Exhibitions
Oracular wit
Giles Auty
One of the more depressing aspects of exhibitions by thrusting young artists is the number of lost-looking art students they attract. The students' cumbersome thought processes are almost visible, yet even the dimmer among them are probably capable of picking up the message such exhibitions exude: here is the kind of stuff they had better do themselves if they hope to forge successful careers.
At Julian Opie's show a group of stu- dents busied themselves making copious notes about the unedifying objects of view. Having walked round the whole thing myself, I wondered exactly how the apolo- gists for this kind of work would explain this particular lot away through their cata- logue essays. Whenever an experience is as numbing as this, one may expect to find words such as 'irony' and 'paradox', 'dislo- cation' and 'displacement' deployed exten- sively by the defence. But the claim that really staggered me here was that the exhi- bition was witty.
While appreciating that German humour is different, I was still mildly surprised to learn the kind of thing Wulf Herzogenrath, director of the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, finds funny: 'The last colour repro- duction of the Cologne catalogue shows an image of four letters, F,U,C,K, with the C facing the wrong way. The title, "Experi- ment in Volume", leaves the spectator unsure of the nature of the experiment involved: word and meaning, relief and painting, depth and humour. . . . '
Opie is in his mid-thirties and trained inevitably, in view of the nature of his work and the inside-track success that has attended it — at Goldsmiths' School of Art. Opie's admiration for Duchamp is obvious, but of course Goldsmiths' is the college where worship of the twin deities of Duchamp and Marx is virtually compulso- ry. Former students of Goldsmiths' can boast the best-washed brains in the busi- ness.
The exhibition opens with a roomful of references to travel by motorways. Whether the subject, the treatment or the actual experience of such travel is the more sleep-inducing is difficult to determine. The artist's super-bland paintings of the subject echo a world of simulated driving and computer games, while models con- structed from cement modules illustrate the principles of cloverleaf and flyover. To what conceivable purpose? Is this paradox It is believed that some dinosaurs could run faster than a cheetah, 1991, by Julian Opie or paralysis? Let us drive on.
The second gallery space brings together work made between 1938 and 1991 which looks, at first sight, as though created by a number of different people. Objects which are clearly hand-made and painted spoof suitcases, foodstuffs and books seem to me to reveal a last flash of juvenile exuberance before the icy grip of 'ironic' post-minimalism takes over. Functionless objects made from metal and glass and seemingly of a industrial nature echo the chilling world of freezer cabinets and such- like appliances. Louvres — a device much favoured by Opie's sometime mentor Michael Craig-Martin, the artist/philoso- pher responsible for presenting a glass of water entitled 'Oak Tree' and now a trustee of the Tate — begin to make an appearance in Opie's work. Apparent climbing frames, bookcases and room- dividers burgeon suddenly. What, if any- thing, does this all mean?
On the next floor, outsized children's building bricks give way suddenly to a roomful of beautifully made but highly sim- plified models of buildings which are not, however, constructed to the same scale. What these signify is left in the catalogue to Lynne Cook, high priestess of the cab- balistic to whom all turn now for interpre- tations of the intractable: 'Yet their very blankness coupled with an assertive odd- ness of scale makes them surprisingly com- pelling'. Soon the familiar adjectives `dislocated', 'disorienting' and 'enigmatic' creep back and de Chirico is evoked for pedigree.
No casual visitor would suspect, let alone see any of this in the work but we are expected to accept the whole written rig- marole as gospel. At a somewhat sub- kneecap level, meanwhile, I notice that the artist cannot spell Graham Greene's name correctly. I think it would be hard to read the writings of Greene without noticing the third 'e' in his surname and I begin to won- der privately what Opie has ever read. In short, what do he and others of his kind really know that would justify our accepting them as new oracles of our age?
The last time I saw Roger Hilton I sat, clad in a black overcoat, on the end of his bed. 'Are you the angel of death come to carry me away?' he demanded, presciently, for he died within a fortnight. Drunk or sober, a good deal of Roger Hilton's utter- ances verged on the oracular, being shot through with metaphysical apergus, While a lot of artists of our time seem to have two layers of skin too many, Roger possibly had two too few. He could be tetchy and wildly funny by turns. He served in the war as a commando and spent three years as a pris- oner of war. I did not agree with aspects of his utopian modernism yet respected the utter sincerity of his largely abstract paint- ings. These were never elegant, in the man- ner of Ben Nicholson, but intuitive, informal and insouciant to a degree.
I do not think the present exhibition answers all the questions about the artist. I cannot say I care greatly for the scratchy awkwardness of his work in the 1950s, yet warm increasingly to the paintings of his last years when he was bedbound by an alcohol-related disease. The wild pathos of these and of his last letters, published in facsimile, is deeply moving. Palpable pain, poetry and humour abound. The very last image in the show, 'Untitled', 1974, seems to me to show an armless figure in a funer- ary boat, heading off backwards on a last voyage to eternity. Hilton was not a man to leave quietly: his wry wit prevailed to the last.
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