A
detour round Tate Britain, taking in Jess Flood-Paddock and Jake
Chapman, the better to ask the questions which everybody else
does
Now,
despite what that Daily Mail style header might suggest, I am not
some traditionalist type who would suppress everything that happened
after Landseer and who regards those Impressionists as dangerously
modern and quite possibly foreign.
But
as I was watching the recent repeats of Robert Hughes' 'Shock
of the New' series, I noticed he seemed as keen to find
end-points for Modernist movements as beginnings. Indeed, sometimes
it feels like Modernism inhabited a bit of a bubble. From
Impressionism to Fluxus... the 1870s to the 1960s... it rode a wave
of technological and social change. Radical and innovative art seemed
not a fringe, not even a response to but a
component of a wider trend.
Once
that era was over, what were we left with but a series of spent
gestures now divorced from their meaning? Arriving after Modernism's
last supper, we were inevitably left with nothing but the dirty
dishes. Art became beached in Post-modern purposelessness.
Take
for example Jess Flood-Paddock's 'Mindless, Mindless',
(up top) in which a bunch of over-sized bicycle seats are artfully
arranged on a section of Tate Britain floor. This, we are given to
believe, is a comment on the recent riots. Bicycle seats often get
nicked, something which Flood-Paddock has used to (and I quote) “explore the
exchange value of objects and, more specifically, their emotional
value” in a work which is “concerned with the rhetoric of over
simplification and misrepresentation.”
It
is of course a great big steaming pile of crap.
Even
if I were convinced that bicycle seats were an insightful emblem of
the riots (which I'm not), there's no way you'd
make that connection simply by looking at them. Works like this seem
to think they're being conceptual when they're actually being
ineffective. The work isn't a package for the idea so much as an
oblique general pointer towards it, like getting street directions
from a shaky drunk. You need to read the sign just to know what
you're supposed to be pontificating about.
With
Lis Rhodes' recent 'Light Music' (as covered here), you had to experience the
work to get it. Here it's all happening backwards.
You feel the artist wrote a proposal promising a cutting-edge
challenging piece about a hot social issue. She knew her audience and
what they'd go for.
But
that audience isn't even the audience, it's not
you or me. Of course the whole caboodle is aimed at the ones with the
real purchasing power - the curators. You can so easily imagine them
getting all excited...the urban riots! ...the ones that happened a
few short miles from this gallery! ...how now,
darling! ...how edgy! The work itself and it's
relation to us punters is secondary at best. The sales pitch was
successful, the commission was won. On to the next one. This isn't
art as social comment. It's art as blag.
I
emerged from the room speculating that if there's more riots, and if
they break in the gallery and make off with those stupid oversize
seats... that would be an artistic statement
worth making.
When
you see such sheer unadulterated crap it would be easy to go on to
dismiss all contemporary art, to claim everything that came after
Modernism was mere post-modern claptrap, a sea of signs signifying
nothing. But that would be as easy as it would be blind. For it to be
true, you'd have to buy into that most post of all Post-modernism's
doctrines – that history ended, and all we can do now is repeat and
revive. (Clue – if absolutely everybody in the world is standing
still, history has ended. If you see anybody still moving about, it's
most likely still going on.)
With
hindsight, it might seem like Modernism had it easy. But I doubt it
felt like that at the time. And just as each Modernist movement broke
with the past, rained on yesterday's parade and devised new ways to
engage with the contemporary, so should we.
And
sometimes, every now and again, people even do. Take for example Jake
Chapman's 'Chapman Family Collection' (2002,
above). Stumbling across this room elsewhere in Tate Britain, I was
pleased to see a display of some splendid-looking African fetishes.
True, I was also a little confused as to what they were doing
there, and wondering if I'd passed through some
secret passage to the British Museum.
You
can look at them for some time before you notice. One is clutching
what is surely a carved bag of fries. Another has a familiar-looking
curvy 'M' inscribed on his shield. The clownish face on that one
there, haven't you seen it before? Then it's all around you. A few
may be decoys, but most make reference to McDonalds at some point or
another.
The
cool thing, in direct inversion to all that in-the-know Flood-Paddock
crap, is that you have to notice this for yourself. The title and
indicia keep up the fiction this is some genuine African collection.
In fact, as
I was later to discover, when this was first shown at the
White Cube gallery, a deadpan press release enthused over these
recent ethnographic finds from Camgib, Seirf and Ekoc.
(Try them backwards.)
In
a way, this is post-modern. The African art, that
seemed so authentic to Picasso and his Modernist brethren, is now
often expressly made with the collector market in mind. Woodcarvers
labour in sweatshops, trying to guess what the Western eye would most
want to see. Meanwhile, our fetishes have become the toys and figures
we collect with our burgers, or the action figures which have
replaced books on bookshelves.
But
rather than suggesting that if us gallery-goers get it we must be
smart, so are surely above all that, Chapman cunningly implicates us
in the process. We enthuse over the figures first, then
notice the trick. We're not flattered but ribbed, perhaps even
challenged. It's art for our era that still questions our era. To
borrow a description I heard somewhere it “explores the exchange
value of objects and, more specifically, their emotional value” in
a work which is “concerned with the rhetoric of over simplification
and misrepresentation.”
The
answer, then, to our initial question is – most of the time, yes.
That's why I keep turning up to Modernist exhibitions like a man out
of time. But not always. Sometimes, even today, art can still have
some bite to it.
Great stuff - thanks for sending me the link!
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