Art
Uncertain
Terence Maloon
Officially sponsored 'packages' of contemporary British art always cause loud and long contestation, all the more when they Purport to be representative. By now we're nsed to artists and (especially) critics behaving disgracefully over the selection of the Hayward Annual every year. Well, exhibitions of this kind confer prestige, and inclusion in a 'package' approved by the Arts Council, British Council or the Tate enhances an artist's standing among his Peers. In a country where encouragement and reward for visual artists are pitifully meagre, this may seem to be a big deal. It's really no big deal, especially considering the vacuity of some of the hacks who're most honoured, trotted out in nearly every 'Best of British' exhibition at home and abroad.
'lin Certain Art Anglais' is a more dubious assortment than usual, sponsored by the British Council, selected by Michael Compton, Richard Cork, Sandy Nairne and Suzanne Page, and recently exhibited in Paris. A reduced version of the show is at the Palais des Beaux Arts in Brussels until 29 April. The Council must like 'certain' — the exhibition of abstract art they exported to Canada last year was titled Certain Traditions'. They profess a resolute impartiality in regard to the art they Promote, seeking not to influence, exhort or misrepresent the kinds of art being produced in this country, but rather passively to reflect. Hence their partiality to the word certain', which relativises the selected artists while leaving their context, the interests and merits of excluded artists uncertain.
The British Council has done its best to undercut, camouflage or mystify acts of mischief some of the more arrogant selec tors would like to perpetrate under its aegis. The title originally projected for this show was 'Est-ce qu'il-y-a un art anglais?' If carried, and if the works in this show proposed the 'answer', the French would surely have thought, 'Pas beaucoup, pas grande chose.' Suzanne Page, one of the organisers, writes a disclaimer in her introduction to the catalogue: 'This exhibition doesn't pretend to represent the best English art today' — I should hope not — 'but [intends] to inform [the Parisian public] of its diversity and singularity.' She assumes that 'classic' British painting and sculpture are already well known in France. As far as I know the Parisians are even more ignorant of contemporary British painting and sculpture than the New Yorkers. 'Classic' no doubt means Bacon, Hockney, Moore and Caro.
This purports to show off the English avant-garde, stressing photography, 'conceptual' charts and diagrams, video, installations, performance, and so on. It is sweepingly assumed that the contemporary work in painting and sculpture is marginal, irrelevant, obsolete. The token inclusion of some indescribably dreary paintings by Alan Charlton and Stephen Buckley would seem to confirm painting's desuetude (apart from the 'classics' maybe, who are too old or well-established to convert to a more fashionable medium). Further underlining the death of painting, Paul Waplington is pressed on our attention. He's a self-taught social realist whose working-class origins and mildly contentious subject matter have put his gormless drawing and insensitive painting beyond criticism for at least one of the selectors. Similarly, the odd IRA slogan or atheistical squib redeems Conrad Atkinson's pathetically flimsy arrangements from their aesthetic triviality. And these weren't the worst of it, not by a long chalk.
It's odd to note how recent avant-garde fashions seem to have caused a revival of puritanism within the art world. The dominant tone of 'lin Certain Art' is heavily Methodist — sober, unostentatious, unemotional, humourless, drab, evangelical, stolid. These traits are notorious as a formula for bringing about any visual artist's impotence. Maybe it's the fear of impotence (as James Faure Walker noted in Artscribe recently) that haunts some of these artists, accounting for the frequent rhetorical overkill of their accompanying manifestos, their conspicuous espousal of worthy social causes, the paraded evidence of hours they've spent reading, the vogue for abstruse footnotes, the fastidiously 'professional' presentation of diagrams, charts and photographs. Some time ago Richard Cork, one of the selectors of 'Un Certain Art' and self-appointed ringmaster, first of the Minimal and Conceptual avant-garde, latterly of art for Society, called upon all artists to render themselves accountable to 'the people'. Just how much some of these artists have been influenced by calls for mass-accountability is uncertain, but the ostentatious diligence, leaden seriousness, pedantry and conspicuous do-gooding prevalent here would suggest the worst.
The Anglophobic French might well savour the signs of our economic plight reflected in the cramped, passive, joyless mien of so much of this art. However, with a few exceptions, one got almost no sense of what it is like to be alive in England now. The outstanding exception was Nick Hedges, with his fine photographs of conditions in factories. They were straight reportage, but distinguished by their insight, empathy, a beautiful eye for the telling detail. There's nothing flashy or modish about these photographs. But there is beauty in the resilient grace of the steelworkers' bearing, in their moments of relaxed cameraderie, in the infernal brilliance of molten metal in the foundry.
I have to correct Suzanne Page's claim that this selection is indicative of British art's diversity. British art is a far hardier, more vigorous beast than the French have been given to believe. The best of it is diametrically opposite in spirit to the thinlipped puritanism of this exhibition. But, as I overheard a delighted spectator remark at a show of Gray Wragg's splendid new paintings a few weeks ago, 'It's so un-English'.
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