Date: 11-02-1992
Owning Institution:
Publication: The Independent 1987 - 1999          
Subject:   20th Century  Now      

Young artists have a reputation for wildness that is not entirely deserved. In fact, many of them tend to be fairly conformist, which is why their work can often be a better barometer of fashionable taste than that of senior and more accomplished figures. The degree show may prove more enlightening, to the critic in search of something like a zeitgeist, than the solemn retrospective devoted to the work of a proven figure. Young artists are, almost inevitably, artists in search of a language, of a means of expression, and they tend to light on forms and methods which they perceive to be at the cutting edge of modernity. Such self-conscious avant-gardism may not always be arresting, but it is not without significance. It speaks of its times; and it offers a useful reminder that all artists, no matter how great or original, are shaped by the age in which they live.

''Ready Steady Go: Paintings of the Sixties from the Arts Council Collection'' at the Royal Festival Hall, and a modest display of work shortlisted for this year's Barclay's Young Artist Award at the Serpentine Gal-lery might not seem to have that much in common. But both focus on the work of British artists in their twen-ties and early thirties and together, serendipitously, they amount to a sort of compare-and-contrast exercise - a survey of what were, 30 years ago, and what are, now, seen to be the happening styles and subjects of new art.

The RFH foyer is not the most congenial of gallery spaces, but it seems appropriate to much of the work in ''Ready Steady Go'', which dates back to when David Hockney looked to be a bright young prospect. Most of the paintings look at home in this functional, brutalist environment, with its flimsy partition walls and the kind of metal gridwork false ceiling, with spotlights, that the Tate acquired in many of its galleries in the 1960s and 1970s and has recently been busy ridding itself of. The idea that the shapes and spaces manifest in such architecture might represent a form of aesthetic as well as social progressiveness is reflected in the spatial organisation and use of geometric forms in many of the pictures on show: Peter Joseph's Yellow Painting, for instance, a triangular canvas painted flatly in the colour of its title, which is as dumb and forthright a piece of proto-Minimalism as you could hope to find; or Bridget Riley's Op Art piece, Movement in Squares, a painting which manages to conjure a powerful effect of motion, of spatial recession and illusionism, from its resolutely blank vocabulary of geometric elements.

It is not too difficult to infer, from the works in ''Ready Steady Go'', the fashionable subjects of artistic debate at the time: flatness versus illusionism in abstract painting, for instance; or - evident in the splendid Caulfield Sculpture in a Landscape, with its Polo-minted pseudo-Hepworths stranded in a landscape that looks like a frame from one of Herge's Tintin books - the relationship between fine art and commercial art, between high and low culture. Peter Blake weighs in cogently here with a portrait of the pugilist Baron Adolf Kaiser, a tribute to the half-Nelson which the wrestling community used to have (still does) on Blake's imagi-nation.

John Hoyland's dumbly titled 19, 12, 66 was painted the year after the American critic Clement Green-berg awarded him one of the prizes at the John Moore exhibition and it is, indeed, a perfect example of what abstract painting became in The Age of Greenberg: a wall of colour, whose only departure from flatness, from the integrity of the picture plane (ah, the old Greenbergian jargon) is a stripe of recessive black, a stripe of advancing red and a horizontal band of the same colour brushed on to its field of green. It is as good as anything by Noland or Olitski, or any of the other Colour Field painters so vocally defended by Greenberg, but it does nothing to dispel the impression that Colour Field painting was only the mannerism of Abstract Expressionism, that it represented a dissipation of feeling and meaning in the merely decorative. Like most of the paintings here, Hoyland's doesn't look like it took long to paint - and it looks like it was meant to look that way.

