Sixty Years Review – Adding Insult to Injury | Art and Design | the Guardian

Sixty Years review – adding insult to injury | Art and design | Th... https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/apr/27/sixty-yea...

Sixty Years review adding insult to injury

Tate Britain, London A lacklustre celebration of female talent shows both artists and gallery in a very poor light

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he omens for Sixty Years were dark from the start. To begin with, warned the press office, it was not to be regarded as some kind of separate exhibition, just a rehang of the permanent collection. And even then, only the last 60 years of T the permanent collection. And even then, only with the work of 30 artists. That these artists were all women – a momentous event, entirely without precedent in the history of Tate Britain, originally founded as the National Gallery of British Art in 1897 – was not to be thought of as anything too special. And sure enough, the gallery has managed to make nothing special of it at all. There are no signs, no directions, nothing to indicate the existence of Sixty Years. Why, you might almost think they were embarrassed.

And so they should be. This is a dismal event. Sixty years of art by women – including some of the greatest artists at work in this country – and what has Tate Britain got to show for it? A glum display, ill-lit, badly arranged and worse selected, in which nobody is shown to halfway decent effect and all are shoehorned into a remote space with partitions so thin you can never get away from Georgina Starr singing Long-Haired Lover from Liverpool in a 1994 video, which the artist herself might justifiably regard as juvenilia. Even with all hopes duly dampened, this is a startling disappointment.

Bridget Riley’s exquisite painting Achaean – its radiant stripes evocative of ancient Egypt – no longer glows, killed off by the artificial glare on a wall by the exit. Alison Wilding’s marvellous sculpture Assembly, a concatenation of transparent panels that seem to shiver as you move around them, has its powers severely reduced by clumsy positioning. Rachel Whiteread’s casts of a small floor and ceiling, in yellowing rubber, are among the least fulfilled of all her sculptures and chosen, you can’t help feeling, because they were less complicated than the cast of a whole room or staircase to install.

There is a terrific early video by Gillian Wearing from 1996. Sacha and Mum, with its Noh-like ritualisation of the despotic relationship between a mother and daughter, veers from tenderness to outright abuse and back, so that the viewer can hardly keep up, or make out all the complex ambiguities in between. But instead of a film by the magnificently gifted Rosalind Nashashibi – and Tate Britain has three works that could have been screened – there is an oil painting on canvas.

The veteran artist Rose Wylie is properly represented by one of her joyously large and ungainly paintings, juxtaposing a prissy blond pin-up and a gaping porn queen. And the same is true of Fiona Rae, one of whose characteristic swirly samplings, all psychedelic colour and freeze-dried motifs borrowed from hi-lo culture, hangs by the door as you enter. But there are no paintings at all by the Turner prize-winning painter Tomma Abts, only a handful of drawings.

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Pin-Up and Porn Queen Jigsaw, 2005. Photograph: Tate © Rose Wiley

The all-black canvas Veil, with its too obvious title, is one of Iranian-born artist Shirazeh Houshiary’s least interesting works. Still, it is the very pinnacle of subtlety compared to the kitsch paintings of Dawn Mellor. Tate Britain has recently purchased a trio from her Sirens series, parody portraits of TV policewomen that include Gillian Anderson as The Fall’s Det Supt Stella Gibson, face caught in a fishing net infested with hooks.

Other new purchases include two works by the ubiquitous Monster Chetwynd, whose gigantic neon slugs slithered down the facade of Tate Britain last Christmas. It is true that Chetwynd’s performances, carnivalesque or crass depending on your preference, can’t easily be conveyed in Sixty Years but her enormous photographic self-portrait, collaged up with a pair of bats for a hat – Crazy Bat Lady, it’s called – makes me long for the utterly singular transformations of a genius like Claude Cahun.

Chetwynd’s work was bought for Tate Britain by its patrons. If there is a story here, it is not so much that of art made by women in the last six decades as purchases made by the museum during those years: the institution’s tastes; its public and private funding, as well as its poverty; and above all the patchiness of its collection.

For no matter what one thinks of the present selection, it is surely beyond doubt that the museum would rather have the spending power of a zillionaire plutocrat to buy new – or perhaps different – works. Fiona Rae is not the only artist here who personally gave her painting to Tate Britain; Maggi Hambling donated her turbulent seascape and all six gouaches by Tracey Emin were presented by the artist herself.

Pace Denise Coates, of the online gambling business Bet365, who funded several of these pieces to mark the centenary of women’s suffrage last year (and why couldn’t Tate Britain get its timing right?) someone seriously needs to give them more money. It is sad to think that Tate Britain has nothing by Celia Paul, Chantal Joffe or the Turner prize- winning film-maker Laure Prouvost. Sadder still to think that there is nothing on display here by so many of our foremost artists whose work is in the permanent collection, such as Cornelia Parker or Cathy Wilkes, Britain’s representative at this year’s

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Venice Biennale.

I could go on, and I will. Here are just a very few of the world-famous artists in the Tate collection who were overlooked in Sixty Years: Eileen Agar, Gillian Ayres, Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, Phyllida Barlow, Tacita Dean, Barbara Hepworth, Lubaina Himid, Tess Jaray, Paula Rego, Fiona Tan or any number of younger women from Helen Marten and Charlotte Prodger to Lindsay Seers.

Of course it could be argued that the space is simply not big enough to include them all. In which case it should have been much larger. Of course it could be argued that there was never any intent to mount a special show dedicated to 60 years of art by British women in the first place. Perhaps it looked like special pleading, separatism, or sexual discrimination; in which case, why display these works by gender at all, bundling them together in this half-hearted jumble?

The programming at Tate Modern is taking a new direction this year, with shows by Dorothea Tanning and Natalia Goncharova, after the crowning success of Anni Albers in 2018. But Tate Britain has Mark Leckey and Frank Bowling. And while it is tremendous to see long and avid queues for Van Gogh and Don McCullin this week, and so many visitors absorbed in Mike Nelson’s Duveen Gallery commission, it is not wonderful to find Sixty Years, at least when I was there, almost completely deserted.

Perhaps the problem starts at the very door. Every work here asks questions, we are promised in the wall text, as if this was ever any kind of enticement to look at works of art. But if you cannot spot the questions, do not worry – “Captions next to the artworks include some open questions for reflection and discussion.”

Six million years of evolution, and this is what we have come to: puerile and insulting topics to get us to stand and ponder the work of female artists.

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Topics Art The Observer Exhibitions Women Tate Britain reviews

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