Munira Mirza
posted 5 November 2007

If there is one new thing the public has learnt from the latest media circus around the night of Princess Diana’s fatal car crash, it is that a CCTV control room must be an awfully dull place to be. In those grainy, black and white photographs, the arch-icon of modern celebrity passes through a swivel door in possibly the most glamorous hotel in the world, on her way to an event responsible for thousands of column inches. But what we see is a flat simulacrum – an eerily familiar image that is unsatisfying in its lifelessness when seen through the lens of a surveillance camera.

The anti-climax of ‘real-life’ footage occurs again and again as CCTV becomes the primary medium through which historically significant events are witnessed (just think of the stilted images of the 7/7 bombers outside the train station in Luton; about as interesting as a clip from Crimewatch). But such images are what we chase after these days. The photographs of Diana’s last hour are a continued source of controversy - the paparazzi who chased her car down the Parisian carriageway stand accused of contributing in some way to the accident.

Perhaps one could make a reasonable justification that these paparazzi were in fact only following the clarion call of the nineteenth century poet and critic, Charles Baudelaire, in his 1863 essay 'The Painter of Modern Life', to reject the idealised academicism of conventional artistic subjects and to depict the real world; to capture ‘the passing moment and all the suggestions of eternity that it contains’. Instead of the idealised portraiture of the court painter, these craven photographers tried to capture the ‘real life’ of a famous person, and render her more mortal to the public.

The Painting of Modern Life is a fascinating exhibition which takes Baudelaire’s essay as a cue to explore the way in which our experience of reality is shaped and distorted by the photographic and media image. Yet, instead of showing us how uninteresting ‘real life’ is, these subjects take on an entirely new and interesting life when recreated on canvas. The painters in this exhibition approach historical events as newspaper images on disposable chip paper. They ignore the grand and famous in favour of anonymous people with accidental, ordinary lives. By drawing attention to our perception through the mediating lens, these painters make such ordinary subjects richly expressive of our age.

Gerhard Richter’s iconic black and white images are often blurred horizontally to mimic the effect of the camera shutter. The result is disorientating, as the viewer does a double-take to see if they are staring at a painting or a photograph. The same deception is at work in Belgian artist Luc Tuymans’ brilliant but alienating images that resemble CCTV footage, or Eberhard Havekost’s masterful copies of TV, video and photographic media, or Robert Bechtle’s technically accurate but also sympathetic portraits of his family standing proudly by their cars in ‘’61 Pontiac’ (1968 –69) and ‘Alameda Chrysler’ (1981). You are fooled into believing that you are looking at a photograph of reality, when in fact, you are looking at a painting of a photograph. The hall of mirrors is a wonderful experience.

The exhibition is divided into distinct categories – history and politics, work, leisure and everyday life, social space, modern individuals and family and friends – though at times the placement of paintings can appear arbitrary. It must have been something of a strain for the curator to cohere these diverse images and subjects into the overarching theme, when they splinter off into so many disparate directions.

History and politics is the easiest section to read across time, making comparisons with the past and present. Warhol’s ‘Race Riot’ (1963), based on the Alabama riots, and his silkscreen ‘Orange Car Crash’ (1963) illustrate the naïve sixties fascination with magazine and newsreel images. Race riots appear as a theme in Vija Celmins’ lovingly reproductive ‘Time Magazine Cover’ (1965). Gerhard Richter’s neutrally labelled depiction of Jacqueline Kennedy in ‘Woman With an Umbrella’ portrays the intimate tragedy of one woman through the alienated, mass media blur of the camera. It is a marvellous and haunting picture which makes the viewer conscious of their own fascination with the subject and almost voyeuristic desire to see beyond the newspaper image inside the heart of the celebrity.

One can also trace a shift in the kinds of subjects artists have sought to depict as newsworthy. Richard Hamilton’s ‘Citizen’ (1981-83) shows the IRA ‘dirty protest’ in the Maze prison – a curious paradox of what he believed was human dignity in the midst of its degradation. As we get closer to the present we get a more sentimental (and pretty poorly painted) series of works by Marlene Dumas, which are predictably focused on the unhappy trio of Palestine, poverty and prostitution. Johanna Kandl cheerfully betters this by visiting Eastern Europe where misery seems to be a universal characteristic.

What emerges walking around the exhibition is the rather casual assumption that modern life is a lonely and absent space. These Hopper-like qualities are tragic and beautiful but at the same time, one can’t help feel that they are surely only part of the story. Modern life is also emotionally rich, dynamic, funny and engaging. Wilhelm Sasnal’s pictures of petrol stations are empty of the one thing that would give them human content – cars. Is this really our reality, or only what a few artists became preoccupied with in the last century? Are we really seeing inside ourselves if we take the starting point that reality must begin with the ordinary?

No matter. This exhibition may miss out on many angles and traditions. It is also clearly curated by someone, Hayward director Ralph Rugoff, with a particular interests and tastes. But then this is no bad thing, because it draws out recurrent patterns and motifs in the individual works. Above all, the viewer is invited to study an ambitious collection of paintings which are both beautiful and intelligent – very far from the humdrum images that we take for granted in everyday life.

Till 30 December 2007.