Free art in London

It’s all Greek to Jenny Saville. The English painter’s new body of work combines ancient Grecian themes with ideas of digital representation. But are the results tragic? 

How long can you pump out the same ideas before anyone cottons on? In the case of British sculptural megastar Antony Gormley, the answer, apparently, is indefinitely. 

In 2000, American artist Pope.L created the world’s most precarious toilet. It was a vast rickety wooden tower, topped with a porcelain throne upon which he sat, covered in flour, and ate The Wall Street Journal.

In a 2020 interview, young Belgian painter Bendt Eyckermans said ‘my paintings are no great enigmas’. But this show of sombre images, full of symbols to decode and narratives to unravel, sure makes that seem like bs. 

In tiny ceramic compositions, Ron Nagle conjures infinite imaginary worlds. The American sculptor, who has been ploughing the same dreamy, psychedelic, hyper-colour furrow since the 1960s, creates small things (none bigger than 16cm) to make you think big.

You wouldn't get away with it these days. But in the eighteenth century, you could go spend a few years in Turkey, come back with a big beard, and call yourself ‘the Turkish Painter’ like Jean-Etienne Liotard (1702-1789) did. Call it cultural appropriation or just an incredibly embarrassing gap year, but it worked. Liotard was a sensation.

Lie back and think of the English countryside: do you picture rolling hills, bales of hay, endless green, quaint villages, rural idylls, bucolic perfection, Gainsborough, Constable, Turner? Of course you do, it’s in our national psyche, so ingrained in our public consciousness that it has its own visual vocabulary. But this little exhibition at the William Morris Gallery proves English landscape art is about much more than undulating hills and gambolling lambs. 

Max Hooper Schneider has witnessed the birth of life, and he’s witnessed its death too. The American artist got a place on a scientific expedition to deep sea hydrothermal vents, where fungi and bacteria are spewed out, giving life to the seas. But he’s also been to the reefs of Fukushima, where life has been obliterated by nuclear holocaust. 

Beauty’s a pretty big topic. Almost all of art history, up until postmodernism, dealt with it in some way, whether that’s the divine kind, the physical kind or the ooh-isn’t-that-poppy-field nice kind. But with its usual combination of art, artefact and science, the Wellcome Collection is looking at the physical kind, with diversions into gender binaries, issues of race, the cosmetics industry and what that means for beauty standards. 

The whole space is decked out in pink fabric and concrete, like a real life Juno Calypso photo (two of which show up later). It starts with a bust of Nefertiti and seventeenth century drawings of the devil attacking vain women. There are perfect-figured Roman sculptures and turn-of-the-century French corsets, copies of Vogue and a reclining marble Hermaphroditus. 

But the show gets so caught up in trying to make points that it forgets to tell a coherent story. It wants to tell you that beauty is a tool of colonialism, a perpetuator of whiteness, or used to enforce gender norms. But it doesn’t bother to explain how beauty went from Rubens to Kate Moss, or the Venus of Willendorf to Nefertiti, how different beauty standards are in Africa or Asia, or how beauty has changed, evolved, mutated. 

The points made aren’t the issue, it’s just that it feels like being stuck in an argument instead of walking through an exhibition, being lectured instead of educated. 

There are still great things here. Those unsettling Juno Calypso photos, Narcissister’s tower of her mother’s belongings, the incredible photo of the artist Cassils after sculpting their own body to heroic trans-masc proportions, terrifying beauty tools and iron bodices. 

Maybe the problem is that the exhibition is too broad. It would work as a show about the beauty industry, or about contemporary beauty standards, or about the history of beauty. But as an attempt at all three, it’s just a bit ugly.

The whole gallery screams and screeches with fragments of clashing sound. A room is filled with sand and blankTV screens, robotic fingers play dissonant chords on an electric organ, traffic roars as glass shimmers with images of the Empire State building. Raven Row has been turned into a Lutz Bacher jukebox, and it’s playing all the hits.