Intelligence: New British Art 2000
at Tate Britain, London

Review of exhibition including artwork by Sarah Lucas, Susan Hiller, Yinka Shonibare, Bridgit Lowe, Douglas Gordon, Oladele Ajiboye Bamgboye, Tacita Dean, Jaki Irvine, and William Furlong.

While Tate Modern opened with curatorial controversy and fanfare, Tate Britain offered “Intelligence,” which launched a series of exhibitions to be held every three years to present different perspectives on current art in Britain. Twenty-one artists participated, including many of the most well-known younger British sculptors.

Installation works included Sarah Lucas’s Life’s a Drag Organ (1998), which plays on cigarette drags and road races with two burnt-out cars and decoratively arranged Marlboro cigarettes. Alternately glued to the front hood and the front seats, the interiors suggest tar-covered lungs and illustrate auto wrecks—acting as documents snapping at the dated glamour of the pack and continued worldwide car fetishes. Susan Hiller suspended a multitude of speakers in Witness (2000), which emitted several accounts of UFO sitings in various languages. With voices sometimes presented at once, it sounded like an intergalactic convention in a sci-fi movie, yet individual accounts—spoken at different points in the installation—spatially gave the effect of overhearing confessions in a crowded room. Meanwhile, suspended on a platform just below eye-level, Yinka Shonibare’s Vacation (2000) consisted of a nuclear family of astronauts covered in his trademark African textiles, raising issues of constructions of alienness/ otherness and the problems of specific cultural authenticity in a globally interactive world.

Dealing directly with written language and art, Bridgit Lowe’s I Saw Two Englands Break Away (1996–97) was composed of 225 found book titles that—when combined and read horizontally— created a lengthy textual narrative: “I saw two Englands / Breakaway / The Stagnant Society / Lies / Skin Deep…” With the book-title text written out on the opposite wall, the constructed sentences read stiltedly and raised issues about oneness, juxtaposition, personal perspective, and a futile quest for meaning. Also playing with layers of text, Douglas Gordon’s large-scale installation List of Names (since 1990)—on three walls—looked like a multiplied museum benefactors list. Accounting for all of the people the artist has met in his life—those that he can recall at a given time—the list documents the wealth and failure of memory.

On the video installation front, highlights included Oladele Ajiboye Bamgboye’s Spell for Beginners (1994/2000), composed of an ordinary living room interior and TV monitor. The black and white video showed the Nigerian-born artist (with muscle-toned body and dreadlocks) enacting a voyeuristic and photogenic bathing scene, which contrasted with images of a snow-covered landscape and the artist’s former partner, Anne Rome Elliott. The artists discuss the break-up of their relationship, hinting at public and private influences in predominantly white Scotland. Tacita Dean’s Bubble House (1999) documents the artist’s encounter with an abandoned Modernist house on the Caribbean seaside. Built by a Frenchman to resist hurricanes, the house was deserted after his arrest for embezzlement. The vulnerability of the house—and man—to life’s forces is brilliantly captured with a bubbled window/ eye of the structure framing a stormy, videoed seascape, hypnotizing the viewer with crashing waves as thunder rolls in. Meanwhile, Jaki Irvine’s Eyelashes (1996) deals with the disconnections of personal accounts and perspectives, differences between thinking and speaking, and friction between the visual and verbal. A woman talks about male fascination with female eyelashes, while the video shows a man and woman having a conversation over breakfast. Experientially, the disconnections disorient, because the images and text are incongruous and deceptive.

William Furlong’s site-specific sound piece Thossel (2000) rounded up “Intelligence.” With spoken text by the show’s artists, the title refers to the site in a village where people gathered to discuss ideas. Set in a room with strategically placed, square sound boxes, the piece encourages contemplation, as viewers hear a mixed arrangement of the artists’ discourses. “Intelligence” not only presented a new(er) selection of post-YBA artists, but also showed that the powers are casting a strategic shift for world consumption, which should guarantee continued global attention to London’s art scene into the new millennium.