A plastic fish on a turntable, a readily available price list and a gushing
middle-aged crowd? It could only be the degree show season, that special
time when universities become galleries, artists skulk by their work and
parents try desperately to say nice things about why their son has stacked
three TVs on top of one another. What’s more, it’s the time when gallerists,
collectors and dealers prowl for new blood. So what is the flavour of the
next generation? Having visited a selection of Britain’s best shows, BA and
post-graduate, I can confirm that said TV stacks do still lurk, but there is
also some real, jaw-dropping talent. Now let’s talk trends.
Back to the drawing board
What’s this? Monet-style Impressionism? Accomplished landscape photography for
its own sake? That’s right, finally a comfort for those of you who have long
despaired of contemporary art: skill is back.
“People are tired of seeing piles of crap,” says Imelda Culleton, a graduate
of Central Saint Martins, whose celebrity portraits are mounted in
shimmering cut steel. “The whole installation theory is getting so old-hat,
the actual skills of producing work are definitely coming back.”
The “piles of crap” are still there, mind you, but they’re facing a serious
offensive. “My art can be seen as perceptual, rather than conceptual,” says
the photographer Puneeta Sharma, who aims to restore an appreciation for
“the beautiful parts of our planet”. Other examples include Anna Cronin,
from the Slade, an artist who has painstakingly recreated a swath of seal
fur in ink, and Sarah Whitehouse, from Glasgow, whose prints layer line and
colour to suggest surreal, fairy-like creatures hovering on a waterscape
before a hazy setting sun.
“There’s a real healthy interest in figuration. People want to start to tell
stories again,” confirms Mark Hampson, the senior tutor in printmaking at
the Royal College of Art. “This year we’re seeing people who are serious
about the subject and less interested in the glamour of a profile.”
History repeating itself
With an interest in craft, comes an interest in art history, twisted with the
contemporary. “Any millennial shift creates a reflective moment, and we are
at a point of transition,” says the gallerist Maureen Paley, who discovered
several artists at their degree shows. “I’m aware that artists are
investigating things that may have come before and trying to analyse where
they are now in relation to the past.”
An interest in art history seems only fitting at the Glasgow School of Art,
where even the cracks on Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s walls seem decorative.
Renaissance imagery is everywhere, particularly the Madonna and Child (no,
not Madge and Mercy — though they wouldn’t be out of place, see trend No 4),
abstracted, cut up and collaged or even painted surprisingly straight.
Christine Leathem, a student, points out a fashion for Romanticism and Dada.
She has collaged old photos and formed them into beguiling landscapes. “I
suppose you go to gallery openings all the time, so trends spread quickly,”
she says.
At the polished RCA show, Maisie Broadhead has chosen well-known paintings
that contain a symbolic piece of jewellery, such as Vermeer’s Woman
Holding a Balance, reimagining them with contemporary figures and
producing the piece of jewellery to be sold alongside. “There might be
something in it,” says Broadhead, who had noticed another artist, Hector de
Gregorio, producing similar work in another department. “Perhaps people are
looking back to when things were a bit better.”
It’s going down well: Broadhead sold seven prints during the degree show,
while de Gregorio was one of the few artists whose entire show sold, bought
up by Vicki Conran on the opening morning.
Bringing it all back home
They might be facing the impending pressure of graduating into a recession,
but students aren’t depicting doom and gloom. “Instead of asking for the big
solution,” says Klaus Jung, head of fine art at Glasgow, “the students seem
to retreat and try to make themselves comfortable by turning to what is
closest to them: the reality around them.”
Literally, in some cases. For what became Glasgow’s surprise centrepiece,
Harriet Lowther sent out more than 200 letters thanking the companies who
made her belongings, from Tetley teabags to Bic pens. Many replied in
genuine surprise — Jessops even sent an automated response beginning: “We
are sorry to hear of the problems you have experienced, prompting your
letter of complaint” — and Lowther then framed and mounted their letters in
a huge display. The result is an unusually positive and funny dialogue,
gently highlighting the things, and people, we take for granted. “Thank you
so much for your letter,” writes Amanda Anderson from Strathclyde
Partnership for Transport. “It was such a breath of fresh air . . . we never
get to hear from happy customers!”
The playful veneration of stuff continues at the RCA, where Thomas Adank has
put lemon Fairy Liquid through a series of mini metallic party fountains,
creating a lovely, slow unctuous oozing in calming yellow — “a sweet gush
for a sweet world,” he says.
Over at Goldsmiths, Antony Gormley’s son Guy is graduating, mockingly
exhibiting a film reel of self-portraits and his name in flashing lights.
But his work, too, is rooted in his personal surroundings. “It’s best to
talk about what you understand, rather than things you don’t know about, so
I work with the materials and subjects around me.”
Then there’s the fashion for installing a whole, makeshift room — I must have
seen at least 15 — that tend to be much darker, evoking personal or family
issues. Katherine Jones at Goldsmiths was a rare example of a genuinely
poignant one, telling the first-person story of a terminated pregnancy,
written around a room stuffed with books, plants and pictures. You feel as
though you’re in her house, suffering with her, but perhaps too late.
Pop goes the easel
Brian Harvey, of the boy band East 17, bursts out from a wall at the Royal
Academy, Girls Aloud perform in French at Central Saint Martins and, with
spectacular timing, Michael Jackson’s Scream video gets a
remake at Goldsmiths. “Me and my sister both loved Michael Jackson, and I
felt that the video could be an instigator for filming us both at this point
in our lives, just about to finish university,” says Alex Fear, who played
Jackson in his video. “I think pop music is a more relevant thing to
people’s lives than all the conceptual stuff, and I’m interested in how we
project our own emotion on to it.”
“Pop seems to have seeped into the zeitgeist,” notes Brian Griffiths, a tutor
at the RA, and points out two frelated shows, Art on the Underground’s
current Pop Will Eat Itself, featuring a ceramic bust of Jennifer
Lopez at Piccadilly Tube station, and Tate Modern’s upcoming autumn show Pop
Life: Art in a Material World.
Prints Charming
At the Royal Academy, the galleries appear almost sparsely hung with shiny,
lacquered canvases, bold blocks of colour — and a mischievously bubbling
paint pot. The latter is the work of Robert Leech, who has inserted a pump
into a pot of household emulsion to let out a slow, silent burp, claiming to
explore the mass-produced nature of today’s art and also let us enjoy the
beauty of the paint itself, in all its goopy glory. It’s an interest in
material that forms part of a larger preoccupation with surface, and a
significant revival of print-making. “There is incredible interest in how
surfaces are made, and lots of references to printing,” says Richard
Wentworth, the outgoing Ruskin Master of Drawing at the University of
Oxford, where this year’s degree show is almost entirely abstract.
For example, Ralph Mackenzie, from Glasgow, fed the same sheet of paper
through five different printers. “Students are getting more comfortable with
digital media, and they’re not impressed by technology any more,” Jung says.
“So they try to move on and make something new out of it, using technology
in quite an unusual way.”
And the rest . . .
Trends that didn’t make the cut include narrative video art, wild, colourful
abstract painting, animals, from pet-portraits to wild bears and even a live
tortoise, and the everlasting influence of the YBAs, with rude words in
lights and naked people covered in fried food. It wouldn’t be right without
them.
