15 JANUARY 2005, Page 38

Alternative history

Andrew Lambirth

Faces in the Crowd — Picturing Modern Life from Manet to Today Whitechapel Art Gallery, until 6 March The first part of the title of the Whitechapel’s latest portmanteau show is taken from Ezra Pound’s masterpiece of compression, the two-line poem ‘In a Station of the Metro’ — ‘The apparition of these faces in the crowd;/ Petals on a wet, black bough.’ The poem is a triumph of Imagism, the short-lived movement (c.1910–17) Pound helped to launch, which was in favour of brief, musical phrases and clarity of image, and in revolt against the woolliness of Romanticism. The second part of the title reveals the outward thrust or purpose of the exhibition: to present an alternative history of modernism as seen through the evolution of realism. So, in this scheme of things, abstraction, long fêted as absolutely essential to modern progress, doesn’t get a lookin. It sounds an interesting project until its real intention emerges — to attempt to provide a back-history, pedigree and justification for the contemporary efflorescence of photography and film.

I sometimes wish that photography and film (too much of it glorified holiday snaps and home movies) could be hived off from the main body of art and dealt with as a separate enterprise. All those curators who are obsessed with the moving image would then have to create a new niche for themselves in the National Film Theatre or British Film Institute. Or else build up an entirely original support and evaluation system for the largely impoverished efforts of those camera-wielders who now call themselves artists and leech dry the resources intended to support the national school of painting and sculpture. Pluralism is all very well if it results in good art, but all we have is confusion. Boundaries are so blurred these days that nothing of any precision — let alone the hard, gem-like quality of Pound’s images — is likely to result from the muckheap of ‘artistic’ inspiration. So we muddle along with anything and everything qualifying as art, and no sense of value apart from the financial.

For the duration of this exhibition, the Whitechapel’s airy spaces have been segmented into a number of different-sized cubicles or booths, designed for the supposedly intimate showing of paintings, one or two sculptures, photographs and films. The paintings are restricted to the downstairs, so you are advised to linger there for all you’re worth before venturing upstairs into the wilderness of video and still. I mean, there are enough good photos downstairs (by the likes of Weegee, Cartier-Bresson, Walker Evans, Brassai, Sander et al.) to keep most devotees of reportage happy for an hour or two. I thought the work of Seydou Keita and Helen Levitt particularly arresting. And, occasionally, the photography even approaches art, as in the compelling enig mas of Alexander Rodchenko — but then he was a painter.

In what constitutes an ante-room to the exhibition as you come in is a cubicle containing half-a-dozen Atget photographs of Paris, a rather dark Sickert of the audience in the Gaite Rochechouart, Bomberg’s magnificent ‘Ghetto Theatre’ and ‘Ringside Seats’ (1924) by George Bellows. The last, a remarkable pre-TV depiction of the moments before a boxing match, with its closely observed areas of interest and activity scattered across the canvas, may at first sight appear clumsy. In some ways it is, but the careful construction of the picture — both dramatically and geometrically — is supremely effective. The Jack Yeats painting of a similar subject looks a mess beside it. But none of these images can be properly seen given the limited dimensions of the booth. These are paintings which need air. The space was further cramped when I was there by the presence of a young person in the corner muttering distractedly into a mobile.

Admittedly, there are several fine things to be seen in this show, not least the Manet masked ball and the much more modernlooking Lautrec, the despairing Munch, and a bit of manic movement from the Futurists Carrà and Boccioni. There’s a Beckmann café scene and two smoothly disturbing Magrittes, all three borrowed from private collections. Christian Schad’s decadent three-quarter-length portrait hints at the lure of corruption. John Heartfield’s collages stand out, as always, for their incorruptible honesty. The cell containing Bacon, Dubuffet and Paolozzi (who’d want to be locked up with them?) works well as a piece of hanging, each picture adding to the sum of the others, and round the corner one of George Segal’s frozen tableaux has more life to it than many a flashier exhibit. (Pistoletto, for instance.) At the top of the stairs, a couple of Juan Munoz’s grey polyester-resin seated men avoid keeping watch. I don’t blame them. Enter the upstairs galleries for such orgiastic delights as Carolee Schneemann’s video ‘Meat Joy’ (1964), or the real madness of Bruce Nauman’s clowns — a rare class act.

So much of the rest is pretentious, pointless or hideous. (I make exceptions of Andreas Gursky’s cibachrome print ‘May Day II’ and Thomas Schütte’s ‘Head of Janus’ in glazed ceramic.) The exhibition is dominated by ideas which the art is straitjacketed into illustrating: closure and enclosure, politics and spectacle, change and decay. Not forgetting the relationship between the individual and society. Why this frenzied search for meaning? Art speaks of itself — we’ve had enough of subtexts; beauty and uplift is what we crave. Social reporting belongs in the history books. Admission is £8.50, which might be good value if you’re a ‘B’ movie addict. If not, you could save yourself the expense and browse through the hefty catalogue instead.