History is Now: Seven Artists Take On Britain, Hayward Gallery - exhibition review

From the Battle of Britain to mad cow disease, seven artists turn curators to ask what it means to be British in the lead-up to the general election in May
Signs of the times: July, the Seaside, 1943, by LS Lowry (Picture: John Webb/DACS 2014/The estate of L S Lowry)
Ben Luke21 March 2015

We look to artists to see the world differently. Few London galleries have reinforced this idea quite as spectacularly in recent years as the Hayward. It’s shown how artists have rethought architecture, revitalised figurative sculpture and responded to contemporary dance. Now, seven of them have been asked to get their heads around a real monster of a theme: Great Britain.

History is Now is part of a wider Southbank Centre festival, Changing Britain 1945-2015, marking 70 years since the end of the Second World War, but also looking ahead to May’s general election.

In this show, the artists are curators; it’s a chance for them to muse on different aspects of this country’s life in those seven decades, just as we’re poised to ponder its future at the ballot box. The artist-curators are of different generations, the oldest being Richard Wentworth, who’s in his late sixties, and the youngest Simon Fujiwara, in his early thirties. Creatively, they’re a varied bunch: Wentworth and Roger Hiorns are both cerebral sculptors, though highly individual, John Akomfrah is a film-maker, Fujiwara works primarily with installations, Hannah Starkey is a photographer and siblings Jane and Louise Wilson are video artists. Each brings his or her own vision, intellect and aesthetic to particular aspects of British society and culture since 1945, and calls upon all manner of stuff to do so, from paintings, sculptures, photography and video to posters, TV news excerpts, architectural models and sundry bric-a-brac.

The result is six exhibitions in one, which you need about half a day to see in proper depth. But don’t be daunted — it’s a fascinating show, leading us into intriguing areas of British life without preaching; it trusts in you to make what you will of them.

Though it’s on the top floor, Wentworth’s section is a good place to start. It’s all about the Britain that he grew up in, between the Forties and the Sixties, and the links between what he calls the “humdrum modesty” of domestic life on the one hand and technological and military advancements on the other.

I spy: Untitled by Hipgnosis, 1976 (Picture: Hipgnosis/Aubrey Powell )

It’s full of the tension between Britain’s lyrical landscape and its need to protect its borders. There’s Paul Nash’s Battle of Britain, almost celebratory with its looping contrails and smoke, yet with another Luftwaffe formation ominously emerging on the horizon, and then his nightmarish Totes Meer (Dead Sea), featuring the carcasses of hundreds of wrecked German aircraft.

Wentworth makes a convincing case for the importance of beaches and coasts within British identity — he’s curious that works such as LS Lowry's July, The Seaside was painted in 1943, and the year after that Robert Capa shot scenes of unimaginable beachfront horror at the D-Day landings.

While Wentworth’s section, full of deliberate collisions and overlaps, is a broad analysis of an era, Hiorns’s room, back downstairs, focuses on one specific issue: BSE and its human form vCJD, the whole Eighties and Nineties “mad cow disease” hoopla, and what it tells us about the relationship between a government and its people. Hiorns calls his section “a deluge of raw information”, an ocean of scientific papers, government memos and artistic tangents — a great film of Andy Warhol awkwardly eating a burger and photographs such as Tony Ray-Jones’s Picnic, Glyndebourne (1967).

There’s footage from 1990 of John Gummer, then agriculture minister in the Tory government, attempting to feed his daughter Cordelia a burger; the moment, Hiorns contends, “when the public lost their faith in the governance of this country”.

The other sections are similarly absorbing. The Wilsons look at loaded architectural spaces: the streets of Northern Ireland in the Troubles and RAF Greenham Common during the women’s peace camp.

History is Now

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Starkey raids the Art Council’s collection of photography to contrast advertising and publicity images — including the design collective Hipgnosis’s untitled photograph of a man’s sinister peak through blinds, which featured on a Brand X album cover — with photographs made by artists outside the commercial sphere. Akomfrah, meanwhile, unearths gems from the council’s collection that mine a rich vein of experimental film.

Too often, British art is narrowly defined by its handful of key players, but here less widely celebrated artists have their moment. The Wilsons give generous space to Penelope Slinger’s photographic collages and film, like a cross between Seventies performance art and Hammer Horror, while Starkey’s section features arresting and underrated works by Hayley Newman and Paul Trevor. If much of this sounds earnest, the mischief can be found in Fujiwara’s take on present-day Britain.

Beginning with Meryl Streep’s Thatcher costume from The Iron Lady, a marker of Britain’s shift from an industrial to a service economy, Fujiwara’s section is inspired by his economist brother Daniel’s theories of “happy economics”.

He looks at the increasing influence of statistics on people’s wellbeing on government policy and the display is a deeply ambiguous take on art and culture’s role in this — there’s Sam Taylor-Johnson’s celebrity-tastic, feelgood film of David Beckham sleeping, for instance. Fujiwara’s might be the most contemporary section but everything here feels pertinent to now in its own way. It’s a portrait of Britain as a deeply complicated, often inspired and sometimes infuriating place.

It leaves us with much to ponder about our past and present as we head for the voting booths in May.

History is Now is at the Hayward Gallery, SE1 (0844 847 9910, southbankcentre.co.uk) until April 26. Admission £10.90, concessions available

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