Britain on Show

The British Council Collection is widely regarded as one of the most comprehensive holdings of modern and contemporary British art in the world, containing some 8500 art works by over 1650 British artists. Some of their collection was recently showcased at the ‘Future Demands your Participation’ exhibition at the Minsheng Art Museum.

A significant number of the artists gathered at the show had been nominated for the prestigious Turner Prize (established in 1984 to celebrate the best new contemporary art in the UK). Among the 40 artists participating in the exhibition, there were 12 Turner Prize winners and 21 Turner Prize nominees, including Mona Hatoum, Damien Hirst, Anish Kapoor and Steve McQueen.

The upstairs gallery was dedicated to the big names, including several from the YBA (Young British Artists) canon who shot to fame in the late-80s / early-90s with shows such as ‘Freeze’ and ‘Sensation’ and whose dominance culminated in Charles Saatchi’s ‘Young British Artists’ exhibition in 2004.

Damien Hirst, Last Supper Portfolio, 1999

If the events, social ruptures and cultural upheavals of the last six decades have made British identity increasingly hard to define – to Brits themselves, let alone the ‘outside world’ –  this exhibition is brave attempt in unravelling the rituals, folklore and social phenomena of the UK that may constitute the notion of ‘identity’. The exhibition contains work that comments on broader issues that make up the British social fabric, as well as the minutiae and peculiarities of our social disposition.

Grayson Perry, Out of Nowhere, 2008

Turner Prize winner Grayson Perry’s work maps the broader discontents of late 20th century Britain: themes around isolation, fleetingness and anger become part of a body politic that appears to be simultaneously both worshipped and taboo.

Gillian Wearing’s static Boytime video re-enacts the stagnations and apathy of modern day Britain most acutely represented by bored teenagers sitting around, whilst the idea of idling around is made literal in the clothing and bottle of White Lightning cider arranged around a bodiless homeless person.

Gillian Wearing, Boytime, 1996

Below is Nathan Coley’s Camouflage Bayrakli Mosque, 2005, placed next to a video loop of TV footage of the opening of the Ascot races. Coley’s stripes recall the French artist Daniel Buren’s work of the 1960s – Buren covered institutions of power such as museums with fabric as an attempt to strip them of their potency. There’s an interesting overlap here – the classic aristocratic ritual of Ascot, a royal affair, and the representation of  new structures of power in the UK such as the Mosque, which holds much more tangible value to a large section of the current population than the archaic symbol of the Royal Family does – though i’m sure this goes unnoticed by Chinese viewers, perhaps the clash between old and new resonates.

The Ascot reference is made more interesting by the context of British power in China. During the period of British colonialsim in Shanghai, what is now People’s Square was a racecourse frequented by the wealthy expatriates. The pomp and ceremony of an ostentatious display of wealth, with royals not horses being paraded round the circuit, is subverted by the looping and duplication of the video. I wonder how a Chinese viewer reacts to these juxtapositions – how does this jar with preconceptions of the UK past and present?

Beyond these monolithic visions of British identity, downstairs there are more localised and provincial displays of status. If the Royal family in their golden carriage circling Ascot is a form of peacocking for the upper classes, the equivalent for young suburban boy-racers is showing off their souped up Vauxhall Astra’s and Renault 5 GT’s at Max-Power events around the country – the royal circumnavigation turned into a ‘donut’ (the act of spinning a car round in a circle creating fumes of smoke).

For me, the really interesting work in the show is a collection of local folkloric rituals and oddities which are startling to a British viewer, let alone a Chinese viewer with no knowledge of these actions and their role in communities – it’s a far cry from the classic image of Great Britain for any foreigner. Certainly, these details give a more nuanced insight into true British identities than any large scale event, such as the handover after the Beijing Olympics, where the UK chose trite multicuralism, double decker buses, an ageing guitarist and David Beckham as representative symbols. The beauty of a show like this is its capacity to cover the small and unknown, and it complements the grander Expo activities the British Council are planning.

It’s a treasure trove of unusual work – Art by prisoners, protests pictures by angered locals publicly demonstrating against the council about housing issues, paraphernalia from the Durham miners gala and other works that you would not naturally expect to see in a conventional gallery space.

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It’s interesting how certain documents and objects take on a different character when placed in a gallery context. Doc Rowe documents folk rituals and customs around the UK. Some of his work on show includes a lengthy video of ‘Bottle Kicking’ in Hallaton, Leicestershire. In this annual event, people from two local villages try to get a bottle into the other villages territory. On video, what you see is a giant scrum of men endlessly moving back and forth – you never see the bottle, just body upon body, in what appears to be a futile wrestling competition.

Also on display is the Mari lwyd of Pontypool, a wooden horse that tours villages in Wales around Christmas time. It was originally a way for agricultural workers to make money around Christmas. Supposedly, the horse is given license to misbehave and be rude to people who it encounters to entertain people for a fee.

Devoid of their local context or historical meaning, all of these strange items take on a comedic role – they are part of bizarre regional customs – and the silliness of it all provides humour for the viewer as well as a realistic inflection on what life is like in the UK outside of the big cities and more importantly, the grandeur and internationalism of London.

Certainly, items like this joke shop display are flashbacks to summer holidays in the UK and contain a certain amount of British-Kitsch it’s hard to explain to people who don’t share a familiar cultural nostalgia. Same goes with the very British humour of the Pizza Rut signage below – its name a self-knowing ironic reference to the quality of the food it serves and the location it’s in.

Some of the literature available at the show is as curious as the work on display: there are books on ‘Cumberland and Westmoreland Wrestling,’ ’1000 Clowns,’ and ‘Ultimate Topiaries’ to name but a few.

At the end of the show, I was left wondering what impressions this collection has on a Chinese viewer: about notions of the UK and also about notions of Art. We interviewed a few people to get their reactions.

“I never thought art could be about such simple everyday things”

“Art doesn’t have to be complicated”

“You don’t always need to have someone explain to you what art is about. If prisoners can paint things so can I”

As most people visiting the exhibition had never lived in the UK, the subtleties of UK culture (and sub-culture) were mostly lost. Instead, people focused on what contemporary art can mean to people and what shape it can take.

For those we talked to after the show, most were quick to say that what was most interesting was seeing how art can be found in every day things and something that can only be created by ‘masters’ – which for a lot was the only ‘Western Art’ they had been exposed to. Although Britain was on show, for most Chinese, this show was more about reassessing what art can be.

“If most people tried to just add a touch of paint to their homes, most neighborhoods would be much nicer. And I can’t wait for Ai Wei Wei to make my home better. I need to do it myself”

The Future Demands Your Participation has finished showing in Shanghai, but a version of the show curated by Chinese curators will be touring second and third tier cities around China as part of the British Council’s Expo efforts – given the body of work on display is the output of ‘outside of the metropolises’ UK it will be fascinating to see how the exhibition is received outside of Shanghai.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 24th, 2010 at 11:10 pm. It is filed under China, Europe, Image, Images, The Review and tagged with Exhibition, featured, nation branding, UK. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.