Postcards from an Eighteenth Century Gap Year - Canaletto at the National Gallery

If you were a young and expensively educated nobleman in 1735, you didn’t take your gap year in Thailand or Brazil or India. You went to Italy. Instead of a Full Moon Party, you went to the Carnevale di Venezia and instead of Machu Picchu you climbed Vesuvius. Modern Gap Yahs come back with 1,200 photos destined for Facebook; their eighteenth century counterparts came back with a Canaletto.

Venetian view painters are often cast in a mercenary light. They are the purveyors of dead cert commercial hits. Why starve in a garret when souvenirs sell?  Canaletto was no maverick, no revolutionary.  He painted what the punters ordered: immaculate reproductions of Venice’s top tourist attractions for maximum bragging rights back home. Been there, done that, bought the painting.

The National Gallery’s autumn show Venice: Canaletto and his Rivals demonstrates that commercial success and genuine artistry can go hand in hand. It’s an unshowy exhibition: chronological, safe, uncontroversial, no radical reassessments here. It does however bring together fifty paintings by eleven different artists in such a way that the paintings are allowed speak for themselves. The advantage of such unobtrusive curatorship is that it encourages a certain amount of thinking for oneself. It’s an exhibition which emphasises looking over reading.

Canaletto doesn’t emerge as the uncontested hero. There's no doubt that he's superior to, say, Luca Carlevarijs who tends towards high camp festivities (his regattas would give the Notting Hill Carnival a run for its money) but pitted against a Michele Marieschi or a Francesco Guardi it’s a tightly fought contest.

Marieschi does mind-altering things with perspective. He twists bridges, canals and even entire islands into arrangements which would fox M.C. Escher. He goes in for bold lighting effects: the courtyard of the Doge’s palace cast into Stygian shadows or pink lightening flashing through storm clouds over the Rialto bridge.

Guardi is a wonderfully sinister artist.  Venice can be a creepy, choleric sort of place and Guardi paints the city at its dankest and most overcrowded. His is the Venice of Thomas Mann or Henry James. If you see a flash of red on the jacket of a boatman in a Guardi painting it elicits a Don’t Look Now shiver.

But it’s not all damp, consumptive gloom.  Canaletto, his pupil Bernardo Bellotto and Johan Richter all possess a wicked sense of humour. Richter punctures the ego of a vain gondolier when he has him clamber clumsily from a boat onto a boardwalk with his arse pointing into the air. Bellotto paints a snivelling child wiping his nose on his sleeve while his exasperated father drags him across the Campo. Canaletto crams his paintings full of incidental detail: a trawlerman scratching his backside, a toddler squalling on the ground, a cat licking its armpit, mongrels squaring up to fight.

Venice looks delicious. Palaces and churches are seen through a lattice of ships’ masts and sail ropes.  Pomaded Grand Tourists in full skirts and frock coats (and that’s just the men) promenade through the piazzas past beggars, fishmongers and novice nuns. From every balcony grandees admire the lagoon while housemaids beat dusty brooms from fourth floor windows. No one has ever made Venice look such a desirable holiday destination as Canaletto and his contemporaries. 

Kensington vs. The Vatican - The Raphael Tapestries at the V&A

What was your reaction to the state visit of Pope Benedict XVI? Elation? Apathy? Damascene conversion to Catholicism? Did you bask in the sunshine and reflected glory of the pontiff in Hyde Park? Or did you line up behind Peter Tatchell waving the banner for atheism?

Whatever your personal preferences, the visit of Pope Benedict has undoubtedly done good things for the Autumn arts calendar. For the Pope came from the South bearing gifts.

To coincide with the papal visit, the Vatican has loaned four of its Raphael tapestries to the Victoria and Albert Museum.  Britain has been home to Raphael’s original cartoons since Charles I, then Prince of Wales, purchased them in 1623 and the V&A exhibition has reunited tapestries and cartoons for the first time in almost 500 years.  

The tapestries are unbelievably beautiful. What artistry, what detail, what patience! Each hangs five metres high and nearly six wide, woven in wool, silk and gilt-metal wrapped thread with sometimes as many as twenty four wefts per centimetre. Designed to hang in the Sistine Chapel the ten tapestries depict scenes from Christ’s ministry and the lives of Peter and Paul.

