Exhibitions
Apocalypse (Royal Academy, till 15 December)
Queue blues
Martin Gayford
Is there anything down this corridor?' 'Can you get out this way?' There's anoth- er room down there, but it's chock-a-block with people.' I am milling about with other members of the art-going public inside a mock-up of Gregor Schneider's cellar (the original being below his house near Monchengladbach). This is, apart from some paintings of jokes by Richard Prince that hang on the grand stair, the first exhib- it you come to in Apocalypse: Beauty and Horror in Contemporary Art. But it is not so much beautiful or horrific as productive of social confusion In this respect, Apocalypse is a very up- to-the-minute exhibition. One reaction of artists to the unprecedented popularity of contemporary art seems to have been to come up with works of art that fewer and fewer people are able to see at any one time. The centre pieces of Tate Modern are the three towers by Louise Bourgeois in the turbine hall. But although up to 30,000 visitors a day go to the new Tate, only three at a time are allowed up the Bourgeois towers.
At Apocalypse there is a video installa- tion by Chris Cunningham — a must-see highlight, since it has been attacked on the comment pages of national newspapers for which there is a modest ten-minute wait. But to enter Mariko Mori's 'Dream Temple', another highlight, I was informed by an attendant got up in a white trouser suit like a space-age Emma Peel, 'You're looking at an hour and a half, min- imum.'
But there it is. The British avant-garde art public, as one might expect, are endowed with the spirit of the -Blitz, and queue stoically, even happily, to see indi- vidual exhibits, even after they have already queued to get in. Apocalypse might as well have been subtitled 'disorientation and queuing in contemporary art', as 'beauty and horror'. Indeed, the latter qualities are in quite short supply. There is of course the Chapman broth- ers' 'Hell', around which the rest of the show was assembled. This is, when you encounter it, surprisingly small in scale, a strange and unquestionably original combi- nation of Armageddon and railway mod- elling. In a series of tableaux, throngs of minute figures, an inch or so high, do unspeakably horrible things to one another. One party wears Nazi uniforms, the other includes mutants with more than the aver- age number of arms, bodies or legs. Every- thing — mutilation, tanks, buildings, landscapes including a lake filled with bloody skulls — is detailed with a fanatical thoroughness that would draw great applause in, say, a 00-gauge model of a Great Western branch line.
Is this, as has been claimed, a work of art of enormous power? It is oddly lacking in the yuk-factor, or the power to shock something that the Chapmans' previous work, particularly the mutant mannequins with genitals and anuses in unusual places, unquestionably had. The scale somehow anaesthetises disgust and disquiet. One peers through the glass cases to discover exactly what revolting thing one Chapman plastic model is doing to another — and is thus caught out by the artist. Our queasy curiosity about horror — provided it is far away enough — is neatly pinned down. If any of these figures were reproduced at life scale, we would probably flinch away.
The Chapmans, it is becoming clear, belong to a venerable tradition: Bosch, Bruegel, Callot, Goya, Dix. There is an obvious echo in one tableau of Bruegel's wonderful 'Triumph of Death' in the Prado, a beautifully painted and profound- ly chilling picture. What is not so clear is whether the Chapmans are adding anything to this tradition. Much of their work looks like Bosch or Goya recapitulated in virtual reality. That's probably the point — but is it enough of a point?
In any case, 'Hell' is their most impres- sive effort to date, and does in some sense deal with horror. The trouble with Apoca- lypse is that none of the other works does, and few are much interested in beauty either. Nor do they have much in common in style or mood. In other words, the organising idea of the exhibition doesn't work. This is not unusual.
Since contemporary art ceased to devel- op in a sequence of easily identifiable styles, such as pop art and minimalism, curators have been tempted to link exhibi- tions together through some notional theme. The Tate is prone to mount such shows in the summer months — Intelligence this year and Abracadabra last being two examples, both strung on ideas of impene- trable dullness and obscurity.
Apocalypse is much better than that, the theme catchier, bolder and clearer; the exhibition presented with much more the- atrical panache (as one would expect of the Royal Academy's Norman Rosenthal). But really the exhibits don't have much to say to each other; the result just looks like a lot of disparate contemporary art. If, as Rosenthal claims, all great art is in some respect shocking, then none of this quali- fies. There aren't many shocks (although the Chris Cunningham film does have some sudden loud noises and a bit of blood, which might give the nervous a start). It isn't even particularly representa- tive of art in the noughties.
The temptation is to dismiss the lot of it. Actually, I think that would be a pity. There are a number of interesting artists embedded in Apocalypse — possibly good if not great. The Belgian Luc Tuymans is one of the better European painters around, though his quiet and subtle work doesn't make much impact in this context. The sculpture of the Pope hit by a meteorite by Maurizio Cattelan is funny, if neither beau- tiful nor horrific (Rosenthal claims humour as one of the features of the exhibition).
The nudity, sex and blood of the Chris Cunningham piece, presumably something to do with the war of the sexes, would be ripe old Art Nouveau kitsch if it was on canvas rather than film. But there is some- thing memorable about Tim Noble and Sue Mariko Mori's 'Dream Temple, 1999 Webster's 'The Undesirables', a pile of rub- bish gathered at a rock festival they attend- ed to hear David Bowie, which somehow casts a shadow perfectly portraying its cre- ators. And the American Richard Prince whose paintings of failed jokes: 'I never had a penny to my name, so I changed my name,' introduce the exhibition — is an intriguing artist whom we in London should see more of. I even suspect that Schneider's house near Monchengladbach would be worth seeing in the original, though the gallery mock-up does not work.
In other words, forgetting the overselling and the grand theorising, judged as a mixed show of this and that, Apocalypse is worth seeing. Going by her other work, Mariko Mori's 'Dream Temple' is probably lots of fun in a psychedelic Zen sort of way, but take sandwiches and a flask if you want to see inside it. Personally, I'm afraid I couldn't face the queue.
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