The Shape of a Pocket

quality – might be deduced from appearances. They didn’t believe that the good looked good. For the most part they weren’t ascetic or puritan; they treated appetite and exuberance as a natural part of life, but not Beauty.
    Beauty they saw as a trick, a ruse, a cosmetic lie. A term that expresses something of this defiance is the compliment of calling somebody ‘a rough diamond’; i.e., a gem that looks like a piece of slag! The Beauty they discovered for themselves was an invisible one closely connected with endurance and companionship.
    In any proper representation of the proletariat therefore this suspicion of Beauty ought to be taken account of; otherwise they risk, once represented, to be no more than pawns in somebody else’s aesthetic or political game. This was a question Mason wrestled with until he was nearly fifty. How not to fall into the trap of Beauty?
    In 1969 he decided to stop casting his life-size plaster sculptures in bronze and to cast them, instead, in epoxy resin. This would allow him to paint them in acrylic. And this is what he did. He began painting his monuments in the derisory colours of proletarian life: the colours of wool shops, knitting needles, tartan caps, bicycle saddles, Wool-worth toys, jam tarts, tobacco tins, pale faces waiting for the stigmata of lipstick kisses, mittens, permed hair.
    When I look at these works I see them speaking of things and of a kind of love that I know nobody will ever find in Matisse or Botticelli or Frank Stella.
    Of course in sculpture it’s not colour which carries the work; colours refer to vernacular, lifestyle, certain memories; the work has to stand or fall according to what it does with space. Space for sculptures is what voices are for theatre. It is the space a work creates within and around itself which articulates its strength, its joy or its suffering.
    As one might have expected from the son of a Birmingham taxi driver, Raymond Mason finally found a way of creating a sculptural space which plays extraordinarily both with the topographical and with narrative. Stories you hear as you drive your fare through the back streets.
    The space of his big sculptural groups consists of flows which run between the figures or the little islands of figures, like currents in a river. Mason talks about ‘the torrent of life’. You peer through the ravine between two bodies, you look over the boulder of a shoulder, or between a pair of legs, or under a raised arm, or around a couple, and each time your gaze is swept away to another form, another life. And these lives add up – as the scenes from a silent Chaplin film add up, except that here, in epoxy resin, everything is present for ever and nothing moves.
    His mastery of this created synthetic space allows the onlooker to become
simultaneously
aware of a crowd who have gathered, of receding streets and red bricks which never end, and of the knotted veins meandering across the back of a working man’s hand. Among other artists probably only Verdi had such an embracing love of the popular.
    Mason’s masterpieces are awkward monuments made during the last quarter of this century to a class that was slowly disappearing, with many of its members forced into terminal unemployment. A class which today scarcely exists but which left the world its own word: solidarity.
    I don’t think Mason thought about this as a project; it was in his blood, or, to put it more finely, it was in what he took for granted and worked from.
    Return to the church of St Eustace and look again. Look at the guy with a cauliflower and his mate with a Swiss chard under his arm, and the bloke with a big nose holding up a case of oranges as if it were a chalice, and the black kid with a cabbage, and the woman with a pompom hat and cherry lips who is carrying a case of Starking apples which press against her bosom, and the man pulling a wagon, and the tomato which has fallen on to the street and squashed. I look and say to myself: I’ve seen saints in churches and Madonnas and martyrs and the saved and the damned, but I’ve never seen people straight off the street except when they’re sitting on the pews, and here they have a chapel to themselves and have been made sacred! (They themselves wouldn’t believe it. Pull the other leg, it’s got bells on it, they’d say.) Made sacred not by the company of the surrounding saints, nor by the buried generals in their sarcophagi, but by the tenderness of an artist who remembered