Keeping it Real

How amusing that a megabucks private collection should transport us back to a time when contemporary art was wedded to ideology as opposed to cuckolded by the capricious market (not so very long ago, kids). It's almost enough to soften the blow of discovering a collector with at least as much good sense as money - a happy outcome of 'Keeping it Real: The Corporeal', the first of four exhibitions at the Whitechapel drawn from the holdings of Dimitris Daskalopoulos.

The Greek entrepreneur doesn't go in for bejewelled art world bibelots, it seems (not judging by this selection anyway), unless you count Sherrie Levine's 1996 golden urinal (in fact made of cast bronze), on display here alongside a 1964 limited edition version of Marcel Duchamp's 'original' 1917 pissoir. The pairing offers a well-aimed conversation about authenticity, the readymade and the enduring appeal of appropriation, though the sculptures don't, perhaps, need to share a vitrine in order to hit their mark, and neither one needs to be installed quite so close to Robert Gober's 'A Pair of Basinless Sinks' from 1986, the overall vibe in this small room being closer to a gents' loo than one might wish for.

Given that the gallery also includes Louise Bourgeois's sardonically titled 'Fillette (Sweeter Version)' (1968-1999) - the castration complex made manifest - a trio of David Hammons's penis prints from the 1970s and a 2006 example of Jim Hodges's florid text work, in ink diluted with the artist's saliva, the bodily references are pretty much inescapable anyway.

Hodges and Hammons, both enjoying something of a London renaissance this summer, operate at the more refined end of the body/identity politics spectrum that Daskalopoulos appears to favour. More generally, the show illuminates the latent fire of surrealism that coursed through but was not contained by the aesthetics of late modernism. There's queer minimalism (Paul Thek's meaty kebabs), fruity and furious abstract expressionism (or at least the promise of in the work of Sue Williams), lots of anxiety and plenty of abjection going down in this diminutive gallery, which continues to be one of the very best bits of the reborn Whitechapel.