Putting the Toothpaste Back in the Tube

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Ane of the great things about taking people on cultural tours is the opportunity to see lots of temporary exhibitions both in Britain and abroad. This calendar week I accept been to the Barbara Hepworth and the Agnes Martin exhibitions at the Tate and the Native Australian Art exhibition at the British Museum. All three were fantabulous and the latter has sharpened my appetite for a calendar month-long lecture tour that I am about to practice from Sydney to Cairns.

On a smaller calibration I was hugely impressed by an Arts Quango touring exhibition of works past 40 British sculptors, nine of whom I had shown when I worked equally a curator. They all dated from the menstruum just before the emergence of the YBA's and included pieces that dealt with the re-contextualisation of objects and the exploration of an expanse that Joseph Kosuth described as 'neither painting nor sculpture'.  Many of them, equally in Carl Plackman's arrangement of canes or Cornelia Parker'due south clock-similar configuration of lead pieces, were wall-based pieces or sat directly on the flooring without a plinth.  Both had a vestigial quality: in Carl Plackman'south case because it appeared equally if the materials had been left over from a performance and in Cornelia Parker'due south because the piece of work seemed to accept been transformed by an industrial or, perhaps alchemical, process.

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A similar magic seemed to accept been at work in Bill Woodrow'southward conjuring of a panther from the metal body of a car-door or in Jean-Luc Vilmouth'southward structure of a totemic figure from an arrangement of household objects. Vilmouth was typical of the artists in the show in that he retained the original character of the bottles and grit-pans that he used by placing them next to each other rather than disguising them or physically joining them together. For this reason, it was possible to read the whole of the image and its individual components simultaneously. Hence one both acknowledged and suppressed the artist'southward intervention. In the case of Tony Cragg's wriggling assemblage of pipes and baskets, it was similar imagining the artist putting the toothpaste back in the tube or, in Bill Woodrow's, like an audience watching a sorcerer supplant a rabbit in a chapeau.

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Some other work by Tony Cragg comprised a Union Jack made out of discarded plastic objects. It reminded me of several other artists who used the flag to comment on the divided, post-industrial earth of eighties Britain. Amongst them were Martin Parr, Paul Graham and Jock McFadyen who made references to form identity, Northern Ireland and the Falklands. Cragg's Marriage Jack invited comparison with other wall-based works by the Boyle Family and Kate Blacker. Like several of their contemporaries, 'the Boyle Family unit' comprised a duo of artists who chose to work collaboratively in a way that underlined the mechanical nature of their process. Their exhibit comprised a fibreglass cast of a section of pavement, which the artists would typically have selected at random through firing an air-burglarize or throwing a dart at a map.  In a similarly self-effacing fashion, Kate Blacker used a branch of a tree to support a triangular piece of painted corrugated iron. The prototype was instantly recognizable as a reference to Cézanne'south love Mont Sainte Victoire. Its hybrid nature, deliberate awkwardness and borrowings from another artist's work were typical of a decade that was already beginning to over-dose on the ironies of post-modernism.

Kate Blacker'south precarious construction was matched by Julian Opie'south jokey assemblage of paper-thin nails and hammers. Back in the eighties 'bricollage' - a term, which referred to the kind of botched DIY jobs that French 'bricolleurs' were alleged to inflict on unsuspecting home-owners – was very much in way.  I noticed the same make-practice-and mend approach in Richard Wentworth's twinning of an open sardine tin can with a galvanized saucepan and in Edward Allington'south juxtaposition of a gold painted cornucopia with a set of shop-bought plastic creepy-crawlies. More shells appeared in the piece of work of Phyllida Barlow who had created hers by winding layers of transparent Sellotape around a key core. Similar tensions betwixt the beauty of the epitome and the everyday materials used were apparent in a sculpture by Richard Deacon in which the creative person had sewn a pair of old trouser legs together and in Alison Wilding's creation of a jewel-like sculpture through bronze-casting two anonymous paper bags.

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Similar many of the artists, all four evoked the poetic strategies of the Italian arte povera move in ways that were ambiguous, funny and curiously disquieting.  Before I left, I plant myself looking effectually to run into if the selector had included any of Damien Hirst's vitrines since his vanitas shells might take looked well in such visitor. Possibly, since they did non appear until 1990, they were a little too late for the brief. Yet their absence merely underlined the gulf that divided the exhibitors from the more than glamorous generation of artists that succeeded them. And that'due south more toothpaste, of class, that doesn't look equally if information technology'due south going dorsum into the tube.