Electric Review

ART: Vacant, but pretty too
Days Like These at Tate Britain

What's the point?
Days Like These, which opens tomorrow, is Tate Britain’s second triennial exhibition of contemporary British art. Unless something’s gone wrong with my sums, then, this means that the first of these exhibitions took place around the time when — just a little bit further downstream, but modishly nearer to Hoxton and Shoreditch — the celebrity-heavy yet content-lite infant Tate Modern first made itself known to superficially fascinated world. And that, of course, was a different age. The gloss had not entirely gone off the New Labour project; a few last glimmers of Cool Britannia still haunted the twighlit air. And even if people only went to Tate Modern for the cafés, the public spaces and the encouraging company of so many well-dressed people — well, they went, and in enormous numbers, too. How was Tate Old, trapped in its bijoux marble temple and cursed with a nightmarishly random inheritance of curatorial crushes and blind spots, supposed to compete with all that?

The simple, two-word answer to this puzzle would seem to hinge on the words ‘Turner' and 'Prize’ — but not for the first time in the world of contemporary art, the simple answer is in this case not the correct one. There are limits to what even this great media behemoth can be asked to achieve. The Turner Prize is, after all, circumscribed not only by its hallowed conventions but by its operating procedures, which are no less real for being unintelligible to 99.8 per cent of the gallery-going public. So while the actual prize-giving evening could be exactly as populist or, alternatively, recherché as Sir Nicholas Serota, Channel 4 and the whimsy of Matthew Collings saw fit to allow, the exhibition itself would always be limited: limited to four artists, limited to the younger end of British art, and limited in the sense that the same artist could not keep cropping up year after year. Hence, I guess, the decision to hold a triennial exhibition of British contemporary art, and hence Days Like These.

Not new, not shocking
Days Like These is co-curated by Jonathan Watkins, director of the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, and Judith Nesbitt, head of exhibitions and displays at Tate Britain, and is sponsored by Volkswagen. What's it like? Well, it is a curiousity of contemporary art language that if by way of reply I wrote, for instance, that Days Like These 'pleases more than it surprises', that would sound like a denunciation. Yet perhaps the lack of surprise is, in truth, one of the show's more subtle pleasures? After all, it is hard not to feel a comforting sense of deja vu as one engages with this miniaturised, museum-bound, one-nation version of any contemporary artfest, from Venice to Kassel to — well, anywhere, really, because that’s surely one of the point of these shows — their polite footnoting of an established international style of contemporary art. The alternative, incidentally, would be worse. Not to put too fine a point on it, the trade show ambience that settled down over the Royal Academy during last year’s Galleries Show does not seem to have blighted this exhibition.

But that’s enough waspishness about a strangely likable show. Insofar as it is in any way distinctive, Days Like These is a notably polite exhibition. Obviously, being polite, it conforms to contemporary convention by making frankly bizarre claims for the intellectual merits of the work on show, few of which can bear this sort of weight. But if one ignores this silliness and simply wanders into the Tate in search of entertainment, amusement or a soothing space in which to day-dream, this show suddenly works pretty well. Whatever else it might do, Days Like These not only boasts an admirably coherent visual style, a reasonable mix of better and less-known artists, but also — amid the boring, the banal and the oversold — displays a touching if sometimes furtive interest in that old-fashioned quality which, for want of a better word, we might as well describe as 'beauty'. And not least at the moment, that seems exactly the right sort of thing for contemporary art to do.

Picking losers
Inevitably, I suppose, there were more than a few disapointments. Because I have an antiquarian preference for paint over any other visual medium, such hopes as I brought with me to Days Like These reposed mostly in two painters: Dexter Dalwood and Peter Doig. Dalwood has made his name out of quirky, playful, narrative-inspired oils where failures in technique invite forgiveness through an attractive refusal to take themselves too seriously — and anyway, sometimes the technique actually appeals, too. But here Dalwood’s two offerings, Nixon’s Departure and Ceaucescu’s Execution, failed to impress. The usual formula — the collage effects, the painterly touches, the faintly arch appeal to media-savvy ways of looking — fell flat, somehow. In Nixon, the symbolism came across as trite; in Ceaucescu the imagery was too blatantly bleak; where, meanwhile, was the humour? As for Peter Doig, his sole painting in Days Like These told an ominous story about a talented painter descending into manner, perhaps even bombast. Here were all the effects — the scraped-down surfaces, the fashionably discordant colours, the slightly lazy prettiness — which are little more than the incidental pleasures of the medium in which Doig works — but here was precious little else. To quote Doig in the catalogue notes: ‘You can ask what the paintings are about, but I can’t really tell you. They’re really just ciphers for your own imagination.’ On the other hand, perhaps they are just empty. Certainly, they looked that way to me.

