Exhibitions 2
Young Americans Part 2 (Saatchi Gallery, till 22 November)
The art game
Martin Gayford
What's going to happen next in art? That, of course, is the big question. The honest answer, as far as most of us are con- cerned, is doubtless 'search me', or possibly 'Saatchi'. Because, if anyone knows, it is Charles Saatchi, collector and advertising man extraordinary. Indeed, there are those in the art world sufficiently crazed with sus- picion to believe that he not only knows what new fashions will appear, he actually makes them appear, manipulating the strings behind the scenes. At any rate he — or the Saatchi Gallery — has come up with a novel stylistic tag: the New Neurotic Realism. And also an exhibition full of transatlantic artists most of us on this side of the pond have never heard of.
The new style and the new exhibition are not explicitly attached to one another. The New Neurotic Realism is supposed to be what's going to happen in British art after the Young British Artists — that is, Damien Hirst & co., as exhibited at the Royal Academy last autumn in Sensation. It is outlined and illustrated in a book of the same name (edited by Dick Price, Saatchi Gallery, £24.95). And one must admit that prima facie it's rather a fetching notion, providing as it does the solution to another perennial critical problem: what on earth are we going to call what's going on (whatever it is)?
It was a defect of the present, or as it may already be the last, style that nobody ever came up with a monica for it — 'Young British Artists' being plainly the result of taxonomic desperation. At one point, I proposed `nerdism', but to my dis- appointment, nobody took it up. The new movement, if movement it is, starts off with the great advantage of having a name (though, as is frequently the case with art movements, it is not quite clear whether there is any common factor among the artists alleged to be involved apart from the label).
It is, of course, one of the iron rules of the art game that something must be going on, even in periods such as the present decade — which has been diffuse and mud- dling to a degree. It may come as slightly more of a surprise to members of the gen- eral art public to discover that all those shocking young artists they were first intro- duced to by Sensation — Tracey Emin, the Chapmans et al — are, to the art world, already thoroughly familiar, and that there- fore it is time for something new.
So the theory works fine. It is when we descend to brass tacks that things become a little more awkward and prickly. The New Neurotic Realists turn out, like the Young British Artists, to be a very mixed bunch; at least one of them, Ron Mueck, the hyper- realist sculptor, was one of the last lot — having featured sensationally in Sensation with a tiny, gruesome piece called 'Dead Dad'. There is quite a lot of photography in the NNR book, plus some disconcerting- looking sculpture including a sort of stalag- mite purporting to be made of the bodies of dead rats — all pretty much business as usual.
The novel feature is that there is also a good deal, even a majority, of figurative painting (much more than there was amongst the YBAs). The painters involved are fairly diverse, but there is a common thread of sorts in an attachment to low-key, mundane, but also weird or nasty, sights. This switch to painting is the big new devel- opment, if I've got the argument right. The idea is that painting disgraced itself in the Eighties with an outbreak of crude and embarrassing expressionism (the artistic equivalent to the lurid braces and loud paisley ties of the era). Now, having served a sentence in the dog-house — just as the slow-footed were again announcing its death — painting can return and deal with much the same range of seamy, mundane material as the Young British Artists, but also perform tasks with which other media have difficulty, such as looking good on the wall.
The Young Americans 2 are not tagged Neurotic or Realist, but the mix is much the same, with some installation and funny- looking sculpture, and a lot of figurative painting. The modes of painting are quite 'Jarvis and Liam Smoking; /997 by Elizabeth Peyton diverse — as are those of the British Neu- rotics — but the mood is rather similar (art movements don't seem to be about formal, visual matters any more, but about moods). Robin Lowe, for example, does high gloss, almost hyper-real pictures of ordinary peo- ple looking a little odd, with a strange or creepy look in their eyes (many of his sub- jects are children, who seem to be an obsession of avant-garde artists these days).
Quite different, to look at, are Elizabeth Peyton's woozily romantic little pictures of rock stars and others — 'Jarvis and Liam Smoking', 'Noel & Liam (MTV awards)'. These are done in the sort of cute, loose- brushed style others might apply to a dish of fruit on a kitchen table, say. The edge comes from the subject matter. These scenes are more what you would expect to see in a magazine for teenage girls than an art gallery. But why should that be so? The pictures get under your skin, because of, not despite, their gooeyness.
There is kitsch recycling going on in the work of Lisa Yuskavage and John Currin. The former espouses a style similar to that used on those ultra-yukey greetings cards depicting children at prayer and little angels in air-brushed pastel-shades. The twist is that these pictures are populated by female humanoid dolls like pornographic Teletubbies (a table covered with statuettes of the same is also on exhibit).
Currin occupies similar territory — sac- charine kitsch turned toxic — though, again, the look is rather different. His stylistic exemplars are more on the lines of Donald McGill seaside postcards (or their American equivalents). And a leitmotiv in his work is doe-eyed women with colossally oversized breasts, bosoms like watermel- ons, presumably as a result of hubristically over-ambitious silicone injections.
These four artists seem to belong togeth- er as a group more than the rest, though there are other works on show, including various kinds of mutant abstraction, full- sized recreations of furniture and fittings in an American version of stockbroker Tudor by Brian Tolle, a scale model, about 00 gauge, of a road through a desert by Michael Ashkin, and big paintings of single words in brash colours — LIAR, INSANE, SORRY, NOTHING — like an edited com- mentary on the Clinton White House, by Sarah Morris.
New? Neurotic? Realism? I'm not sure on any count, as I am not in the case of the British candidates. Nor am I convinced, as yet, that any of them, from either side of the Atlantic, are major, or even very good artists. But the pricking of my thumbs sug- gests that we shall be hearing and seeing a good deal more of them, or of some at least. Currin and Yuskavage from among the Americans. And among our home- grown Neurotics, names to watch include Dan Hays — who does huge paintings of hamster cages that double as geometric abstracts, and Nicky Hoberman, a specialist in large-headed, creepy, shifty-eyed chil- dren. Quite soon the news will filter out of St John's Wood: a New Neurotic Realism show is planned for January. And look out for the Turner Prize short list, not this year, but next.
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