What the Butler Saw: Selected Writings.

Over the last 18 years Stuart Morgan has worked for many publications, including this one, but has recently been associated primarily with the London-based frieze, where he has functioned both as critical guru and midwife to the careers of practically every noteworthy British artist to have emerged in the past few years. The former editor and presiding spirit of the now defunct Artscribe and the curator of ten exhibitions (most recently "Rites of Passage" at London's Tate Gallery), Morgan has, under his various hats, evolved into an odd, perhaps even unique specimen, certainly within the context of the English scene - at once a figure of catalytic importance and of unusual humility.

He is, for starters, a writer who refuses to show off. When he permits himself an idiosyncratic flourish now and then, the gesture tends to care with it a cozy whiff of music hall humor or else the poignantly elaborate diligence of, say, a career ornithologist. Morgan resolutely avoids the arch or effetely clever. If anything, he errs in the direction of an almost excessive thoughtfulness and self-effacement, and he is on occasion given to broad, ontological digressions that can set both reader and subject adrift. Yet the droll, deceptively simple title of this new collection of his writings strongly suggests that Morgan's homeyness and humble dedication, however true to his nature, are more importantly the carefully wrought expressions of a complex and utterly self-conscious critical stance.

What the Butler Saw is of course an appropriated title. It belongs to one of Joe Orton's best-known plays. Orton was a true prodigy of '60s London - an enfant terrible of the working classes. Hilariously scabrous and death-defyingly witty, he courted extremes and wrote some of the best social satire for the English stage since Oscar Wilde, whose iconic status as a sexual rebel and martyr he also shares: Orton was murdered by his lover Kenneth Halliwell in 1967 at the age of 34 and has been revered as a hero by many who have since seen his plays and read his published diaries.

An homage may reasonably be inferred from Morgan's choice of title. Then, too, there is the little joke about class: Morgan's critical voice reverberates softly, but in implicit opposition to the plummy or caustic Oxbridge sonorities adopted by many of his compatriots. As Thomas McEvilley put it in his forward, Morgan "is not doctrinaire - though British neo-Marxism has no doubt left a mark on him." In proposing the notion of himself as butler, Morgan is also, with characteristic finesse and, perhaps, latent egoism, telling us that he is at once the protagonist of his own play of ideas and (nobler still) a servant to art. Morgan's subtlety is paradoxically intense. Even the book's front-cover image - an illustration of Paul Thek's more or less self-explanatory Meat Piece with Warhol Brillo Box, 1965 - conjures a Pandora's box of semiotic possibilities and critical metaphors, ranging from Baudelairean estheticism, to the hollowness/rottenness of Pop art and/or pop culture, to recent precedents for Damien Hirst's decomposing, post-Stubbsian cow heads.

I realize that I've yet to get past the cover of this book. That is at least in part because the author, ever polite and in service to the subjects of the 50 essays collected in this volume, does not elsewhere project or impose much of himself. Indeed, the selection of essays serves to second-guess rather than chart his critical contribution. What the Butler Saw is to some extent a study in omissions.

Despite Morgan's encompassing fecundity as a critic since the late '70s, a surprising number of prominent British artists working during that period - Francis Bacon, Frank Auerbach, Howard Hodgkin, Richard Long, Tony Cragg, Richard Deacon, Gilbert & George - are mentioned only in passing or nowhere to be found at all. Boyd Webb and Steven Campbell, however, were awarded two chapters apiece. (The contents pages are also rife with lesser-known figures such as Marc Camille Chaimovicz, Edward Allington, and Colin McCahon.) Given the total absence of illustrations, coupled with Morgan's way of often jumping right into the middle of matters, reading these sections can be a bit hard on those less than fully versed in the work at hand.

The same sort of thing seems to hold true for the U.S. contingent: late-'70s or early-'80s pieces about Dennis Oppenheim, Robert Smithson, Alice Aycock, William Wegman (punctuated by a decade-long near-blackout - Andy Warhol and Robert Mapplethorpe crop up as subjects but are, along with Joseph Beuys, hors concours) are followed by essays on Richard Prince and Louise Bourgeois who share, for all purposes, the American stage of the late '80s. We pick up again in the '90s with cultural mascots such as Jeff Koons and Madonna - and, of course, Hirst. As for that old trans-avantgarde: no Sigmar Polke, no Francesco Clemente, no Sandro Chia ... the list could go on. I suspect that Morgan and his editor were trying to suggest some sort of distinction between those artists who have become cultural icons and those whom they now consider merely fashionable, but such criteria have the effect of flattening a collection that otherwise might have served as a portrait of an epoch. (A major essay Morgan wrote for a Cecil Beaton exhibition catalogue was, for instance, cordially not invited to this anthology.)

As things stand, only three of the essays convey the full force of the author's character and passions. "Telethon," written in 1980 for Artscribe and the opening piece of this collection, is a dark and surprising meditation on comedian Jerry Lewis' televised marathon performances on behalf of muscular dystrophy: "The arrogance that keeps him going for a day is fuelled by anger at a God who goofs...." Morgan concludes with the idea that Lewis is an appropriately lurid saint for our times. The second, "Homage to the Half-Truth," the text of a lecture given at the Van Abbemuseum in 1991, is Morgan's update of Wilde's famous essay "The Critic as Artist": "That criticism refers to another art does not prevent its existing as an artform in its own right. (We don't despise ballet because it needs music.)" The third and most revealing essay, "Paul Thek: The Man Who Couldn't Get Up," was published by frieze in 1995 and serves as this book's conclusion: "There are artists who grit their teeth, plot their strategy, make their work and become successful. And there are artists like Paul Thek. Fugitive, unworldly, Thek collaborated with others for much of his life and died in 1988, a disillusioned man...." There is no question which kind of artist gets the most room in Morgan's book and heart.

Lisa Liebmann is a writer who lives in New York. She is the author of David Salle (Rizzoli, 1994).