Meanwhile, the Old Masters of the contemporary scene did not give much of an account of themselves. Richard Deacon, ‘a leading figure among a number of British sculptors whose work first achieved international acclaim in the 1980s’ contributed some dreary, faintly Dalek-like ceramics — lumpy things from which extreme worthiness drips like some sort of misfired glaze. But Deacon looks masterful when compared with Richard Hamilton. Hamilton is, in the words of the catalogue, ‘a key figure in post-war British art’ whose role in the development of Pop Art, ‘a movement promoting a fusion of art and ordinary life’, was ‘seminal’ — or, in my alternate version, the most overrated creature currently in receipt of British Council subventions. Hamilton is represented by two works. The first, a digital print notionally inspired by a line from James Joyce’s Ulysses, is hardly competent illustration, let alone ‘art’. It really takes something to bring heavy-handed literalism to bear on Joyce, but evidently whatever it takes, this is something Hamilton possesses in lavish quantities. His other offering, however, is even more derivative and even less explicable. Hamilton has made a reproduction of Marcel Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare by the Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) and accompanied it with a couple of diagrams. As art historical name-checks go, this is unremarkable; as a contribution from an artist who makes claims to significance, it's risable. But worst of all, it’s such a woefully sloppy reproduction! One of the striking things about Duchamp’s original is the meticulousness with which he executed a work that is, insofar as it is ‘about’ anything, an evocation of obsessive enterprise chasing onanistic pointlessness. Hamilton’s copy, on the other hand, is not only slack, messy and misguided, but transparently lazy, too. His ejection from the canon of British art history cannot, for me at least, come soon enough.

Some time in a darkened room
Oh, but we all have our blind spots. For instance, I have zero time for film, at least in its incarnation as a gallery art form. It isn’t just the coercive nature of those awful little theatres with their sensory deprivation, their awkward mid-scene arrivals and apologetic fumbling departures, their inconsequence or their desperate reliance on sex, ambiguity, plotlessness, shaky camera technique, super-close-ups and ponderous self-justifications. No, it is more than that. It is, first and foremost, the sort of special pleading involved in accepting that while there is a whole genre of film that can exist out in the commercial rough-and-tumble of the real world, attracting most of that world as an audience across a variety of delivery mechanisms encompassing everything from cinemas to bedsit video players, somehow the art gallery film continues to insist on its privileged status — its absolute right to bore, annoy and underperform, as if achievement in each of these areas was evidence of unimpeachable superiority over real film. Blinkered? Bigoted? Well, yes, probably I'm both these things — indeed, if I’m claiming anything for this stance, it’s honesty, pure and simple. But with equal honesty, I cannot say that any of the films at Days Like This did anything to change my perspective on film. Kutlug Ataman’s The 4 Seasons of Veronica Read, for instance, a film about a woman who is devoted to amaryllis bulbs, was handsomely installed on four screens, but I lacked the force of will necessary to stay with it long enough to get anything much out of it. As for Mike Marshall’s Days Like These, it consisted of views of a garden being watered by a sprinkler. According to the notes, ‘Marshall focuses on the power of an unexpected moment when something profound or beautiful occurs.’ As points of focus go, this one is beyond criticism — yet the result bored me in a way that watching a real sprinkler and real plants would not have done. Back into the light I went.

Pointless whining and a plastic bucket
Other minor annoyances included the sound installations — as they so often do. Once upon a time hearing a strange sound at an exhibition may, I suppose, have seemed fresh and exciting, although the effort of will necessary to evoke those innocent times is pretty much on a level with that necessary to evoke the first experience of oil paint, say, or perhaps the use of manmade tools. Nowadays, what gallery-going experience is complete without a bit of disembodied and pointless whining? But nevertheless David Cunningham has gamely supplied A position between two curves, for which the following claims are made:

The sound piece which can be heard here, in the alcoves of Tate Britain’s Manon Entrance, consists of an electronic circuit connecting a microphone, amplifier, ‘noise-gate’ and speakers. The microphone picks up the ambient sound, which builds up through feedback, but breaks as soon as a certain volume is reached. It then subsides into quietness, only to begin the whole process again.

