Fashionable flotsam
David Lee is outraged by the 20th John Moores Liverpool exhibition If the organisers were being cruelly hon- est they might have subtitled this collection `47 pictures in search of a foyer'. There are actually 48 exhibited, but more later about the solitary cuckoo in the nest. To cover an otherwise vacant expanse of polished 'gran- ite' tiles behind a reception desk some- where off Cheapside is the most these paintings-for-paintings-sake might realisti- cally hope for. Once installed by the interi- or designer, no one will notice them and no employee will suspect anything of the artists' stated elaborate purposes for mak- ing them. Like so much acclaimed contem- porary painting the world over, this year's John Moores (at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, until 15 February) serves up art's equivalent of corporate wallpaper.
It ought to be no surprise to anyone that this collection of fashionable flotsam is as bad as it is when the judges are card-carry- ing lackeys of the Serota Tendency, those only-too-willing footsloggers of his State Academy of Contemporary Art. Two of the five have served as Turner Prize judges, a third is currently on the Turner Prize short- list, a fourth is a journalist with close con- nections to the Tate Gallery and the fifth, the token joker in the pack, is Surrealist groupie George Melly. So the John Moores, once the pulse of British painting, has now also fallen to that self-perpetuat- ing minority, many of whose members have `Harmony in Green' by Dan Hays `Cud' by Gar), Hume recently delighted in stating that painting is dead. The irony, of course, is that when the Serota Tendency select paintings the medi- um does look dead — from the neck up and the wrist down. You'll notice the absence of a painter on the panel of judges for this painting prize and the only artist, Cornelia Parker, if her own work is in any way indicative, wouldn't recognise a decent picture if she tripped over it. The same pre- dictable persuasion of judges has also hi- jacked the Jerwood Prize so that there is now a dangerously blinkered mind-set rul- ing contemporary art which excludes far more than it includes while carefully cen- soring dissent.
The chief criterion for exclusion is, according to this selection, anyone mature in years who can concentrate for more than three seconds. The State Academy, which over the last decade has institutionalised conceptual and minimal art, and which has been funded by the Arts Council and its lapdog provincial satellites, not to mention having been exported by the reliably sub- servient British Council, thinks the only art worth promoting is by recent graduates, especially those of certain favoured col- leges. Only two of the artists featured here (both of them abstract) are over 47 and the average age of the rest is 37: the winner is 30. Are there no good painters of middle age? You bet there are but these are not recognised by the Serota Tendency. Thus, many of the names here are predictable; one can check them off against the Arts Council's approved lists. Gary Hume, who recently had six months' non-stop exhibi- tion in the two premier exhibition spaces of the capital, the Tate and Saatchi Galleries, and who last month won this year's Jer- wood Prize as consolation for not winning last year's Turner, here wins a £1,000 for a picture, called 'Cud', of bewildering banali- ty — he hasn't done enough to merit even the criticism of ineptitude. If only the pic- ture lived up to its name and could be chewed juicily over but it is scrupulously empty of any visual quality. One wouldn't mind so much if the apologists for this sort of work were literate and persuasive in the defence of what they select, but they aren't. It is frequently impossible to relate the work of art to its billing in the bilge of spe- cial pleading that so often passes for informed commentary. Ironically, the choice here does indeed support the mantra of many camp follow- ers of the Serota Tendency that painting is dead and an irrelevance in an age where the most talented so often end up in adver- tising, film or television. Make no mistake, the feeble pastiches of past abstract styles and the pitiful figure paintings, some of which have won prizes (Tony Bevan's crude head and Jason Brooks's laborious and derivative large face), testify to the fact that painting of the Goldsmith's College ilk is usually banal and underwritten by ideas so tiny they barely deserve illustration. Few of the paintings here will sustain a demand- ing viewer for longer than a glance.
The winner of the £20,000 first prize, `Harmony in Green', a picture of a hamster cage by Dan Hays, who is inevitably an alumnus of Goldsmith's, is little more than a technical exercise adequately executed. Viewing this as a winner of a major prize makes one think that perhaps the period of great western art, which began so auspi- ciously around 1250, has now petered out. The truth is that we've lost the plot of great painting and have entered a new phase in which the criteria for judging work are arbitrary but, compared what went before, demonstrably shallow and trivial. Hays writes: 'I wanted to show the cage as a desirable space to occupy. The painted cage is confined within the rectangle of the canvas.' Brilliant. If the painting was any good we wouldn't need to be told anything at all let alone this blindingly obvious non- sense.
