To Oxford Street tube station and the short walk to get to the Photographers’ Gallery. And it proves to be a good start to the day since, when I reach for my wallet to pay the usual £3 old people’s discounted entry fee to get into the place (full price £4), the gatekeeper points to a sign on his desk informing that, in fact, there’s an early bird discount of which I was previously unaware. It turns out that admission is free up until midday and that I’ve beaten the meridian deadline, which is all rather pleasing, although it does seem that the galleries are a bit more full than usual with what look like gangs of penurious student taking advantage of the vermiform concession. Now, usually on these kinds of occasions the kids don’t provide too much of a barrier between me and the stuff on the walls as they tend to gather together into little huddles in the middle of the rooms to chatter or commune with their mobile phones. But today appears to be different and instead of updating profiles, hunting pokemons, twittering to one another, taking yet more selfies or doing whatever else it is that young, digitally inclined people do to amuse themselves, they all seem to be paying close attention to the works on display. Evidently they’re intrigued by the opportunity to glimpse back into the anthropological investigation of a strange time and place far, far away that is so very different to the world in which they’ve grown up. And what is this mysterious antediluvian analogue locale that must be so baffling to the youthful explorer and yet brings back mixed waves of nostalgic type memories to those of us who once passed through it? Well, it’s the 1970s and, more specifically, records of the place as witnessed, examined and challenged by the photographing feminist activists of the day and whose works form the basis of the Sammlung Verbund Collection, from which this current selection of examples have been drawn.
Looking at all the images here confirms just how much has changed over the past half century and yet just how much has remained the same. For while gender discrimination – which is, I think, probably a reasonably enough umbrella term to use to categorise what most of the show is all about – was certainly more blatant back in the ‘70s, nobody could doubt that it still exists today, deeply embedded within just about all of the structures and institutions of our own contemporary society. I suppose that the big difference, however, between that era and our own, certainly as exemplified by the works on display here, is that back then there was a new, shared sense outrage at the more obvious signs of sexual inequality which was matched by a growing confidence and compulsion among women to very actively go out and confront the iniquities of the situation and try to do something about it. And so, from among the half of the population that had traditionally been silent or, more accurately, silenced, there now emerged artists who felt strong enough to make plain their thoughts across a range of topics whether relating to questions of media representation, sexual exploitation or body objectification.
As for the methods by which this new, radical gender agenda might be propagated, the favourite artistic style seems to have been a kind of quasi-academic, Conceptualist documentary-making format using sequences of images that, for instance, Renate Eisenegger uses to portray herself with mouth taped shut as a comment on the denial of the female voice, or that Martha Wilson uses in her series of self-portraits as Working Girl, Housewife, Earth-Mother and so forth, in order to mock the absurdity of the male stereotyping gaze. If, with hindsight, some of these works look just a little dated and simplistic, then others like Ulrike Rosenbach’s reworking of Warhol’s Elvis portrait (a couple of decades before Gavin Turk made his own similar, Post-Modern gesture) and Hannah Wilke’s portrayal of herself in a crucifixion pose are a bit more punchy, and the brazen self-exposure of Valie Export and her Action Pants: Genital Panic still retains the power to shock and discomfort.
After all that serious, heavy-duty political stuff, I feel a little bit guilty and something of a traitor to the cause when I walk off into Mayfair and call in at Hamiltons for the exhibition of classic glamour supermodel shots by Herb Ritts. Christy, Elle, Claudia, Tatjana and Naomi are all present and all look very happy and healthy in this exuberant celebration of the female form…ok, in this parade of soft porn titillation which is, well, it’s…what can I say…it’s all composed in the very best of possible taste. In mitigation, I’d like to state for the record that I only called in as I happened to be en route to the Timothy Taylor gallery next door. And the art here is perhaps even more alluring. The show consists of about half a dozen large works by Sean Scully, an abstractionist who has been producing his trade mark paintings of simple blocks of subdued colour for quite a few decades. I think it’s fair to describe them as sort of Marmite paintings, not just because the thick impasto layers of paint are applied to the canvas very much in the way one might paste the salty comestible spread onto a slice of buttered bread, but because the appeal of the artworks tends to be both arbitrary and unequivocal. And beyond perhaps mumbling something about the golden mean, I find it hard to make any rational case for explaining why Scully’s simple shapes and bands of colour should be quite so appealing – to me, at least. Suffice to say that I find looking at this display provides a warming respite on what otherwise might be considered to be a very cold day whilst completely accepting that these works are just as likely to leave another viewer completed undefrosted.
So now a bus ride to a new location, the Austrian Cultural Forum in Knightsbridge and the exhibition Tender Touches which is billed as a complementary exhibition to the earlier show at the Photographers’ Gallery (which is of a similar Austrian origin). Except I find that I don’t really get a chance to have a proper look at much of the display as there seems to be a staff shortage or something that means while I get buzzed through the main entrance to the building, I then get stuck waiting in a corridor for someone to let me through a second glass security door. Eventually, having made louder and louder iterations of my irritation, a man does appear and directs me up some stairs but then there’s more confusion when I get to what I think is the main gallery only to find it half-filled with rows of empty chairs and someone starting up a screening of a Fritz Lang film noir. This turns out not to be part of the exhibition but merely the projectionist’s trial run for an evening presentation but it’s distracting enough to make it difficult to concentrate on looking at the rather odd selection of photographs and sculptures that makes up the small display here. According to the accompanying explanatory leaflet, the exhibition ‘engages with concepts of intimacy, alienation, pleasure and desire’. And while I do indeed feel a little alienated myself, I’m happy to concede that Eva Stenram’s digitally manipulated photographs of ‘60s pinups, Friedl Kubelka’s self-portraits as a lingerie model, and other assorted bits of fetishistic iconography attend to those kinds of febrile concerns. As to how the elaborate, layered gateau left over from the opening night performance by Zoe Williams would have fitted into that remit I’m not entirely sure and, frankly, I don’t think I really want to know.
Finally, after that rather shambolic presentation, I take a glacially slow, traffic-jammed bus ride to the ICA for this year’s Bloomsberg Young Contemporaries, the exhibition that is meant to be a showcase of work from the best of the country’s recent fine art graduates. As with all group shows such as this, it’s a bit hard to make out what most of the artists are up to by just looking at a single piece of their output. Having said that, I quite liked the steel cut out shapes by Jack West that open the show. He’s found an interesting new medium to play with that I don’t think I’ve ever seen used before, although it’s not all that obvious how he might be able to develop this initial sequence of logo-like imagery into something more profound. Similarly, Kate Fahey’s digital collages of cloud formations and Saelia Aparicio Torinos’ glass condoms stuck on a metal railing prompt second looks and I’d be quite interested in seeing more of their work sometime in the future. As for the rest of the ground floor stuff, it all looked a bit random and samey to me and very much in keeping with current trends for gathering together clusters of fairly random bits and bobs and sticking them into piles of what, in any other context it, would be called junk. Of course, in a gallery setting the results must be referred to as art but that doesn’t necessarily make it very good or interesting art. There’s quite a bit more of the same upstairs, along with some fairly desperate naif paintings – none of it offensively bad or completely gauche but none of it very noteworthy either. Except, for three short but extremely energetic mini-video clips from the star of the show, Richie Moment. These deliberately bad taste, mash-up satires channel a kind of Keith Lemon vulgarity and bad taste in order to launch an attack on the pomposity and pretension of current art world mores, all of which makes them rather good, grubby fun. It may not really qualify as any kind of example of what used to be called proper, fine art but, I confess, that it did put a smile on my face which, I think, means it has some kind of value.
Arthur, smiling?? You should have taken a selfie.