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The Twilight Saga: New Moon
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A smart, prickly and rewarding view of sexual and emotional confusion
Cock
Restaurants
Kitchen W8 is a bargain for this area, if such sophistication is what you crave
Kitchen W8
Too long and drawn out but very entertaining with excellent special effects
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London,
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Website: http://www.tate.org.uk
Out of Africa: one of the figures from the Chapmans’ Family Collection
The Tate has been spending our money, and some of its rich friends’, remarkably wisely, if this middle-sized exhibition of 23 recent acquisitions — paintings, installations and sculptures — is anything to go by. It works well as a top 20 of British art of the past 10 years or so, with signature pieces from Damien Hirst, Rebecca Warren, the Chapmans, Fiona Rae, Tacita Dean and others.
But there is also a serious theme here. Since the middle of the last century, artists have been making or arranging their works according to ordering systems and styles of scientific classification. In the Sixties and Seventies this approach produced clinical works, grids of photographs of industrial structures, or permutations of cubes. But over the past decade or so, artists have had a bit more fun, inventing their own anthropologies, archaeologies and faux-rational explanations.
Jeremy Deller’s The History of the World 1997-2004 is a large idiosyncratic diagram that links the subcultures of Acid House with the communities of Welsh mining towns. The connection runs entertainingly from Acid House through Kraftwerk, then via the mood of melancholy (a bit of a leap) to brass bands.
Deller wants to prove a thesis, about two different communities sharing the same values, but other artists are content to mock rationality. In the often reproduced Great Bear, an often overlooked artist, Simon Patterson, turns history into geography by taking the famously functional map of the London Underground and replacing the names of stations with those of important personages. He has one Tube line of footballers, another of film stars, another of explorers. If only history could be simplified in this way! Tacita Dean contributes a beautiful but paralytically slow film about an old man who enumerates the different variety of apples produced in his orchard. It’s one small way in which man tries to comprehend the variety of the natural world.
Hirst is here too with his well-known Pharmacy installation (1992), a room of cabinets full of boxes and bottles of medicines that equates our faith in the beneficial effects of art with those of prescription drugs.
The last room offers the first chance in years to see what may become regarded as the greatest work of art produced by British artists in the past 20 years, the Chapmans’ Family Collection. This is a marvellous spoof on the ethnographic museum: an enormous array of faux-tribal masks and artefacts carved by the brothers. They look thoroughly African, yet they have the typical bug eyes of the Chapmans’ drawings — wild hippy haircuts and you will frequently find McDonald’s emblems, chip packets and double cheeseburgers integrated into faces and figures. It’s a flawlessly executed idea that suggests the destruction of local cultures by globalised brands. The Chapmans’ work has not become as hotly traded or expensive as Hirst’s, but the latter’s casual assortments of sea shells, also in this exhibition, look trivial next to the craftsmanship of the Chapmans’ essay on cultural imperialism.
History will devise its own order for these artists, far more rational than the prices and headlines of today.
Until 23 August. Information: 020 7887 8888, www.tate.org.uk
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