British Art Show 7 at the Hayward

British Art Show 7 at the Hayward

15 February, 2011
by: Tom Jeffreys

"The most ambitious and influential exhibition of contemporary British art”? Tom Jeffreys thinks probably not.

As loathe as I am to admit it, and as much as I have a soft spot for the Hayward, I think the Saatchi Gallery has really made exhibitions like British Art Show rather redundant. As patchy, cock-eyed and narrow as Newspeak is, it provides a far more interesting survey of the contemporary British art scene than British Art Show 7, despite the latter's self-billing as “the most ambitious and influential exhibition of contemporary British art”. And there's no question that Saatchi's the more influential.

Secretly, it seems like the curators of British Art Show 7 – Tom Morton from Cubitt Gallery and Lisa Le Feuvre from Goldsmiths – may well be aware of this. Certainly they seem to be trying hard to set themselves apart: where Newspeak commissioned no new work, this sees a commendable quantity; where Newspeak was conspicuously lacking in video art, this has loads of it; and where Newspeak has no unifying narrative thread, this has, um, “the motif of the comet”.

But it doesn't work. It's more than possible that I'm being unobservant, but I can't really discern any common element uniting the works on show, least of all a comet. This needn't be a major problem – after all, the attempt to provide a “panorama of contemporary art in the UK” is worthy and ambitious enough – but it just seems a bit of a pointless attempt to mark this show apart.

Talking of pointless, so to the works themselves. And there really is a lot of rubbish. Charles Avery's mixed media vitrine thing is the most immediately striking of the vacuous and dull pieces on show. This is closely followed by Roger Hiorns' performance piece [pictured] that consists of a naked man sitting on a bench staring wistfully into a fire. Nathaniel Mellors presents a film that looks like Shameless, whilst on the floor a model head spews blue gunge into a tube; Mick Peter does a tatty version of the Anthony Caro sculpture that's on show over at the Royal Academy; Karla Black has made a big  pile of soil; and hot young thing Matthew Darbyshire has paid a trip to Ikea. It's all so dull and depressing.

That's not to say that it's all bad; it's just that so often the push to try and be 'meaningful' actually trivialises the work on show. Phoebe Unwin's dense little paintings show some genuinely engaging ideas, but the titles of the works – 'Aeroplane Meal', 'Cinema' – disappointingly close down their potential. Haroon Mirza's weird multimedia contraption looks wicked (and it's always good to see Richard Strange getting involved) but the appeals to Joy Division, Beckett and epilepsy seem a bit overemphasised. The worst offender here is Becky Beasley, whose seven large-scale photographs of a small block of iron pyrites are bold, elegant and ambiguous. But they're ruined by the artist's insistence on lumbering them with a load of tedious text from Thomas Bernard's Korrektur. Why can't artists (and curators for that matter) simply let art speak for itself?

The only work on show that does anything much for me is that of Maaike Schoorel (who incidentally I first came across at Newspeak). Her slow, subtle paintings tempt you, tease, and taunt with possibilities of meaning. Unlike anything else here, these subtle, quiet works at least encourage you to spend time with them, and then actually reward you for doing so.

But this is the only highlight in a show that is largely a dreary, aimless experience, a show whose principle point of unification, whose central tenet, is that all the works were produced after 2005. The trouble with the new is that it's never new for very long. And here, at British Art Show 7, even the desperately new feels hopelessly old.

British Art Show 7 - In the Days of the Comet is at the Hayward until 17th April 2011.

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Tom Jeffreys