Gray Matter

'She presented arty fakes as real, and no one batted an eyelid - proving art pseuds will swallow anything. In other words she spent a fortune stating the bleeding obvious - that Modern Art is a culture-wrecking con.'

The Sun editorial, 10 July 1991

We have to be careful here. Almost any critical commentary on Muriel Gray's Art is Dead - Long Live TV is likely to be read by its author and producers only as confirmation of their daring iconoclasm.

It's hard to know exactly where to begin. With the concise - if qualified - appraisal from The Sun? Or with the the bonny lass's constant over the shoulder smirks, nods and winks to let you know that she wasn't falling for all this arty nonsense? Or with the completely unheard of 'artists' and their sad - if familiar - ramblings? Or with the knowledge that they were all really actors just playing a part? Or with the presenter's less playful, but no less theatrical, face-the-camera, face-the-people appeals to 'common sense', to 'honesty', to 'skill' and to 'call it crap if it's crap'? Or with the bewildering jump cut edits, the hand held, ever so live, never more than a few seconds on anything film technique?

Muriel Gray's five part 'debunking' of contemporary art was more a collage of televisual effects, fragmentary interviews and self-glorifying set pieces than any known species of argument. It is thus difficult, nay, pointless, to unpack bit by bit what was only held together by the film editor's equivalent of cow gum. Rather, a discussion of Art is Dead will have to start from the recognition that it had nothing of consequence to say about art which isn't obvious to someone with five minutes experience of the contemporary art world. Conversely, what it did say quite a lot about is the current condition of television and the customs of TV 'art journalism' in particular. In this respect Art is Dead was nothing if not symptomatic. Which is a bit sad really, because the one thing you can be sure of is that Muriel Gray and her commissioner at Channel Four, the witless Waldemar Januszczak, thought they had hatched something terribly radical and subversive and daring. In fact it was about as daring as a five-year-old saying 'bum' in front of the grown ups. And not quite as funny.

Art is Dead probably thought it was about art, and clearly thought it had something important to say on the matter. It had this much in common with the more earnest Relative Values and shared a lot with the other recent offering on the subject, Gerald Scarfe's excruciating Scarfe on Art. In fact all these programmes ever touched on were little scandals, big money and artsy people. They were about auctions, collections and pretensions. So what did mighty Muriel have to say about this world? That there is a lot of pretentiousness in it. Yes. And? Well, that's about it really. In which case, you may ask, why did she have to spend so long saying it?

In spite of appearances to the contrary, Gray's confident, plain-speaking, woman-of-the-people narrative was driven by a kind of terror. It's essentially the same terror which drives Waldemar Januszczak and the rest of his smug little series. It's a terror of being caught out, bolstered by the greater terror of being found out.

Its light side is the manifest terror of anything static and silent. This is so widespread that people in TV think it's normal. Do your own experiment. Get a person involved in making films about modern art. Place them in front of something static and silent - a painting, say, or a sculpture. Within seconds they become agitated and twitchy. After a few minutes they have to be physically restrained. Any longer and it's a trip to the dry cleaners. You see, for them it's a kind of torture, it goes against all their most base, most craven and most lurid instincts. They'll do almost anything, pay almost anyone, to stop this incessant unbearable absence of movement or noise. The symptoms of this curious disorder, this part of the terror, you will have witnessed on your television screens in recent months. Paintings, you might think, sit still on walls and keep their mouths shut. Nah. In fact they spin round the room and swoop low over your head; they saunter past nonchalantly in one direction and then hurtle back the other way; they loom over you like a tower block one second and they dissolve into nothingness before your very eyes the next; they boom out Wagner (if they're old and German), whistle Vivaldi (old and Italian), hum Elgar (old and British), gouge out feedback (Abstract Expressionism), sing the Beatles (Pop Art), play Michael Nyman (post modernism), or Stockhausen (anything of uncertain provenance that looks remotely modern). The presenter, meantime, in an effort to keep up with the all-singing all-dancing work of art chases it on a pogo stick, makes headlong leaps at it through windows-on-the-world, or creeps up on it on hands and knees through golden fields of gently swaying corn.

This lesser terror seems to afflict almost all media and art programmes from The Late Show down. It can be extremely irritating but its probably harmless enough - The Late Show still manages to turn out some decent items in spite of the interference. It can however be a symptom of the other, greater, terror. It is this greater terror which is the paranoid motivation behind Without Walls in general and Art is Dead in particular. Let me explain.

There is a kind of autonomy of television. It has developed its own sets of conventions and precedents which provide the conceptual framework for thinking the particular subject under scrutiny. In the history of art on television these would include Kenneth Clarke's gentlemanly and aristocratic Civilisation; Robert 'I wouldn't give a XXXX for a Julian Schnabel' Hughes' journalistic travelogue The Shock of the New; The South Bank Show; sundry Open University programmes and occasional one offs by 'personalities' with an axe to grind. It is these established formats, far more than the specifics of the art, which have provided the main terms of reference for any aspiring new treatment of the subject. Moreover, it seems that as often as not it is the general tone of voice and look of the editing, rather than the particular content of the arguments, onto which attention gets focussed.