Better than the biblical scenes proper are the exquisite embroidered borders. Those running along the base of each tapestry are imagined as bronze reliefs illustrating scenes from the lives of the Medici popes as if they were the epic deeds of the heroes of Troy.

The vertical borders contain sexier and more lugubrious figures. An allegorical portrait of the Four Seasons has Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter done up like burlesque dancers at a particularly racy harvest festival.  Another border depicts the three theological virtues Faith, Hope and Charity looking decorous and chaste in miniature classical temples. Any sense of modesty is scandalously undermined by a pair of buxom, bare-breasted sphinxes holding up the temple of Hope.

The V&A comes out rather well from the exhibition. Beautiful though the Vatican tapestries are they lack the muscular robustness and clarity of the original cartoons. For artworks entering their sixth century, the cartoons are in fantastic nick (there’s been a bit of restoration along the way) and the colours are wonderfully vivid.

These are the most peacock-inclined disciples in Western art. In the Miraculous Draught of the Fishes, Peter wears a tunic in Copacabana lime green, while in the Healing of the Lame Man, Peter (again, who knew the first Pope was such a clotheshorse?) sports cerulean blue and mustard yellow robes. By contrast, the tapestries are muted, washed-out, sun-bleached. The faces of the apostles lose their solemnity and solidity in the transfer from cartoon to tapestry. When the V&A gives the tapestries back at the end of the month they can feel smug that they get to keep the better half of the spoils.

After 500 years, the Raphael cartoons and tapestries stand as testament to the artistic ambition of Pope Leo X. What will Benedict XVI leave on the walls of the Vatican for us to remember him by? If the Popemobile is anything to go by, then papal taste is long due a new Renaissance.

Mad Men: Gin Lane and Lane Pryce

Mad Men is a show for trainspotters. The spotter may favour three piece suits and pencil skirts over anoraks but they are spotters none the less. Keen spotters will tell you which James Bond novel appears on the cover of Playboy in Episode 6 of Season 4 and which 1960s spy drama Sally Draper watches in Episode 5.

Spotters who are watching closely will have noticed a framed engraving on the wall of Lane Pryce’s office. Pryce is a late-comer to the series: a model of the stuffy, tweedy, conservative Englishman. He's the man who balances the books. Marooned on Manhattan Island, a long way from home, Pryce decorates his office with a reminder of the old world. His chosen artwork: the final plate of William Hogarth’s The Rake’s Progress.

Published as a series of eight engravings in 1735, The Rake’s Progress charts the decline and fall of a young man corrupted by money, women, booze and dice. He is aided in his descent by a cast of sycophants and toadies, prostitutes and card sharks, bailiffs and jailors.

At the beginning of the series, our anti-hero Tom Rakewell inherits the fortune hoarded by his miserly father. Coins spill from the rafters of his dirty living room with its cracked window panes and greying whitewash walls. Newly wealthy Tom is already being measured for a new suit.

In the second plate Tom is surrounded by salesmen. A landscape designer proposes a garden in the French style. A jockey presents the cup won by Tom’s racehorse. Maestros insist that hunting, dancing, fencing and music are indispensable to the man of taste and fortune.

Tom develops less refined tastes. In plate three, we find him in a bathhouse late at night canoodling with a syphilitic prostitute. He is drunk and slack-jawed. His socks have fallen down, his shirt hangs loose. The whore has stolen his watch.

And it gets worse. He is arrested in the street for non-payment of debts. He marries an ageing, cross-eyed dowager then squanders her fortune at the gaming house. In the penultimate scene he is incarcerated in the Fleet unable to pay even the beer-boy.

The final print which hangs on the wall of Pryce’s office has the Rake writhing on the floor of Bedlam Hospital for the Insane. The pursuit of ‘stuff,’ the company of whores, gin and cards has ended in tragedy. A salutary lesson for the womanising, whiskey drinking, salesmen of Madison Avenue?

Or just a clever pun at the expense of a Mad Man? 

