

Landscape has always been part of his inspiration, but his work is nevertheless purely abstract. One of the grandest compositions here is Twin Stacks. Years ago when I recorded a conversation with him, he remembered how when he first came to Scotland, he went north as everyone said he should, but instead of going to the famously picturesque north-west, he went to the north-east and was deeply impressed by the cliffs and stacks of the Caithness coast with their massive and colourful layers of rock. Perhaps there is a memory of that here still. Two stacks of five coloured squares sit side by side, symmetrical except that the colours on the left are a few shades lighter than the colours on the right. The picture is a symphony.Whistler would have approved.

In Restore us and Regain at Glasgow School of Art, Tony Swain makes a collage with newsprint tape and stencil and painted tape that might be a respectable art work in itself, but in the context you suspect that is not the point for we read in the blurb that the three artists in the show all "employ contemporary methods to critique and subvert the past". What exactly that means is not clear, but Ged Quinn takes a painting by Claude and adds neatly painted details rather in the manner of Bosch. Is that subverting the past? I doubt it. Tommy Grace's big newsprint collage, Nonum, might suggest that Reeves's example is still an inspiration. It is not real newsprint, however, but pages of meaningless printer's Latin; the art is not enough, but the added meaning is meaningless.

If these artists seem muddled, that is even more true of Joanne Tatham and Tom O'Sullivan at CCA. Their joint show, Direct serious action is therefore necessary, consists mainly of some very big and rather boxy sculpture ranged through the entrance hall, restaurant and gallery. It is painted black and white and flat simple colours, remotely reminiscent of Matisse perhaps, certainly in a perfectly familiar modern idiom.

It could be impressive, but evidently once again the art cannot be trusted to speak for itself. Indeed we are told it is not even going to be given the chance. "It is the choreography and curation of the pieces in the exhibition, rather than the pieces themselves, that should be seen as the work," we are told. Then, very grandly: "The exhibition will work with and against the conventions of the CCA spaces, positioning pieces across the venue to reframe the experience of visiting the CCA."

Once again it is the words, the pompous claim to meaning that gets in the way of the art actually having any meaning. After all, it is not as though the aesthetic is meaningless. Far from it. Francis Hutcheson's An Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue was a cornerstone of the Enlightenment. He was not proposing that the aesthetic is subservient to the moral, but that they are closely akin. Cultivate the first and the second will flourish. That was Whistler's point too. It's not a bad idea at all.

• Philip Reeves until 7 November; Restore Us And Regain until 6 November; Direct serious action… until 13 November