Peripheral ARTeries
Alex Flett
“Story of Art.” However, the term first came about, not as the book says, but in Easter 1971 from an ad hoc symposium at Eagles Nest the home of the painter Patrick Heron with 14 students from Winchester School of Art, and was used as a throwaway joke on Patrick, who described his paintings as being post painterly abstraction. The term post modern made everybody laugh, after which, Patrick started onto the reasons why something such as post-modernism can’t exist except as a Dioginean myth. When I built Wheeled Cross I did partly as a reference to Duchamp. When at the Slade I got myself some vacation work on film and TV sets. One day the company I was doing this for phoned me and said I had been particularly requested by the
BBC. The reason was that they wanted to move a Duchamp bicycle wheel and stool from the studio of the artist Richard Hamilton to Alexandria Palace for an Open University programme. Word had got around that I was a Slade student and that therefore I was exactly the type of person to move the Duchamp! Contained in Wheel Cross is the debunking of a myth over why there was a circle in the Celtic cross. This has been turned into many forms of so called spirituality including sun discs, cosmic wheels, prayer wheels, and goodness knows how many other ideas which have cropped up in the world of new age romanticism. At the same Eagles Nest ad hoc symposium, I became friends with the Irish painter Tony O’Malley, and a few years later he wrote me a letter with a list of books on the structure of the Celtic cross, which in Ireland was free standing, and in