Tomoko Takahashi, Paul Smith, Brian Cyril Griffiths - New Neurotic Realism (1999)

Art Design Publicity 3(2) - Totally Walker | Published 14 August 2011
Page 5 of 9

The first Neurotic Realism Exhibition

A curious feature of this show was that it was sponsored by The Observer Sunday newspaper. Why, one wondered, did a wealthy collector like Charles Saatchi need business sponsorship? The exhibition featured paintings by Martin Maloney, photographs by Paul Smith, sculptures by Steven Gontarski and Brian Cyril Griffiths, and an extensive, messy installation entitled Line-Out (1998) by Tomoko Takahashi. This installation spread across the floor while its maintenance instructions were crudely written on the walls, and so the normally pristine appearance of the central gallery space was dramatically altered.

Tomoko Takahashi. Line-Out (detail), (1998). Mixed-media installation, dimensions variable. Installed at Saatchi Gallery, London.

Tomoko Takahashi, who categorically denied being a neurotic realist, was born in Tokyo in 1966 and trained at Goldsmiths’ and the Slade. It took her days to gather and arrange her materials and so she [slept] in the gallery. Tom Lubbock described the result of her labours as follows:

... miscellaneous junk, huge quantities of it, arranged in an archipelago of tableaux-dumps, and in each dump there’s an electric gadget, like a TV or a tape recorder or an adding machine, still working away, but pointlessly (nothing on TV, no tape in the recorder) ... a techno-dystopian vision of our culture of consumption and waste ... [7]

Like an actual rubbish dump, it proved a fascinating spectacle. Visitors wandered among the mounds of debris along pathways left for the purpose while sharp-eyed attendants made sure no one stole the new tools and equipment that were also scattered across the floor.

Paul Smith was born in Bradford-on-Avon in 1969 and gained an MA in photography at the Royal College of Art. Like Cindy Sherman, he played most of the roles in his colour photos himself, “using digital computer technology to achieve this end. Smith had once been a soldier and in one sequence of prints— Artist Rifle Series (1997)— he recreated photos of war and army-recruitment-style pictures of [troops] on manoeuvres. One reviewer was offended by Smith’s battle scenes because they lacked “the passion and horror” of authentic war photographs. In another series of colour prints— Make My Night (1998)— Smith imitated snaps of lager louts clowning around and gesturing aggressively at the camera. Since these images merely relayed boorish, laddish behaviour, the redemptive function of art seemed to have been abandoned.

Brian Cyril Griffiths (b. 1968) hailed from Stratford-on-Avon and was a Goldsmiths’ MA student. He painstakingly reproduced industrial control panels from cardboard, parcel tape, bottle tops, old umbrellas, etc. The gallery filled with his bulky fabrications resembled a deserted set for Star Trek. In his case, a self-therapeutic, do-it-yourself aesthetic was carried to a manic extreme. Play is often a factor in artistic creativity but the playfulness of many of the [artists in] New Neurotic Realism seemed to continue the kind of projects set by primary schoolteachers and by children’s television programmes like Blue Peter. “Infantilism” was one critical response.

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