There are, however, moments of dissent from the resolutely up-beat mood of most of the art in ''Ready Steady Go'', paintings which hint that perhaps not all is entirely straightforward in the reputedly bright, col-ourful, no-nonsense art of the Sixties. David Hockney's Portrait Surrounded by Artistic Devices is a wonder-fully troubled painting, a portrait of the artist's father surrounded, oddly, by abstract emblems that hark back to Cezanne's remark about seeking nature in the cone, the sphere and the cylinder. Hockney, here, seems worried by the implications of modernist abstraction for an art of human engagement, and his picture seems literally split between the abstract and the figurative, the personal and the impersonal - it is a work, too, that now seems to adumbrate future conflicts in his art, in its uneasy rapprochement between a painting of experience and a painting of cool, affectless formalism. Howard Hodgkin also contributes a peculiar, troubled picture, a portrait of one Mrs K whose sitter, rendered as a kind of Leger mechanomorph, has been almost entirely obscured by a creeping field of blue. This reads as a virtual sabotage of one kind of painting by another - an attempt to divert an art of brightness and clarity to another direction, to shroud it and cloud it and make it mysterious, an art of occlusion and enigma.

Overall, the impression you get from ''Ready Steady Go'' is of a generation of artists filled with a sense of purpose and a certain optimism about the future of painting - these are, for the most part, fairly gregarious works of art, works of art that want to be talked about, to be debated and interrogated and argued over. There is a strong contrast at the Serpentine, where much of the art shortlisted for the Barclay's Young Artists Award looks as though it was debated to death in the post-graduate seminar room before it ever got made. Yinka Shonibare's various Untitleds, made by wrapping found pieces of African textile around canvases, may be intended as commentaries on Western art's appropriation of other cultural traditions, but commentary (''issue-based art'' is the press release way to put it) usually makes for pretty thin, dull work. Gabriel Klasmer is yet another painter of the 1980s and 1990s to make painting about painting, and what the minimally altered surfaces of his black, abstract paintings seem to have to say about painting (not very original, this) is that it is dead - the very act of making a picture, here, is envisaged as a form of mortuary cosmetics.

Optimism, these days, would seem to be in short supply among younger artists. The kind of brash ur-banism of the Sixties paintings in ''Ready Steady Go'' gives way, at the Serpentine, to a depressed art of the metropolis - notably in Richard Ducker's paintings, made from aerosol spray on rolled concrete, whose images suggest bacilli under the microscope. This is art whose subject seems to be disease and whose medium, the graffito, is itself a symbol of social deprivation and civic decay.

There is a strong sense here, too, of art as an activity somehow cut off from the public world, so where the art is not about art itself it seems to retreat into a kind of ineffably slight lyricism. Some is almost entirely opaque: Lisa Richardson has contributed a film, projected on a screen covered with impenetrable automatic writing, of herself kissing a red balloon, again and again, which is not wildly exciting as either cinema or installation art. A better piece (the best, in fact, in the show), is Janice Howard's disconcerting, sinister double movie projection, in which two pairs of hands hover above a table performing inexplicable actions with cards and a napkin. It has a certain Surreal force and seems representative of a strand of younger British art being made today in its absolute lack of declamatory, public intentions, its demonstration of the oddity of the private imagination.

Mel Gooding, one of the judges of this year's Barclay's Award, has written an introduction to the booklet accompanying the show in which he sympathises with the plight of young artists ''in a world changing faster and more profoundly than we could have imagined: how is art to speak for realities and coherence in the year of the Gulf War, the Kurdish agony, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the resurgent violences of an older Europe, the continuing crisis of the planet?'' Put like that, it does sound pretty daunting: maybe all artists can hope to do, these days, is fiddle while Rome burns.

It is tempting to place some kind of political interpretation on the work that won first prize for its maker in these awards: Andrew Kearney's Untitled, a sort of jerry-built fortress made out of corrugated steel and wood, an impenetrable sentry post constructed in the middle of an art gallery. What is it meant to be, ex-actly? An object of sullen resistance, a pseudo-military installation devised as an emblem of man's will to violence? Hard to say, but it is certainly not an optimistic work and does not really look like the sort of thing an artist can usefully ''develop'' from or ''refine''. It is apparently meant to revolve, slowly, in the gallery, but on the two occasions that I visited the show the motor that drives it was not functioning. This seemed, somehow, appropriate, a summary of sorts of the mood among younger British artists right now: not Ready Steady Go, but Temporarily Out of Order.