Modern Art on the Dungheap

Last Summer I sat in the Tate Modern waiting for a friend. The Turbine Hall was in one of its fallow periods, between one Unilever installation and the next. It was early on a weekday morning and more or less deserted. The only other gallery visitors were a mother, with a baby in a pram, and a toddler. The toddler, a blonde and cherubic girl, gleefully rolled a ball up and down the Turbine Hall’s slope. It was the sort of thing to warm the cockles of the heart, a small child enjoying a museum, engaging with the architecture, forming a life-long engagement with art. This touching scene was somewhat spoiled when the mother produced a potty, set it down on the Turbine slope, and stood by with baby-wipes while her daughter relieved herself.

I only rehearse this unsavoury story, because effluent is very much on the cultural agenda – and would you believe it, on the cover of Vogue – this month. Tate Britain is hosting a mid-career retrospective of British artist Chris Ofili. Like his contemporaries Tracey ‘Unmade Bed’ Emin, Damien ‘Shark Tank’ Hirst and Grayson ‘Transvestite Potter’ Perry, Ofili comes with a convenient career-encapsulating sobriquet. Chris ‘Elephant Dung’ Ofili made his name and won his Turner Prize with paintings that recycled the outpourings of the elephant enclosure at Whipsnade Zoo. In his youth he staged ‘Shit Sales’ in Berlin and London, laying out his artistic wares on market stalls.

Before you chorus “modern art – what a load of…” let's speak for the artist’s defence. Ofili is a wonderfully talented and inventive painter with a sensibility to colour unmatched by any living British artist. He is a worthy subject for a retrospective, excrement or no.

The Tate have confronted the dung thing head on.  The exhibition opens with a room that showcases Ofili at his most elephantine. His Shithead sculpture of 1993 is the oddest of self-portraits: a spherical dung ball with Rastafarian dreadlocks and a grinning mouth of human teeth. Also on display are the monumental canvases 7 Bitches Tossing their Pussies Before the Divine Dungand The Adoration of Captain Shit. The exhibition, incidentally, does have a parental advisory warning, but there were dozens of children on the Saturday I visited. (Presumably the offspring of the sort of liberal parents who encourage their children go to the loo in museum foyers).  Ofili is not at his best in these early works, their titles, and the pornographic imagery which accompany them, are the mark of a puerile, underdeveloped imagination. But they are early examples of Ofili’s breath-taking colour combinations, beautiful, saturated Trinidad and Tobago colours.

The crowning glory of the exhibition, and of Ofili’s career, is the Upper Room, here re-created in its David Adjaye designed chapel. When it was first exhibited at Tate Britain in 2005, what should have been a triumph was undermined by an insider trading scandal. The Tate, with Ofili on its board of trustees, was heavily criticised for buying the works. It was a shame. Ofili-gate overshadowed what was the single most beautiful art work of the last ten years. The thirteen paintings, a Jungle Book recreation of the Last Supper, are iridescent jewels, magnificently rich in both colour and texture.

Ofili goes off the boil a bit after the rapture of the Upper Room. His move to Trinidad has been accompanied by a Blue Period. It’s a bit gloomy. Along with colour, he has abandoned his elephant dung. Trinidad is a long way from Whipsnade.

Maybe Ofili needs the dung. It’s his talisman and its absence from the later galleries, with their drowsy, melancholy, and monochrome canvases, is the elephant in the room.

This article first appeared at www.varsity.co.uk

Bright Eyes at The Tate

There’s a tax term, known as Morton’s Fork, which refers to a choice with two equally unpleasant outcomes; the choice between a rock and a hard place, the devil and the deep blue sea, death and taxes. The classic Morton’s Fork question asks would you rather be deaf, or blind? For the artist the answer is simple. To be robbed of sight, to lay down your paintbrush, to find the Tate and National Gallery barred would be a monstrous injustice. There are 152,000 people in the UK for whom this is no theoretical question and the Tate have devised an extraordinary new programme to make their collections accessible to the blind and partially sighted.


