Art and the Sixties: This Was Tomorrow
Tate Britain, London

Nicky Charlish

That two-word phrase 'The Sixties' conjures-up a kaleidoscope of images: there's the pop music and rag-trade London extravaganza called the 'Swinging Sixties'; the napalmed jungles of Vietnam; the Events of May '68. In this exhibition - which concentrates on the artistic expression of that decade's presumably noteworthy characteristics - there is a catholic selection of images. Which ones call for special comment - and why?

The fifties were overshadowed by the effects of the Second World War, so 'The Guv'nors', a 1958 photograph by acclaimed war photographer Don McCullin, is a good starting place. A group of young men stand in a shored-up, bombed-out building. Conservatively dressed, they sport the wavy beginnings of DA haircuts. With expressions that seem uncertain yet defiant, they herald the changes that are coming to rebuild Britain. These changes would be varied, to say the least. Peter Blake's 'On the Balcony' of 1955-57 had already given prophetic hints of the forms those changes would take, with a photograph of the royal family on the balcony of Buckingham Palace being crowded out by irreverent, consumerist images such as a cover of Life magazine and an 'I Love Elvis' badge.

Three years later we get 'Film Star', John Latham's picture-sculpture where shredded books are stuck with plaster and metal onto canvas. It's meant to represent the questioning of old knowledge but seems instead to manifest a random iconoclasm. But how much of this newness was, well, really new? Gwyther Irwin's 'Letter Rain' of 1959 shows a print collage that seems a throwback to the Dadaists of 30 years previously. David Hockey's 'Tea Painting in an Illusionistic Style' of 1961, with its streaky figure confined within a Typhoo tea packet, calls to mind the blurred, imprisoned figures whose private hells are captured in Francis Bacon's canvases. Peter Blake's 'The First Real Target', of the same year, incorporates white and black circles along with blue and red ones. This is a cheeky reminder that pop art styles had first originated with archery targets. Some of the work which was considered to be exploring new ways at the time now appears, well, whimsical - and none the worse for that. Especially outstanding is Ian Stephenson's painting, 'Parachrome' of 1964, in which it looks as if an aerial map of a great city has been showered with tiny pinpricks of colour.

Antonioni's film 'Blow Up' of 1966 gave us the photographer as the symbolic ringmaster figure at the heart of the Sixties Zeitgeist, and photographs themselves have the same role here. Lewis Morley's famous 1963 picture of Christine Keeler straddling a chair recalls for us that the Profumo affair was the prelude to a sea change in sexual morality. Two years later, the same snapper shows a camply tough-defensive Joe Orton, a reminder that attitudes to some forms of sexual behaviour would take a little longer to change. And the lapel-grabbing faces of Charlie and Ronnie Kray swing out from David Bailey's 'A Box of Pin Ups' of the same year are a foretaste of the way crime, showbiz and celebrity will move-on to new heights of fame Britain. But the mixture of the Bailey's pop, fashion and showbiz star pictures are a reminder that the new rebels weren't that revolutionary - they would pull-off the trick of being gradually accepted by the old establishment whilst not only setting themselves up as a new one but also retaining their iconic power to this day.

But whilst the old society only appeared to be in ruins, Britain's cities were so in all too stark reality. Slums and bombsites had to be cleared and replaced - but with what? Enough has been said about disintegration of the brave new world of Sixties architecture, and there no point in listing the low points that are on show here. There are exceptions. A 1968 photograph of the Tellick Tower, Paddington, by Erno Goldfinger, shows that great west London landmark looking over Golborne Road in all its tall, stark bulky beauty (but does its isolation help here to bolster its impact?). Apart from that, only the jokey, blobby offerings from the Archigram architectural group, such as Ron Herron's undated 'Walking City in New York' show architecture that has any recognition of the human need for the impressive, the shapely, the light-hearted.

Questions about what form the good society ought to take weren't confined to architecture. Photograph of two of the areas arguable most famous protest events - the Aldermaston anti-nuclear marches and the Grosvenor Square anti-Vietnam demonstration - remind us that political issues were still taken seriously then. Pundits didn't worry about voter apathy, and spin was something discussed by cricket commentators, not most political ones. But Colin Self's 1965 painting 'Guard Dog on a Missile Base, No1' - showing the snarling dog appearing almost to be first in line with a battery of American rockets - shows that few artists seem to have though about whether there were two sides to the Cold War and the anti-nuclear debates. Meanwhile, Don McCullin's 1968 Vietnam photograph 'Rushing Wounded Marine to Safety' reminds us that, in at least one respect, the Sixties were all too dismally like any other era.

Given our over-familiarity with the Sixties, the curators have done well in providing exhibits that still manage to make an impact on us. The exhibition makes us think, even if it's in ways that curators may not have intended. And the fact that some of the exhibits date from the fifties not only reminds us that decades and eras are not so co-terminus but also makes us ask a question; when did the Sixties begin? With the Teddy Boys? With the Angry Young Men like Osborne and Amis? With the Beatles' first LP? And how much of what we think of as Sixties art might appeared, say, two decades earlier if the Second World War hadn't intervened? Did the war - contrary to received opinion - hinder change rather than advance it?

The exhibition also reminds us that much-derided Sixties materialism was merely a continuation of the consumer blowout of the fifties - itself, a natural 'never had it so good ' reaction to the end of postwar austerity. It was a challenge to old boy capitalism from new, populist entrepreneurs on the block. This, in turn, would lead to emphasis on social rights rather than wealth redistribution, a consumerist socialism, which wouldn't affect, to borrow the phrase of Sixties Prime Minister's Harold Wilson, 'The pound in your pocket.' Do we see here the beginnings of Blairism?

The fallout from the Sixties is still with us. Many of the social currents that the various works of art in this exhibition symbolise have yet to exhaust their flow. Expectation and failure are well met in this exhibition. See it now.

Till 26 September 2004