Fools and Horses

Mark Wallinger comes from Chigwell, in the hinterland between the eastern suburbs of London and the countryside of Essex. Essex is a sort of domesticated, Home Counties New Jersey, a land of up-market pretensions and down-market values. We make Essex jokes in the way Poles make Russian jokes; the lowest common denominators of the nation's psyche and the tabloid press (maybe the two things amount to the same) decided, at the end of the 80s, that Essex was to be the scapegoat. In fact, the trend may have been started by the exceptionally dreary Ian Dury, with his Paean to Essex Man, Billericay Dickie. That said, this county of stolid yeomen does harbour its quota of off-duty criminals and flat-land hillbillies, New Town oiks, little Englanders, Tory-voting yobs and assorted dumb-fucks: much like the rest of Britain, Essex is profoundly depressing.

What kind of an artist is Mark Wallinger? An artist who has created a miniature Stonehenge out of housebricks; made deft watercolours of a dismal adventure playground; stuck a fishing lure in a bird-cage; made works variously concerned with World War II, the Holocaust, the Englishness of Englishness, his old secondary school, deposed world leaders, horse-racing... It goes on: he has almost flooded his dealer's premises; done 'slickly second rate' paintings of his friends whom he dressed up to look like dossers and homeless people, and has attempted to register the colours of West Ham football team with the Jockey Club.

What is he - a maverick post-conceptualist, a Duchampian object-hoarder, a Realist painter? Political satirist, naughty-boy iconoclast, or a Neo-Neo-Classicist (as one curator had it, at the time when Neo was everyone's kneejerk)? These maladroit categories serve only to show the impoverishment of what passes for thought in the Art World. The more Wallinger produces, the less applicable are the labels.

Questions of identity are at the core of his project. Social structures, labels and presumptions fascinate him, and his breadth as an artist stems from a belief that only by playing with these strictures can we be liberated from them. He is even prepared to adopt and pay lip-service to the most conservative aesthetics and subject matter, only in order to trash them; or to pick on what might seem an inconsequential idea, and worry it into revealing its richness, His is an art of disguises and subterfuge.

In Passport Control (1988) he made a series of blown-up passport photos of himself, childishly doodled over with a marker pen. In one shot he gave himself a Yasser Arafat head-dress, in another the ringlets and homburg of an ultra-orthodox Jew; his face was hidden under a terrorist's balaclava, and pathetically disguised with B-movie slanted eyes and Fu-Manchu moustaches, fooling no one.

Slipping through passport control, the traveller becomes a marked man: to immigration officials, we are all prime suspects. Innocence is eroded with every step we take through the customs hall. The excise man's stare loads us with imaginary contraband - was that an airline meal I ate, or a condom full of cocaine? Am I constipated, or is it a bag of diamonds stuffed up my arse? A small yet hysterical inner voice wants to cry out, 'Stop me, I'm guilty!'. And so, as we drag our baggage and our neuroses under those watchful eyes, we adopt a shifty, self-conscious nonchalance, half hoping to be found out. Something of this familiar, self-conscious unease was captured in Passport Control and in the later Stranger2 (1990), about which Wallinger noted: "The man in the passport photobooth is failing desperately to settle in a presentable pose before the next flash of exposure. His dignity is compromised by a wayward tonsure and a booby-trapped stool.'

In Stranger2, discarded photo-booth mug-shots of anonymous strangers were lasercopied, duplicated and enlarged, then pasted on the undersides of three tiers of mirrors, each virtual image reflected on the mirror below. Looking down onto the little mirrored units one saw the reflected, doubled face of a stranger - two images of the stranger, one above the other, each partly obscured by its double. Standing directly above the object, I saw my own face in the uppermost mirror. Wallinger said that he'd been attempting to get to grips with Lacan when he made this piece. Stranger2 was like a demonstration model from a psychology lab test - to be viewed, and discussed: Be sure to note the interjection of the viewer's gaze, the apparent splitting of the subject, the re-presentation of the anomalies of the mirror phase, the fragmentation and ungraspability of the Real, etcetera, etcetera. However you looked at it, wherever one stood in relation to the work, the images kept escaping, the faces - truly anonymous faces (even their owners had rejected these records of themselves) - remained partially incomplete or split, or could only be viewed at such a slanted angel that the image lost all coherence. It was the narcissism of self-regard that was booby-trapped here.

