Dolan Cummings
posted 13 July 2007

There has been much discussion recently about whether art can or should play a political role. Works like Mark Wallinger’s ‘State Britain’, a reconstruction of Brian Haw’s peace camp which was removed from opposite Parliament, provide a focus for political discontent at a time when party politics is failing to engage. The danger, however, is that looking for political meaning in art works can obscure what is special about art. A current London exhibition of contemporary art suggests a more subtle approach.

The End Begins is a selection of works from the still-growing Lodeveans Collection of international contemporary art put together by the collector Stuart Evans and his son John. The title, taken from a painting included in the show, ultimately comes from the first chapter of John Wyndham’s 1951 novel The Day of the Triffids, in which the hero keeps his sight after a meteor shower has blinded everyone else. Curator Gill Hedley says much of the work has an ‘apocalyptic visionary feel’. If the artists are seers in some sense, however, they do not offer a political message. This eclectic exhibition is not held together by an intellectual theme as such, and it is not a Zeitgeist show like the celebrated Sensation of 1997. Nonetheless, seen together, the various works shed light on the nature of art itself and how we might relate to it.

Many of the works show an obsessive quality, having been made using techniques that seem almost insanely painstaking. Pauline Kraneis’ ‘Gardine I’ is a view from behind a net curtain: only on close inspection does it become apparent that the tiny part of the picture seen through each hole in the pattern has been painted individually in watercolours, and the curtain itself is the remaining blank paper. Richard Foster’s ‘Electrical Goods’ comprises two photo-realistic drawings of toasters and kettles on display in a shop, seen from two very slightly different angles. And Alex Pollard’s ‘Cat Monkey’ is a bronze cast of rulers bent into an animal shape and then painted to look like rulers again.

It would be possible to achieve very similar effects using much easier means, so why do they bother? It’s a question that goes to the heart of what art is about – it is not simply an idea, much less a message, rendered in a particular medium, but a creative process involving the transformation of ideas as well as materials. Though it is the finished product that functions as a commodity to be collected and exhibited, art is not reducible to the object itself: the process matters. The obsessiveness of artists in pursuing their vision is itself a kind of message. Though none of the work is didactic, Stuart Evans says the collection reflects his interest in art that seems to point to something, suggesting in the process that ‘there is a point’. It is in this sense that the artists are seers. The flipside of crudely political interpretations of art is a disdain for meaning of any kind, and Evans, a practising Christian, has no such postmodern qualms.

The exhibition includes two pictures by Michael Landy, who is famous for destroying all his possessions in his 2001 ‘Break Down’, but while that work was widely interpreted as a statement about consumerism, these ones reveal a fascination with artistic production itself. ‘H.2.N.Y. Picture-making machine 2’, an oil stick drawing, and ‘H.2.N.Y. Metallic suicide’, in goauche and glue, both show the same elaborate Victorianesque contraption, raising questions in their form as well as content; this is hardly agitprop, but it is rich in meaning. Meanwhile, David Huffman’s mixed-media picture ‘Steppin' Stone’ shows figures in space suits playing basketball in a dreamlike landscape. Huffman is African American, so the obvious reading might be that black people experience white society as an alien environment, but more interesting are the unexpected resonances that emerge, and in particular the odd familiarity of the alien world Huffman conjures.

Art may well have a political dimension, but it is rarely political in the straighforward ways people want it to be. Rather than looking to artists to set the world to rights, we would do better to appreciate the unique qualities of art as a source of unexpected meaning, and perhaps find the inspiration to take responsibility for politics as citizens rather than spectators.

The End Begins is at The Hospital, 24 Endell Street, London WC2H 9HQ, till 4 August 2007.