Art

Before genial American curator Ralph Rugoff swooped into London to take the top job at the Hayward Gallery a year ago, the venerable 1960s institution experienced a period of, perhaps not exactly crisis but certainly stagnation. There had been no director since 2004 and as Rugoff admits, a metaphorical whiff of mould had begun to grow on the once radically rectilinear walls. ‘This place seems like it had a bad reputation as this kind of concrete, government-mandated cultural wasteland and yet this building, and the Southbank, have always been places where people like to hang out.’ Anyone knocking around the newly refurbished Royal Festival Hall may have noticed the recent increase in artistic intrusions to the public walkways and meeting points that have so far included artists’ flags, fountains and an off-site space for one-off projects.
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The art seeping out of the Hayward is not only to get around the gallery’s odd physical position – ‘we don’t have a street level entrance and we’re not on the riverside either’ – but also to engage a new audience for contemporary work, because, ‘The art audience is the toughest in the world, they’ve seen it all before,’ says Rugoff.

The 50-year old is far from an institutional dinosaur himself, having made his name in San Francisco by staging shows (and writing) about such surprisingly varied topics as invisibility, forensics and slapstick comedy in art. ‘One of the most interesting things about art is asking people to embrace contradictions,’ says Rugoff, which is precisely why his first major exhibition as curator-director of the Hayward is called ‘The Painting of Modern Life’. As an antique technology, paint should be, by definition, the wrong medium with which to best depict our fluctuating, media-driven world, but Rugoff has selected 105 paintings that glimpse our bathrooms, motorways, hotel lobbies, street corners and funerals, first through the impassive lens of a camera, and then through the manipulative brush of the artist.

All 22 of the artists in the show ‘translate pictures and photographs in a way that makes you unsure about what you’re looking at,’ says Rugoff. ‘By questioning both mechanical and handmade forms of representation, paintings and photographs become almost suspect; things you can’t take for granted anymore.’ This grey area was a new battleground for realism, fought over by any number of artists pointing, shooting and painting, that included Richard Hamilton, Andy Warhol and later, Luc Tuymans, Peter Doig and Marlene Dumas. ‘They radically enlarged the gene pool of what you could paint’, adds Rugoff, referring to the further appropriation of televisual and moving images in the ’70s and ’80s.

The undisputed giant of the photopainting genre is Gerhard Richter, who made hundreds of painted copies of yellowed family snapshots or photos clipped from German newspapers in the 1960s. Richter’s subtle blurring – through deft smears and drags from his brush – of black-and-white images of concentration camps, films stars or famous leaders, forever changed the relationship between the two media. ‘Richter thought of the photograph as the norm, but if he could distort that and make how we see the world seem strange, then he could make a picture that might really scare people.’ Despite a couple of sunny, Pop-era pictures by Malcolm Morley and David Hockney, there is a definite dark undertone to ‘The Painting of Modern Life’. Then again, counters Rugoff, Richter’s portrait of a distraught, post-assassination Jackie Kennedy could be interpreted differently. ‘She looks like a German housewife having a bad day, but it’s so intimate that it could be your neighbour. There is a sense that no imagery is innocent.’

Beyond this first display of serious intent, Rugoff’s sense of humour is still in evidence for next year’s exhibition, ‘Laughing in a Foreign Language’, which introduces both his newly international agenda for the Hayward (curators from Germany and Japan have just joined the staff) as well as a new rotation policy for the five gallery spaces. ‘Almost unbelievably, the Hayward was closed, on average, for four months a year. That was a hangover from when the commercial sector, and maybe even the pace of life, was a lot slower. The previous show would take two weeks to tear down and then it was four weeks to rebuild the space. Starting in January there will be two or more shows on at any one time in the gallery, allowing us to stay open and stagger our opening dates. That’s the frustrating thing about ‘museum time’; the landscape changes so quickly, it’s no use being booked up for the next three years.’

Next for the skip rapidly filling up outside the Hayward, is the adjacent Starbucks (cue anti-corporate applause), to be replaced by a late-night bar with its own exhibition schedule. Rugoff’s whole mantra seems to be: ‘Trying not to get in the way of the audience’s relationship to the art. People get really nervous when they go to commercial galleries, because it’s like walking into a shop where you can’t afford any of the clothes. One day I hope we have an entrance down here,’ he gestures wistfully. Until then he is bullish about his adopted home: ‘In terms of contemporary art I can’t think of another city with such a wealth of institutions putting on really good shows. Visual arts aren’t ghettoised here, and while small movie theatres seem to be dying, I’m really curious to see if art galleries become the public places where people come together. So far everyone seems to be doing really well.’

'The Painting of Modern Life' is at Hayward Gallery until December 30.