Twelve British Artists
New York art people of my acquaintance liked this show. So did I. What wasn't to like? All the artists - and to my surprise l do mean all dozen of them, without a dud in the lot - came across as skilled, smart, and inventive, though mildly so. Mildness was a common quality, as was freshness. As was distinctiveness. The young Britons struck me as quite uniformly distinctive in relation both to each other and to recent art strategy, about which they seemed spectacularly well informed.
If l sound ambivalent (l am trying to), it is on account of that general context of wearily sophisticated artistic moves and countermoves: an academically structured, commercially directed repertoire of models and expectations only too hospitable to the bright newcomer, who may readily find a slot to fill. To see the repertoire functioning so efficiently for so sizeable a cohort of tyros occasions mixed feelings of small admiration shadowed by growing, big ennui.
(What is art about now? Who needs it? Who cares? Why? Cosmic questions are accumulating like clouds of an eventual storm. Meanwhile the air is stifling.)
Anya Gallaccio's dying flowers and Damien Hirst's dead butterflies will stick longest in my memory I suspect. Scores of sunflowers under glass on the floor and hundreds of zinnias backlit between vertical panes made an exhilarating decorative impact when new and - the sunflowers especially - a fantastically gruesome impression as they rotted. As sociable symbols or in-jokes, the flower pieces suggested a witty and dire, good news/bad news allegory of the typical present-day gallery show.
As for the butterflies, scattered about a glassed-in environment with rows of vacated chrysalises and an abstract painting mounted like a seesaw, l was disappointed to learn that the lovely bugs had not, as l first surmised, arrayed themselves by perishing in situ. Knowing that Hirst placed them spoiled an effect of beauty randomly composed by tiny catastrophes. Beyond that, l do not think l would care, even if l knew, exactly what the painting was doing in there. (Another Hirst, a colour-chart-like grid of circles of household paint on canvas, hung alone to prove that he has an acute feeling for painting and its discontents - here with a balance of demotic material and hieratic form, making for an arid grandeur). The butterfly piece was overcomplicated.
Gallaccio and Hirst partake in an idea - roughly, the handling of raw nature with tongs of aesthetic protocol - that is among the most vital in recent art, which is not to say the idea is very vital. As also practised by, for instance, Matthew Barney, who coldly manipulates his own compulsive physicality, the tendency is certainly clever, exploiting the present exhaustion of artistic form and institutional ambience to heighten the contrasts with organic reality (real livingness, ordeal, death). The tendency also feels last-ditch, part of a dwindling arsenal of recourses for not being excessively boring when one must put on an art show (as one always must somehow, though for reasons increasingly recondite).
Other of the artists also use stiffly arbitrary form to bracket rankly lively content: extreme physical discomfort (Marc Quinn), manic paranoia (Abigail Lane), and rough sex, tabloid journalism, pornography and so on (the versatile Sarah Lucas). Still others play less classifiable angles. My favourite is Steven Pippin, whose multi-media project called Laundromat Pictures, which might have been undertaken on a dare to research and develop the all-time clumsiest photographic technology, is very funny. Pippin's delicate and noisy motorised wood sculpture Wow & Flutter was the single most beautiful object in the show. Lt reminded me of the famous and mysterious British sculptural flair, cynosure of Cragg and Deacon - still reigning major artists who prove curiously uninfluential on the new generation (Rachel Whiteread respectfully excepted, and perhaps Marcus Taylor).
Most affecting about the British twelve (including Lea Andrews, Keith Coventry, Liam Gillick, and Gary Hume) is the alacrity with which they pile into a game that shows abundant signs of being lost The game is contemporary art as, at least a seriously pleasing organ of cultured sensation, intellect, and feeling, susceptible to excitements and disquiets significant beyond itself. Fewer and fewer now are the game's professionally unaffiliated spectators. Smaller and smaller grow the stakes. Be it recorded, nonetheless, that the Britons blew through New York with a pizzazz that will merit them and their native scene the ongoing attention of whoever keeps score around here.
