Date: 13-06-2010
Owning Institution: Tate Britain
Publication: Sunday Telegraph Reviews 2004-2011              
Subject:   17th Century  18th Century  19th Century  20th Century  Now    

The American author E.B. White once remarked that “Humour can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind.” He compared comedy itself to “a bubble”: “it won’t stand much blowing up, and it won’t stand much poking. Essentially, it is a complete mystery.”

Tate Britain’s new exhibition, “Rude Britannia: British Comic Art”, takes White’s remarks as a starting point for its own explorations. For curator Martin Myrone, comedy and art alike are essentially inexplicable: both are “beyond words, sense, analysis, a matter of instinct and honesty rather than intellect and theory”. Myrone’s colleague and co-curator Cedar Lewisohn goes still further, dreaming of a new utopia of critical enlightenment in which crude distinctions between activities such as creating fine art and performing stand-up comedy  be abolished together. “Why not think of Tommy Cooper as a performance artist? Or Martin Kippenberger [the late German painter whose pictures often resembled custard pies] as a clown? Maybe it’s OK to go to the Tate at the weekend, look at the bricks and have a giggle...”

Whatever next? Ricky Gervais for the Turner Prize? Gilbert & George for Best Comedy Performance at the BAFTAs? Come to think of it, maybe the man is on to something. This could work.

For “Rude Britannia” Tate Britain’s own curators have worked with a number of guest curators drawn from the world of practising satirists, comic publishers and indeed comic performers – Steve Bell, Gerald Scarfe, Harry Hill, the editors of Viz – to select a screamingly amorphous body of British comic art ranging from the seventeenth century to the present day. The exhibition is divided into thematic sections so that Scarfe, for example, presides over a room of satires positively pullulating with vomitous disgust for politicians past and present: Gillray’s depiction of William Pitt the Younger as public enema number one, sitting astride his cowering nation, or carving up the world as if it were a plum pudding, together with the rapacious Napoleon Bonaparte; all the way through to Martin Rowson’s Tony Blair, giving evidence at the Iraq inquiry but shown as if metamorphosing into one of the victims of the war his own policies promoted: a yellowed, putrefying corpse, with the powers of speech.

Harry Hill’s absurdist corner is a room grassed with astroturf and stuffed with puzzles, provocations, deceptions and incongruities. Eighteenth-century satires like Paul Sandby’s image of an enormous exploding arse poised above Portland Square (an allusion, apparently, to the Georgian craze for hot-air ballooning) coexist with objects trawled from the fields of popular culture such as the wonderful Flask in the Form of a Potato of circa 1800, a fake terracotta spud designed to allow the bibulous farmworker to indulge his habit without attracting the attentions of his overseer. David Shrigley’s wide-eyed Dead Cat occupies a plinth while clutching a poster with the message “I’m Dead”. This defiantly ambiguous object could be seen in a number of ways. Is it Damien Hirst redone as taxidermical stand-up comedy (its theme, after all, is pretty well identical to the title Hirst gave to his original, Saatchi-sponsored shark in formaldehyde, namely The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Something Living)? Or is it Monty Python’s “Dead Parrot” sketch reworked as a piece of Conceptual Art? Then again, if Cedar Lewisohn is right, maybe Monty Python’s parrot sketch was a piece of Conceptual Art in the first place.

“Rude Britannia” could have been terrible – so many thematic shows are – but it turns out to be inspired, partly for the reason that the contemporary and the historical art that it contains, the supposedly high and the supposedly low, from Hogarth to Benny Hill, speak to each other so effortlessly and so entertainingly. To move from Gillray’s seeping, sex-mad politicians to Sarah Lucas’s onanistic rubber hand on a spring, forever miming the gesture of a disappointed football fan’s contempt for his foe; to move from Thomas Patch’s caricatures of English connoisseurs to Glen Baxter’s knowing pastiches of Modern Art-speak; to move from Rowlandson’s distended faces and anatomies to the grotesquely inflated Michelin-person presented in John Isaacs’s sculpture of 2003 I Can’t Help the Way I Feel – a kind of three-dimensional emblem of the demonisation of body fat – is not to move from one artistic universe to another; it is to be reminded that to a great degree the comic and the grotesque constitutes virtually the sole constant or continuity in the entire history of British art.

After all, for centuries the only area in which the British artist could exert his imagination and truly indulge his fantasy was the realm of comedy. The pattern was set during the Reformation, in the 1530s, when the churches of the entire nation were purged of all their “high” art – the altarpieces, the sculptures, all the images of Christ and Mary and the saints – with only the “low” art, the gargoyles and the babooneries, allowed on sufferance to remain. The situation persisted into the eighteenth century, when Hogarth’s comic histories such as The Rake’s Progress furnished British art with a grotesque and conveniently mass-produced version of the great fresco cycles of Spain or Italy, that Anglicanism had forbidden. Many of Britain’s most vigorous contributions to the revolutions of modernism also originated in the field of British comic art. The seething, inflamed satires of Gillray anticipated the soul-baring art of twentieth-century Expressionism, while George Cruikshank’s quickfire satirical drawings of contemporary life were an important source of inspiration to the father of Impressionism, Edouard Manet, and the father of Post-Impressionism, Vincent Van Gogh, alike. The categorical slipperiness of British creativity has persisted into the twentieth century and beyond. Britain’s most distinguished Surrealists were indeed the likes of Tommy Cooper and the Monty Python team, while in recent years fine artists have themselves increasingly worked at the margins of popular comedy. “Rude Britannia” is a vigorous, raucous, knockabout exhibition which manages to be laugh-out-loud funny and thought-provokingly serious at the same time. What an exuberant contrast it makes with Tate Modern’s dour and disappointingly unimaginative offering of the moment, “Exposed”. Carry on Tate Britain.