There's a stag in the living room. He has already spat on the carpet and if he doesn't keep his head down, those antlers are going to kebab the lampshade and skewer the ceiling. The neighbours have come round and they're all sitting expectantly, mesmerised, stifling hysterics.
Before he got into stag-drag with a pelt on his back, the shaman did a spot of vacuuming - a ritual cleansing of an already spotless flat in a Liverpool tower block. He's a nice young shaman in horn-rimmed glasses, going into a trance to ask the animal spirits which of them will protect the tenants in this condemned high-rise and watch over them when the flats come down and the new homes go up. They are frustrated and impotent; if Liverpool council won't help, perhaps the animals might sort things out.
The stag gyrates, then slumps giddily into an armchair. "He's gone," the audience of local ladies mouth to one another, and stifle a laugh. He clucks and roars, yelps and mews as he goes on his inner journey, mimicking the creatures he meets on the way. Had he a sense of humour, Joseph Beuys would have loved Marcus Coates's film Journey to the Lower World.
I think Coates made the ritual up, as well as his mystical encounters with the moorhen, the coot, the grouse, the curlew and the sparrowhawk. His bird calls and grunts recall Percy Edwards, who once enthralled the nation with his animal and bird impersonations on the wireless. There isn't much call for that sort of thing nowadays - except as a spoof, except as art. If he had called himself a shaman, Edwards, like Coates, might have got into the British Art Show, the five-yearly report on the state of art in Britain.
The sixth British Art Show, organised by the Hayward gallery and curated by Andrea Schlieker and Alex Farquharson, opened at the Baltic in Gateshead on Saturday. Coates is a rare example of peculiarly British whimsy in an exhibition that, inevitably, is as much international as it is about Britishness. We forget how insular this country and its art used to be, even 25 years ago. As the curators rightly point out, national survey shows are now an anachronism: the British art world is full of emigre artists, as well as artists whose subjects, as much as their careers, reflect the globalised world.
Zarina Bhimji returned to Uganda, where she was born, to film Out of Blue. It revisits the landscapes and wrecked buildings where the ghosts of Idi Amin's terror campaigns still linger. Breda Beban went back to Belgrade to float on a barge down the Danube on a steely autumn day, singing a lament to the European and Asian shores of the river. Glasgow-based Rosalind Nashashibi filmed family life in a house in Nazareth. Ergin Cavusoglu went to film the black-market money dealers in Istanbul.
As much as these works reflect the fact that film and video have now become dominant ways of working, they are all in a sense elegiac encounters with places, people, cultures. Conversations in Nashashibi's film are untranslated, and the camera hovers over dinners, siestas and calls to prayer. The haggling in Istanbul market is full of threat and ambiguity: "I buy all sorts ... Exact, I've got exact euros ... there's definitely going to be a crisis, definitely a crisis!" Over the voices Cavusoglu has superimposed a solemn Byzantine ecclesiastical chant. You feel the complexity of the world.
A sense of dislocation and displacement is reflected throughout the show. Most of the sculpture and painting seems uncertain of its place - physically, historically, stylistically. This is more than the usual postmodern anxiety over idiom. Quotation from redundant styles, the dead letters of American-type 1960s modernism, Malevich's constructivism, Art Deco, hand-stiched craft dolls and jewellery - all reflect a kind of uncertainty and artistic homelessness. Hugh Locke's Black Queen writhes with plastic lizards and gewgaws. Gary Webb's ± gawky, colourful sculpture sings to itself, providing the sort of musique concrète accompaniment that bad TV art programmes once used to signal the difficult, futuristic ambition of wacky modern art. And the small, intense and hermetic painted abstractions of Tomma Abts have a kind of clenched-fist desperation about them. What strange, unsettling paintings these are. They get under the skin.
That said, the British Art Show is not without its quota of the forgettable and the regrettable. A lot of it will be forgotten (much has slipped my mind already). But this is also a more interesting show than many previous editions. That is either because it is curated better, or because art has got more interesting. I'm tempted to say that the situation, rather than the art itself, is largely what is interesting. Things seem so wide open, they're falling apart.
If the show is a snapshot, a weather report, an audit and a diagnosis, we have to negotiate it on our own terms rather than according to curatorial rubrics. We are all caught up in the mood of the times, the ideas and infatuations slushing round the art world. For some, contemporary art is like a bottle of piss that some cowboy decorator has left in the corner. Luckily, the pop bottle of yellowing wee, by Richard Hughes, is a perfect copy made of solid resin. Hughes has not so much answered the call of nature as the call to genius, and this is the kind of thing artists make when they realise they aren't one.
Enrico David has said about his own giant hand-sewn dolls: "I have always felt that my embroidered works manifest a lament for a lack of an identifiable belief or ideology that might deliver the promise of becoming a better artist . . . Art for me is something that allows me to make the best of a bad job." We might take this as ironical, as a defence against uncertainty and a lack of shared values. Who knows what skills are needed nowadays, what is worth making art about?
Sometimes a theme imposes itself, unbidden. Anna Barriball blew soap bubbles over a number of found old black-and-white snapshots. The soap was mixed with ink, and the blobs, spatters and traces don't so much deface the images as insinuate their way over them like the blooms of a slow-spreading disease. Old photos, like old films, almost always remind us of death. We see time there. Barriball has simply added another layer.
Almost the same thought struck me about the old, out-of-copyright film footage used in Neil Cummings and Marysia Lewandowska's Screen Tests, a beautifully edited compilation of diligent art students at their drawing class in (I guess) the early 1930s; young men and women making faces and larking about for the camera. It was another age with other values, and very different difficulties.
