British Art Show 7

Christian Marclay’s ‘The Clock’

The British Art Show, organised by the Hayward Gallery and just opened in Nottingham, contains one remarkable piece, Christian Marclay’s “The Clock”, and three provocatively interesting ones, by Wolfgang Tillmans, Charles Avery and Sarah Lucas. This quartet is so staggeringly superior to anything in the current Turner Prize exhibition that I wish it could be parachuted into Tate Britain as an alternative prize display. All made in 2010, these works are conceptual, engage us instantly, and wonderfully demonstrate contemporary British art’s diversity, originality, formal mastery, and exhilarating capacity for renewal.

I defy even a resolute video-hater not to be charmed and mesmerised by “The Clock”. Taking a century of black and white and colour films as his raw material, Marclay has created a 24-hour video collage, pieced together from thousands of moments when time is expressed or when characters interact with a clock or watch. Edited so that the fragments flow in actual time, “The Clock” is a working timepiece, yet one which distorts chronology, collapsing differences between cinematic and lived time, narrative and the fleeting moment, aesthetic and everyday experience. While life – love, death, waiting for a train – is distilled on screen to the tick-tock of the second hand, Marclay makes metaphysicians of us all as we ponder time passing, remembered, lost, arrested by art, stopped by death, continuing without us. An abundant, magnificent work, currently showing at White Cube as well as in Nottingham, this ought to be acquired for the nation.

Wolfgang Tillmans is another collage artist of generosity and broad vision, and has never looked more affecting and effective than at Nottingham Contemporary. Here, abstract beauty, in a monumental imageless photograph “Freischwimmer” (Free Swimmer), a velvety green surface crossed with dynamic, fragile black lines, is juxtaposed with an assemblage of documentary material referencing poverty, injustice, human rights abuses against homosexuals – a photograph of two smooth-skinned gay teenagers being hanged in Iraq is particularly haunting.

Tillmans is a tender-hearted but biting political artist; his lifelong themes of truth and freedom are shown viscerally in the sensual surfaces and crystalline moments of falling light in his photographs, and intellectually in the constellations of images with which he asks us to interrogate reality.

Nothing appears further from Tillmans’ topical urgency than Charles Avery’s “The Islanders”, an epic, ongoing fictional creation developed in drawings, paintings, sculpture, installation. Avery’s delightful tableau of a black man in working clothes and boots poised to kiss a delicate girl in white cotton and red flip-flops, set in a bizarre glass-enclosed landscape, entices for its perfection of wacky detail. Yet Avery is a metaphysician too, and the sublimely titled “Miss Miss finally gives in by the tree where Aeaen sought to bamboozle the One-Armed Snake by attaching himself to the tree to make himself a larger thing” is, if I read correctly, this hallucinatory kiss that never happens.

I had always thought Sarah Lucas’s melons-as-boobs and phallic cucumbers the least philosophical of Young British Art, but “NUD CYCLADIC”, her latest sculptures made from fluff-stuffed tan nylon tights fashioned into biomorphic forms, changed my view of this exuberantly material girl. Self-mockingly exhibited on breezeblock plinths, what look like twisted, looping, ambivalently-gendered body parts, at once resembling hot flesh and cold stone, announce a new formality and questioning of sculpture’s means and meanings. Louise Bourgeois comes to mind, but so does Barbara Hepworth; narrative balances abstraction, visual slang competes with classical rigour.

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Imageless: Wolfgang Tillmans’ “Freischwimmer” (Free Swimmer)

An exhibition that brings work of this quality to audiences across the country – the British Art Show tours London, Plymouth, Glasgow – has earned its keep. That is the good news. The bad is that these four works call a constant reproach to the mediocrity and insignificance of almost everything else on display. Why the gap between the best and the rest?

Three examples are typical. Karla Black’s twisted strands of pink polythene suspended in space show, according to the catalogue, how “formless and unstable matter combines to create forms that are almost objects.” In Nathaniel Mellors’ sitcom parody “Ourhouse”, a hulking guest causes havoc ingesting books and excreting them as foul-smelling sculptures; alongside the screening, a plastic head spews out pulp. Nearby, Juliette Blightman’s arrangement of lamp and vase on a shelf below a Turner landscape poster is called “the formula is familiar, too quickly and too easily employed. It would not be a bad idea, in this case, as in others, to consider it from the vantage point of time...”

This, as every visitor knows, is pretentious, effortless rubbish. Alluding to time and change, curators Tom Morton and Lisa Le Feuvre subtitle their show “In the Days of the Comet”, but to encompass Marclay and Blightman under the same theme is like serving caviar with chewing gum.

Hayward director Ralph Rugoff claims the five-yearly British Art Show is “unrivalled in its scope and national reach ... identifying new trends and providing a vital overview of the most exciting contemporary art produced in this country”. Yet this selection reveals an embarrassingly narrow range.

For a start, more than half the 39 featured artists are represented by galleries within a single square mile – London EC1, E1, E2 and E8 – who mostly favour the distinctively conceptual, downbeat aesthetic beloved by curators and tedious to everyone else. Apart from three in Glasgow, no UK galleries outside London have supplied work.

All but seven of the show’s artists, too, were on display a fortnight ago at Frieze Art Fair. If the British Art Show is replicating the roster of an established commercial fair, it is surely failing in its job to showcase emerging talent. Moreover, artists whose subversive interventions animated Frieze look dull and pious in Nottingham’s overwhelmingly conceptual milieu: Spartacus Chetwynd’s wooden-steel contraption “The Folding House”, for example, or Matthew Darbyshire’s pink-white design pastiche “An Exhibition for Modern Living”.

“Changes in curatorial approaches have radically affected our perception of what art means,” Rugoff says. The most dramatic of these changes, since the British Art Show launched in 1979 with 112 artists, is the blinkering of curatorial taste. In 2000, the show included Martin Creed, Michael Landy, Simon Starling, but also David Hockney, Paula Rego, Michael Raedecker. Although that pluralism still defines the wider British art scene, it is disappearing from public institutions as curators schooled in theory dominate the discourse and concentrate their trawls in conceptually-orientated galleries. This is the new academicism, and as Nottingham shows, it serves neither artists nor audiences well.

British Art Show 7, Nottingham Contemporary, Nottingham Castle Museum, New Art Exchange, to January 9; Hayward Gallery, London SE1, February 16-April 17; Glasgow May 28-August 21; Plymouth September 17 December 4.

Christian Marclay’s ‘The Clock’ is at White Cube, London SW1, to November 13