In recent years it seems makers of art programmes have come to regard these precedents as generally academic, paternalistic, reverential and slow. Boring. Middle aged. Not sexy. Not television. True enough, perhaps. And what has emerged in their place is a generation of quick, slick, young, fun, bright, breezy items. Hence all the snappy edits, pirouetting paintings and pogoing presenters - and the lesser terror. Art is Dead strained its every muscle to declare its irreverence, to show it was not like these grown-ups in suits and or, in the case of the Open University, in flares and cravats. It would not be academic. It would not be boring. It would not be caught out.

But there was also something else behind these too obvious displays of irreverence and iconoclasm, behind these very heavy handed attempts at being light-footed and youthful. It was betrayed in Art is Dead by the excruciating high moral tone which couldn't be concealed behind the contrived carelessness of its style. While the professed claim of the series was to 'debunk' the pretentiousness of modern art, to cast doubt upon the claims made for modern art by its apologists, there was never an ounce of doubt in the presenter's self-righteous, finger wagging tone and shrill insistence that you (not I) have been duped and that I (not you) dare to point the finger. (Talking of pointing the finger, another of Januszczak's specious creations is called J'Accuse. Come to think of it, Without Walls? Really. You begin to wonder who these people think they are when they anoint themselves with such grandiose titles.)

But haven't we heard, somewhere before, something similar to this missionary zeal, this self-serving populism, this pious iconoclasm, this appealing to some undefined but commonsense table of values, this speaking from a position of such security that it brooks no doubt and requires no defence? Of course we have, and it was this, not the phoney artists, that was the real revelation of the series. Forget the spiky bleached hair, the impish smirks, the youngish clothes and the left-school-early accent. Ignore the faster than a speeding bullet edits, the cute graphics and the graffiti logo. This designer rebel was really just the ghost of dear old Peter Fuller come back to haunt us. To be honest I prefer to remember Peter as he was, all grimy glasses, pre-war suits and train spotter intonation.

But appearances aside, where were the significant differences? Not in the arguments, because they didn't exist. Or perhaps, if it's possible, they existed even less in Gray's monologues than they did in Fuller's. Mostly it was just assertion and innuendo and more assertion. Its most fitting tribute really did come from The Sun, who know a thing or two about assertion and innuendo (if you get my drift, wink, wink).

In reality this was far worse than anything Peter Fuller ever put together. Fuller knew where his interests lay and was more or less open about it. He was simply conservative, provincial and anti-modern. Muriel Gray, on the other hand, does her utmost to disguise her petty provincialism in a flurry of adolescent pips and postmodern squeaks. You're left thinking that perhaps Fuller was a really sophisticated intellectual after all. Mind you, Gray's theatrics made Fife Robertson's televised splutterings about modern art of a decade and a half ago seem erudite and urbane - in a Scottish kind of way. Muriel Gray, Fife Robertson...you don't think...could they by any chance be related?

Clearly Gray and Januszczak are sustained by the conviction that they are the outrageously daring iconoclasts who will strike terror into the weak hearts of the doddering old bourgeois establishment; who will shatter the complacent status quo; who will boldly go, etc, etc. Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth. And this is the source of the real terror: the terror of the lassie who doth protest too much: the unspeakable self-knowledge that she is what she so insistently declaims: a part of the same tired old reaction, not a radical new vision of art or of television or of anything else.

In the end Art is Dead was as dispiriting as it was predictable and familiar. Its petit-bourgeois philistinism, expressed in its tabloid fabrications and innuendo, was symptomatic of something far wider and far more deep rooted than the wilful ignorance typical of many journalists and television producers. Its political home was with a decade of small minded but powerfully supported right-wing attacks on anything - from architecture to education to the health service - which might contain a hint of cultural liberalism. Not Bolshevism or Anarchism, perish the thought, but the mild progressiveness which has been a feature of most European social democracies during the modern period. During the last decade this cultural reaction found new voice in this country. But as Modern Painters, clearly the theoretical mouthpiece of the Keep Britain Philistine movement, has demonstrated, this fear and loathing extends both historically and psychologically much deeper: at least to the origins of modernism and its early days in the middle of the last century. Ah, yes, Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites, The Hierling Shepherd and Pretty Baa Lambs. Now there's British art, there's skill for you.

So after all the huffing and puffing and tilting at straw men, who did Muriel Gray line up in her defence? Only Brian Sewell, Melvin Bragg and Sister Wendy 'what's-up-doc' Beckett. All people who are taken seriously by no one except television producers, and only then, you suspect, because they look or speak funny. And not exactly at the forefront of the radical revaluation of values, are they?

So what can we expect to be served up with next from Channel Four's mould-breaking series on contemporary culture? Beadle's About Art?