Robert Firestone

Robert Firestone				Main Gallery			Jan 2 - Jan 31, 2007

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	Robert W. Firestone The Italian Futurists were the first, I suppose, to make paintings that were intended to be direct representations of states of mind. I am thinking particularly of some of Umberto Boccioni’s best-known compositions – Those Who Come and Those Who Stay. With their angry passion for modernity they were also interested in technology in all its forms. It is not surprising that F. T. Marinetti, the prophet of Futurism, was also the author of an early science fiction novel. One of the reasons for recalling this, in the context of Robert Firestone’s visual work, is that his compositions often, with their overlapping forms and sliding shifting planes, have a distinctly Futurist look. The Futurists were of course aware of the birth of new theories about human personality that characterized European culture at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, though it was Nietzsche, with his myth of the Superman, who fascinated them rather than Freud. From the 1920’s onward, however, Freud and Freudian theories have had a pervasive influence on contemporary art, and so too have those of Freud’s once-disciple and later rival Carl Jung. Where the Surrealists chose Freud as a mentor, many later avant-garde artists, among them Joseph Beuys, have drawn on Jung. The Surrealists saw Freud as a necessary but also dangerous liberator. In his Manifesto of 1924, which marks the official start of the Surrealist Movement, André Breton says: “Beloved imagination, what I most like in you is your unsparing quality.” As a professional psychotherapist of many years experience, Robert Firestone is undoubtedly aware of the impact psychoanalytic theories have had on the development of contemporary art, and also of the way in which artists have often distorted and misused them. His concern, when he turned to art as a means of personal expression, was to find images that would exemplify his own researches, which concern the way in which human beings often shut themselves off from their truest feelings, and shut others off from these as well. One of his best-known books is entitled Fear of Intimacy. It may, therefore seem paradoxical that the chosen vehicle for his art is the very latest technology, since anything technological is so often dismissed as impersonal and lacking in true emotion. I think what attracted him to the digital world was twofold. First, like the Futurists, he seems to see in the machine a commitment to the future, rather than the past. Second, there was a more practical attraction, which was the lightness and transparency of the effects he could obtain. These reflect the condition of mental transparency that he wishes to convey – a direct joining with the viewer. Computer art forms are very new. When we talk of artistic novelty we must in fact think of two things. First, newness in terms of technique, which is an absolute, like all forms of scientific and technological advance. A vehicle powered by an internal combustion engine was new in this sense, when compared with its immediate predecessor, the horse-drawn carriage. Secondly, there is the idea of aesthetic renewal, to which reactions are always necessarily subjective. Firestone uses computers, computer software and computer driven printers not for their own sake, but for the way they can offer a new world of the emotions. And it is on this basis, I think, that he would wish to be judged. Edward Lucie-Smith Edward Lucie-Smith is best known as a writer of books on contemporary art. His titles include Movements in Art Since 1945, Art Today and Art Tomorrow. He is also an exhibition curator, poet and internationally exhibited photographer.