British Art Show 9 finds healing in troubled times

Financial Times

‘British Art Show 9 finds healing in troubled times’ By Rachel Spence

February 2022

“If my grandmother had been Mexican this would have been a llama,” observes a deadpan Andy Holden with geographical abandon, as he proffers a small china cat up to the camera. Winning the prize for whimsy in the British Art Show 9 — and possibly in any show this year — “Cat-tharsis” (2016/21) consists of vitrines containing 300 feline figurines collected by Holden’s grandmother and Holden’s own video performance, in which he lovingly unwraps each ornament while treating us to a moggie-centred monologue. “Cat-tharsis” is as compelling as it is silly, but when we discover that his grandma’s obsession was triggered by her husband’s descent into Alzheimer's, Holden’s trinkets take on a tender, healing gravity.

For many of us right now, a little magical thinking wouldn’t go amiss. Kitsch kitties might not float your boat, but a whirl around the latest iteration of the British Art Show, currently at Wolverhampton, could be just what the doctor ordered.

Held every five years under the auspices of the Hayward Gallery, the British Art Show is the largest touring exhibition of contemporary art in the UK. Aiming to “open up the work of a new group of extraordinary artists to the widest possible audience”, it launched last year in Aberdeen and will continue to Manchester and Plymouth.

This ninth edition is the trickiest wicket yet. How do you express the visual imagination of a nation split down the middle by Brexit then wounded to the bone by a pandemic? And how do you make that expression relevant in a city such as Wolverhampton, where unemployment is nearly 40 per cent higher than the national average and one in three children live in poverty?

The curators’ answer is to gather work that both reflects suffering and champions values — such as care, redemption and healing — that alleviate it. No one finds this balance more sensitively than Helen Cammock. Growing up in Wolverhampton in 1970s, Cammock — joint winner of the Turner Prize in 2019 — has already made work speaking to the city’s dark history as the constituency of Enoch Powell, author of the infamous “rivers of blood” speech, frenziedly inveighing against immigration, in 1968. Here, she has updated “Changing Room” — her heartbreaking 2014 video which hymns the courage of her Jamaica-born father, a teacher, magistrate and ceramicist, in the face of vicious racism — by casting animal sculptures using her father’s original moulds.

Again and again, this show reminds us that reparation resides in the honouring of memory and experience. Described as “electronic music’s answer to Basquiat”, the artist and musician Gaika weaves us through “Zemel” (2022), a darkened room in which human faces on digital screens morph through different incarnations, from ancient sculpture to modern man, to a spine-chilling soundtrack of folk songs.

Installation view of Elaine Mitchener’s ‘[NAMES II] an evocation’ (2019-21) © Aberdeen City Council (Art Gallery & Museums Collections)

The son of one of the “Windrush generation” who came to the UK from the Caribbean after the second world war, Gaika dedicates “Zemel” to “Black heroism in general”. The continuous evolution of the faces operates as a reproach to the unyielding features of those colonial statues which the Conservative government — which was also responsible for deporting Windrush immigrants — is currently insisting must remain in situ in public.

When old-fashioned hierarchies no longer cut the mustard, artists turn the canon on its head. Simeon Barclay transforms Rodin’s sculpture The Age of Bronze (1877) — beautiful youth, eyes closed in ecstasy — into the coolest nightclub sign this side of Studio 54 by layering images of that nubile body in neon and vinyl print.

Emblematic of the healthy state of contemporary painting, a gallery devoted to that old-school medium and its sidekick, printing, offers some of Wolverhampton’s most innovative images. From Alberta Whittle, we have a series of prints from her conjuror (2021) series. Photo etchings on copper plate, they show a graceful dancing figure against a fabulous dreamscape of ripples, waves, crests and reefs. The original “model” was an Algonquin man who was painted in watercolour by a colonial governor in the 16th century and described as a “flyer”. A century later he was re-immortalised in an engraving as a “Native American sorcerer”. To find him here as a “conjuror” is to wonder if the tables have turned. Are we now summoned as inaccurate fantasies of his desire?  

Whittle is one of many artists who ride the thermals of myth, folklore and the supernatural to rise above our planet’s failures of imagination. Another is Paul Maheke, who cleaves to the concept of ghosts as a way of thinking more creatively about gender identity. Suspended in the centre of the gallery, his fabric “drawings” bear faces inspired by those divined in tea leaves and coffee grounds. The visages are made from bleach so they emanate out of the cloth as if swimming up from our own unconscious. The effect is once strange and familiar, as if secretly we have always known our unstable, invisible, inner selves.

Maheke says his work is about “what’s absent, what’s left untold, what’s left unseen”. Such hidden elements are expressed through abstraction in the work of Hurvin Anderson. One of Britain’s most electrifying painters, here he offers four paintings from his series inspired by the barbershops which used to operate in the homes of Caribbean immigrants and which to Anderson as a boy felt like “a secret meeting hall”. In the earliest, “Is it OK to Be Black?” (2015-16), bottles and lotions are ranged beneath the faces Martin Luther King and Malcolm X as if the struggle for black empowerment is on the line with every hair-do. By 2020, when Anderson made “Dixie Peach”, he has whittled down this lost, clandestine world to anonymous squares, ovals and a background tile patter. Washed with thin, translucent tints, these layers of shape and colour haunt each other as if the spectres of previous coiffures — and all their complex social meanings — still lurk today.

But the last word should go to Cammock. Shown separately from the video and ceramics, the final part of her “Changing Room” installation is a sparse textile map which was commissioned by Wolverhampton Art Gallery and the Hayward Gallery for the British Art Show 9. Including a blood-red river snaking through a yellow ring-road, and bold, bleak repetitions of the word “Leave”, the iconography signals both her family’s flight to London as life in post-Powell Wolverhampton became untenable for a black family and Wolverhampton’s recent Brexit vote. But the map also boasts a grid of black abstract shapes, possibly footprints, next to the legend “Plotting the Course”. A reference to the landmark 1988 exhibition held by the Blk Art Group —  formed in Wolverhampton in 1979 — it signals that black art was alive and brilliant long before the white establishment paid it any attention.

That was then. This is now. Will a culture of care and healing prevail? Or is our national pandemic of inequality and injustice beyond antidote? Cammock’s map, like the entire show, leaves us balanced on a knife-edge.

As for Wolverhampton, it’s been earmarked for housing secretary Michael Gove’s “levelling-up” project. It’s worth noting that the government paper which announced this initiative started by making comparisons to Renaissance Florence. But if Gove wants 21st-century solutions to 21st-century problems, he might do better to engage with the outburst of contemporary imagination in Wolverhampton Art Gallery right now.