The scheme is the brainchild of the irrepressible Marcus Dickey Horley, Curator of Access Projects at Tate. In his hands all the gallery rules are broken: dogs are welcomed into the Tate’s hallowed halls and he exhorts ‘Do touch the art.’ His Touch Tours combine visual descriptions with the tactile handling of sculpture and installation work. A tour such as this stretches the guide’s powers of description as he conjures the frenetic slashes and spatters of Pollock’s paint or the pellucid clouds of a Monet for a blind audience. Marcus brims with adjectives, anecdotes, and analogies: Monet, who himself suffered from cataracts, is remembered for leaving his wife languishing in police custody so that he might paint undisturbed and the rhythms of Pollock’s Summertime are likened to Jazz riffs. To illustrate the size of a monumental canvas Marcus will ‘Halloo’ from either end so that distance can be measured by ear and in the case of Louise Bourgeois’ Maman a walk beneath its spindly legs conveys its arachnophobic breadth. The Tate have also re-created the distinctive brushstrokes of the great masters on small canvases so that raised impastos or silkily blended oils can be made visible through the fingertips.


The current Turbine Hall installation, Dominique Gonzalez- Foerster’s TH 2050, provides rich fodder for Marcus’ Touch Tours. The premise is elaborate: the year is 2050, it rains incessantly in London and this unremitting stream of rain water has caused urban sculptures to grow. To curb this growth, sculptures such as Bourgeois’ Maman have been moved inside the Turbine Hall. The installation plays sinister games with the senses: rain water drips from the ceiling leaving treacherous puddles on the concrete floor, the ceaseless drumming of the rain reverberates from loudspeakers and the sculptures are approached through a tangle of plastic butchers’ curtains. David Johnson, an early acolyte of Marcus’ scheme who lost his sight during his Art A-Level, is keenly aware of these sensory tricks as Marcus leads him through the Turbine Hall. He stops to feel the concrete scar of the Hall’s floor through which Doris Salcedo’s crack used to tear and to test the slippery puddles where the 2058 rain has seeped through. He is a gingerly explorer of this strange landscape of sculptures grown like triffids and rows of bunk beds which house refugees from the deluge. He pauses to feel the chill iron of the bunk beds, to pace the regimented rows, and to press his ear to a wireless playing songs from a happier age. Some of Marcus’ sketches prompt recollections from David’s school days. Running his hands over a swollen Henry Moore, David is full of recollections of Reclining Figures seen in childhood.


An exhibition on the fourth floor of Tate Modern by Brazilian artist Cildo Meireles also engages with blind viewers. Blind Mirror is a work of sticky, malleable mastic which encourages the visitor to prod and probe and manipulate the waxy surface while Through is a labyrinth of glass panels which crack and splinter disconcertingly underfoot. David is sanguine about detractors who dismiss Marcus’ initiatives and who argue that the nature of art demands that it be seen. His evident delight in Marcus’ tour is resounding proof that art is more than mere looking. While others race through the galleries, ticking their mental list of art-to-see-before-you-die, David and Marcus take time and care. The indefatigable Marcus is taking on new challenges, leading tours for Deaf-blind visitors and training new guides in the art of deft story-telling and breathless descriptions. A truly eye-opening experience.

This article first appeared in Varsity

Pigheaded

The Size Zero Debate. It makes a good headline. Those eye-catching Zs, the hissing sibilance, the obligatory picture of the underage model with her jutting clavicles and shrunken wrists. Once again we are in the throes of the twice yearly carnival of international catwalk shows which, since the death of anorexic model Luisel Ramos two years ago, have been plagued by the sibilant spectre of Size Zero. The models are now under as much scrutiny as the couture and any designer who books a coterie of skeletal teenagers is vilified in the press for their complicit role in promoting, if not glorifying, anorexia nervosa. Madrid caved to pressure and imposed a ban on underweight models but the major players: New York, Paris and Milan continue to venerate the x-ray figure and deny the existence of breasts, hips, flesh, all the trappings of a womanly body.

And now theatre land has weighed in on the debate (if you’ll excuse the pun.) Neil LaBute, the playwright perennially dubbed ‘cuddly’ by interviewers, has given us Fat Pig, a heavy handed attack on the cult of Size Zero and neurotic dieting. The play opened in March and the provocative subject matter and media-friendly cast ensured comprehensive coverage in the Sunday broadsheets. Fat Pig was trumpeted as a savage polemic on our narcissistic culture.

