Dear Arthur,

I was up at St Ann's church in Oldham last week to see the Dachau Christ, it has been given a home there after being in and out of storage at Gallery Oldham. It looked different to how I remembered it when I last saw it, maybe that's because I am always looking at the black and white photo I have of you putting the finishing touches to it in 1968. The caretakers there told me that it has been hung in a recess so that the congregation can look at the altar without having to see it. There is still a split between those who admire it and those who hate it. So good to hear that it's still managing to disturb,
Yes, and I also went over to Leyland for a close look at the Stations of the Cross at St Mary's.

It's all research for a paper I gave at the university conference. Now I'm a student I'm "learning the terms of reference"so I can get the academics interested too. They do "speak a different language", but it's not that hard to learn it.

I'm putting copies of these letters on this blog, which I've called 'Love love me Do(oley)'. Clever eh? You know with the Beatles connection and all that.

But also because ever since I heard Terry Eagleton talking about Marxism and love, I've been keeping an eye out for 'love' in art history. So it was good to read David Hulk's essay 'Despair or Defiance: The Double Inflection' in 'Re-reading Read' - Michael Paraskos (ed) London :Freedom Press, 2007,  pp. 144-151. It's all about Reg Butler and the geometry of fear group, but this time Hulks is looking beyond the inherent fear to a capacity for love that saves us from despair and moves us on to defiance.

Anyway I put this into the research paper, even suggesting that "Dooley's work might take us from the geometry of fear and despair to the figuration of love." I thought this was a risky idea, but did it any way. No one talks about love in this business, or if they do I haven't met them yet. They seem to shy away from it. Certainly no-one picked it up at the conference. Although I imagined them thinking - uh oh- sentimental, romantic. Someone recently asked David Harvey, talking at LSE, if we ought to get away from the romanticism evident in 'Rebel Cities'. He replied that he wasn't against romanticism, that it takes a little to get anything done. (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KM9IYtgZ8Sg).

What we all want to know is where you got some of your ideas from. I think I can see traces of Alexander Bogdanov and the Proletkult's ideas about an autonomous working class art that breaks away from dependence on bourgeois forms. I like that Proletkult argument that abstraction is belated not progressive. Were you aware of these ideas, or did you just arrive at them by way of your own reasoning. Did the Liverpool Communist Party talk about these things? What exactly did you say to Clement Greenberg when you gave him a tirade against the hard edged abstraction he was promoting? I will soon be going to the People's History Museum to look at some archive stuff to see if I can find out any more.

I am trying in all this to bring your story back into art history. At the university they tell us to "be reasonable: demand the impossible." So when I was thinking about the canon. I started to wonder if we should try for the impossible - canonisation- St Arthur, patron saint of working class artists. When I write to the Pope, I will ask if he has an answer yet to your inquiry about the resurrection!

Robert Gaunt