Art Now is a series of free exhibitions at Tate Britain showcasing emerging talent and highlighting new developments in British art. It is generally held in the big exhibition room on your right, next to the rotunda, once you’ve gone up the stairs and through the main entrance to Tate Britain.
This big, white, well-lit room is currently hosting a site-specific exhibition by Glasgow-based artist France-Lise McGurn (born 1983).
Figurative outlines of people
McGurn mostly works with paint, and draws people, slender outlines of people caught in various postures and actions, often dancing, leaping, twisting, turning. That’s certainly what the work here looks like – light and elegant drawings of naked people – in the detail below, apparently bending stretching walking sitting – and these sketchy outlines are treated with random washes of primary colours applied in broad brushstrokes or patches.
Installation view of Art Now: France-Lise McGurn: Sleepless at Tate Britain, 2019. Photo by Tate Photography
In a big white room
The room is big and light and airy. The walls are painted white and there are big skylights. I went on a sunny day. The overwhelming visual and psychological impact was of LIGHT and airiness. It felt lovely just to walk around the room, glancing now and then at the figures dancing on the wall. They felt like a sort of 21st century version of a Renaissance frieze except that the great majority of the wall had been left a pure and cleansing white.
Installation view of Art Now: France-Lise McGurn: Sleepless at Tate Britain, 2019. Photo by Tate Photography
Interplay between canvas and wall
A lot of the figures – dancing, bending, posing, sitting amid blotches and spatters of yellow and orange paint – have been painted directly onto the wall. Presumably this is what it means to say the work is ‘site-specific’ in the sense that, eventually, when it ends, they will all be painted over.
Except for the half a dozen or so canvases, ranging in size from medium to very, very large, which are stuck to the walls. These canvases partake of the bigger pattern i.e. they are composed of line drawings of people in motion, with washes of paint which start on the canvas and wash over onto the walls, joining them to the bigger configuration.
On the whole, though, looking closely, it seemed to me that the figures and compositions on the canvases were more densely drawn and painted. They felt like the nexuses of the composition, out of which, and between which, flowed lines of energy. Focal points.
Installation view of Art Now: France-Lise McGurn: Sleepless at Tate Britain, 2019. Photo by Tate Photography
Curators and sex
So the whole thing gave me the impression of light and airiness and dancing and happiness. Being in this room made me smile.
However, McGurn is a woman, and the curator of the installation is a woman, and so I was not at all surprised to learn, when I wandered over to the wall label, that the installation is actually all about sexuality and the body.
Much more so than their male equivalents, contemporary women artists are very often concerned with the body and sex, often with their own bodies, quite often with taking their clothes off to expose their own bodies, examine their own bodies, question their own bodies.
Both women artists and women curators are often obsessed with sex and gender in a way the rest of the world is not and in a way which has the effect of narrowing and limiting and confining responses and ideas and feelings and the imagination. This is what the curator writes:
‘McGurn draws on a collected archive of found imagery to create figurative installations which express notions of sexuality, ecstasy, loss and consciousness. The new body of work presented in Sleepless explores the experience of living in a city as one that is intimate and inherently sexual. The exhibition title itself evokes key themes in McGurn’s work, including partying, dreams, longing, motherhood and nostalgic popular culture, recalling the 1993 romantic comedy Sleepless in Seattle.’
Hmmm it is mildly interesting to learn that the piece is named after Sleepless in Seattle – although what these perfect, mute, rather Greek god-like figures have to do with very non-Greek-looking Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks is not immediately obvious. But:
‘The experience of living in a city as one that is intimate and inherently sexual.’
Hmmm. As you crowd onto the Tube at rush hour, as you wait for a bus in the rain, as you walk past deafening roadworks, as you breathe in the toxic mix of diesel fumes and carbon particulates… does your experience of living in the city strike you as being ‘inherently sexual’? Or ‘intimate?’
My querying of these kinds of curatorial descriptions isn’t motivated by anti-intellectualism or anti-feminism. It’s that:
1. So often their descriptions of human existence seem wildly at odds with the experiences of myself, my family and everyone I know. I just asked my son if his experience of living as a student in the big city of Bristol struck him as ‘intimate and inherently sexual?’ I cannot reprint what he said. He thought I was mad.
2. More importantly, my view is that this kind of stock-in-trade obsession with sexuality, gender and identity, this kind of standardised, boilerplate rhetoric about sexuality and desire, actually conceals and masks the art itself. The art itself is made up of lines and patterns and colours. The ‘subject matter’ is an important part of it, no doubt (although learning that the title comes from Sleepless in Seattle narrows and limits and brings your experience of the wall paintings down to a very specific time and place and cultural reference with a bit of a thump).
But the art itself is a matter of lines and patterns and colours and surfaces which, as you follow them with your eyes, begin to make your imagination flow and bend and soar along with them. And as they spill over from the canvas you feel a lovely sense of freedom and unconfinedness, and as some of them dance up towards the sunny skylights you feel a wonderful sense of openness and freedom.
For me, far more important than any amount of guff about the inherent sexiness of ‘the city’ is the dynamic visual and tactile effect created by the contrast between the painted walls and the more composed canvases which stud them. That juxtaposition is visually and imaginatively exciting.
What irritates me about the way so many curators and wall labels and guides write about art is that they cramp and confine it by imposing narrow social definitions and ideas and fashionable ‘issues’ onto it, instead of attempting to explain how the art is made, and the effect it has on us. Not on our Guardian-reading social consciences, with their narrow Pavlovian responses to trigger words like gender and sexuality and race and refugees and equality and the male gaze, and the rest of contemporary art scholarship’s fantastically small and limited little box of woke issues.
But where art should and generally does work – deep down in the imagination, the soul, the spirit, the unconscious, the preconscious, on our feelings, on our feel for pattern and colour and the sometimes very fleeting moods and responses they trigger in us.
The actual art of Sleepless made me want to fly, I felt beguiled by the strange and unexpected whorls of lines and the dancing figures, which shimmer across the walls, some of them rising up into the sunlit sky.
The curator commentary on it brought me down to earth with a painful bump, thumping my mind with the worst kind of artspeak clichés.
I met a man at a dinner party the other day who goes to even more art exhibitions than me. He told me he has stopped reading any of the wall labels of any exhibitions of contemporary art, because he finds them so irritatingly narrow and repetitive and limiting. Although, by doing so, you risk missing out on important information, I’m beginning to think he’s got the right idea. That you should go to an art exhibition and just respond to the art without any interference from the curators and guides imposing their obsessive concerns with gender and race onto the visitor.
Demographics
This exhibition is FREE to stroll in, around and out of, and certainly isn’t worth going to Tate Britain just for itself – but if you’re going to Tate Britain anyway, you should make the effort to seek it out. When I went at about noon on a weekday, there was one other person in the room.
Related links
- Art Now: France-Lise McGurn: Sleepless continues at Tate Britain until 8 September 2019
Books & Boots 