With the exception of Basil Beattie, who (damn him) rarely fails to make abstract art look significant, and Stephen Farthing, a good painter represented by an indiffer- ent but still intriguing work, the entire exhibition parades a lack of technical abili- ty and an absence of ambition which reduces what is produced to at best grada- tions of decorativeness. A single thin idea painted thinly is considered sufficient in order to succeed, and if you paint it badly it doesn't matter anyway. Viewing this exhibi- tion leaves a viewer with a yearning to see any young artist attempting something dif- ficult. One has only to visit the National Gallery to see Rembrandt's 'The Blinding of Samson' (painted when the artist was 30, the same age as Hays is now) on loan from Frankfurt, a picture in which drama, char- acter study, a dazzling orchestration of light and shape, the full gamut of possible emotions, and the ability of the painter to move effortlessly from virtuoso sketchiness to precise detail, to realise that a catas- trophic collapse has occurred in the ability of artists to make a painting which rewards looking at more than once.
Take the abstract painter Callum Innes, a prize winner here and an artist previously shortlisted for both the Jerwood and Turn- er Prizes. Innes's paintings, the artist has explained, explore the ways edges of colours meet. So what! From Masaccio to Francis Bacon, an understanding of the way colour and form work were taken for granted, but here the elementary under- standing of what makes a painting a paint- ing is presented not only as the subject but as an original 'idea' worth pursuing. Artists such as Innes should be saved the embar- rassment of exhibition until they have not only mastered the expressive fundamental of their craft but are using them to edify their audience with genuine insights. Imag- ine what would have been lost if Giotto had told Cimabue to stuff his apprentice- ship because he was interested only in how the edges of colours relate to one another. Can you imagine Rembrandt making a remark like this or writing an 'artist's state- ment' like those penned by Hays and many others in the catalogue? Well, can you? No, of course you can't because Rem- brandt didn't need to tell his public, any more than he needs to tell us 350 years later, what his work is about. Its meaning is as lucid and as relevant now as it was then and as it will be in the future to all sentient, perceptive beings. Yet Innes's negligible work is passed off as the acme of accom- plishment in contemporary art.
In fact, the exaggerated status enjoyed by artists such as Hume and limes (and now doubtless Hays too) proves only what most of the public already suspect, namely that the body politic of contemporary art is rot- ten, credulous and arrogant and should be done away with at the earliest opportunity. When an exhibition parading such feeble execution and ideas can be passed off as the zenith of what is achievable in art, it is a travesty and an insult to many capable painters whose works are unfashionable but who are attempting something more than this superficial chic. If painting is to survive in any form worth looking at, then the State Academy must be forced to cast its net wider, so that, if we are to continue at all with public funding of the visual arts, others benefit from taxpayers' largesse. Much of the work in this show, which will have little appeal beyond institutions and art colleges, would not exist if the Arts Council did not promote and encourage its production.
How on earth Blaise Drummond, who is 30 and a new name to me, got his promis- ing painting, 'Little Western World', accepted is beyond rational explanation. Drummond's picture is a melancholy epic of modern life, from the absurd pointless- ness of our leisure pursuits to our attempts to assert authority over the natural world and, otherwise, to find a reason for life. It has the irony requisite of modern painting in so far as it echoes recent styles of paint- ing while keeping these nudge-nudge refer- ences subservient to the grander overall game plan. Having come recently to paint- ing from a brief academic career, Drum- mond has just started a post-graduate degree at Chelsea Art College. It is hard to believe that anyone there can teach him anything except perhaps how to stop mess- ing around trying to paint well and to con- centrate instead on formulating a career strategy.
The John Moores biennial was born out of enlightened patronage in 1957 and was murdered by the Serota Tendency in 1997. By thus allying itself the prize has surren- dered any right it may have had to be taken seriously as the country's major award for painting. It is a tragic yet entirely pre- dictable ending.
David Lee is editor of Art Review.
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