Richard Patterson,
Motorcrosser III, 1994

Hype aside, there is a lot that looks fresh and confident here. While referencing Surrealist and conceptual forebears, Jordon Baseman’s and Christine Borland’s objects are uniquely theirs. Baseman’s Call me Mister, a man’s business shirt with children’s sleeves and a collar of wispy black hair, is a potent and humourous confusion of power and sexual symbols. His eerie casts of animal teeth set in human dentures make manifest repressed conflations disturbing our highly guarded animal/human distinctions. Borland’s gendered bullet proof vests made of cotton wool and costume jewellery embedded in simple white singlets, also focus our attention on the vulnerability of human subjectivity. Garments are used to different effect by Yinka Shonibare whose trademark batik prints, sourced from Africa but the product of Asian techniques, are finely crafted into man-sized flouncy Victorian corsetry, mixing sexual ethnic and art/craft designations in a beautiful affirmation of the fluidity of categories.

The object is most definitely affirmed in this exhibition, with the barest hint of installation, no digital art and a strong showing of painting and photography. Of particular note are Chris Ofili’s strange configurations which bring together indigenous design, elephant dung and black pop icons, while Robert Billingham’s snapshots of his family life in a council flat, processed at the local photo lab are compelling by appearing artless, unmediated and immediate. Rare in the context of large exhibitions like this one, the miniature object also makes an appearance with works like Judith Dean’s fragile and disposable crayon shaving sculptures, Andrea Wilkinson’s tiny paper cut-out family and Tania Kovat’s diminutive icon Virgin in a Condom . (Ed: Kovat’s Virgin in a Condom was stolen during the exhibition.)

Of the handful of time-based works, Willie Doherty’s dead-end road video (a metaphor for Ireland’s "peace process") and Douglas Gordon’s frame by frame deceleration are effective. The most engaging however is Gillian Wearing’s twist on real life TV; this work makes us privy to the painful but ultimately banal secrets of the men who answered Wearing’s ad seeking volunteers to confess all on video in disguise. The confessors wear a variety of bizarre masks which leave the viewer only the eyes and voice on which to gauge emotions, evoking a peculiar sense of being both too close and yet not close enough.

This is a large exhibition, featuring some 100 works from close to 50 artists. But to the curator’s credit, it is neither overwhelming nor disturbingly incoherent. Ultimately, there is a fairly good balance between the stars and emerging talents with just two old-timers, Richard Hamilton and John Latham, providing some context. Pictura Britannica need not rely on the hype to lay claim to a thoroughly energetic presentation of a slice of British contemporary culture.

Jacqueline Millner
October, 1997

© The artists and
Courtesy of MCA.

Rachel Glynn, Long hair
shirt dress, 1996