After an unhappy period at Chelsea College of Art, he took the Goldsmiths' MA and hit the streets with a series of 'history paintings' which, with their Marxist/Materialist detachment, socio-historical erudition and fascination with the relation between art production and class, showed a remarkably adept facility at converting raw political anger into a series of critiques of the mentality of Thatcherite Britain. In doing so, he alluded to great swathes of social and cultural history. Nonconformism, the emergence of the working class, the Enlightenment, Robbie Burns, Hogarth, Stubbs, Blake, The Beatles, Wallinger's mother, all were used in one way or another. Add to this dinosaurs, lavatories and the use of cardboard, wood, wool and slate, as well as oil-paint, canvas and watercolour. His technical means are as diverse as his subjects.

The paintings were, perhaps, indigestible: a rich stew, long in the pot. Maybe they attempted too much, with their references to the placid never-never land of English landscapes, oaks and Toby Jugs, Nation and patriotism and the father-figures of British art. Wallinger proceeded to vandalise these with spray-can graffiti and jarring disjunctions. Cocking a snook at the dominant attitudes of the moment, including the essential conservatism of the Neo-romanticist paintings in vogue at the time, he adopted both the mannerisms and assumed pedigree of precisely that which he wished to criticise.

The trouble was that you could always hear the dull clank and hiss of the allegorical machinery grinding away in the background. The references started jamming the cogs. But Wallinger was never a hectoring Comrade or a Dave Spart, and if the work used history in order to demythologise it, the artist also recognised the complexity of the issues. There was nothing shabbily disingenuous or fashionably retro in his adoption of art-historical and social motifs. Returning to some of these themes in more recent paintings, it is clear that a lesson has been learned.

The references to nationalism, state control, mythologising as forgetting, racism and class permeate most, but not all the work. The allusions in Wallinger's work are often arrived at elliptically; there are times when he tries to see the world as a Martian (or a Martian poet) might.

A heap of discarded spectacles, with toy sheep and four-eyed faces hanging in frames, overlooking the pile (Sins and Virtues), dealt with the holocaust; the Subbuteo football game mounted on a plinth which conflated the 1966 world soccer cup with both World War II and the decline of Britain since 1945 (They Think It's All Over... It is Now); and the reference to a poem by Rupert Brook in the magical Heaven, which was nothing more than an angler's lure, a streamlined fake-fish with barbed treble hooks, suspended in a gilded bird-cage. These disconcerting collisions of objects and allusions in his 1988 show at Anthony Reynolds Gallery showed that Wallinger was capable, as an object-poet, of using objects not as cryptograms, so much as tart epigrams and metaphors for the most complex issues. We'd snag ourselves on these barbs, as on the fisherman's hook.

There is something of the esprit d'escalier about this vein of Wallinger's work. The Genius of Venice (1991), presented seven pages of the Royal Academy's catalogue to the exhibition of that name, illuminated from the rear. The image on the reverse page was visible through the paper; thus the face of a bearded man shone through as a ghostly presence around the crotch of a reclining female nude, and the face of a youth became an apparition behind the head of an older man. The work was derived from a simple circumstantial observation, revealing a wealth of meanings.

Whatever would lead Wallinger to make outline drawings of the classrooms, gym and woodwork shop of his old secondary school, on blackboards, and to illuminate the vanishing-point of the drawings with lightbulbs set into the boards (School, 1990)? What labyrinthine process led to his installation of a hosepipe (Fountain,1992) fixed at one end to a tap in the basement of Anthony Reynolds Gallery, and coiled and snaked up the stairs, across the hardwood floor, to emerge at crotch-height through a small hole in the plate-glass window, where the nozzle spurted a dribbling stream into the street? Of course, the work was not intended as a riposte to the ludicrous willie-show (as it came to be known) curated by Jeffrey Deitch and opening on the same night across the street at d'Offay's; it was mere serendipity.