Before he got into stag-drag with a pelt on his back, the shaman did a spot of vacuuming - a ritual cleansing of an already spotless flat in a Liverpool tower block. He's a nice young shaman in horn-rimmed glasses, going into a trance to ask the animal spirits which of them will protect the tenants in this condemned high-rise and watch over them when the flats come down and the new homes go up. They are frustrated and impotent; if Liverpool council won't help, perhaps the animals might sort things out.
The stag gyrates, then slumps giddily into an armchair. "He's gone," the audience of local ladies mouth to one another, and stifle a laugh. He clucks and roars, yelps and mews as he goes on his inner journey, mimicking the creatures he meets on the way. Had he a sense of humour, Joseph Beuys would have loved Marcus Coates's film Journey to the Lower World.
I think Coates made the ritual up, as well as his mystical encounters with the moorhen, the coot, the grouse, the curlew and the sparrowhawk. His bird calls and grunts recall Percy Edwards, who once enthralled the nation with his animal and bird impersonations on the wireless. There isn't much call for that sort of thing nowadays - except as a spoof, except as art. If he had called himself a shaman, Edwards, like Coates, might have got into the British Art Show, the five-yearly report on the state of art in Britain.
The sixth British Art Show, organised by the Hayward gallery and curated by Andrea Schlieker and Alex Farquharson, opened at the Baltic in Gateshead on Saturday. Coates is a rare example of peculiarly British whimsy in an exhibition that, inevitably, is as much international as it is about Britishness. We forget how insular this country and its art used to be, even 25 years ago. As the curators rightly point out, national survey shows are now an anachronism: the British art world is full of emigre artists, as well as artists whose subjects, as much as their careers, reflect the globalised world.
Zarina Bhimji returned to Uganda, where she was born, to film Out of Blue. It revisits the landscapes and wrecked buildings where the ghosts of Idi Amin's terror campaigns still linger. Breda Beban went back to Belgrade to float on a barge down the Danube on a steely autumn day, singing a lament to the European and Asian shores of the river. Glasgow-based Rosalind Nashashibi filmed family life in a house in Nazareth. Ergin Cavusoglu went to film the black-market money dealers in Istanbul.
As much as these works reflect the fact that film and video have now become dominant ways of working, they are all in a sense elegiac encounters with places, people, cultures. Conversations in Nashashibi's film are untranslated, and the camera hovers over dinners, siestas and calls to prayer. The haggling in Istanbul market is full of threat and ambiguity: "I buy all sorts ... Exact, I've got exact euros ... there's definitely going to be a crisis, definitely a crisis!" Over the voices Cavusoglu has superimposed a solemn Byzantine ecclesiastical chant. You feel the complexity of the world.
A sense of dislocation and displacement is reflected throughout the show. Most of the sculpture and painting seems uncertain of its place - physically, historically, stylistically. This is more than the usual postmodern anxiety over idiom. Quotation from redundant styles, the dead letters of American-type 1960s modernism, Malevich's constructivism, Art Deco, hand-stiched craft dolls and jewellery - all reflect a kind of uncertainty and artistic homelessness. Hugh Locke's Black Queen writhes with plastic lizards and gewgaws. Gary Webb's ± gawky, colourful sculpture sings to itself, providing the sort of musique concrète accompaniment that bad TV art programmes once used to signal the difficult, futuristic ambition of wacky modern art. And the small, intense and hermetic painted abstractions of Tomma Abts have a kind of clenched-fist desperation about them. What strange, unsettling paintings these are. They get under the skin.
That said, the British Art Show is not without its quota of the forgettable and the regrettable. A lot of it will be forgotten (much has slipped my mind already). But this is also a more interesting show than many previous editions. That is either because it is curated better, or because art has got more interesting. I'm tempted to say that the situation, rather than the art itself, is largely what is interesting. Things seem so wide open, they're falling apart.
If the show is a snapshot, a weather report, an audit and a diagnosis, we have to negotiate it on our own terms rather than according to curatorial rubrics. We are all caught up in the mood of the times, the ideas and infatuations slushing round the art world. For some, contemporary art is like a bottle of piss that some cowboy decorator has left in the corner. Luckily, the pop bottle of yellowing wee, by Richard Hughes, is a perfect copy made of solid resin. Hughes has not so much answered the call of nature as the call to genius, and this is the kind of thing artists make when they realise they aren't one.
Enrico David has said about his own giant hand-sewn dolls: "I have always felt that my embroidered works manifest a lament for a lack of an identifiable belief or ideology that might deliver the promise of becoming a better artist . . . Art for me is something that allows me to make the best of a bad job." We might take this as ironical, as a defence against uncertainty and a lack of shared values. Who knows what skills are needed nowadays, what is worth making art about?
Sometimes a theme imposes itself, unbidden. Anna Barriball blew soap bubbles over a number of found old black-and-white snapshots. The soap was mixed with ink, and the blobs, spatters and traces don't so much deface the images as insinuate their way over them like the blooms of a slow-spreading disease. Old photos, like old films, almost always remind us of death. We see time there. Barriball has simply added another layer.
Almost the same thought struck me about the old, out-of-copyright film footage used in Neil Cummings and Marysia Lewandowska's Screen Tests, a beautifully edited compilation of diligent art students at their drawing class in (I guess) the early 1930s; young men and women making faces and larking about for the camera. It was another age with other values, and very different difficulties.
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