It may feel a little aimless but Part II of Newspeak does still have some great work on show. Tom Jeffreys reports.
What does it mean to be an 'emerging' artist? It's one of those catch-all terms that everyone uses (myself included) but it frequently doesn't mean all that much. I only mention this because Newspeak - British Art Now claims to be a “museum-scale survey of emergent British contemporary art”, and with the second part of the exhibition opening this week at the Saatchi Gallery it seems a pertinent question to ask.
And yes, as ever with Saatchi, it's all about the new – predictably the gallery is at pains to highlight an “explosion of new and vigorous forms” from a “new generation of artists”. But – and this is both a good and bad thing – Newspeak doesn't really feel that new. The youngest artist on show is Clarisse D'Arcimoles (born 1986) but there's also work by the likes of Ansel Krut, who's now in his early sixties. Perhaps, the show seeks to put the notion of a 'generation' into question...
This issue is not just a quibble; rather it demonstrates the lack of clarity at the root of an exhibition like this. Is Saatchi attempting to unveil to us the next YBAs or simply show some recently produced work that he likes? Because it's hard to tell. Where something like the Saatchi/Channel 4 New Sensations project succeeds is its clarity of purpose. But most of the Newspeak artists have been exhibiting fairly extensively across London for the past few years, so this is more a muddled summary than a bold new dawn.
And the work, predictably, is patchy. Painting is particularly polarised, with decent showings from Caragh Thuring, Edward Kay and Graham Durward all making a case for the continuation of the medium, despite some of the absolute dross on show. Nick Goss' work unfortunately seems to have stagnated a bit since I first saw him last year – Maaike Schoorel's works, hanging opposite, beat Goss at his own game, by offering a similarly slow emergence of imagery and implication, but with more dexterous subtlety.
Personal highlights include Anne Hardy's staged photographs, all teeming with objects, numbers, symbols, clues to a life or narrative; Maurizio Anzeri's applications of embroidery to old photographic prints – there's a sense of nostalgia mixed with a kind of poignant glamour; and Dean Hughes' backing card Shelves. Little shelves are positioned along the wall, each boxed off, each bearing a sort of tiny pigeon-hole. These simple, repetitive works seem reminiscent of an all-too familiar genre of drab architectural modernity. There's a sense of the homogeneity imposed upon the individual, the repression at the base of the archive, but also something hidden – a secrecy (emptiness? plenitude?) that continues to evade and resist.
It's also great to see works by the likes of Henrij Preiss, Juliana Cerqueria Leite and Tessa Farmer – we've been championing these three for a while now, so maybe this show of support from Saatchi will provide a useful boost. Preiss incorporates a range of strangely familiar symbolism into his work – layering them together, hollowing them out, and outlining only a series of dereferentialised frameworks. Leite uses her body to create explorations of space and the positioning of the individual in the world – her more recent work here hints at a fertile new direction.
Tessa Farmer is probably worth the journey to Sloane Square alone, but then I'd travel anywhere for her work. Hanging suspended in mid air, desiccated insects – wasps, butterflies, bumble bees – are assaulted and picked to pieces by an ethereal swarm of tiny winged creatures. Simultaneously natural and unnatural, the effect is at once unsettling and enthralling. Around the carcasses tiny fairies flit and fly – these little scenes are founded upon death and yet they teem with life. The excruciating detail should be repellent but is somehow beautiful and engrossing. My only slight reservation is the use of a vitrine. It feels too Hirst-esque, boxing up both a work and a world that should be free to infiltrate the air around you, creeping into the gallery, crawling into the mind.
Newspeak – British Art Now, Part II is at the Saatchi Gallery until 16th January 2011.
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