Getting to the Heart of God's Bottom

Francis Bacon Joseph Beuys Charles Avery Subodh Gupta Simon Starling Deitch Defends Dakis Joannou Show at the New Museum Much Ado About Beuys Tyeb Mehta

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Smash all instruments
"Altermodern," curated by Nicholas Bourriaud at Tate Britain, features the work of 28 artists. Most are in their thirties and forties, and more than half are British. One — Gustav Metzger, whose autodestructive works of 50 years ago influenced the Who to smash up their instruments onstage — is in his eighties. The nonnatives are from all over: Delhi, New York, Yaoundé. I don’t know how wide any of their artistic horizons really are, though. The theme of the show is open-mindedness: a sense of all times being available to the present and the accessibility of all subjects. It’s true anyone can find his or her way into these artworks. But while no one is excluded no one will necessarily be greatly enriched by the experience, which is much more to do with style than substance.

Israeli mayor endures shamanic trance
Nobody could fail to find Marcus Coates quite funny in "Altermodern," doing a mad shaman act to the aged mayor of a small town in Israel, explaining the defensive tactics of the plover, and even demonstrating the sound of the plover’s call: a wry comment on peace, art, Joseph Beuys — a lot of things. In his film, Firebird, Coates wears a raccoon on his head and a stuffed hare pokes out of his jacket. The mayor doesn’t speak English — a translator conveys the gist of Coates’s comic shaman drivel, and the mayor earnestly pays attention, his expression veering between concentration and glazed but polite distraction. Coates’s whole outfit is blue and white (which happen to be Israel’s national colors). In the UK it would be called a shell suit. He has big sideburns and wears outsize Elvis sunglasses. The mayor wants to respect the situation but can’t necessarily swallow it — same as anyone going around "Altermodern" as a whole, I suspect.

Bush styling tips
Anyone can get into the art objects in "Altermodern," because they are not singular, focused, or intense. They spread out, they exist in time, they can be dipped into and they can be easily forgotten. They tend to be fragmented, either as if the thought is actually about fragmentation, or else as if thought association or thought-streams, however shallow and daft, are more true to (modern) life than thoughts that find a form or a metaphor that is densely layered or compressed, as painting for example tends to be.

Simon Starling’s installation exemplifies the first strand, where "design" becomes strange just by being put through a literal but rather neat alienation process. We see a set of slightly different stylish writing desks all based on a design by Francis Bacon (he created it for the author Patrick Wright), which has been reinterpreted by international designers who each received the same mobile-phone image of the Bacon design to work from, sent by Starling (who exhibits the results using the packing crates the objects were shipped to him in as sculptural plinths). Spartacus (formerly Lali; on her 33rd birthday she legally took the name of the slave who led a failed revolution against the Roman Empire) Chetwynd’s sexy video Hermito’s Children is in the latter camp. Shown on recycled retro-style TV sets, it proposes a kind of duality, or stoner-level double take, between comic avant-garde arty nudity that seems to be from another age on the one hand and up-to-date pubic hair trims on the other.

I am a camera
If today’s artists are sincere on the whole, nevertheless a lot of what goes on in the artworld is arch and false. Artworld people act sincerely within patterns and structures that are often rather empty. Marcus Coates’s joke on political futility is based on this paradox. The whole show is pervaded by it. An artist records the pattern of his brain waves while thinking of what to do for an exhibition. They become the basis for a sound installation. Another artist draws New Yorker-style cartoons of a whimsical fantasy island inhabited by pantomime monsters. Another one pretends she thought she was a camera as a child; it was disturbing and dreadful, so she thought she was a projector instead and that felt better. And yet another one writes a play that mimics the authority-baiting tones of Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi, and is set in God’s bottom. All these works in "Altermodern" by Loris Gréaud, Charles Avery, Lindsay Seers, and Nathaniel Mellors, respectively, have a certain flair.