Intelligence: New British Art 2000
at Tate Britain, London
artdesigncafé | café library | Published 15 September 2009
This review first appeared in Sculpture magazine, 20(2), pp. 75-6 in 2001.
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Sarah Lucas. Life’s a drag organ, (1998). Two burnt cars, cigarettes, and glue, 146 x 460 x 180 cm.
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.
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