British Art Show 6
Until January 8; Baltic, Gateshead
(then touring to Manchester, Nottingham & Bristol)

The British Art Show is an art marathon. Taking place every five years since 1979, the sprawling show aims to identify the latest trends in British art, and to tour them far and wide. This year, for the first time since 1979, the show won’t make it to Scotland, but Newcastle’s Baltic gallery plays the perfect host to the large-scale show.

Four storeys of the sky-scraping ex-flour mill are home to labyrinthine corridors and wide open spaces full of videos, pictures, sculptures and more. All the stops have been pulled out to accommodate 126 artworks without any impression of clutter.

The most profound challenge must have been the 25 films, DVDs and videos; never before has this much video art co-existed peacefully in one place. Many films have their own miniature black box spaces, insulated for light and sound. The experience of watching them is totally immersive, and as a result you can find yourself enmeshed for hours in this seductive flytrap.

Out of the 50 artists selected, a whopping 20 of them are represented by the moving image. On the evidence of this show, photography would appear to be entirely defunct. Traditional video art is on its way out too, in favour of a new set of rules. Video art used to behave in much the same way as painting: you could dip into it anywhere in the loop, spending as much or as little time as you liked with it. Storytelling, with a beginning, middle and end, was decidedly old-hat.

Now, after years in the wilderness, the narrative has resurfaced. Marine Hugonnier talks us through her expeditions to Palestine, and Saskia Olde Wolbers tells a beguiling story which requires ten minutes of your time. If you walk in, as I did, half way through the tale, the end is spoiled before you get to see the beginning. If galleries are to become mini-film festivals, they have to learn how to handle this foreign concept of the beginning, middle and end.

One unfortunate casualty of the show’s cinematic nature is those pictures which don’t move. Coming out of a comfortable, dark room, having been kept captive for 10 minutes or more by an unfolding story, the paintings which line the corridors are too easy to walk past. A ten minute video is made up of 15,000 separate pictures. Having processed these at top speed, the brain can’t slow down in time to absorb a single, timeless image on the wall outside.

Glasgow artist Lucy Skaer is lucky. She gets pride of place in the foyer of one floor, where her drawings make an unusually high impact on everyone who steps out of the lifts. I say unusually, because the effect of Skaer’s drawings is generally more creeping than leaping. Mass media images of corpses are entwined elegantly with wine-glasses and abstract patterns, neutralising shock-horror images and subtly restoring their power.

Skaer is one of four artists in the show represented by the Edinburgh-based doggerfisher gallery. The fifth Scotland-based artist is Toby Paterson, represented by the Modern Institute in Glasgow. The vast majority of the remaining 45 artists (including two more under the Modern Institute’s wing) live and work in London, so it’s encouraging that these two organisations have had the strength to puncture that London bubble.

What’s not so encouraging is the implication that artists without central-belt agents have no chance of recognition. The curators (Alex Farquharson and Andrea Schlieker) reassure me that this is mere coincidence; that they explored deeper into Scotland but that the best artists just happened to be with those two galleries. I suspect that, venturing into the unknown territory beyond the Watford Gap, the curators needed the reassuring warmth of galleries they’d seen at Frieze Art Fair.

At the risk of excessive griping, there is one other aspect of the British Art Show’s selection which betrays a narrow point of view. The curators, having set out to survey “new and recent tendencies in British art”, made automatically for artists in their 20s and 30s. With nothing short of mortification, Farquharson and Schlieker confess to letting in some artists over the age of 40; “we felt,” they say in the catalogue, “a case could be made for their inclusion.”

I would like to hear the case for their exclusion. The Turner Prize is for artists under 50, and Beck’s Futures targets the young. In fact, British Art Show 6 feels like a compilation of the best of Beck’s Futures from the past five years. If you’re past the age of 40, it appears that you now need a special dispensation to be recognised as contemporary.

In other areas, the curators have triumphed. This is the first year, for instance, in which half of the artists are women. And for the first time, the British Art Show recognises the huge number of foreign-born artists who live and work here. Many bring with them a heightened sense of their own cultural identities, making for an enlightening mix of works.

Although the exhibition is left to speak for itself, Farquharson and Schlieker have identified three distinct strands in recent art. One is a revisitation of modernism, another is the movement towards a truly participative art. The third, arising partly from the global mix of artists, is an engagement with international politics.

Zarina Bhimji’s film Out Of Blue is a lingering exploration of her native Uganda, with all its beauty and underlying menace. Zineb Sedira takes us into the linguistic obstacle course that is her family, ranging from Arabic to French and English.

Ergin Cavusoglu’s roomful of suspended screens sets the currency traders of an Istanbul market against a powerful piece of Byzantine song. The two forms of worship – financial and spiritual – are set against a final screen of silent men, queuing patiently at the market for their heavy loads. The two systems of thought seem equally detached from reality, when contrasted with the weighty burden of the daily grind.

Glasgow-based Rosalind Nashashibi’s film, Hreash House, sits well in this context. Her contemplative fly-on-the-wall film of an ordinary family house in Palestine has the roaming, light-filled delicacy of a Vermeer painting.

The second strand – known to some as Relational Aesthetics – concerns an art whose material is not paint or clay, but society itself. Carey Young sent all of the exhibition’s staff on a conflict management course, as part of her continuing investigations into corporate strategies and their sometimes ridiculous application in other spheres.

Marcus Coates’s half-hour video attracts a gob-smacked gallery audience who just can’t tear themselves away. Offering his shamanistic help to the residents of a Liverpool high-rise scheduled for demolition, Coates is filmed staggering about in a stag-skin while the bemused residents grapple with the spectacle. Coates’s performance is utterly ridiculous, but you, along with the bewildered Liverpool audience, remain transfixed.

The final strand in the exhibition is very much in tune with last week’s review of Like It Matters at CCA. Modernism is revisited by a generation of artists who have not grown up reviling it. Glasgow artist Toby Paterson is a perfect example; his wall paintings, models and works on perspex take an innocent delight in modernist architecture, remoulding it in the dream-space it could only ever inhabit.

Paterson’s stunning show at the Barbican last year has been cherry-picked and reassembled at Baltic, losing the subtlety of its original curved space. There, you could navigate through gliding layers of images; here you are pressed up against an unforgiving block.

Claire Barclay’s work is somewhat mis-cast in this category, with a few small self-contained pieces failing to convey the teeth-on-edge, precarious nature of her larger installations.

Of the three loose themes, this neo-modernist one is the only category that verges on contrivance. The curators, perhaps over-indulging their own creative urges, have included pseudo-modernist works more suited to fashionable loft-conversions. These include Tomma Abts’s retro paintings, and Gary Webb’s psychedelic sculptures, which, though weird and wonderful, are pure 1960s fantasy.

There is more exuberance in this exhibition than the average Scot is used to. Richard Hughes’s pieces are a marvellous antidote. The first, Roadsider, sits cannily in a corner, on the floor, as if left there by accident. The juice bottle, dripping with condensation, is made entirely from resin.

Elsewhere, Hughes’s glowing match, half-burned, balances on the edge of a cheap formica shelf. The glow never subsides, because it is in fact a careful replica. That moment of illumination, so over-lookable but in fact so precious, is frozen in time. It is a Caravaggio remade in the most modest way.

So, the selection is made for another five years. From Beck’s Futures, to British Art Show; next stop for some will be the Turner Prize. Fifty artists have officially arrived, and the rest must wait another five years. But if they’re over the age of 35 now, they’ll be on a sticky wicket by the time their next chance comes around.

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 02.10.05