It's a Curse, it's a burden
Irony has a pretty firm grip on the British psyche cojones right now and it's not about to be loosened with the rampant nastiness of the looming millennial experience. Curated by Glenn Brown, 'It's a Curse, it's a burden' takes its title from The Fall's It's a Curse (1993), a song that mocks our nostalgia for childhood things: 'Smarties, Vimto and Spangles were always crap, regardless of the look back buzz...'
As with some of Brown's earlier shows, the inside of the white gallery space has been painted a pillar-box red, a colour familiar to fans of TV shows that sell the pornography of home decoration. It seems that this is Brown's millennium meltdown bunker or rumpus room, a place to hunker down for the apocalypse with a stockpile of anxieties.
Phillip Akkerman, who is now at least 18 years into his lifetime project of self-portraiture, is represented by two jivey, cartoonish paintings. In Self portrait No. 72 (1994), Akkerman gives his distended chops the hue of Spike the bulldog's favourite rib-eye steaks in 'Tom and Jerry'. A second self-portrait Self portrait No 43 (1998) shows the artist as an oily, Bruegel-ish peasant wearing a peaked cap and sprouting hairy warts.
Directly opposite is one of George Condo's best paintings, Back in Paris (1989). A Picassoid parody, it proclaims the artist's love of monsters and dental detail, depicting a boulevarding, unhappy, open-mouthed Condo brute with a pac-man jaw. This is first-generation Postmodernism: a referential, grandfatherly job, digging the last spadeful of content from the Modernist mine.
Glenn Brown's painting Secondary Modern (1998), a copy of a reproduction of an Auerbach portrait, transforms Auerbach's striated paint texture into a glassy, smooth surface in a mockingly beautiful way. But if Brown gives the Modernist gesture the once-over, Rebecca Warren's clay sculpture Helmet Crumb (1998) is even more rigorous. Exhibited at nose level on one of those 'Modernist-art-in-its-studio' plinths, it presents the spectator with a full perineal view of two straddling sets of rough clay legs, in 70s platform heels. The reference may be to the cartoonist Robert Crumb, but the bound-up thighs also evoke Hans Belmer's dolls and bondage photographs - nagging mainstream Octoberist fare.
Add N to X's 12-minute video Little Black Rocks in The Sun (1998) recalls a 60s avant-pop heritage pausing for a pit stop at the BBC's Radiophonic Workshop. The analogue synthesisers and Space 1999 solarising combines into ambivalent nostalgia for the Moog days with an accelerating-towards-the-abyss glee.
The ironic bunker, of course, has a safe core. But Keith Tyson's fallout shelter, covered in an orange plastic survival blanket and a few dusty, canned groceries, a polyester sleeping bag and some tennis shoes, is a deadpan sneer with its own laminated wall tag to emphasise its museum-grade irony. The Protective Shield For Use Against Atomic Spirits (1996), with a black Gothic cross slapped on the outside, is more Mike Kelly than Kelly's own Ectoplasm Photograph (1979) hanging next to it.
Glenn Brown's freewheeling accompanying text claims that the exhibition captures a number of rebellions that employ 'the essence of black humour, existentialism at its most funny'. But exactly what kind of black-hearted rebellion is this? As the novelist David Foster Wallace notes 'it's pretty hard to be a bona fide iconoclast these days when even Burger King advertises its onion rings with 'Sometimes You Gotta Break the Rules'". Avant-garde irony has become so diluted that the most mainstream television or advertising can spin it round, redeploy it and then look back and laugh. While Condo picks on Picasso, Brown on Expressionist readings of Auerbach, Akkerman on the tension between pluralism and Modernist programmatics, Tyson and Add N to X on public-safety film moments, what connects them is hip fatigue - the ironist's love of his cage.
