Life after YBA-mania: exploring the current London art scene, a New York critic finds the British capital awash in museum interventions, artist collectives, landscape paintings and some jejune nose-thumbing - Report From London - Critical Essay

Art in America, Oct, 2002 by Carol Kino

Only 10 years ago, you had to work hard to find new art in London. Now you can't escape it. Not only does this city boast a newly significant gallery scene, it has the Tate Modern, the world's largest museum of modern and contemporary art; in addition, just about every other exhibition space in town seems to have revamped itself, courtesy of Lottery funding, and is joining in with its own contemporary art shows and projects. Current art has become so popular that even institutions that have nothing to do with visual art, like the Sadler's Wells Ballet, feel compelled to mount exhibitions. So does the newly hip department store Selfridge's. The last time I shopped there, I happened upon a cheesy "white box" at the back of the store's main floor, where I saw an exhibition of editioned photographs by Mat Collishaw. (The gallery, called Inside Space, shows prints and photographs.) If you've ever had a yen to look at YBA art while humming along to Muzak, this is the place to do it.

Outside the ballet-company and department-store circuit, many of London's commercial galleries remain small and idiosyncratic--ideal for site-specific installations and ideally forgiving where emerging artists are concerned. In the last five years, the number of galleries has mushroomed, the focus of activity has shifted from the West End to the East End, where many artists live, and several of the city's most interesting spaces have found the means to expand. Last year, though I was disappointed to discover that some of these had reconstituted themselves as blandly commercial operations, quite a few had somehow managed to retain their original underground character.

Take the legendary Cabinet Gallery, formerly based in a grungy South London council flat--the perfect setting for work by Martin Creed, Jeremy Deller and the other anarchic artists in its stable. Now it's housed in an unmarked industrial building at the edge of a North London construction site. Despite the move, Cabinet has stayed true to its roots. The last time I tried to enter the alleyway leading to the gallery's front door, a rat scuttled across my path, almost as though it had been summoned there by Central Casting.

London still abounds in publicly funded and artist-run spaces. This time, those in South London struck me as particularly impressive. As well as the South London Gallery, which has been mounting public-minded exhibitions for several years, the area now boasts at least two impressive warehouse galleries, Milch and Beacon. And then there is the dazzling Trade Apartment, an artist-run gallery housed in a glassed-in bridge that spans a dilapidated shopping arcade. (The dealer, Raymund Brinkman, who calls it "a nightmare for painters," says that he builds a different "set" inside the space for each show.) Looking into the arcade, one sees a flower stall, a greengrocer's shop and a down-at-the-heels tropical-themed restaurant. As loud ragga tunes pulse up through the floor, courtesy of the music store below, art seems almost beside the point.

Perhaps the best thing about London's gallery scene, though, is that it is still not especially massive. On one trip last season, I managed to visit nearly every contemporary gallery and exhibition space that had something up--a feat I'd never dream of trying in New York. Even better, about a third of what I saw was pretty good--and totally different in nature from much of the work one sees in New York.

For instance, though contemporary art is generally presumed to eschew spirituality and religion, in London that just ain't so. A surprising amount of work these days owes a massive debt to the Church of England. And though smart alecky British artists once seemed to enjoy sending up Christianity (I'm thinking of the many renderings of the Last Supper by Sam Taylor-Wood, Damien Hirst, et al.), many of the pieces I saw in London last year displayed a somewhat more reverential attitude.

Mark Wallinger's Whitechapel show, "No Man's Land" linked several years' worth of this stellar artist's work into one grand seriocomic progress from death to afterlife [see p. 148]. George Shaw's amazing landscape paintings, which I'll discuss below, reenvision scenes from a bleak housing estate as the Passion of Christ. In Taylor-Wood's most recent shows, at White Cube and the Hayward Gallery one of the splashiest pieces was Pieta, an editioned 35mm film in which Taylor-Wood, recently renowned, unfortunately, for her many battles with cancer, solemnly cradles Christ in her arms; he's played by the American actor Robert Downey, Jr., notorious for his many battles with drugs. And the highlight of Chris Ofili's recent show at Victoria Miro Gallery, a stunning large-scale space, was a chapel-like installation involving a room-within-a-room and 13 dramatically lit portraits of rhesus monkeys; The central monkey assumed a Buddha-like pose, while the other 12 reprised a 1957 Warhol drawing of a monkey, as well as suggesting the 12 apostles.

While the museum intervention/institutional critique has been taken up by artists just about everywhere, London, with its array of venerable museums, offers especially rich pickings. British artists seem to have lept into this fray with special alacrity, perhaps because until recently most of them had far more exposure to historical than to contemporary art.