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I can’t recall seeing Tate Britain looking this good in a long time. With the exception of the placing of Rachel Whiteread’s monolithic room cast – a classic piece but with an austere façade that completely obscures the entrance to the central halls – the unfolding vista is upbeat, kicking off with the combination of Jim Lambie’s vinyl-taped floor and David Batchelor’s floor-to-ceiling lightbox tower, and continuing through Ian Davenport’s ‘bar-coded’ wall of multi-hued paint to the perfectly installed suite of video rooms at the rear. For feel-good factor, the Tate’s second triennial, entitled Days Like These, seems to have got it just right.
There’s an ease to the Lambie/Batchelor conjunction that seems to dismiss the more theoretical layers that Batchelor places on his work; a vacuous aesthetic immediacy that seems more than appropriate to the cultural moment. At the other end of the scale there are chill-out spaces, easy-to-overlook subtleties such as Susan Philipsz’s tune-picking sound piece in the entrance lobby and Margaret Barron’s miniature fly-posted urbanscapes on the street furniture outside. And there are quiet dialogues that may or may not be intentional. Call me obsessive, but I couldn’t help but find fascinating the way Cornelia Parker’s binding of the two naked lovers in Rodin’s The Kiss – a feat achieved with a mile of string – drew my attention towards the two permanently-sited bronze masterpieces of nineteenth-century bondage that flank the Tate’s main entrance, to which I’d been oblivious for the past 30 years.

In between all this is a vast panoply of recent British art created by artists separated, or perhaps united, by a 50-year age gap, from octogenarian Richard Hamilton’s ongoing affair with Duchamp to Nick Relph and Oliver Payne’s Duchampian-inspired soft-focus video-homage to the urinal and the gentlemen’s toilet. In all there’s some 25 artists represented in an exhibition that is impeccably installed.





And therein, perhaps, lies the show’s principal weakness, in that its coherence and raison d’être reside largely in deft juxtaposition and skilful presentation. What isn’t clear is what its aims are or who the intended audience might be. Is this an attempt to define the moment in a selective and critical sense or a more objective stock-taking of recent production, a sort of potted résumé of the past three years? Is it aimed at an informed audience or a wider public? And does the span of artists add up to a coherent whole or is there a touch of cultural correctness at play in the inclusion of Hamilton, a figure who secured his place in the British canon long ago?
Reading between the lines, I’d guess these questions haven’t been resolved because of a basic mismatch between the institution’s need for a larger audience (although this isn’t a paying show) and the curators’ more specialised insight. To satisfy the former, there is a clear sense of Days Like These reprising some of the highlights of the recent past for the benefit of those who don’t follow contemporary art on a regular basis, with the result that way too many of the pieces are overly familiar. This isn’t just careless curating because curators Jonathan Watkins and Judith Nesbitt are too experienced to not know when and where these works have been shown before. Kutlug Ataman’s four-screen video, The 4 Seasons of Veronica Read, for example, was actually on show at the Serpentine when this show opened, as well as having been aired at Documenta 11, while there are many other works here that have previously been shown in commercial galleries and widely reproduced in the arts press.

On the other hand, there is a sense in which this is an insider’s show and not an exhibition for Joe-public at all. In one of the three catalogue essays, Jonathan Watkins eloquently argues that art has now surrendered its status as an exclusive activity and has integrated itself within the commonplace world of the everyday. However, he ignores the paradoxical corollary to this, for as art has progressively merged with the ordinary stuff of daily experience so it has become ever more dependent on the gallery and curator for ratifying its status as ‘art’. Without the approbation of the gallery context, Ceal Floyer’s bucket containing a CD player playing the sound of water dripping into a bucket is merely a prop or a prank. Ask yourself how many of the films and videos on show here would receive a favourable reception if transposed to the context of your local cinema. It is only the intervention of the gallery’s attendant rules, conventions and support mechanisms that lays the grounds for accepting this work within the hallowed status of ‘art’. And it is precisely the mechanisms for this transubstantiation that the wider public finds so alienating. Moreover, the failure to recognise this merely illustrates the degree to which the art world is a self-regarding clique.

Despite these inherent problematics, however, Days Like These does succeed in bringing together some interesting work and is, on the whole, an extremely positive affirmation. Dexter Dalwood, Ian Davenport, Peter Doig, Sarah Morris, and George Shaw – together with pencil-artist Paul Noble – prove that painting in Britain is not only alive but versatile. Most of these paintings have been exposed before – and I personally would have preferred to see more of the superb new work that Davenport has in his studio to the single wall painting he’s showing here – but the message refuting painting’s much exaggerated death comes across loud and clear. Sculpture doesn’t get much of a look in, however. Aside from installations such as Batchelor’s tower and Nathan Coley’s reconstruction of the Lockerbie trial’s witness box, we are left with the two stalwarts of Whiteread and Richard Deacon: both are excellent, but hardly bring anything new to the equation.

In the screening rooms, Morris accompanies her single painting with the complementary film Miami (2002), a formalist portrait of various locations within the city to a techno soundtrack by the artist’s partner, Liam Gillick. One of my favourite rooms, however, is showing Mike Marshall’s eponymous video projection, Days Like These (2003). Deceptively minimal, Marshall montages static shots of garden sprinklers in a suburban arcadia with a soundtrack of the sprinklers’ rhythmic pumping and a background of heavy reverb. After a while the unrelenting normality of this lush ersatz Eden takes on the dimensions of vintage David Lynch circa Twin Peaks, with expectations of a Happy Valley massacre that never actually materialises. Like Morris’s Miami, the key to this work’s success lies in its high production values: it is possibly one of the few videos in this show that would go down well at the local cinema.

Keith Patrick

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