The title is contentious, the premise slight. Tom (Robert Webb,) who is thin, falls in love with Helen (Ella Smith) who is not. She is the Rubenesque, fleshy bottomed, plump-cheeked heroine of the piece; the eponymous fat pig in the eyes of Tom’s obnoxious workmate Carter (Kris Marshall.) Jeannie (Joanna Page) is Tom’s skinny, neurotic ex who opposes the match. LaBute’s characters are meanly drawn: the three thin characters are monsters: self-obsessed, inconsiderate and consumed by the New York cult of mineral supplements, gyms and alfalfa sprouts. Buxom Helen is warm, funny, kind and self-sacrificing. It’s a fairy story turned topsy-turvy where the ugly stepsisters are good by dint of being ugly while Cinderella is a bitch because she is thin.

Robert Webb is a suitably confused Tom, both smitten with and ashamed of Helen, but he falls too often into the truculent, adolescent mannerisms of his alter ego Jeremy of Peep Show, a character he has been playing for too long. Kris Marshall does a convincing New York drawl and is suitably viper-like, a villain in a Calvin Klein suit, flashing predatory grins and casting critical eyes over skinny Jeannie’s backside. Joanna Page as Jeannie is neurotic, demanding and wholly unsympathetic with an accent that is American by way of Cardiff, South Africa and possibly Bratislava. Her accent is so peripatetic as to be distracting and at its worst, incomprehensible. The dialogue is sub-sitcom pilot, relying on coarse fat jokes (obesity as the last refuge of the politically incorrect scoundrel) and clunking, implausible exchanges.

In the final scenes we hope for redemption, lessons learnt, and chocolate cake with double cream for all, but the play ends with a bathetic display of moral cowardice that is both unsatisfying and lazy. Fat Pig is too childish in its morals to be a true attack on the modern malaise: fat equals good, thin equals bad, there is no happy medium. Worse, the play is guilty of complicity in the cult of the body beautiful it aims to attack, with its cast of photogenic TV stars, ill-suited to their roles and unable to command a West End stage. The cast take their bows in swimwear; Helen shrouded in a sarong so as not to offend delicate sensibilities. The relative nobody Ella Smith is superb; the others are just dead weight.

This article first appeared in TCS

Emin in Edinburgh

I had intended to write in praise of Tracey Emin; a riposte to the naysayers who dub Emin all that is wrong with British art or who hold her accountable for the degeneracy of female youth with her used condoms and botched abortions. I was all set to put my head above the parapet and declare myself a fan of Emin with her patchwork, cross-stitched, Women’s Institute materials and her skinny, scraggly draughtsmanship. I was going to put her detractors in their place and condemn them for their timid, narrow-minded, suburban understanding of contemporary British art. And then I saw the exhibition.


20 years of Tracey Emin at the Scottish Gallery of Modern Art certainly fulfilled the promise of its title. Two decades seemed to have passed by the time I emerged from the final gallery. I felt old before my time. Disillusioned. The retrospective is vast, interminable, and unrelieved by any hint of charm, beauty or subtlety. Her art is not one that breathes its import gently or that requires reflection; its an art that cries ‘Look at me! Pity me!’ like a petulant toddler unwillingly on the weekly supermarket shop. Ten, eleven, twelve rooms which wallow in self-pity are too much for even the most charitable and forbearing of souls to bear. If by room four you are not mentally chastising ‘Stiff-upper lip,’ ‘Make do and mend,’ and ‘Get over it!’ then you are a  patient soul.


But why the change of heart? How could a stalwart champion of the artist, who had always fought Emin’s corner when dinner party philistines called her crud or chavvy, suddenly find herself tutting and irritated by Emin’s attention seeking antics? It’s a question of scale. In the past, an etching here, a drawing there, a blanket at the Tate, a mono-print in a private collection, had been enough to convince me that Emin was an artist of insight and nuance. Emin’s skinny limbed figures in their self-conscious poses express with lyrical economy all the awkwardness and sexual clumsiness of youth while her blankets with their bold messages of anguish, hurt and disappointment are heartbreaking; the child’s security blanket emblazoned with all the betrayals of lost innocence. But room after room of Emin is another matter altogether.

