C87 Reviews

London

Finally.  Young British Art has at last slipped quietly from the cutting edge of New Labour's Cool Britannia to the cutting-room floor of the Sensation show.  The closing edit of the YBAs into a glossy catalogue and blockbuster exhibition also marked their end as a fashionable news item.  By November of last year, the 'Death of Brit Art' was front-page news.  The YBAs were old and boring.  Their 'conceptualism' was a cold drudge and we were primed to look out for something new - an art which if not exactly clever, would at least be enjoyable - a seductive Art Lite for the millennium.  And its name was New Neurotic Realism.

Though initially enthusiastic, the reviews of NNR soon turned chilly.  The huge fanfare of publicity that accompanied the launch of Die Young Stay Pretty at the ICA looked perhaps too well-handled, with the NNRs spin-doctor/curator, Martin Maloney, looking altogether too apt in his role as Media Relations Manager to the new baby of 'British Art'.  Yet despite the puff, this supposed 'alternative' to the 'YBA establishment' looked strangely familiar.  December's ICA show was not entirely unlike Maloney's earlier curations - (Die Yuppy Scum at Karsten Schubert or his much earlier Lost in Space).  Much of the press coverage around the NNR show at Saatchi's has focused obsessively on Maloney as the authorial centre of 'the movement'.  The cool reception NNR has received recently is perhaps more of a suspicion of Maloney's overactive curatorial presence than an explicit rejection of the work of 'the group'.  Maloney himself is not exactly a fresh-faced outsider - he was included in Sensation, writes reviews for Flash Art, teaches at Goldsmiths and is reputedly a friend of Charles Saatchi.  Significantly, he is also of the same undergraduate generation as Damien Hirst.  His own paintings and positioning of NNR must be interpreted as a continuation of that strand of art-making in British colleges which lost out to the 'Neo-Conceptualism' of the late eighties.  Under the guise of The New Spirit, a contemporaneous generation of art students revelled in the lush excesses of paint - in joyful disavowal of the arid intellectuality of 'conceptualism' and the anti-commercial 'extremism' of 'Performance Art'.  Maloney's own paintings are typical of a generation that has sat patiently on the sidelines, waiting for the up-swing of a pendulum that supposedly moves between two poles - with the visual, the 'beautiful' and 'sensual' on one side 'replacing' the dry and sourly 'intellectual' on the other, at regular intervals.  It thus seems more than mere coincidence that the first big exhibition of Julian Schnabel's work for ten years should now also be showing at the South London Gallery.

Despite the 'alternative' spin, the NNR at Saatchi's looks like an extension of the degree show format of Sensation.  The social culture of British art schools, and their intellectual and imaginative horizons, have had a hugely determining effect on the shape of both YBAs and NNRs.  Yet the effect of art schools as a productive force in the creation of art is much under-theorised, particularly by comparison with recent examinations of the 'framing effects' of curators, historians, critics, and markets.  But, despite such sameness, some interesting work is still apparent at the Saatchi show.  Timoko Takahasi's Beaconsfield is a shambling spread of wires, 'ancient' computers and cheap swivel lamps.  What seems like an electronic avalanche has occurred and detritus of all kinds is crushed into that once blindingly white space.  What at first appears as chaos is in fact a precisely curated topography - in which little clocks sit like model armies waiting to attack.  When natural daylight fades, the lamplights glow like grottos and the once insidious and darkly menacing objects turn now into quaint relics of obsolescence.  Where Takahasi dumps us in the mess that hides behind the slick surface of an informational world, Brian Cyril Griffiths re-makes the surface of our digital age from cardboard, bottle-tops and gaffer tape.  At once badly, yet ingeniously made, his assemblages poignantly 'curate' today's waste products into a reconstruction of the past's image of the future - Flash Gordon, in cardboard, for the millennium. 

Beyond the Brit Art loop, Georg Herold's show at the Anthony Reynolds Gallery comes as a relief.  The two glass cases of Rude Museum reconstruct, and at the same time exhaust the conditions of the museum as framework for art.  Enclosed at the top, but open at the front, the 'cases' hold a bricolage of minute displays - a single rusted paperclip, two daftly white sugar cubes, one broken arm from a pair of tortoiseshell spectacles.  The cases and plinths that structure and frame Herold's mini-museum are as rough and improvised as its contents.  The slick invisibility of the frame is thus shown to be as broken and discontinuous as the objects it displays.  In Act of God two black condoms are filled with water, and wobble like breasts, on a white plate.  The sign of male genitalia is transmogrified and swollen into that of the female sexual organs.  The penis tip becomes the erect female nipple and in the same act, the engorged black condom pales into translucency.  The effect is of an upside-down exhibitionism that first startles and then makes you laugh at its obviousness.  Most appropriately for the wake of Brit Art, Herold also gives us a wooden Union Jack - one that, even drained of colour, shows up the crudity and constructedness of attempts to structure identity under a single sign.  Jerrybuilt and cumbersome, British Flag is the antithesis of a flag.  Far from flying high, it is as rigid and inflexible as a five-bar gate - a coarsely botched bit of fencing, rammed together with more violence than skill and at the same time, a panicked and provisional architecture of reassurance.

Bernadette Buckley and Jaime Stapleton lecture at Goldsmiths College, London.

Die Young Stay Pretty, Institute of Contemporary Art, November 1998/January 1999
Georg Herold: Anthony Reynolds Gallery, December 1998/January 1999
New Neurotic Realism, Saatchi Gallery, January-March 1999