Although Cunningham has begun this process, he has little control over its outcome. He provided the conditions and the equipment, but it is the bodies of people moving through the space which move the air and alter the quality of the sound.

The sound is not very interesting, but at least its location means that it does not distract from other art in the intrusive, sleeve-tugging way that sound installations so often do. Worse by far was a piece by Ceal Floyer called Bucket. As ERO’s more contemporary-art-aware readers may have intuited, this piece consisted largely of a bucket placed in the middle of the floor in one of Tate Britain’s galleries. But when it comes to proper critical appreciation, once again, the notes provide the answers:

Humour is a defining factor of Floyer’s work. Her dry wit often depends on a double entendre, and careful timing. This work momentarily fools us into believing that there is a leak in the gallery ceiling. However, trailing from the bucket is an electrical wire plugged into a nearby socket. The other end is connected to a portable CD player, playing a sound like a drop of water hitting an empty plastic bucket. The sound reproduction is good enough to force us to do a double take. Yet the sound is always the same, as if it is always the first drop in the bucket.

By presenting ordinary things in this way, Floyer shows how it is the physical, cultural and social context of the art gallery that turns anything shown in it into art.

Now, I’ve occasionally had to write this sort of thing myself, and so I am richly aware of the cheapness of quoting it even as I can’t quite stop myself from doing so. My justification? Simply, I suppose, that this last sentence sums up exactly what Floyer’s art does not do. One does not have to be particularly old and jaded to have learned by now that a bucket in the centre of an art exhibition — not least, a bucket with an electrical wire trailing from it, and a CD player protruding from it — might well be a work of art, and not just a bucket. In other words, the context has the perverse effect of making the experience less interesting, less arresting, less revealing, if only because one is so desperately bored of being manipulated in this way. But in Floyer’s case, the failure is compounded by something else the text gets wrong — the sound quality. Since the noise made by the CD player sounded to me either like the sort of frog whose song punctuates the night in the savannahs of Guyana — or, only slightly more fancifully, an old dog farting in a strangely rhythmic fashion — it was even more difficult to connect either of these events with a plastic bucket in any naturalistic schema.

All of which probably makes Days Like These sound sillier and less compelling than, in its better moments, it was.

Evil existed before 9/11, too
Nathan Colley, for instance, was given a room to himself in which to display a variety of work based on the Lockerbie trial that took place in 2000 in the Netherlands. Coley, who according to the notes is ‘interested in the ways in which particular places can embody conflicting systems of religious or political beliefs, and how we become convinced about the “truth” in particular situations,’ seems to have spent time observing this trial, and also to have struck up some sort of relationship with the Imperial War Museum.

If so, this is yet another tribute to that institution’s formidable good judgement. Colley’s evocation of the trial consists of twelve pencil drawings, in which evidence or incidental material relating to the trial is rendered in a style that blends meticulousness with discernible individual gesture, so that the time-consuming nature of the exercise comes to resemble a penance, or a reconstruction, or a patient attempt at understanding. In the middle of the room is a replica witness box, based on one used at the actual trial. It is prosaic and yet also strangely sinister — an index, maybe, of the frailness of the boundary separating order from disorder in our world — or maybe something else. Who knows? In any event, it genuinely had the effect of silencing people who entered the room. Meanwhile monitor played a series of interviews — with Lockerbie inhabitants? — stripped down so that nothing was visible except the interviewees' faces, and nothing audible except their replies to the same set of silent questions, which seem to involve issues such as religion and nationality. The calm, measured voices washed the room in sounds that for once were anything but inconsequential. But the hard thing to capture, in describing this room, was its modesty, its maturity, its refusal to lapse either into sentimentality or art-world archness, and its staunch unwillingness to offer anything resembling an easy answer.

The relationship between art and politics, let alone art and war, is outside the ambit of a short review. Yet it was hard to forget, wandering through Colley's instalation, that the press view I attended was taking place just as the Prime Minister was making an emergency statement to the Commons about Iraq. Given that Colley’s work seems genuinely to be about good and evil and how we make sense of the two, it fit the moment perfectly — not by offering answers, because it did not do that, but by providing a sober, dignified environment that seemed to resonate perfectly with something that was very much in the air. It just seemed right, somehow. But the nature of that almost soothing rightness also seemed very much in keeping with the tone of the exhibition. There was nothing unattractive, nothing messy, nothing loud or violent about it, either. Not everyone's approach to Lockerbie and everything that has happened afterwards would have looked like this.

