Visual indigestion
Andrew Lambirth
Art & The 60s: This Was Tomorrow Tate Britain, until 26 September
Not another examination of that troublesome decade? Yes, I'm afraid so. Just when you thought it was safe to confine the Screaming Sixties to the rumpus room of fading memory, along comes a substantial and serious-minded exhibition aiming to distil that decade into a select number of images — painted, sculptural and photographic — and to proffer a satisfying pound of flesh to all those hungry culture vultures presumed to be out there waiting, beaks agape. Of course, it's good for art students to see what happened in the Sixties — though it does rather break their alibi of ignorance and might even prevent them from mindlessly repeating what was first done then — but is there really a large percentage of gallery-goers avid for the Sixties' dirty washing to be rinsed once more in public? If there is, at least there's one of David Medalla's soapbubble sculptures to help with the laundry...
That particular dream machine manufactures bubbles to make moving sculptures of clouds — a hippyish gloss on a surrealist notion. Even the supposedly 'radical reappraisal' of painting and sculpture that characterised the Sixties was not really that revolutionary. Of course new materials were available, and new imagery (just think to what good effect the Pop artists put advertising logos, signage and packaging), but there was still only a limited number of things you could do with plastic or cut steel or indeed paint. Not everyone went as far as action painter William Green, who famously rode a bicycle over his canvas and even set fire to it to increase the complexity of his mark-making. (Ken Russell's short film of Green in action is showing on a monitor next to one of his paintings in the first room of the exhibition.) Meanwhile, Gillian Ayres, whose early picture 'Distillation' of 1957 hangs in this first room, was flinging the paint about to good effect, and demonstrating how far she had moved towards pure abstraction since her blocky, Roger Hilton-inspired palette-knifed paintings of two years previously. There was, indeed, a sense of freedom in the air.
Freedom to destroy, too. Evidence of one of Gustav Metzger's performances in which he 'painted' on nylon with hydrochloric acid is 're-created' here (rather a pointless exercise; it's enough to see him filmed at work, as one can on the adjacent monitor), looking like some ghastly wreck from Miss Haversham's wedding feast. The anarchic Metzger (born 1926) was the high priest of auto-destructive art, the culmination of which came in 1966 with the Destruction in Art Symposium (DIAS). This gave people the chance to smash pianos or, in the case of Hermann Nitsch, get a bit more physical with animal carcases than Damien Hirst is prepared to be. Today Metzger may be seen buzzing quietly about at Royal Academy functions, perhaps dreaming of wilder days.
In this vast and crowded portmanteau show there is a welcome amount of colour and humour. Take Philip King's inventive sculpture `Tra-La-La' (1963), an exploration of colour in space, in pink and blue plastic. Bruce Lacey's 'Womanizer' (1966) couldn't be more different — a seedy figure reclining on an ancient dentist's chair, with three pairs of pink, rubber-gloved hands, which inflate and deflate at regular intervals in an appalling quiver of lust. Incongruously next to it is Allen Jones's masterly canvas 'Man Woman', again from 1963, the Larkin watershed year. This is the only work by Jones in the exhibition, which seems odd considering what a major role he played in the art of the times. There are plenty of good things by Peter Blake and David Hockney (his 1964 shower painting hangs nearby and is a superb reminder of the young artist's originality and technical genius), while artists like Joe Tilson and Derek Boshier are shown to memorable effect.
Yet the exhibition is visually indigestible. There is a mass of black-and-white photographs of celebrities and pop groups (The Stones, The Beatles, The Who), some of them highly diverting. There's a great deal of other documentary material, including film footage of such classics as Blake, Boshier et al. doing the twist in 'Pop Goes the Easel', and Yoko Ono having her clothes cut off. There's lots of good stuff — an early Barry Flanagan sculpture, a monochrome Patrick Caulfield and works by lesser-known artists such as Frank Bowling and Ian Stephenson — and I particularly liked Gwyther Irwin's collaged 'Letter Rain', the Colin Selfs, Nick Monroe's cheeky Martians and the interlude of architectural models by such greats as Archigram and Goldfinger. But in the end there's just too much crammed together, and the collision of so many dreams and realities leaves a melancholy taste in the mind.
This legendary decade exerts a fascination disproportionate to its real cultural achievement. It's often thought of nostalgically as a golden playtime, whereas in reality it was enormously brash and ambitious, rampantly consumeristic and boastful of its broadmindedness. In fact, the 60s witnessed the beginning of the long and disastrous surrender to American tastes and values, of the effective subduing of our own rich indigenous culture in favour of an imported and supposedly more glamorous one, which was actually ersatz and innutritious. As people of discernment know, the only really good thing to come out of the 60s was the Bonzos (save a novel or two and some films). Apart from the art, of course, which still deserves a better analysis and celebration than the partial and muddled assessment on offer here.
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