The sensational performance piece, Untitled, by Roger Hiorns of a naked youth sitting on an anonymous metal park bench looking at a small fire blazing on the other end of the seat, was not taking place when I was at the British Art Show. It left the bench with a slight scorch mark, but otherwise quite ordinary-looking. It was slightly perplexing. The presence of the young man and the fire would have changed Hiorns’ sculpture, whose work is concerned with the “alchemical transformation of ideas, actions and materials”. Here the temporary fire and the human flesh contrast with the permanence of the metal bench. Hiorns is a dab hand at the spectacular and it is worth hanging about for the performance to begin.
The British Art Show, held every five years, is concerned with the here and now, offering an overview of current concerns. The selected work, by 39 artists, has been made in the last five years and encompasses the full range of fine art forms, showing video, painting, sculpture, installation and drawing. Some names are familiar, most notably Sarah Lucas, whose series of sculptures, NUDS, shaped from stuffed nylon tights and fashioned into biomorphic forms, take a wry look at the body, sexual stereotyping, sexual identity and bodily functions. It is the latter that imbue the intestinal forms of interlinking tubes to the human body, whether in appearance or its internal working. Closed rather than open, Lucas combines repulsion with intrigue.
By contrast, there is more traditional painting, confounding again the assertion that the art of painting is dead. George Shaw’s seemingly modest works show ordinary suburban scenes set in the West Midlands depicting drab buildings, one image showing a redundant pub being knocked down to be replaced by houses with little concern for who might like to live there. Forlorn wet streets in muted, greyish colours, paint a gloomy picture. Rejecting conventional materials, such as oils or acrylic in favour of house paint, Shaw works from photographic snaps, his work carrying an air of nostalgia for the loss of a real – or imagined – world.
The gentle political comment of Shaw’s work is more assertively expressed by Wolfgang Tillmans in his tabletop collage of printed matter and photographs. Although best known as a photographer, Tillmans uses found text and image to comment on contemporary life, whether it is the hanging of men accused of being homosexual in Iran, an X-ray of a brain or two books on the philosopher Krishnamurti. Tillmans has made an unashamedly personal assembly and is all the better for that.
One of the highlights of the exhibition is Christian Marclay’s film The Clock, an engrossing montage of thousands of film clips that depict a clock or a reference in some way to time and its significance in the original film. The Clock has no narrative as such, but its allure lies in the way Marclay segues from one short excerpt to another. Ingeniously the 24-hour-long video is synchronised with real time. By combining the reality of time with the fiction of the action portrayed, Marclay “feeds” on another art form to great effect.
In the British Art Show, subtitled In the Days of the Comet, the curators use the concept of the comet – the measurement of time, historical recurrence, harbingers of change and parallel worlds – to suggest the diversity and broad concerns of the selected artists; although some work seems dense or obscure, there is much to provoke, challenge and entertain.
British Art Show: In the Days of the Comet, which is accompanied by a useful catalogue, continues until April 17 before touring to Glasgow and Plymouth