Mark Wallinger is one of culture's omnivores. Ideas for projects seem to pour out of him (was the hosepipe a self-portrait?). But for the last two years he has, along with his other projects, been engaged in the production of two series of inordinately time-consuming paintings. The first, Capital (1991) debunked the staid values of the official portrait with a number of paintings of friends, posed as derelicts, society's losers, in front of the hallowed and imposing doorways of major financial institutions in the City. He brought to bear all the academic techniques and compositional devices of quasi-realist portraiture to these paintings, with their varnished glazes, careful modelling and concentration on detail. A second series (both have been purchased by Charles Saatchi) is just being completed. The paintings demand the most tedious skills and application. Yet Wallinger is not to be confused with all those painter's painters for whom the medium has definitely become the massage parlour. That said, he will also admit - with some sorrow - to being a sport-bore; a football, cricket and horse-racing bore. Addicted to the turf from an early age, the infant Mark even placed bets and quibbled the odds with Uncle Dick, who ran an undoubtedly illicit family book. As a prelude to a recent visit to Wallinger's studio, I was treated to a three hour disquisition on the racing game. His eyes assumed a far-away look, and he gesticulated like a man in control of imaginary reins.

I am singularly unqualified to discuss the ostensible subject of Wallinger's most recent paintings. I've never spent a day at the races and wouldn't begin to know how to place a bet. I am now in possession of more information on the topic than is good for me, coming from somewhat puritan, Cromwellian stock, for whom betting would be an immoral activity, on a par with hanging out washing 'of a Sunday'. Wallinger, from Essex, suffers no such scruples: The Wallingers, I'm certain, hang out washing whenever they choose. I mention this because, in his newest works, breeding is everything. The four paintings, all derived from the stilted photographs which appear in a book called Stallions of 1991, depict life-sized racehorses, and the title of the work is Race, Class, Sex.

Soviet Star, Shareef Dancer, Reference Point and Dancing Brave are all descended, through a direct male line, from Darley Arabian, an Arab stallion brought to this country by the brother of a Mr Thomas Darley of Yorkshire. Darley Arabian, born in 1700, is the progenitor of the strongest line of thoroughbred, racing horseflesh in the country. His son, Eclipse (B.1764) was painted by Stubbs (the painting is owned by Paul Mellon). Wallinger's horses are all owned by Sheik Mohammed, of the ruling Maktoum family in Dubai. Brother of the Prime Minister, Mohammed is Minister of Defence.

There they stand, these four bays. Each isolated against a blank white background, each on its own canvas, sixteen or so hands high. Every detail, of fetlock, wither, crop and belly is faithfully recorded. The pose is the same for each horse, as it is for all the horses in Weatherby's Stallions of '91. They face the left, in a vague sort of horsey contraposto. The original photos are black and white but Wallinger has faithfully coloured them in. The reins lead off the paintings to an invisible handler, cropped out of the picture; a proud owner whom we cannot see.

They are frightfully well done. Wallinger recently visited two of the major trainers at Newmarket, by way of research, and presumably to acquire some hot tips and perhaps an invitation to the nob's enclosure at some meet or other. He was gratified to learn that these somewhat alarming characters, for whom the arcane world of racing means everything, recognised the horses at a glance. What they failed to recognise, perhaps, was Wallinger's attention to the politics of sport.

Mucking-out, breaking-in, training, exercising, preparing the horse for the unpleasant ordeal of the race itself (Wallinger was assured that the horses detest racing) is the daily round of the racing fraternity, but it is a world where pedigree, class and form matter as much for the individuals involved in the sport as it does for the animals themselves. The redoubt of the feudal system informs every aspect of racing - and affects Essex punter, humble stable-lad and Royal patron alike. The Jockey Club, the thoroughly undemocratic, ruling junta of the game, determines everything. Racing provides a model of the world which continues to hold sway in Merrie England, as much as it does in Latin American dictatorships and Eastern potentates. It is a reflection of the world where identity, race, sex and class counts for everything, don't y'know.