Art and Australia, Review of Pictura Britanica at The MCA Sydney.
By Anthony Bond.

Pictura Britanica is a survey exhibition of young British artists accompanied by two senior artists, Richard Hamilton and John Latham whose practice may be seen to have been influential for the current generation.  The artists chosen by Bernice Murphy correspond closely with the recent British Art Show, the latest in a series of contemporary surveys of emerging talent organised by the Arts Council of Great Britain.  It is representative of the diversity of current practice in Britain where much of the work rewards an inquiring and lateral approach from the viewer.

The selection is inclusive and makes a point of acknowledging the importance of multicultural and regional artists by contrast with the normal bias towards London�s blue chip galleries and art schools.  In practice London remains a market centre that attracts talent from all over the British Isles.  It is interesting to see how many of the artists are represented by Anthony Reynolds and Richard Salmon.  These galleries have evolved a rather quirky practice that sits slightly outside the main stream.  Reynolds has been active as an agent, not always with a gallery, for many years.  In spite of moving into a space over the road from Anthony d�Offay, London�s most eminent dealer in contemporary art, he remains relentlessly eccentric.  His resistance to established trends is very engaging and creates one of the loop holes that allow for genuine innovation.

The theme of the exhibition is inevitably subordinated to the demands of a national survey which has too many components to be adequately dealt with here, however, there are some outstanding works that reveal distinctive links with certain continuing trajectories in British art.  Few artists readily adopt a national identity these days but working environments do produce responses and reactions which are a part of any social activity.

An obsessive investigation of the immediate environment of the artist; the home, the street and the extended family, links several of the artists in this exhibition with the tradition of Freud, Bacon, Kitaj, Auerbach and Kossoff. 

Ironic self deprecation and a healthy sense of the ridiculous, exemplified by Richard Wentworth, may not be obvious in some young super stars but it is a virtue when it appears in this exhibition. 

There is also a British history of truth to materials which evolves into a meeting of art and life, this gets turned on its head and parodied but none the less provides a formal frame for many of the artists.  This is an area that Tony Cragg has opened up creating a whole new landscape for sculpture.

John Frankland�s installation Right Here Right Now certainly put pressure on the boundary between art and life.  It could easily be dismissed or even missed altogether by a careless viewer.  Opposite the existing lift on the third floor Frankland created a metallic looking wall with a simulated lift entrance in the middle of it.  At first sight the design was typical of many recent office fabrications.  There was something strange about it however that made you stop and look again. 

The surface was reflective and viewers saw themselves and the surrounding space mirrored in it.  The reflection was not in focus giving the image an oddly diffuse quality reminiscent of Gerhard Richter�s paintings.  The diffusion of the image is one of the visual clues to the fact that the metal is in fact a sheet of fabric stretched over a frame.  The stretching of the material literally stretches the reflection.  The surface is too perfectly flat to be a rigid sheet while the corners and edges reveal the tension of stretched fabric. 

The wall was made out of a series of vertical panels, as prefabricated walls tend to be, but once you begin to think of them as fabric stretched over a frame they can be seen as a row of reflective monochrome paintings.  As monochromes they take on all the contemplative associations of a monochrome tradition.  They also suggest Ian Burn�s Reflex paintings of the late 1960s or his six shaving mirrors in the collection of The Art Gallery of New South Wales.  Burn was primarily concerned with promoting intense visual awareness and this work richly rewards such an approach.

If it is taken to be site specific, Frankland�s wall could be read as a comment on the architecture of the MCA.  The gallery space is a shell dropped into the original building and the architect Andrew Andersens has been at pains to remind us of this.  For example the cut away corners revealing the original windows constantly reinforce the transitory nature of the walls.  Frankland�s simulation underscores this sense of false space dramatically.

Cael Floyer also plays with the space and with the viewer�s sensibility.  Next to the lift there are two fire doors.  Under one of these doors a brilliant strip of light seemed to be flooding in from an unusually bright exterior.  There is just a hint of strange encounters about this luminosity, however we quickly discover that this is an illusion.  The light is coming from a projector placed on the floor opposite the lift.  The means are revealed but the sensation continues to engage us. 

Floyer also makes the text on a light bulb visible by the addition of a lens so that the light bulb becomes a projector that reveals itself.  Another projector is discovered in the form of an old turntable playing a recording of the sound of a carousel projector clicking round.  Visibility, invisibility and imagination are the raw materials for these enigmatic works.

Bethan Huws is represented by an object which she dismisses as not being art.  This is a tiny boat made by carefully folding a wild reed.  Huws� art only really exists in the mind of the viewer.  She finds ways to stimulate memories or imaginary places and events in the mind.  In one earlier piece she describes a walk by a lake.  Every minute incident of nature is recorded as a hand written text on the wall.  The wind shifts and causes ripples on the lake changing the colour and texture of its surface.  The sound of the wind in the leaves and the passing of a cloud are juxtaposed with the observation of an insect on the reeds.  We are transported in our imagination to a place in our own memories.  This is not poetic transformation it is pure information.  The little reed boat may have been made while sitting on the shore of the lake.  We have all folded some shape from a bus ticket or a sweet wrapper while musing on the nature of the world about us.  This little object might prompt us to recall such moments. 

Gary Perkin�s Cleanliness Is Next To Godliness seems at first to be another of those ubiquitous comments on surveillance.  A small scale model of a room is mounted on the wall and then surrounded by surveillance cameras.

The detail of the room, however, immediately takes us beyond this popular obsession.  It is clearly an institutional space, but it is not the pristine clinical environment of a modern hospital.  The enamel of the bath and the paint on the exposed pipes are chipped and discoloured.  On the edge of one of the one bath tubs there is a still life of primitive emetic apparatus.  The atmosphere is something like that of a run down mental institution.  The veracity of this image is compelling and terrifying.  The nature of constant surveillance now takes on a whole new psychic drama.

Richard Billingham is one of thousands of young artists documenting the squalid dramas of everyday life in the city.  There is something extra in these works however.  It may be the intimacy of the works which document his own family.  Unlike the subjects in most photographs of this genre, I found myself becoming quite attached to the battered dad and even the gross, tattooed mother.  His acceptance of her violence seemed to enact a kind of ritual of belonging.  It was the image of the dog adoring the family that completed the feeling that what we were seeing was not simply alienation and dysfunction but a profound bonding.  For better or worse these people have entered into a contract which may be as close as many families ever get to lasting love.

There were a number of beautiful objects in the exhibition but it was the site specific and the very modestly scaled works that seemed to come off best.  Rachel Whiteread is a wonderful artist and I have seen this particular sculpture looking totally magical but in this crowded room it died.  There was too much visual distraction for large scale atmospheric sculpture in the space.  On the other hand Judith Dean�s minute installations worked perfectly.  These consisted of coloured pencil shavings carefully preserved as fragile cones and arranged in circles like maquettes for some gigantic public sculpture.  Close inspection of these installations threatened their very existence, they could so easily blow away with a sneeze or even a sigh.

The exhibition itself was fragile because of the subtle and fugitive nature of the best works.  As a consequence some of the criticism in the Sydney Press stopped short of the necessary visual engagement.  It is all too easy to walk through a big survey exhibition and leave with the superficial impression that this was just another circus with those British brats.  I look forward to experiencing the exhibition when it is re-created in different spaces during its tour.