Jake and Dinos Chapman were dismissed by some even in the 1990s as overgrown adolescents selling shock for its own sake, and yet it is their work that brings this dismally shallow show closest to a moment of depth. Their sculpture Great Deeds Against the Dead, based on a print of Napoleonic war atrocities by Goya, is a display of dismembered, bleeding nude corpses hung on a tree. It asks questions about war and art, the representation of pain, whether art can have a moral purpose.
The best British art of the 1990s was like that, coming on as brash, vulgar, macabre, yet also unexpectedly intelligent and emotional. Unfortunately this show is neither. You’d think Tate Britain would want to do justice to a decade in which these Millbank premises played a starring role, staging the Turner prize in the years when bisected cows, concrete houses and elephant dung got the nation arguing.
At the start of the 1990s no one thought Britain was a leader in contemporary art. By the millennium, we were better known for new art than new novels. A show that spectacularly revisited fin-de-siecle British art would be an interesting proposition.
Instead former Vogue editor Edward Enninful has been invited to stage his personal fantasy version of that decade, mixing up art and fashion, with the emphasis very much on fashion. There’s more about Isabella Blow than Rachel Whiteread, who is represented by an early cast of the inside of a hot-water bottle. Damien Hirst has a couple of small, harmless-looking sharks balanced on a circular rail.
There’s no chance of understanding from this how his early work seemed to confront the tiger shark’s maw of death. Perhaps his 1990s art can still move, or perhaps it has become silly with time, but there is not enough of it to even begin to decide. This is not a real exhibition.
Not only are there style mags in the show, its design has the breathless superficiality of a glossy layout bigging up its glib theme, in this case “The 90s”, in a glamorous sweep of strikingly juxtaposed images. But setting fashion photography alongside works of conceptual art is a terrible idea. If you take the fashion images seriously you reduce the art to another stylish pose.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
