12 FEBRUARY 2000, Page 44

Exhibitions

Live in Your Head (Whitechapel Art Gallery, till 2 April)

Thinking the unthinkable II

Martin Gayford In 1970 the artist Keith Arnatt exhibited a work entitled 'Is it Possible for Me to Do Nothing as my Contribution to This Exhibi- tion?' It sounds, though I have never seen it, an absolutely typical product of its peri- od, not so much for the idea that doing nothing might be a work of art, as for the speculative tone, 'Is it possible?' Around 1970 it was possible for just about anything to be a contribution to an exhibition, as is shown by Live in Your Head, the survey of the radical art of those days at the Whitechapel Art Gallery.

The late Sixties and early Seventies were thd age for thinking the artistically unthink- able. Could a pile of oranges be art, or a slide show, or a bottle of chewed-up paper, or a walk in the country? Why not, replied the zeitgeist, why not give it a try? There are those who think that 'Alia, but it is not art' is an unanswerable response to any unexpected aesthetic phenomenon. But that ancient put-down won't get you far at the Whitechapel. On show are works which are positively lying in wait, hoping someone will raise the question.

There, for instance, is Michael Craig- Martin's celebrated piece, 'An Oak Tree' (1973). This consists, as its title wouldn't suggest, of a very ordinary glass of water, on a very ordinary shelf — plus a dialogue between the artist and an interlocutor, in which the former explains that, by an act of artistic will, he has transformed the glass of water into a spreading, leafy oak tree. Its external appearance remains unchanged, of course, it is just the inner essence that been metamorphosed. Inwardly, you have an oak tree,before you; outwardly, a glass of water.

What is this? Leaving aside the matter of whether or not it is a work of art, it is, among other things, a wry joke on the sub- ject of transubstantiation, and a comment on the philosophical doctrine that things may have an inner essence separable from their physical manifestation. It is a neat intellectual conundrum, in front of which it would be most unwise to blunder in with a blunt inquiry such as 'But is it art?' (or even an assertion that one doesn't know much about art, but that's not it). 111.

Rose Finn-Kelcey's 'Here is a Gale Warning, Alexandra Palace, 1971 `Oh, yes,' one can imagine the voice in the dialogue continuing, 'so what is art? Could you provide a clear, watertight defi- nition, please?' There is no subject which these artists would be happier to discuss, as philosophically as you please. Another piece on show consists of a photograph of the artist, Keith Arnatt, bearded and hairy in the fashion of the time (1972), holding a placard which reads: 'I'm a real artist'. Next to it is a long quotation from the Oxford philosopher John Austin on the logic of the word 'real' in ordinary language.

The artists wouldn't even have been much disconcerted by the idea that what they were doing wasn't art. A lot of them were browned off with the notion of art, conventionally understood. Even the kind of thing which would have struck the person in the street in 1972 as pretty way out abstract sculpture constructed from bits of girder and metal sheeting welded together, for example — seemed to these revolution- aries altogether too academic, confined, rarified. Indeed, quite a few of the major figures — Richard Long, Gilbert & George, Bruce McLean -- were trained at St Mar- tin's School of Art under Anthony Caro in exactly that tradition — and rejected it.

Like their contemporaries on the Paris streets in 1968, these artists wanted abso- lute freedom, a degree of liberty which per- haps isn't available in this constrained, imperfect world. The result has acquired several monikers, of which conceptual art is the most widely used, and would do fine for the two works already described, but not for some of the others. At the time, the term dematerialisation was also tried out because one common factor seemed to be that the object was disappearing — though there were still objects about, about a hun- dredweight of oranges in the case of Roelof Louw's 'Pyramid (Soul City)'.

For a while, all this was thought to be an aberration — not to say, a load of tiresome, fun-revolutionary, hippy whimsy. Nowa- days, it is recognised as the basis of the much discussed young British art of the Nineties (Hirst, Emin and co.). If you want to see the origin of Turner Prize art, go to the Whitechapel. Most of the ideas were thought up 30 years ago.

So how has it all worn? It must be admit- ted that a lot of the exhibition looks like hell — aging bits of text, decaying pho- tographs, grainy old film. In comparison, the Young British Artists of the Nineties had much more visual pzazz. There are ele- ments — notably the fun-revolutionary Marx-plus-Marcuse — which now seem as remote and quaintly period as phrenology (one of the artists involved proposed an art strike — no production of conceptual art for three years — notably failing to bring capitalism to its knees). In other cases, lit- tle is left but a ghost of the original.

One would have had to be there at the time to take in the full aroma, so to speak, of the performance in 1974 by COUM core members Cosey Fanni Tutti, later of Vibrating Gristle, and Genesis P-Orridge. All that remains is a photograph of two people adorned with what look like black leather straps and gravel. Similarly, the exhibition would probably have more impact if Stuart Brisley were really sitting in the middle of it in a tub of cold water and offal, as he did in his performance piece 'And for today Nothing'.

But there are works that survive, if not as art — let's not get into that — as something interesting. There's 'An Oak Tree', for one. For another, there is John Latham's cele- brated piece 'Art & Culture' of 1966-67, for which he invited students to chew up and spit out pages of Clement Greenberg's essays on art, subsequently fermenting the resultant liquid, and presenting it neatly bottled in a leather case with notes and a copy of the original book. This had two results. Latham was sacked from St Mar- tin's, and his pupils really did spit out intellectually speaking — the formalism of Greenberg, much revered by Caro and other members of the sculpture faculty.

Predictably, the artists who went on to fame and fortune — G&G, Richard Long — stand out for visual impact. Long's early photographs are beautiful, and G&G, anar- chic as always, produced — of all things in this context — hand-executed drawings of themselves. Much of the rest looks not so much conceptual as like blueprints, first drafts for artistic notions which might or, more likely, might not take off. But all that thinking the unthinkable did have results, and some of them, it must be admitted, have been most fruitful.