Viwed en masse, her oeuvre descends into a morass of piteous misfortune; a solipsistic Grand Tour through Emin’s childhood traumas, her adolescent traumas, the traumas of her twenties, her thirties and so on. Lest we be unconvinced of the many traumas of her life we have a brief digression into the various traumas Emin imagines she suffers in the womb. It is a life unrelieved by sun-shine, optimism, joy or indeed any sense of proportion. Cunt Vernacular, a video diary detailing Emin’s miseries and sexual misadventures charts in horrible detail, month by month, year by year, the sexual abuses, physical sufferings and psychological privations of a seemingly attractive, successful, and financially independent woman.


This is not to make light of Emin’s experiences: sexual abuse, nervous breakdown, a tendency towards self-destruction, all of these are curses which can mar and destroy lives. But to pursue these themes, to devote one’s entire working life to recreating them in paint, or ink, or clay, to assemble them into a retrospective, well, the whole enterprise descends into solipsistic self-regard. No lessons are learnt, Emin replaces one abusive boyfriend with another, seeks out another sexually aggressive partner: it’s all grist to the artistic mill.

Emin is mistress of that most self-obsessed of idioms; the diary entry of the fourteen year old girl who believes that no one ever has or ever will suffer like she suffers. Most girls of fourteen grow up and live to be embarrassed by their self-centred ramblings. Emin has never grown up and hers are the vernacular and pictograms of the teenage diarist, fascinated by her periods, by boys and the sinister mechanics of sex. Like the poet U.A. Fanthorpe, Emin cannot help but smear, whether literally or figuratively, every facet of her creative output with her own bodily secretions: blood, sweat, shit and tears all flowing from the splay-legged creature Emin conjures to represent herself.


Rave reviews are no good to Emin. She thrives on abuses and insults; her art relies on her being a victim. So, at the risk of being a facilitator, an enabler, a purveyor of further scars on Emin’s already lashed back, I pronounce the show a failure, a self-centred, ugly, prolix catalogue of the unwanted and self-inflicted wounds of a joyless life.

The Fires of Hell - The Chapman Brothers at the White Cube

In the aftermath of the 2004 MOMART fire, the national press wallowed in schadenfreude, warming its hands over the embers of Britart and the charred remains of Tracey Emin’s tent, Damien Hirst’s Charity, and the Chapman Brothers’ Hell. ‘Didn’t millions cheer as this ‘rubbish’ went up in flames?’ crowed the Daily Mail while the letters pages were filled with the Pooterish response of Middle England: the disgusted-of-Tunbridge-Wells brigade who saw the immolation of the scatological excesses of the YBAs as a fitting bonfire of the vanities.

Four years on from the immolation of Hell, and the Chapman Brothers are back with a new version of the inferno, vaster and more horrible than the first. This time round it’s Fucking Hell; a two-fingered salute to the pre-Raphaelite loving middle-class. This is no mere exercise in juvenile obscenity-mongering, but a relentless and seemingly infinite pandemonium of evil and suffering. Nine glass vitrines stand in the shape of a swastika, once an emblem of eternal life and now, since the Nazis, a symbol of inhumanity. Each is filled with a monstrous regiment of toy soldiers, their uniforms emblazoned with swastikas, their features and bodies contorted as they heap atrocities on one another. Here, a phalanx of soldiers assembles with spears embedded in their eyes; there, severed heads are savagely tossed in the back of a Jeep. Score upon score of soldiers form rank, racked and bent double beneath the weight of physical and psychological tortures. Spliced creatures with two heads and Catherine-wheel arms career across cratered battlefields, while in one gut-churning Golgotha of a case, dismembered corpses lie six deep in a slurry of blood and sewage.

The violence is nauseating. Forget the bums-on-seats sadism of Torture Porn and Grindhouse cinema, this is the stuff of nightmares. The emaciated G.I.s and Wehrmacht troops recall the cavorting, grinning skeletons of the danse macabre and the Black Death carnival. In one diorama, troops converge on the ruins of a Greek temple whose pediment is filled, not with gracious muses, but with a frieze of maimed and mutilated infantry.

Plastic vultures hover expectantly over each grisly vignette, their bloodshot eyes feasting on the mass graves and scenes of genocidal fury. The day I visited, a lone housefly buzzed above the vitrines like some vengeful spitfire, a pestilential presence sucked in from the street by the stench of carrion rising from the White Cube killing fields. Spend too long in this charnel house, this claustrophobic basement, amongst so many unholy martyrdoms, and a creeping sickness sets in, leaving you reeling, polluted and ashamed.

