Modern art needs to rediscover its rebellious spirit
New Contemporaries. There’s something in those two words that evokes a world of wide-eyed, unabashed optimism in which E-type Jags, Jean Shrimpton and stylish modernist interiors are never far away. In fact, this is not so far from what the words actually do represent. An annual exhibition of work by current British art school graduates that has run, with a few interruptions, from 1949 to date, New Contemporaries reached its annus mirabilis in 1961, with one of the legendary British art exhibitions which launched British pop art, making stars of a group of young artists, many just graduating from the Royal College of Art, including Allen Jones, Derek Boshier, R B Kitaj and, of course, David Hockney.
It was a show that introduced a new spirit in British art, with work that was not just bright, fresh and looking to popular culture for inspiration, but showed that young people from working class and provincial backgrounds were breaking through in art just as they were in pop music, fashion and films. The fact that a number of the artists, notably Jones, had been expelled from the RCA for not towing the academic line lent the show an authentic aura of rebellion. Yet looking at the advance publicity for this year’s Bloomberg-sponsored New Contemporaries exhibition, which opens at the Baltic Gateshead on September 29, will make you wonder what on earth happened to that spirit.
Certainly the event makes much of its illustrious tradition: of the fact that just about every significant artist of the past half century has taken part — not least many of the YBAs who emerged in the late 1980s.
“Although not household names yet,” we are told, “each of the 47 painters, photographers, film makers and sculptors are hoping that this year’s touring exhibition will see them achieve the success of New Contemporaries alumni such as David Hockney, Paula Rego, Damien Hirst, Gillian Wearing and Chris Ofili.”
Not only is the tone horribly patronising, but isn’t there something depressing in the idea of modern art’s revolutionary spirit reduced to a stylish retro-cycle in which young artists appear to aspire to nothing more radical than imitating the success of well-known figures a generation older than themselves?
In 1961, New Contemporaries already had an illustrious past, in the form of RCA old stagers such as Robin Darwin and Carel Weight, who had originally founded the exhibition: but it was one with which the young artists were at violent loggerheads. Yet that sense of intergenerational conflict, which was such a force in powering modernism — whether it was Manet reacting against his academic teacher Thomas Couture or Jasper Johns wanting to kick over the traces of American abstract painting — has all but disappeared from contemporary art.
Anyone looking at the advance images for this year’s New Contemporaries show for a sense of “where art is going”, will be forced to conclude it’s still going where it was 10 or even 20 years ago.
That’s a situation compounded by much of today’s art education in which far from starting from a brutal “ground zero” in which there are no exemplars, as you might expect, students are given lists of artists to study, rather as 19th-century students were made to look to the Old Masters for inspiration.
Yet the models for today’s young artists aren’t, by and large, mega-names such as Picasso, Duchamp or even Hirst, but currently buzzy figures who are just a few steps further on from the students themselves. The result is a kind of modern academicism geared to churning out yet more stuff that looks like “contemporary art”.
This sense of cosy stasis infects not only exhibitions devoted to so-called “emerging artists” (what a patronising term that is) but just about every major art event from the Folkestone Triennial to even the mighty Venice Biennale, the 2017 manifestation of which provided only one work (it was actually the winning German pavilion) that created the exhilarating frisson of entering new territory.
Where many still think of modern art as characterised by intractable conflict with mainstream society, art today is so institutionalised — funded by governments and financial institutions, explained by curators — it has no incentive to be in conflict with anything; rather than becoming part of the mainstream, it has become a complacent mainstream on its own terms.
Thankfully, however, there’s no need for despair. I have complete faith in the ability of today’s young artists to create work that reflects the reality of their time in challenging ways. But it will be through forms and structures they’ve created themselves, not through corporate-funded institutions such as New Contemporaries.
This is the 40th anniversary of the summer of punk, which still provides a powerful reference point for self-determined youthful innovation. And Hirst and the YBAs made their initial impact not with New Contemporaries, but with 1988’s Freeze exhibition. They organised Freeze themselves — and that was the whole point.
As Turner Prize-winning photographer Wolfgang Tillmans told me — a touch frostily — when I asked him if he’d give my daughter work experience: “I always believe young people should create their own paths.” Amen to that.