Art and Place

Tate Modern's largest ever retrospective of living artists covers the occasionally scatological, no-holds-barred work of Gilbert & George.  If you are visiting London, you have until May 7th to see it.  In the past I might have said that you should not take anyone who might be easily shocked, but we live in a culture where shock is no longer shocking.  My teenage kids have the usual contemporary kid reaction to attempts by liberal parents to broaden their minds - to them, artistic shock is now merely embarrassing.  You can see the liberal pendulum swinging back to conservatism before your very eyes.

But what struck me was not the artistic endeavour or the remarkable continuity of vision over five decades so much as something that I have noticed elsewhere - the role of place in a work of art.  Can any art rooted in place be fully appreciated by someone who has not shared that sense of place to some degree with the artist?  You look at the labels and see Gilbert & George's extremely large works on loan from private collections all over Europe, presumably only able to fit inside the large houses of the Euro-rich.  How can a wealthy collector understand the references to the East End street?  Do they need to care?

A Duccio madonna and child cannot be understood without thinking about how it fitted into its church environment.  Students of art spend lifetimes in trying to recreate the symbolism or the cultural, social, economic and even political context of a work of art but what cannot be reproduced is the felt sense of being in a place and time shared by the artist. 

All the perceptions, the gestalt of place, may be partly reproducible in living memory but not conveyed through the art itself to a 'stranger'.  A work of art might fix some aspect of place but only so that other aspects are crowded out.  The whole draft that we call reality will then be rewritten by the observers to fit their own needs.  Art is, self-evidently, never precisely what it represents and there are plenty of French philosophers to tell us more if we really need to have all this confirmed for us.

Two artists bring out this reaction in me because I know the places which contributed to their art (though I would not be so presumptuous as to believe that I understood their art any better than anyone else and certainly no better than the artists themselves). Gilbert & George (counted as one artist) produce their work within a few streets of East London and Tracy Emin was born (as I was) and raised (as I was not) in Margate. 

Those streets of Gilbert & George's are very familiar to me.  London's cultural shifts and changes are expressed almost precisely in work after work.  An entire cultural experience over five decades is reproduced, in admittedly simplified terms, to someone who has lived through them without always comprehending what was going on at the time.  This sense of place lived in and then fixed as a 'memory of sentiment' must be impossible for many owners of these works to understand, so something else is driving them to buy and appreciate.  But the evocation of a specific time and place is still core to the art and it will be lost when people like me and others in my generation die.

The same with Emin.  Neither her work nor G&G's can be reduced to this evocation of place but anyone who grew up in the depressed culture of an English seaside town (mine was the neighbouring town of Ramsgate) can see in her graphic work direct reference, perhaps unconscious, to the primitive graffiti and seedy culture of an economy that lived hand-to-mouth on seasonal visitors who sometimes never turned up and, if they did, had little to spend.  Her autobiographical reactions to the culture of desperation and abuse and her reconstruction of herself through art could have taken place in any zone of deprivation - even in an abusive wealthy context - but the visuals and textures of her work evoke a particular time and place to someone who also participated in it.  That aspect of her work will also die as her generation of observers die.

Does this link matter, between the artist's possibly unconscious drawing down from place and the minority of people who may not appreciate what should be appreciated in the art but who still see these unconscious references to a shared world?  Probably not to the artist or the collector or the art market or the critic or the historian, but this evocation of experience provides a surprising link between watcher and watched.  The two sides do not have to like each other but they share an admittedly attenuated sense of being 'distant family'.  And like a 'family' that shares childhood memories but, otherwise, has nothing in common in adult life, this bond can still draw some people back in a crisis to the art - as a family gets called to a funeral, a wedding or to survival in a war. 

This brings us to Gilbert & George once again.  The very first room of the retrospective shows early work very different from the rest of the Exhibition except in scale.  It shows a rural idyll of sorts with Gilbert & George apparently celebrating the same sort of English sense of place that dominates Tate Britain.  There is an essay to be written on how English art moves from celebrating ownership of land [Gainsborough] to becoming integrated with the land as a national ideal, especially in the context of wartime experience and subsequent reactions to postwar changes in society. 

Gilbert & George's sharp shift to specific place from generalised national place in the 1970s and Tracey Emin's reversion to the personal in a revolt against place (yet never entirely leaving it behind) and so many other examples of trying to fix or avoid memory or fix and move on from place seem to indicate that 'English' artists are engaged in a continuous troubled process of coming to terms with the fragmentation of national identity.  This is especially clear in the very last rooms of the retrospective where the arrival of Islamic culture in the East London streets is recorded with the same aggression as the arrival of AIDS.  One of the 'enfants terribles' was born in Italy and Emin is of Turkish descent with continuing Turkish links and it may be that this enables them to see or feel or express what the indigenous English have long felt - that there is a profound disconnect between what our inherited national culture claims for us and what is experienced in the streets. 

Not that most of us care any more.  The English now believe with LP Hartley that the 'past is another country'.  But the shift from the culture of the 1940s and 1950s to the urban multicultural sexualised culture of the 1990s and 2000s has shattered the old sense of place and nationhood.  It has replaced it (in many cases) with a stronger sense of specific place, such as that of being a Londoner, and of personal rather than collective memory.  Our artists may, with that genius for the semi-conscious articulation of hidden truths, be chronicling this cultural revolution in which a world of rootless transient communities has emerged, where there is no longer any shared institutional authority and where memory is unstable because it is not easily reinforced by community norms as a national 'myth'.  A real war might change that, of course - but not the phoney war on terror.

Whether a wealthy collector in Luxembourg or Liechtenstein really comprehends any of this - any more than a nineteenth century British imperial collector of Italian altarpieces could understand a late-medieval small town Catholic sensibility - is another matter.  But I am sure that the collectors are making some very sound investments.