Date: 03-03-1992
Owning Institution: Hayward Gallery
Publication: The Independent 1987 - 1999                
Subject:   Now              

Doubletake'', at the Hayward, is a large exhibition of contemporary art devoted to the theme of, um, er, what was it again? Oh yes: ''Collective memory''. The show got off to an inauspicious start when one of its extramural projects, a poster for the London Underground designed by Jeff Koons, was turned down by LRT, apparently on the grounds that Koons' prominently printed name might be misinterpreted as a racial slur on London's black population. Needless to say, the content of the poster, a photograph of Koons and his wife, La Cicciolina, their naked bodies diplomatically obscured by three kitsch statuettes of Scotty dogs, had nothing to do with the decision to censor. Still, it may not be such a great loss. The extent to which a picture of Mr and Mrs Koons adopting the doggie position would have furthered insight into the relationship between contemporary art and collective memory is questionable.

''The artists in this exhibition,'' according to curators Lynne Cooke, Bice Curriger and Greg Hilty, ''share an equal distrust of the securely social and the purely personal.'' Some of them may also, with hindsight, have developed a certain distrust of the ingeniously curatorial. Quite what all these artists are doing together in one exhibition is less than clear. There is precious little evidence of anything much like a collective spirit, and the heterogeneity of the art in ''Doubletake'' is heightened by Italian architect Aldo Rossi's redesign of the Hayward for the occasion. Rossi has carved up the exhibition galleries into a series of cubicles, which most of the artists present have furnished with evidence of an assiduously cultivated singularity. The result is, effectively, to sabotage the curatorial generalisations said to provide the exhibition with its logic.

So while you process from, say, French artist Sophie Calle's surveillance-style photographs of grimacing bank customers, taken by a camera housed inside a cash-dispensing machine, to Swiss collaborators Fischli & Weiss's sham workshop, a garageful of clutter - drills, tyres, bottles and what have you - made from hand-carved, hand-painted polyurethane, the general drift of the show remains obscure. Both of these rooms might be said to offer reflections on common experiences, collective memories even (though that's stretching it), but how they might be said to relate to one another is less evident. Calle homes in on that moment of anxiety as you wait to see if your bank balance is going to embarrass you. Fischli & Weiss seem interested, rather, in the extent to which the things that we think of as unique to us, like our messes, can be convincingly fabricated, and are therefore social rather than personal facts.

Visiting this exhibition is like trying to follow a trail but finding yourself inside a labyrinth, full of dead-ends and false turnings. The artists' intentions can often seem as opaque as Fischli & Weiss's dummy bric-a-brac. The impression is, overwhelmingly, of private concerns, of hermetic preoccupations, given voice to in code. Rossi's design may be intended to evoke the notion of a communal human mind, with its separate but adjacent chambers of memory, but these compartments are apt, too, to suggest the isolation cells of the lunatic asylum. The exhibition becomes an opportunity for the display of idiosyncrasies - although this is partly the fault of the large group show format itself, in which artists are inevitably represented by incomplete fragments of unknown (at least, that is, to a general audience) larger oeuvres.

The subtle, dystopian nature of American artist Robert Gober's neo-Surrealism is fairly hard to deduce from his contribution here - a pair of trousered legs made from wax, jammed into adjacent corners of his cubicle, suggesting the absent remainder of this dismembered body somewhere on the other side of the door leading out of his room. In fact, that's all you get from Gober, whose installation can only amount to a split- crotch ante-room to the work of Narelle Jubelin, an Australian artist specialising in sublime landscape imagery rendered in the unlikely medium of petit-point. This particular juxtaposition establishes what is, in general, the broken momentum of a tour round ''Doubletake'': see it, get it (if you're lucky, if you've been to the right exhibitions and read the right texts) and move on. You might presume that Jubelin's work is about the marginalisation of women's craft traditions within the dominant discourse of fine art (as contemporary artspeak might phrase it) - but they seem like an awfully laborious way to make the point, these Turners redone in needlepoint. No need to dwell here, however. There might be something better round the next corner. Keep walking.

