Arts
Trends at the Tate
John McEwen
New Art
(Tate Gallery till 23 October) New Art really is a bad exhibition. Most of the painting and sculpture on view is an insult to artistic technique and in- tention. The selection is a mixture of rubber-stamp trendiness and non- sequiturish personal preference. The presentation confusingly dovetails with the permanent collection at two points; and the catalogue's tortured attempts at justifying the mess are couched in terms that must have George Orwell spinning in his grave.
The title, for a start, is pure Newspeak. 'New Art': what a sinister concept. There is, of course, no such thing as 'new' or 'old' art. Art is or it is not and no final arbiter exists, that is the beauty of it. The Tate's Director, Alan Bowness, stopping the buck Big Brotherishly, thinks differently. He ad- mits to no doubt or humble qualification on the subject. 'This exhibition at the Tate celebrates the arrival of the new art of the Eighties. It has been selected and cata- logued by Michael Compton, Keeper of Museum Services at the Gallery and recognised internationally as an authority on the art of our time.' So there. One turns with trepidation to Compton's introduc- tion. What demons have come to possess these, privately, gentle and reasonable men? Could it be that they do not really care too much for this 'new art' them- selves? Compton is anything but clear.
"New" does not only mean that which has been made recently, nor what is simply
unlike anything seen before ' So what does it mean? No answer. 'Artists are themselves the best judges of what is good and significantly new in art' — some artists more than others, particularly on this occa- sion. ... the newness of works of art that are 20 or 50 years old will have little to do with the consonance of style or content and the applicability of contemporary criti- ques.' (Would you trust a critic who used `critique'?) 'Artists now dead: Picabia, Chirico, Magritte and Broodthaers, have become 'new' artists, especially in their late work. The living: Balthus, Oppenheim and Copley, are equally 'new' though no better than, say, Miro.' So why is none of them included? It is not as if New Art is much to do with the 'young'. The German Beuys is included and he is 62; the majority of the 80-odd remainder are out of their twenties, many of them comfortably.
But the show is not just about 'tren- diness' either. The title may promote that expectation, and most of the leading tren- dies are in it, but Michael Compton's own loyalties (Beuys and Merz, fading trendies
now, among them) nicely confound it. There is also a lot of English art thrown in, most of it of no standing or appeal interna- tionally. Nevertheless the 'new' of the title ob- viously refers to the trendy element in the exhibition, which in character is, ironically, not 'new' in the sense of 'novel' at all, today's trend being for rehashes of one kind and another, done with a shameless eye for the main chance. Opportunism, however, is, according to Compton, also a `new' art form: 'It is only when one con- siders the whole as a vehicle of success that one sees the American context in which such success ... is an art in its own right with its own styles. This can be read as an unexpected irony.' Irony is a great let-out. Three artists included (our own Bruce McLean; the Germans Dahn and Dopoukil) owe their international reputations — and are taken seriously — because they paint deliberately to send up the rest. The rest, in terms of trendiness, breaks down national- ly. There are the Americans, born in the Fifties, who rip off the work of American 'Pop' artists of the Sixties — with the dif- ference that they make a brazen point of technical incompetence. They are the worst. Then there are the similarly aged Italian dandies, now mostly tempted to New York, who recycle the ideas of earlier and pro- founder Italian art, crudely beefed up in size and method to attract instant attention. They are probably the most interesting of this poor bunch, though the samples here (some of them already in the permanent collection) do not do them justice. And finally there are the dour stay-at-home Ger- mans, some of whose leading lights have been slogging away for 20 years now, large- ly un-noticed. They paint in the manner of Fifties artists — abstract expressionists etc — and are now promoted as the represen- tatives of the rebirth of the previously unmentionable German zeitgeist. Michael Compton wrote a book once about 'PoP Art'. He could have been more explicit about all this derivation.
Alan Bowness declares that this is the first general survey of its kind at the Tate since the 54:64 Gulbenkian-sponsored ex- hibition 20 years ago. It is modest of him to compare them. The Gulbenkian exhibition, which he helped to select, was incom- parably superior in every way. But things have changed. The Tate does not have the singular position it once had. The Hayward, Serpentine, Barbican, ICA, Whitechapel have all appeared or been enlarged in recent years. The present sur- vey is a much smaller affair than the Aca- demy's A New Spirit in'Painting of 1981,
and covers much the same ground.
The Tate, of course, is always in a dif- ficult position when it comes to the art of the moment. Should it buy every passing fa- shion, or wait until after a certain time has elapsed, and therefore risk having to pay much more than originally would have been the case? Alan Bowness does not want the Tate to have a frowsty image. He has plans to build a separate gallery for 'New Art', He has sought to enliven interest by starting Patrons of New Art'. He is quite open in the belief that the presence in our midst of such trendsetting and extravagant collectors as Mr and Mrs Charles Saatchi, is something the Tate should acknowledge and even celebrate. But New Art is surely a warning that he must not lose sight of the prime function of a museum, and that is to preserve the best for the future. Every trend includes one or two better artists, but to pursue trends willy-nilly — as currently ap- pears to be the case — is, for a museum, an abnegation of responsibility.
The ill-effect is well illustrated at the mo- ment. Michael Sandie, arguably the best English sculptor since the war, unarguably one of the best, currently has a roomful of work in the Arts Council's Sculpture Show, He dominates that exhibition and has right- ly been assigned a principal position in it. He is an artist of experience, technical excellence and moral strength. He is unrepresented by a single piece of sculpture in the Tate collection. It hardly needs say- ing that he is also not deemed to be a 'new' artist; ironically enough, Sandie is in the running to make the first public memorial to George Orwell.
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