The adjoining exhibition of landscape watercolours ought to be a breath of fresh air; but the thirteen twee landscapes, the preserve of the lady watercolourist, are the work of Adolf Hitler. How do you reconcile these mediocre daubs with the orchestrator of the Holocaust? We want our villains to be monsters and it is a source of endless disconcertment that the great dictator, the creator of a Fucking Hell on earth, had a fondness for saccharine views of the German countryside.

Hitler’s watercolour idylls have been covered by the Chapmans with Crayola rainbows, butterflies and love hearts, and other faux-naive scribbling of the nursery school. ‘If Hitler had been a hippy, how happy would we be?’ asks the exhibition title. Their detractors call the Chapmans ‘puerile’ or ‘adolescent,’ likening the language of Fucking Hell to that of a Warhammer set or Airfix model, or comparing the defacing of the watercolours to schoolboy graffiti. But these Brothers Grimm are no pedlars of teenage fantasies, theirs is not the wet dream of the high school killer or video game assassin, theirs is a vision of hell to compete with Virgil, Dante, Bosch or Rodin, a chilling rendering of apocalypses past and still to come.

Californian Condor seeks n/s, gsoh female with large wingspan for propagation of the species

It is the unfortunate disease of the Londoner to dub anything outside the confines of the M25 ‘provincial.’ Paris and Rome are pale imitations of our great metropolis. Leeds and Manchester are veritable backwaters. Cambridge is dismissed as a mere hamlet, scarcely on the radar of the London cosmopolite. But Cambridge, it turns out, can more than hold its own against London’s cultural leviathan, at least as far as baffling contemporary art exhibitions go. Three Days of The Condor, currently nesting in Kettle’s Yard, surpasses anything the capital has to offer in terms of sheer oddity.

The Swedish artist Henrik Hakansson, a dedicated bird-watcher and environmentalist, has turned Kettle’s Yard into a temporary hide from which to observe some of the world’s most endangered bird species. There are MDF ramps to navigate, electric cables stretched across the floor, and bird song tweeting intermittently though gramophone speakers. Google printouts are blu-taced haphazardly to a wall, while in one room, a stuffed bird rests in a glass coffin. It is on loan from the Natural History Museum but looks suspiciously like the parrot wielded by Clouseau in Revenge of The Pink Panther. Some of these birds are flying perilously close to the fate of the  Dodo. In the poignantly titled exhibit Lonely Hearts Club, Hakansson has prepared a dossier on each of the mate-less birds in the manner of a professional match-maker.

The lonely bachelor Sphix Macaw is beyond the help of any dating agency. Hakansson captures the macaw calling vainly for a mate in a film reel which plays on a shaky loop. Touching though these scenes are: the macaw singing to the moon, a Condor flying fruitlessly through the empty skies, they can’t compete in a post-Attenborough age. If this were an Attenborough documentary, the macaw would perform a Macaranan mating dance, plumage splayed in a heroic display of pomp and machismo. Hakansson’s macaw perches forlornly on a branch, and that, for several hours is about it.

The internet printouts are disappointingly symptomatic of the latest affliction to hit the contemporary art scene. The Tate Britain recently came into possession of some Xeroxed papers by the artist Bethan Huws; an artwork that quite literally wasn't worth the paper it was printed on and these lazy photocopies have spawned a slew of imitators. Hakansson’s Google search results on endangered bird species are unenlightening and devalue the environmental message.

Heart wrenching though the plight of these birds is, Hakansson is no Attenborough, he’s not even a Bill Oddie and in an age when we are spoilt by Life on Earth beaming images of polar bears on melting ice caps and snow leopards hunting on the Siberian tundra direct to our TV screens, a mournful macaw tweeting in a lachrymose sort of way is desperately uninspiring.

Call me a philistine, call me an environmental fascist, but as I listened to the soporific tweeting I found myself guiltily re-hashing the infamous Monty Python sketch: This parrot is no more. It has ceased to be. It has expired and gone to meet its maker. This is a late parrot.

