A rave review for Kylie? She should be so lucky

Pity the poor custodians of the new Kylie exhibition at the V&A. For theirs is a hard lot. Not only must they contend with the heaving throngs of Kylie fans all fighting to get a look at those gold hot pants, but they must do so while listening to Kylie’s entire back catalogue, on a loop, eight hours a day, seven days a week, for the next five months. So, to the strains of Now We’re Back Together, I climbed the East Stairs of the V&A and ventured into the high camp world of Miss Minogue.

Apparently, and this is news to me, Kylie is a fashion icon on par with Gianni Versace and Vivienne Westwood, the last two subjects of V&A costume exhibitions. In the Autumn, the V&A will unveil The Golden Age of Couture, profiling the 'New Look' of Christian Dior, Hubert de Givency and Cristobel Balenciaga.  But Kylie is not now nor will she ever be a tastemaker on the Balenciaga/Versace/Dior scale. So why then is she the subject of a major retrospective at the V&A?

Because she’s popular, of course, and as Waldemar Januszczak put it, there is a lamentable vogue among the nation’s art institutions for ‘catering to the tastes of the average Heat reader.’ Unlike Januszczak, I have no objection to such transparent, populist tactics. There’s always an outside chance that somewhere between the Kylie, the café, and the gift shop a visitor might stumble upon some proper art (by which I mean art that wasn’t worn to the Brit Awards.) But there are ways and means. This retrospective is an epic act of lazy indulgence on the part of the V&A. There has been no attempt at originality or ingenuity in the display of costume, no effort at revelation, and no pretence that this is anything more profound than a feature in Hello!

Despite contributions from Alexander McQueen, Karl Lagerfeld, and John Galliano there is a cheap, shoddy look to the clothes on display. A lycra mini-dress by Veronique Leroy could have come straight from the bargain bin at Jane Norman, while a pink chiffon number from Chanel trimmed with ostrich feathers was more Soho Drag-Queen than Rue St. Honoré . Most hideous of all was a yellow marabou bolero last seen on Sesame Street's Big Bird. Most of these outfits were never designed to be seen up close and personal. An aggressively sequined number that might have looked fabulous on a distant stage, appears tarnished at first hand. A feathered and plumed dress which moved like a dream on MTV just looks mangy and moth-eaten in the flesh. Only a Helmut Lang couture creation, all cascades of pleated crimson chiffon, held its own under the gallery spotlights.

The designers who steal the show, however, are Dolce and Gabbanna who designed the wardrobe for Kylie’s sell-out Show Girl tour. Among the D&G outfits on display are a sumptuous black velvet appliqué dress with a ten foot long train, a midnight-blue star-spangled bustier, and several of their signature silk corset dresses. Also on show are Dolce and Gabanna’s original Show Girl design sketches. Far be it from me to be prescriptive but wouldn't a Dolce and Gabanna retrospective have been more diverse, more adventurous, more culturally exciting than this rummage through Kylie’s cast-offs? And talk about populist! Oscar dresses, condemned advertising campaigns, Madonna, Naomi Campbell, Mario Testino, Victoria Beckham, Chloe Sevigny, Giselle, Charlize Theron…Need I go on? A D&G exhibition would have shed light on a hugely influential and innovative fashion partnership while also appealing to that all-important Heat reading demographic. Instead we have to make do with the lazily curated Kylie, an exhibition as skimpy as those infamous gold hot-pants.

From Brideshead to B*llocks

In the Summer of 2005, the infamous artistic double-act Gilbert and George were chosen to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale. These Saville-row attired doppelgangers were sent as ambassadors, as emissaries, as representatives of our great nation. And what did the dynamic duo offer up for the arbitration of those snooty Europeans? 25 images featuring their V-sign flicking selves. Rule Britannia.

It could have been much worse. In the context of Gilbert and George’s repertoire of motifs: of which semen, excrement, urine and the word c*nt are the perennial stalwarts, a few V-signs were very much the lesser of several evils. But is this really the best we can do? Does this artistic paring, obsessed as they are with bodily emissions and expletives, really represent the pinnacle of artistic creativity in 21st Century Britain? Nicholas Serota certainly seems to think so.

The Tate Modern is currently host to a two-hundred image strong retrospective spanning G&G’s forty year career. The exhibition is so extensive that it spills out of the gallery space into the concourse, vestibules, and café of the fourth floor. That’s an entire floor of Tate Modern devoted to poo, expletives and spermatozoa. What must foreign tourists think of us?

Now I’m no puritan when it comes to art. I’m all for boundary pushing. If Piero Manzoni wants to defecate into eighty small glass jars in the name of art, then let him. If Tracey Emin wants to discard her used condoms on the floor of the Saatchi Gallery, then so be it. What I do object to is artists who pursue the same scant, infantile, attention seeking ideas for the entirety of their careers. What this exhibition makes abundantly clear is that Gilbert and George happened upon a rather good idea circa. 1969 and then proceeded to flog their dead horse for the next four decades. The same urban street scenes, the same expressionless self portraits, the same sexually explicit phrases, over and over again. The most galling thing of all is that the duo’s earliest collaborations yielded some sensational work. But sensational soon turned to sensationalist and well, you know the rest.

The first two rooms of the exhibition are devoted to these early works; ‘charcoal on paper sculptures’ (that’s drawings to you and me) some 13ft in height. These depict the young Gilbert and George on a jaunt to the green and pleasant English countryside, a world away from the urban East End of their later work. In subject these recall those early Et in Arcadia Ego passages of Brideshead Revisited. The long grasses and reeds of a river bank are rendered in hasty charcoal strokes evoking the stir of wind on pasture.

But Arcadian country scenes do not a headline make and so Gilbert and George turned to shock tactics. Their Dirty Words series debuted in the early 1970s. These grainy black and white shots of profane graffiti, toy soldiers, and urban decay make striking images. Like much of Gilbert and George’s work they would make great album covers or bill-board adverts, but that does not necessarily amount to great Art.

Here’s the truth of the matter: Gilbert and George aren’t bad, they’re just limited and endlessly repetitive. They have also lost all power to shock, try though they may with countless images of ejaculating phalluses. Even the BBC, that bastion of the establishment, has now produced a documentary entitled ‘I Love the C-Word.’ Gilbert and George are no more daring than the ten-year old boy who shouts naughty words in the school playground; a fitting metaphor given that Tate Modern's turbine hall is currently over-run with playground slides.

The legacy that Gilbert and George leave behind amounts to nothing more than a few hundred images glorifying distasteful bodily functions and a handful of beautiful drawings no one will ever remember. Leaving the gallery and walking along the South Bank I found myself irresistibly drawn to a suitably G&G verdict : What a load of Sh*t.