John A walker\'s erotic sculptures 1960-63

JOHN A. WALKER’S EROTIC SCULPTURES 1960-1963 (all photos copyright John A. Walker)

Sexual desire is normally at its height during a male’s teenage and early manhood years. This was certainly true in the case of the British art student John A. Walker who, in the late 1950s, was studying fine art at a university art department in Newcastle upon Tyne.

John A. Walker, circa 1956-57, in his attic studio, Jesmond, Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Sexual imagery first began to appear in his cubist style reliefs such as ‘Wooden diversion’

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dated 1960 and in his dreams, drawings and paintings. Witness the pen and ink drawing ‘Phallus’ (1960)

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and the oil paintings ‘Dream symbols’ (1960) with their sperm-like images.

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His main tutors at that time were Victor Pasmore - an abstract Constructionist artist - and Richard Hamilton - a Pop painter. Thinking that he could respond to Pasmore’s wood and plastic reliefs in an amusing way, Walker devised a sculpture from wooden beams and plywood cut outs that hung on a wall but with parts that were like flaps roughly resembling a female vagina and a curved part that was hinged so that it could swing from side to side like an erect penis. The plywood surfaces were painted with pastel colours such as pink and mauve.

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The work responded to the vogue for kinetic art - art with moving parts - and art capable of change (a mature student at Newcastle - Roy Ascott - was making ‘change paintings’ at the time) and the desire for audience participation. (Members of the public could alter the position of the moving parts.) Walker entitled this sculpture ‘Lady Chatterley and Mellors’ to reference the chief characters of D. H. Lawrence’s famous erotic novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover that was being published in paperback by Penguin. (Walker already owned a copy he had smuggled in from Paris.) In 1960 this book was prosecuted in the English courts on the grounds of obscenity. It was cleared by the jury and this event could be interpreted as the beginning of the sexual liberation movement associated with the 1960s.

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Pasmore must have liked the sculpture because he included it in an exhibition held in the Hatton Gallery, Newcastle alongside his own more austere, puritanical

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constructions.

A second hinged plywood sculpture that was oval in shape presented the vagina flaps without a phallus. See the sculpture second from the right in the photo below. Again the pigments added were pastel in hue.

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John A Walker, wall display of sculptures in a final art school show 1961.

A third hinged sculpture that resembled a phallus was cut out from a piece of blockboard and then painted a reddish purple It was entitled ‘Wooden Obstacle’ 8

(1960).

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A more ambitious wall mounted sculpture entitled ‘Codpiece’ (1961, revised version 1963) consisted of a smooth form made from fibreglass and coloured aluminium in order to resemble the shiny metal of a car’s hood. Beneath this form hung a long lozenge shape made from wood with a metal edging and covered with a sticky Fablon material with a marble design. (The aim was to produce an object typical of jewellery.) It was suspended so that it could swing from side to side and spin

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around. Obviously, this work was inspired by the codpieces that historical figures such as Henry VIII used to cover (and highlight) and protect their private parts .

Lavatory handles are often shaped like a phallus especially if one turns them into a vertical position. This ‘Lavatory handle’ was greatly enlarged and made from wood and plaster and then covered with green Fablon. The effect of light in the photo makes it seem like a sculpture by Brancusi.

The Pop artist Richard Hamilton was keen to impart to students his knowledge and 11

appreciation of the art of Marcel Duchamp and their joint influence was reflected in such habits as employing popular culture materials such as motor cycle parts and objects such as a red plastic bread cover bought from Woolworth’s. A wall sculpture with erotic overtones made from such readymade objects was constructed in 1960.

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A Catholic priest who viewed these works dismissed them as ‘fetish’ or ‘cult’ objects found in non-Christian tribal societies. Walker was quite pleased with this characterisation.

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The flexibility of motor cycle metal tubing encouraged audience participation because the tubing could be twisted into different configurations that would then remain. For reasons lost in the mists of time, the work illustrated below was entitled ‘Letter 21 to Bernard’ (1962).

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In 1962, in London, the phallic quality of such tubing resulted in a small number of wall sculptures one of which had the image of an eye collaged to its end.

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‘One man and his balls’ (1962) was a wall sculpture with moving parts that featured a self-portrait face of Walker at one end of a beam and, at the other end, his genitals; both were painted aluminium and both could be spun around. Furthermore, the sculpture as a whole revolved around a central fixing point and

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could be spun at speed. This work illustrated the common human experience that sometimes the rational mind is in the ascendant and sometimes the sex drive. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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