What's wrong with good looks?
But then who could deny that Days Like These has a strong organising aesthetic, and that furthermore, that aesthetic is a cool, handsome, colourful, abstract, rather intellectualised and yet sensually appealing one?

At best, the style that sums up Days Like These could probably described as a sort of late, faintly apologetic yet languorously attractive flowering of colour field abstraction. In the actual show, it encompassed everything from Ian Davenport’s Untitled Poured Lines (Tate Britain) (a huge bright striped work executed in housepaint directly on the gallery walls) to Jim Lambie’s Zobop (psychedelic stripy patterns applied directly to the floor of the Duveen Galleries) to Tim Head’s Treacherous Light (a digital projection composed of countless pixels, their millions of colours constantly shifting in an apparently random way — and incidentally, despite my horror of those darkened rooms and film-type experiences, a seriously beautiful and memorable work). This style was picked up in the exhibition map and publicity materials, too. But what does it mean? What are the stripes, the dots, the pure saturated colour, the suppression of facture, the formality all about?

One's left wrestling with this, because these images are so insistently the ones that remain in the mind long after one has left Tate Britain. Ultimately, a lot of it seems to be about pleasure for its own sake — not the messy, violent, complicated pleasures bound up with, say, Titian's work, for instance, or the witless simulation of pleasure cynically evoked by Jeff Koons, but rather, the strong and tasteful pleasures of strong colour, clear lines and clean white walls — a pleasure all about disengagement from the world, or perhaps a distillation of pure pleasure out of inevitably compromising complexity. Or to put it another way, it bears a family resemblance to the armchair that Matisse (whose Snail would have looked entirely at home here) wished to create for the weary businessman whose little sins and satisfactions the bourgeois Frenchman so intimately understood. But perhaps that's the point? In days like these, with economic downturn looming, war in the air and a generalised sense of unease, perhaps it is reasonable for art to appear to us, not as saviour or boringly self-critical spokesman, but rather, as comforting purveyor of Matissean luxe, calme et volupté? Perhaps Tate Britain, in its ongoing and incidentally largely laudable attempts to please, has noticed something about the way in which the wind is blowing?

Then and now
Days Like These made, I think, only one serious mistake. Once I had left the exhibition (it is scattered fairly widely inside and even outside the building) I took the opportunity to wander through some of the 'historic' collections — in particular, the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth century holdings. Here the pictures — some of them, obviously, absolute masterpieces — were dotted sparsely around the dark walls of the dimly-lit, near-empty galleries. Meanwhile the explanatory panels waged a savage, bitter little war of political correctness against the art itself. To choose but a single example, a painting by George Stubbs known as The Reapers was denounced by its panel for its refusal to present agricultural workers as anything other than clean, well-dressed and attractive — apparently, rendering them as filthy and brutish would have more appropriately acknowledged the reality of the economic conditions under which they laboured, at least according to the curators at Tate Britain, who seem to feel that this is primarily what George Stubbs ought to have been trying to convey.

Here, then, was a strange paradox. The paintings in this part of the museum were at least as important, resonant and aesthetically powerful as any of Tate Britain's newer works. Yet the rooms seemed slightly dead. The hang was far too sparse, the lighting too dim, the tone too much that of a particularly regrettable O-level history text come to life. I should have liked Days Like These, with its general lightness of tone, good manners and adorably retro recurrent nods to formalist criticism to have launched a guerilla raid into these parts of the museum — well, at least enough of an incursion to suggest that these works, too, were art of a sort that might potentially be enjoyed, rather than interrogated for their qualities as historical sources. A semi-recent V&A show, Hans Haacke's Give and Take, managed to cheer up some of the darker corners of their gloomy empire through these sorts of interventions — why not Tate Britain, too? To fail to do so is, after all, to assert by implication a fundamental discontinuity between the art of then and the art of now — an assertion that, whatever else might be said about it, will do Tate Britain no favours in its attempts to rival its younger sibling's popularity.

Days Like These runs from 26 February — 26 May 2003 at Tate Britain. Admission is free.

Bunny Smedley, February 25, 2003 10:07 AM