Exhibitions

HG (Clink Street Vaults, till 15 October) Young British Artists v (Saatchi Gallery, till 29 October)

Mesmerising effect

Martin Gayford

Entering HG through a door in a side street, you find yourself in a 19th century dining room, apparently recently aban- doned by its occupants. Candles still burn, half-eaten food lies on plates. Beyond this there is a maze of huge, gloomy spaces where flashing lights disorientate and sepulchral gloom creates a mood of Gothic trepidation. Astonishing sights await the visitor.

I found it all rather disconcerting — and not because of the dark and the surprises. This is an installation at the Clink Street Vaults by the celebrated American artist and theatre director, Robert Wilson, in col- laboration with the sound and lighting spe- cialist Hans Peter Kuhn (commissioned by Artangel and Beck's). And installations are a variety of art in which generally I am able to see very little virtue. Indeed, I have maintained that I have never, ever set eyes upon one that was as interesting, entertain- ing or beautiful as a good painting. Now that satisfactorily exasperating line will have to go.

It remains true, all too often, that the word 'installation' signals not only some- thing boring to look at, but also a visual conundrum whose meaning is comprehen- sible only to those willing — and able — to wade through the accompanying critical prose. When you have succeeded in under- standing what it is all about, you often wish you hadn't, so depressingly vague, preten- tious or naïve is the point being made. All the above applied to almost every exhibit in the dreary exhibition Rites of Passage at the Tate in the summer.

But none of it is true of HG. On the con- trary, it is beautiful, exciting, imaginative, and highly entertaining. The connecting theme of time travel — the HG in question being of course the author of The Time Machine — provides the opportunity to mount a series of stunningly theatrical tableaux. In one barrel-vaulted dungeon, a mummified corpse lies surrounded in bil- lowing fog. Above, hovering in mid-air, hang a severed hand and goblet. Through a barred door it is possible to glimpse, in the distance, a sunlit jungle glade with flutter- ing foliage and crying birds. A ragged gap in the wall reveals a ruined classical city with arrows above which are miraculously suspended in the air. The effect is close to fiction of the magic realist school — a series of detached, mesmerisingly exact, images.

The Piranesian gloom of the Clink Street Vaults, dramatised by Kuhn's lighting, per- mits far more artifice and enchantment than is possible on the polished floor of an art gallery. In fact, the best effects are those which come closest to stage sets or the pictures seen through an arch or open- ing. Those that one picks one's way through — a floor covered in shoes, for instance — were more run-of-the-mill (dis- carded footware for some reason is a staple component of installation).

There is considerably less enchantment at the Saatchi Gallery, 98a Boundary Road, NW8, where Young British Artists v is on show. Young British artists are at present rather over-exposed —with the ICA and Serpentine also in on the act — and it could be that it is slightly older figures who are in need of this kind of promotion (though admittedly `Middle-Aged British Artists' might be a harder brand to market).

In the case of this batch, the shortcom- ings certainly seemed to be the failings of youth: self-consciousness, pomposity and shallow cynicism. Indeed, some of the pieces are so elaborately cool and ironic that the effect is not so much Post Mod- ernist as mannerist — art about art about art. Hadrian Pigott in fact goes so far as to produce an art joke about an art joke. His `Resurrection (after Richard H)' consists of a large piece of white shrink-wrapped soap with the words 'Slip It To Me' inscribed thereon. This is a reference to Richard Hamilton's 'Epiphany' (1964) a red painting in the form of a badge bearing those words, which is itself an ironic, 'witty' reference to popular culture, art, sex and so forth.

Pigott, indeed, seems the most engaging of these young artists. His work belongs to the already rather overcrowded genre which aims to reveal the mystery inherent in ordinary rooms and domestic appliances (q.v. the oeuvre of Rachel Whiteread). Clearly, his chosen territory at present is the bathroom, and the basin and soap dish in particular. And from those ingredients he produces in effect a series of surreal objects in the tradition of Man Ray's spiked iron and Meret Oppenheim's fur- _ lined tea cup. These unusable convex basins, and plumbing items packed in vel- vet cases like clarinets, are lightly diverting. It is disappointing to discover from the accompanying text by Sarah Kent that they are all — 'Slip it to Me' included — intend- ed as a deeply serious comment on pollu- tion — 'our refusal to take responsibility for the suds we swill down the plug-hole'.

Kerry Stewart, a sculptor, makes figures with the slightly clumsy modelling, slightly displaced colouring of plastic model toys. But they are all a bit weird or unlucky — a pregnant school girl, identical twins, a nun sleeping on the floor, a crippled child. The overall impression is of a sort of politically correct surrealism — which is not much fun because the whole point of surrealism is its no-holds-barred anarchy.

The two painters in the show — Keith Coventry and Glenn Brown — produce paintings about painting. Coventry's are all white, just like the abstracts which the American artist Robert Hyman has been executing for many years. But Coventry's are not abstract. When you look closely, you discover that they are in fact figurative images of a rather cosily and therefore ironically British variety — the Royal Fam- ily, Big Ben, the Horseguards on Whitehall — from which all colour has vapourised. Only the brushstrokes remain, as if some- one had bleached a Sickert. The results are rather beautiful. But can any fertile devel- opment grow from such an excruciatingly self-conscious starting-point?

That question goes double for works of Glenn Brown, many of which are deliber- ately flat, photographic-looking copies of paintings by Salvador Dali, Frank Auber- ach and Karel Appel. He is apparently both fascinated by, and sceptical of, the unfettered emotional bravura of these artists. Hence the sad and cynical mockery he makes of their creativity.

Strictly, it is said, in engineering terms, to be impossible for bumble bees to fly; but fortunately bumble bees don't know this. The currently fashionable intellectual nihilism — Lacan, Derrida and all that comes close to ruling art impossible, and quite a lot of young artists do seem to have found out about it. This is unfortunate because as King Lear remarked, 'nothing will come of nothing.' You cannot make art on a basis of nihilism. That is part of the problem these days.

`Sleeping Nun' by Kerry Stewart