"The vicar's sponging his aspidistra again"...
Tate Britain with its Rude Britannia exhibition celebrates the satirical, silly, smutty and saucy in the nation's visual arts. Some great stuff but the overall effect was a bit like having a pub boor telling jokes then insistently explaining them. A tad unfair perhaps, but somehow the subversive wit evident in a lot on display is diluted by its being brought together on such a scale. A sneaky peak at Viz comic tucked into your Tolstoy probably has more impact than prolonged immersion in it, and historical contextualising does tend to detract from both the fun and any shock value.
The exhibition would make a good book (and of course it has), but as a show big portions of it felt like padding. As a book too, you would be able to avoid the people explaining the jokes to each other too "it's a lampoon, you know".
So, what isn't padding? The video piece that juxtaposed scenes of Bernard Bresslaw and Kenneth Williams in 'Carry On Up the Khyber' with sexually explicit Gujarati dialogue was full-on and direct. The double entendres become single entendres become robust sexual swearwords (but Simon Bates wasn't there to warn us it was a certificate 18 video); the images of 'browned up' pantomime gurning from messrs Bresslaw and Williams has an unsettling quality in this subverted context, twisted and wrong but much the better for it. Like the most effective humour it confronts taboos, and is crude and sophisticated at the same time.
Sexual swearwords - the best ones are aren't they? Even if Simon Bates would somewhat disapprove. He liked them too, really.
What else? Photographs of iconic moments of 20th century reportage recreated by residents of old folks homes. The Ruby-Oswald shooting, the napalmed Vietnamese, scenes of historical drama with a cast of pensioners in cardigans and slippers. Exploitative or inclusive, there is poignancy and absurdity in these images.
Jake and Dinos Chapman's 'Exquisite corpses' etchings. The old game of folding paper, pass the drawing - taking turns to fill in the heads, torsoes, groins, legs; as if Goya, Fuseli, Hieronymus Bosch and Gerald Scarfe were playing it.
Angus Fairhurst video performance: A Cheap and Ill-fitting Gorilla Suit. Good title that one, and the piece itself is cartoonish, slapstick, irreverent and wierdly moving - the gorilla suit (one of the iconic comedy costumes) deteriorates through the performance leaving a much less hairy inner man.
So, how much out of ten would I give this exhibition? ...er, I'd give it one. Fnarr fnarr. Etc.
