Olympic-themed portraits

The long march to the 2012 Olympic Games means different things to different people. The arts sector, coupled with sport in a state department in Britain, has watched its funding threatened through the years of preparation for 2012, long before the recent round of cuts.

The UK’s Department of Culture, Media and Sport has most recently told arts organisations to look for cuts of between 25 per cent and 40 per cent, devastating by any standards, and likely to be unreachable for many in a sector that has been paring itself to the bone for years. There will be carnage in the arts over the coming years, and those who can do so are turning to private corporate sponsorship. But the barrel will by no means be bottomless there, either.

By an inevitable irony, much of the sponsorship that will be available will be connected directly to the Olympics. That pork barrel will bear many further visits. The first of a projected series of partnership projects between the National Portrait Gallery (NPG) and telecoms company BT is now open, and already there are clear indications of the tail wagging the dog. There will be oral history projects and a website and various community bits and pieces, but so far there is a lot of corporate hoopla without much culture to show for it.

It is not, if truth be told, an arduous commission to ask a photographer or two to make portraits of people connected with a big national project. It is characteristic of arts sponsorship that it somehow takes great crowds of well-remunerated people to administer the tight budgets of not particularly well remunerated artists. A basement gallery in the NPG is set aside during the summer to display precisely such a commission, and it already looks vaguely desperate.

Paralympic athlete Nathan Stephens, photographed by Bettina von Zwehl

Bettina von Zwehl has made a series of portraits of athletes under the catch-all “inspiration”. She has posed her sitters outdoors in places that mean something to them, but that are quite unreadable to viewers. And she has, for the most part, posed them in civvies. This gets away from the endless logo’d Lycra which is the working uniform of most of them, but unfortunately it also takes away much of what we understand by them. An athlete’s uniqueness is bound up with movement. Pose them very still for slow large-format portraits and they do indeed become just “ordinary people”. This is political correctness of a kind: the whole point of great athletes is that they are far from ordinary people.

The best of von Zwehl’s portraits in this series is, in fact, the only one who is not an athlete, a portrait of a Ray Haggan, a man who typifies that business of patient dads endlessly driving their children to training and competition. He became the heart of a swimming club, which produces champions as well as “ordinary” trainees, and his story is indeed inspirational in the context of the NPG – a symbolic gesture to the one when thousands could have earned it just as well.

The second group of portraits, by Brian Griffin, are more successful. Griffin has many important portrait commissions under his belt, and knows exactly what he is doing. In this series, of the movers and shakers behind the Olympic bid and delivery, he uses one simple trick to perfection. Almost all the portraits are groups, often of three or more sitters. In every case (barring one), Griffin has made his composition out of the sight lines of the sitters. None of them looks in the same direction as each other. They each gaze into the distance, as well they might when contemplating the billions of pounds and the wholesale reshaping of large chunks of society in their hands.

Tony Winterbottom and Ken Livingstone, photographed by Brian Griffin

But we can see that the aspirations of each may contradict the aspirations of the others. They clash. It’s a brilliant pictorial conceit, and enough to make these portraits of anonymous-looking men and women in business attire very interesting. Talk of not singing from the same hymn sheet! They look as if they might burst the frame of the camera, so obviously do they strain in different directions.

The former mayor of London Ken Livingstone, portrayed with his consultant Tony Winterbottom, is actually pointing in two different directions at once. A hilarious portrait of the architect Zaha Hadid has her raised several feet above her fellow sitters, in a billowing green confection. She may have made a fuss about being posed in a lower position, but even if she didn’t, it looks exactly as though she had. Well done, Brian Griffin. To manage to achieve that degree of barbedness within a conventional format is a considerable achievement.

Even though this is a bland exhibition and a slight one, we should be grateful for that much. In the months to come it will probably be a surprise if we get even that much zip and pep. Stand by for a high tide of corporate messaging masquerading as art.

‘The Road to 2012’, National Portrait Gallery, London, until September 26 www.npg.org