Their brilliant careers - British art, various artists, Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, Texas

Art in America, April, 1996 by Lynn MacRitchie

The brothers rode out the storm in the studio, and in "Brilliant" they unveiled a completely new kind of piece. Made in secret, it proved to be an approximately life-size painted fiberglass and mixed-mediums model of the famous astrophysicist Stephen Hawking with diamonds in his teeth, sitting in his wheelchair upon a smoking mountaintop (a fog-machine effect). The piece, which stands about 10 feet tall, was received in silence by knowledgeable viewers stunned by the drastic shift in subject matter and uncertain whether the piece, called Ubermensch (1995), was meant to glorify Hawking or to mock him. Despite its exaggeration, it does not seem cruel. It rather seems to sum up and embody the crass adulation which surrounds Hawking and the sentimentalizing of his condition as the "great mind trapped in a ruined body" in the popular press. Here, he is the helpless monarch of all he surveys, his teeth flashing as brightly as his mind; the image is as vulgar as the hype in which he is now engulfed. No wonder the Chapmans, those celebrants of the grotesque, find him an irresistible subject. They claim to be "obsessed" with him and have promised a series of works, including one showing him risen from his wheelchair.

The Walker made a single off-premises foray, in what proved to be one of the exhibition's outstanding successes. Down by the Mississippi, Michael Landy's huge installation Scrapheap Services filled most of a former soap factory. The piece, which he developed elsewhere over a two-year period, involves the invention and presentation of a fictitious cleaning company which offers to rid the world of people rendered obsolete in the course of economic "progress." The spurious firm's activities are "demonstrated" in a videotape which perfectly captures the look and sound of commercial "information" products. Life-size mannequins dressed in distinctive red uniforms were dotted about the factory, sweeping up hundreds and hundreds of 6-inch figures and loading them into a huge grinding machine for disposal. Painstakingly punched from paper, cardboard and aluminum packaging materials, the little figures littered the warehouse floor like drifts of autumn leaves. This wonderful piece made its point just as powerfully on the banks of the Mississippi as it would have on the Thames. Landy, like several other artists in the show (Abigail Lane, Chris Ofili or Anya Gallaccio, for example) follows a distinctive path, engaged with private obsessions rather than shared themes.

The Walker was an appropriate setting for the American museum debut of these young British artists, having been, 30 years before, the location of "London: The New Scene," which was the first overseas showing of British Pop artists. (At least, that's how the participants were described in the publicity, although by no means were all of them committed to a Pop agenda.) Although Flood describes the earlier show as an excuse rather than the reason for his curating "Brilliant," the opportunity to make historic comparisons was timely. Just before the Walker show opened, an exhibition of Pop art at the Whitford Gallery in London suggested comparisons between work by Peter Blake, Allen Jones, et al., and that of the present generation. Yet while sources and subject matter may have some parallels--a dedication to the ordinary, an interest in sex, a tendency to choose bright commercial colors--the approach of today's younger generation is entirely different. Bridget Riley, at the Walker 30 years ago, stated that her work was related to the history of painting. The "Brilliant" artists, by contrast, seem to feel no need to pit themselves against history.