And again, the intimation is just allowed to lie there, as if all we could be was puzzled.There are lots of paintings, too, almost all paintings about painting, using paint to make reference to style and authorship and handicraft and old-master values, putting those concepts into doubtful inverted commas. They’re often extremely accomplished in their knowing and detached way: Glenn Brown’s super-slavish copies of Dali, Fiona Rae’s pick-and-mix melanges of a variety of abstract styles, Richard Patterson’s combinatons of photo- realism and big sweeping brushstrokes which turn out to be meticulous representations of brushstrokes.The effect is viewer bounce-off: you try to read the picture as a normal painting and you can’t. But, in both cases, the joke is just witheld, allowing something a little more anxious to enter, some intimation of the arbitrariness of knowledge, or the deep personal weirdness in society that’s just a small ad away. Simon Patterson’s The Great Bear (the London Underground map, with all the station names changed to bizarre lists of world-famous people) and Adam Chodzko’s The God Look-Alike Contest (he put an ad in Loot asking people who thought they looked like God to send him their photos) could both have featured in some Monty Python Book of yore Or nearly could have.
And you might say that’s the defining aesthetic – though of course it excludes the best things.But it includes some nice almost-gags. But it seems to me that this “directness” leaves much Young British Art as a kind of Zeitgeist decor, catalysing and reflecting all sorts of contemporary problems, but not making anything of them. Raise responses, get people going – that’s the thing.Well, the issue goes back to Pop Art at least, and I don’t suppose there’s much point trying to dispute it. It strikes them as a good directness, staging the contemporary without any safe mediation, bringing the anxieties of the age “live” and unresolved into the art gallery.
The art stays clueless, and presumes the viewer is too (an annoying assumption, that of course you have never got to thinking about this stuff before, let alone tried to work it out). But it’s this cluelessness, this stupidity, as much as the particular subjects and responses invoked, that gives the work its real power, to some people anyway. Meanwhile, the titles offer a grand sentiment that nudges its own pretentiousness, naivety or irrelevance: The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living or Some Comfort Gained from the Acceptance of the Inherent Lies in Everything – as if to say, your responses can’t quite amount to that, can they? So what do they amount to?This is the characteristic form of YBA’s realism: simply to invoke a difficult reality, and leave it there, as a confrontation You can’t call it engagement. The specimens are resonant with mortality, beauty, pathos (though never quite with the aura that photos of them promise).
