Exhibitions 1

Ant Noises (Saatchi Gallery, till 20 August)

Brave new art world

Martin Gaylord

Last Summer I was interrogated in front of a Rothko. We were in the Guggen- heim, Bilbao, and my questioner asked me why I was looking at this picture of huge, fuzzy patches of colour. Because, I said, it's absolutely beautiful, and I find the more I look at it, the more I want to look at it. It takes one over. `Ah,' replied my questioner (wrongly, by the way), tut anyone could have painted that. It takes no skill, you could have done it yourself.'

There, in a nutshell, is the disagreement which lies beneath the current disputes over Tate Modern and such Tate Modern- ish works as Damien Hirst's 'Hymn' — a 20-ft bronze statue magnified from an anatomical toy — currently on show in Ant Noises at the Saatchi Gallery. On the one hand are aesthetic conservatives, who feel that art should carry on broadly in the line of Giotto and Michelangelo, painting, carv- ing and modelling — preferably something recognisable. On the other are the aesthet- is progressives, who don't.

Neither side has a monopoly of virtue (that was where Mr Blair's forces-of-con- servatism outburst went off the rails). Con- servatism and progressivism are the yin and yang of art and everything else: holding on to what's valuable, innovating when a gain can be made.

Those who feel resistance to change in art often do so because of the depth of their attachment to the art of the past (I feel it myself). Unthinking neophilia is quite as foolish a posture as intransigent reaction. But the insistence that art must be based on laborious handcraft — the basis of my interlocutor's objection to the Rothko, and of the many objections to the Hirst — is unsustainable.

All Hirst did, the complaint goes, was think of this piece, 'Hymn', and get others to make it. He did no work himself. Long ago, Richard Wollheim produced a quick knock-down reply to that: if thought is not work, then most of the middle classes do nothing at all. What else are lawyers, civil servants, and academics up to — indeed, most Spectator readers too — but thinking, and writing or speaking their thoughts? `All' Hirst did was have a highly original, visually powerful idea.

The result, like much of his work, is both jokey and disturbing, a heroic figure with the bland epidermis of Action Man or Ken (the doll, not the mayor) which is cut away to reveal the internal plumbing of liver and lights. Personally, I was more taken by the new Hirst on show in Out There, at White Cube, Hoxton Square, a skeleton above whose eye sockets two eyeballs maniacally revolve, suspended on currents of air. That seems to encapsulate Hirst's take on humanity — a weirdly animated bag of meat and bones — more wittily and suc- cinctly. But 'Hymn' is not to be written off.

If you take a step back, you can see that some of the art on show in Ant Noises the title an anagram of Sensation requires a great deal of hand-applied craft, some none at all (by the artist at least). It all depends on what is necessary.

`Big Baby '1996, by Ron Mueck Ron Mueck achieves a level of craft that leaves the most realistic sculpture of past centuries — the eye-poppingly gruesome polychrome work of the Spanish baroque for example — standing at the starting block. Every follicle, every wrinkle is mim- icked with mesmerising precision with the result that the very realism becomes disqui- etingly odd.

The moulding and casting of Rachel Whiteread's internal spaces from buildings and chairs requires specialised skills of a non-traditional kind. The work on show, `Untitled (One Hundred Spaces)' is the most beautiful piece of hers I've seen: cubic forms moulded in resin the colours of Turkish delight — pink, mauve, yellow, green — laid out like the ancient Chinese funerary army, and representing the voids beneath one hundred chairs.

Like Hirst, and Mueck, Whiteread is tak- ing an extremely original look at normality, and if there's a common factor in contem- porary British art, that's it. Although, for that matter you could say that taking an original look at normality is as much a tra- ditional component of art as hand skills with brush or chisel. It's also what Jenny Saville is doing via one of the most classic modes of Western art — painting of the naked female body.

Off form Saville can look traditional in an unflattering sense — weakly Euston Roady — but her best painting, 'Fulcrum', is at least as strong as Hirst's 'Hymn% which stands beside it, and might be the masterpiece of the exhibition. It shows a mighty mound, a wall of piled-up fat, elder- ly, massive women: maternal bodies as seen by a baby, perhaps, or flesh as architecture. The point is not that Saville's painting is art and Hirst's sculpture isn't. It would have been a :bad idea for her to have 'Ful- crum' painted by assistants; her kind of painting, unlike, say, Bridget Riley's, requires the personal touch. But equally it would have been a waste of time for Hirst not to have the thing made by other peo- ple: you might as well expect an architect to build his own wall. 'Hymn' positively requires a mass-produced, impersonal finish.

Of the other artists in the show I have less to say. Chris Ofili's jolly Afro-popPY paintings look less exciting in this company than earlier displays of his work. Sarah Lucas, who does allegedly witty things with cigarettes and sanitary appliances, I just don't get. Following a new self-denying ordinance, however, I shall not regard that as a reason to condemn.

This is a triumphant moment for con- temporary British art. In Tate Modern it has an awe-inspiring headquarters. New galleries are springing up, including Jay Jopling's White Cube (see above) and an outpost of the glamorous Americ Gagosian Gallery in Heddon Street, 'I• Triumph can go to the head. No doubt Po' terity will judge that a good deal of what is currently admired and exhibited is worth- less or slight. But that is always true in any field at every time.

It is also becoming more and more likely that the best British contemporary art of the last decade — editorialised-over, Turn- er-Prized, hyped, anathematised, Sensationalised — is going to last. Gom- brich notes that Quintillian had a phrase: `do tempori' (I give in to the times, I yield to fashion). There comes a moment when it Is more eccentric, and self-defeating, to resist change than to accept it. This has been reached and passed with Hirst, Whiteread and co. Relax and enjoy this brave new art world.