The 90s: Art and Fashion review – this isn’t an exhibition, it’s a magazine spread
Jake and Dinos Chapman were dismissed by some even in the 1990s as overgrown adolescents selling shock for its own sake, and yet it is their work that brings this dismally shallow show closest to a moment of depth. Their sculpture Great Deeds Against the Dead, based on a print of Napoleonic war atrocities by Goya, is a display of dismembered, bleeding nude corpses hung on a tree. It asks questions about war and art, the representation of pain, whether art can have a moral purpose. The best British art of the 1990s was like that, coming on as brash, vulgar, macabre, yet also unexpectedly intelligent and emotional. Unfortunately this show is neither.
You’d think Tate Britain would want to do justice to a decade in which these Millbank premises played a starring role, staging the Turner prize in the years when bisected cows, concrete houses and elephant dung got the nation arguing. At the start of the 1990s no one thought Britain was a leader in contemporary art. By the millennium, we were better known for new art than new novels.
A show that spectacularly revisited fin-de-siecle British art would be an interesting proposition. Instead former Vogue editor Edward Enninful has been invited to stage his personal fantasy version of that decade, mixing up art and fashion, with the emphasis very much on fashion. There’s more about Isabella Blow than Rachel Whiteread, who is represented by an early cast of the inside of a hot-water bottle. Damien Hirst has a couple of small, harmless-looking sharks balanced on a circular rail. There’s no chance of understanding from this how his early work seemed to confront the tiger shark’s maw of death. Perhaps his 1990s art can still move, or perhaps it has become silly with time, but there is not enough of it to even begin to decide.
This is not a real exhibition. It’s a magazine spread. Not only are there style mags in the show, its design has the breathless superficiality of a glossy layout bigging up its glib theme, in this case “The 90s”, in a glamorous sweep of strikingly juxtaposed images. But setting fashion photography alongside works of conceptual art is a terrible idea. If you take the fashion images seriously you reduce the art to another stylish pose. If, like me, you care about the art, the fashion looks pretty vacant.
Juergen Teller’s 1996 photograph Kristen McMenamy No 3 is hung next to Sarah Lucas’s 1997 work Chicken Knickers. Teller’s picture depicts its subject naked and smoking with a lipstick heart drawn on her containing the word “Versace”. What is it saying other than “Buy Versace”? Now look at Lucas’ photograph of a raw chicken stuck to someone’s knickers. It’s funny – a great deed against a dead chicken from an artist with a genius for estrangement, as a Lucas sculpture of a “Bunny” on a chair with thin stockinged legs reminds you.
Teller is exposed as just a clever stylist whose images lack poetry or meaning. His portrait of Kate Moss has none of the distance or mystery of Gary Hume’s painting of her with a shiny, metallic, mirroring face. Hume provides one of the few moments when fashion and art genuinely overlap – but as pop art, his Kate is more a baleful, Richard Hamilton-like comment on celebrity than a celebration of Cool Britannia.
Not that the show has much to say about that wider pop cultural fizz. There’s an entire room full of party pics depicting the club scene, but surely another point of the 90s was that mainstream British pop was revived – I guess Enninful is too sophisticated to find space for Oasis or Blur, let alone Fat Les.
Instead we get couture. You can obviously see Alexander McQueen as an artist. But honestly. The room dealing with “body horror” is dominated by his costumes that are just mannered and pretentious. If they express anything it might be a hatred of women whom he forced to go on catwalks in suits of wire and steel bouquets. In the same room pompous, awful images shot by Sean Ellis for The Face take up an entire wall. It’s next to these that Jake and Dinos look so profound.
Other fine artists don’t fare so well. Helen Chadwick gets two tokenistic eerie photoworks while the death-obsessed art of Hamad Butt, shown beautifully at the Whitechapel not so long ago, is squeezed to the end of the gallery. Chris Ofili is namechecked with No Woman, No Cry; Tracey Emin gets one neon. Other artists are noticeable by their absence, from Jeremy Deller to Mat Collishaw to the late and missed Christine Borland.
Or am I wrong? Does Young British Art fully deserve the dismissive treatment that Tate, which did so well out of these artists, gives it? Perhaps it really was a load of codswallop. But even if you don’t share my belief that some of the art of that time is powerful and enduring, surely it deserves enough space to be seen and judged.
After just seven rooms it suddenly ends. I hoped what I’d seen was a prologue to more art, bigger art, with enough space to appreciate it. But no. That’s it. You leave as dissatisfied as you might after flicking through a 30-year-old copy of The Face in a dentist’s waiting room.