Life, oh, life: not just the greatest song of the twentieth century, but one of the elemental building blocks of art education. For centuries, life-drawing was taught in art schools across Europe as an essential step in the huge leap towards becoming a great artist. Life classes have fallen out of fashion over recent decades, but artists still use real life as a source.
This show kicks off with old paintings and etchings of eighteenth-century life-drawing classes: studious pupils in wigs obsessing over the details of nude male models. There’s an amazing little wisp of a Lucian Freud painting here too, a shimmering, hovering torso on barely touched canvas.
Then you’re plunged into a whole room of works from Jeremy Deller’s ‘Iggy Pop Life Class’ project, which is exactly what it sounds like: drawings by amateur artists who got the privilege of depicting punk rock’s most iconic body in the flesh. Some are precise, some a mess, some overdone, others just right – Iggy’s flesh sags, his bits dangle, and throughout he remains uniquely and iconically him. It’s a neat, clever exercise in pure, unfiltered form.
But then the show sort of falls apart. There are some good works, like the handful of gorgeous Chantal Joffe nude self-portraits, Ellen Altfest’s hairy arse, and a couple of excellent Jenny Saville works (the study of her fresh-out-of-the-womb newborn baby, screaming with sharpened teeth, is enough to put you off bonking for life). But there are also some new but dull Yinka Shonibare sculptures, an inevitable Antony Gormley and some Gillian Wearing and Humphrey Ocean works that feel barely related to the theme. Why these artists? Why these works? Why in this order? They’re trying to make the show feel like a ‘project’, but it just feels like a rushed mess. It ends up too convoluted, too haphazard.
The virtual reality works downstairs are brutally pointless too. Why would you need to see a Shonibare sculpture in VR when you’ve literally just seen it in R?
There are some really great works here, but you wish they’d just take it all down and start again; give the project the time, love and space it deserves. Then they’d have something excellent. Instead, it just ends up feeling a little lifeless.
@eddyfrankel
