Walk, Don't Run
ART
Rejection from this show can cause paralysing heartache; inclusion can mean all the difference to the courage and application brought to bear on subsequent work. There is.. too, the 4aqty that not all students have had the advantage of a switched-on background in steaming Notting Hill, rolling their reefers in torn-out sheets from this month's Art International. On the contrary, many of the supplicants for inclusion in this display grew up in remote parts of the country from which London seems a glittering citadel of knowledge and liberation. These same country cousins (Moore and Hepworth once among them) are often just beginning at this moment to feel their wings in the comparatively sophisti- cated ambience of a London school after their initial struggles in a smaller art school in, say, Market Harborough.
This year, the exhibition is not held in the capacious and unpretentious space of the Suffolk Street Galleries, but at the Tate: out of an en- trance of about 2,000, precisely 85 works, painting or sculpture, are displayed among the labyrinth of installation screens at the end of the Duveen Sculpture Hall left behind from the Lowry exhibition. A gleaming white decor, brilliantly spotlit, gives a dramatic if artificial solemnity to each exhibit: the total effect is cheerful, but not unlike the better sections of the Ideal Home Exhibition or the Motor Show if a few anarchists with a sense of humour had taken charge. On each side stretch the Olympian galleries of our national depository of British and of Modern Foreign masterpieces.
As a member of the jury this year, I am partly to blame for the absurdly low fraction of work on show from the battalions submitted. I did in fact take along a bottle of Scotch on the first morning allotted to the judging, hoping we might all get stoned out of our minds and thus release the friendly mood of acceptance so appropriate, to my way of thinking, for this special task. But crates of booze awaited me; most of it disappeared whilst the relentlessly sober jury had lunch in a sedate cake shop: on our return, the officiating students seemed rather glittering-eyed and unnaturally deft in their handling of the artwork.
Not wanting to make heavy weather of all this, I do feel that it is deeply improper, and wholly inappropriate, for this show to be held at the Tate. I can't conceive such an affair being housed at the corresponding institutions in New York or Paris, where professional standards mercifully still prevail. Though a joint culprit, I deplore the absurdly small selection on view and deprecate the attitudes of students who want a smart, slick arriviste show astutely tailored to dealers' fashionable requirements—and I deeply mistrust present-day teaching methods which produce bland, conformist, impeccably finished exercises in style rather than the cultivation of a personal vision.
The show fills the space previously devoted to Gabo, Rouault and David Smith. The public may well be confused. However, the presumably eager Tate is now truly swinging (the exemplary rehanging of many rooms being apparently not enough), for among the exhibits are several examples of the newest trends in erotic art, one enthusiastically bulldozed in by me: a horizontal vagina in a glass case, carefully stitched in cloth, feather duster brush appropriately in place, the whole flashing rosily alight, on and off from an electric lead. Why not? It's well done and it's what some students are doing. But there was a time when even inclusion in a Tate Gallery show, let alone the permanent collection, was a kind of accolade. Apart from the question of public stan- dards, artists might consider all the implications
• of a show which could well be called 'Last Exit to Millbank.' BRYAN ROBERTSON
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