Angel of The South (Bank)

There is a survey trotted out by journalists to illustrate the dearth of knowledge amongst the general public about contemporary British artists. It goes like this: one hundred people are stopped in the street and asked to name a living British artist. Of those hundred, 94% quote Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin: respectively the enfant (now middle aged) terrible and ladette of British art. The remaining 6% of votes are apportioned thus: two votes for Gilbert and George, one for Rachel Whitehouse (it’s Whiteread but marks for trying,) one for Picasso (dead and Spanish,) and two for Anthony Gormley.

The survey goes one step further: each participant is asked to name a work of art by their chosen artist. Without exception all nominators of Hirst choose ‘The Shark Tank’ and all champions of Miss Emin ‘The Bed’ (the Rachel Whitehouse fan also plumps for Emin’s masterwork.) The two Gilbert and George fans cannot not name a single work by the duo and the Picasso aficionado suggests‘Sunflowers’ (that’s Van Gogh: French, and also dead.) Full marks though to the Gormley fans who not only displayed admirable originality and artistic nous for rejecting Emin and Hirst but who correctly identified Gormley as the artist behind The Angel of The North.

In the wake of Gormley’s Blind Light at the Hayward Gallery in London, I would hope that a second survey would reveal a contingent of Gormley converts: someone needs to release the stranglehold that Emin and Hirst hold on the imaginations of the general public. It is a superlative exhibition possessing both style and substance in an age when too few contemporary artists muster anything more than the former. The focus of the exhibition is the human body. Not the body’s visceral workings as extensively catalogued by Emin nor its inner psychological yearnings, but rather an examination of the body in relation to its environment. Claustrophobia and agoraphobia are the watchwords here. Life-size lead casts of Gormley’s own body are imprisoned by iron spikes or perch atop rooftops along the North and South Banks annihilated by the vastness of the skyline.

The eponymous piece of the exhibition is a 20ft glass room filled with thick water vapour generated by ultrasonic humidifiers. Its aim is to disorientate. Gormley likens it to ‘being on top of a mountain or at the bottom of the sea.’ Visibility was said to be no more than two feet, in reality it was a matter of inches. The peasouper conditions reduced visitors to cripples, shuffling forward incrementally, hands outstretched, searching for a wall, a fixed point by which to navigate. The space is small enough to keep fear at bay. How different it would be if the experiment was reproduced on a larger scale; the clammy isolation magnified ten or fifteen times, the exit panic-inducingly distant.

The space is no less impressive from the outside. You watch as those trapped inside emerge from the swirling mists, flatten their palms against the comforting solidity of the glass walls, summon their courage and stride off again into the unknown. One gorilla in the mist had daubed ‘HELP!’ in the condensation of the glass striking a humorous note in an otherwise disquieting exhibit.

Less successful was Gormley’s Space Station, a 27ton steel structure tilted precariously on its axis and perforated by square openings. Gormley likened it to a ‘dark, labyrinthine, prison’ and also to the compressed, foetal form of a human embryo. Try though I might, squinting as if looking for the unicorn in a Magic Eye picture, the foetal form remained hidden.

Upstairs, this foetal motif is used to greater effect. Matrices and Expansions is a collection of suspended works in stainless steel, their tentacles interlacing with all the intricacies of coral. They recall hornet’s nests or a chrysalis and within their tendrils, a human-shaped void is discernable, floating like a laboratory specimen, not waving but drowning.

The crowning glory of the exhibition is Event Horizon. Thirty golems, life-size casts of Gormely’s own body, stand atop buildings on the North and South banks, over a distance of 1.5 sq km. From the Hayward’s terraces you can spot them; one atop the National Theatre, one on Waterloo Bridge, another atop the Royal Festival Hall, like a latter day Terracotta Army, standing sentinel over the heart of London. More disturbingly, their precarious stations at the precipices of each building suggest incipient suicide leaps into the abyssal Thames. It is a superlative and innovative staging of a sculptural installation, animating the buildings along the river banks and uniting the disparate styles of the North and South. The sentinels are due to be removed when the exhibition closes. I wish they could remain, not only as river guardians, but as permanent reminders that there are greater forces at work in modern Britain than Emin and Hirst.