Gradually, ''Doubletake'' comes to feel a little bit like a smaller version of the Aperto, the promising new-comers' section of the Venice Biennale: a sequence of desperate attempts at eye- catching virtuosity, each enacted in cramped circumstances. This is the art show as variety act. One of the main drawbacks of this type of exhibition is the extremely limited opportunity it offers to the artists involved. You get invited to show, presumably, on the basis that what you have already done fits in with some thesis that the curators have in mind. So don't rock the boat: arrive, do your turn, and thank you very much. Everyone has a vested interest in making sure that the artists concerned are up to their old tricks again.

And few disappoint. Philip Taaffe, who made a name for himself in the appropriationist 1980s with his bastardised versions of Bridget Riley Op Art paintings, has contributed some bastardised versions of Bridget Riley Op Art paintings. Simon Patterson, whose trick is the arrangement of famous names in unwonted formats (the names of Christ and his disciples printed up, say, as a football teamsheet) is another who shows he can be relied on to turn out more of the tried and trusted.

At least what he does is funny: a faithful simulacrum of the London Tube map, in this case, with the names of the lines and stations changed, so that instead of Bank on the Northern Line you might find Geoff Hurst on the Footballers Line, or Zeno on the Philosophers Line. This might have made a better proposal for an LRT poster, and could have had some interesting effects on the tourist population. Day return to Charlton Heston please.

Conformity to established stratagems is one of the more dispiriting facts of contemporary art, although it may be less the fault of individual artists than the predicament in which just about all artists find themselves now. No wonder, perhaps, with so many hundreds of thousands of members of the art proletariat prospecting for that mysterious attribute known as ''originality'', that once an artist has found some quirk or mannerism that makes him stand out from the crowd he should hang on to it for dear life. This naturally tends to produce an art of apparently absurd specialisation: narrow furrows, vastly over-ploughed.

Know them by their attributes. There's Mike Kelley, for instance, who displays teddy bears and other such stuffed playthings, disfigured by use, the justification of which is said to be a critique of the sentimental notions of childhood foisted on the unwitting consumer by toy manufacturers. There's Jon Kessler, who makes Heath Robinsonish machines, in this case a gigantic music box for one of the Hayward's outside sculpture courts which plays Mary Hopkins's hit ''Those Were the Days'' in lugubriously slow tempo. This is said to constitute a reproof to unconsidered nostalgia. Such explanations, however, assume the character of excuses. Seriousness of intent is offered up as a compensation for the thinness of the work.

Most of the artists here tend to look trapped within the confines of the minor genres they have invented for themselves. The major significance of ''Doubletake'' may lie in the clarity with which it defines this, the major cultural fact of our fin-de-siecle.

''Doubletake'' is not a thoughtless exhibition, but it does seem misconceived, because it attempts to define something like a zeitgeist in contemporary art while also seeming to acknowledge that no such thing can exist. The curators have chosen art from several different continents, which reflects what may correctly be described as a shift in the balance of power in the contemporary art world, and a change in its orientation. Art in the twentieth century has, thus far, always had its capitals: Paris, Berlin, New York. But no more: ''Doubletake'' acknowledges that it is no longer possible to sustain the notion of a cultural imperium in any one city, or even country.

If one thing can be said to unite the artists in the show, it might be a certain discontent with art about art and an ambition to make work capable somehow, of connecting with the world outside the art gallery: not much, maybe, but at least something to go on. The ambition to be relevant may, however, be another form of anxiety, a backhanded recognition by contemporary artists that this is actually beyond most of them - that their work is too specialised, that they are too hampered by the limited nature of their adopted styles and subjects, to communicate much beyond the platitudes of the art school seminar room. This is most painfully clear in the work that has been commissioned for sites outside the Hayward. Juan Munoz's concrete pastiche of a war memorial on the South Bank opposite Jubilee Gardens - a concrete block decorated with some blank, cast metal flags - is a worthy parody of jingoistic attitudes. And Stephan Balkenhol's wooden statue of a boy on a buoy, floating in the middle of the Thames, is equally inconsequential. It bobs along on the surface; the great river runs heedlessly by, its course quite undisturbed. It may attract a few curious stares from passers by, but in a few weeks it will be quite forgotten.