The unbearable lightness of Wearing

At first glance, Gillian Wearing's work could seem voyeuristic. It isn't. But does it offer us any valuable insights instead?

By Tom Lubbock
Tuesday, 26 September 2000

Gillian Wearing's work is about things that are worth thinking about. Go to her show at the Serpentine Gallery after, say, a visit to Apocalypse at the Royal Academy or Ant Noises at Saatchi, and you should feel a change of gear. This is art that has its eye on more than striking attitudes. It's concerns are serious. And if you feel at the end of it that it leaves the world none the wiser, it's still worth thinking why that is.

Gillian Wearing's work is about things that are worth thinking about. Go to her show at the Serpentine Gallery after, say, a visit to Apocalypse at the Royal Academy or Ant Noises at Saatchi, and you should feel a change of gear. This is art that has its eye on more than striking attitudes. It's concerns are serious. And if you feel at the end of it that it leaves the world none the wiser, it's still worth thinking why that is.

Wearing won the Turner Prize in 1997. She may be even better known for having her work ripped off by ads. An early piece, Signs that say what you want them to say and not signs that say what someone else wants you to say - photos of people in the street holding up personal hand-written notices - was flagrantly borrowed for a car commercial. But while any plagiarism is irksome, the re-take only emphasised the point of the original. In Signs, the messages are often genuinely odd. In the ad, they're replaced by the most bland and normalised tokens of individuality.

Our knowledge of others and the limits of that knowledge is one of Wearing's main concerns. Her art is People Art. Her photos and videos often involve people declaring themselves and describing each other. She arranges situations where spontaneity and performance, confession and impersonation, display and disguise, privacy and exposure interact. Occasionally she uses actors in character, but mostly her basic material is the personne trouveé.

The Serpentine show is a small retrospective, a selection of almost 10 years' work, and it manages to pack a good deal in without too much signal jamming. The Signs are there, and Dancing in Peckham, a video of the artist in a shopping mall dancing, absorbed, to music in her head as shoppers pass. Another video, Homage to the woman with the bandaged face who I saw yesterday down Walworth Road has the artist trying to imagine this person, going out herself with a bandaged face and a concealed camera to record peoples' reactions.

In 2 into 1, a woman and her two sons talk lovingly and rudely about one another, but the voices are transposed, with the boys speaking, lip-synched, their mother's speech, and she theirs. In Trauma, various people Wearing found through a small ad - "Negative or Traumatic experience in childhood or youth and willing to talk about it on film. Identity will be concealed" - reveal bad things directly to the camera - except that their faces are concealed behind vacant, childlike masks. In Drunk, a group of drunks is filmed, behaving drunkenly against a blank white background.

Now these spectacles are variously intriguing, as you might well expect when you have people revealing themselves, or making a public spectacle of themselves, or making a spectacle of the public. But maybe this isn't quite so worthy a pleasure. For some people who don't like Wearing's work, its appeal is all too obvious, and obviously dubious. Apart from the family in 2 into 1, most people in Wearing's work are poor, powerless or damaged. Sensitive issues of representation may well arise. Words like "intrusive", "voyeuristic", "exploitation", "manipulating" and "freakshow" might suggest themselves.

This line of criticism I think is wrong. Firstly, because this critical vocabulary can be used to prohibit the representation of anything which is outside the artist's immediate experience. The price of being non-voyeuristic may simply be complete ignorance of most of the world.

And for another thing, Wearing's work is anyway perfectly alive to these scruples. It's done its media studies. It knows all about the intrusion and manipulation of candid confessionals and documentary observation. The interest of her photos and films is at a remove from those well-known forms. We're not primarily to be interested in the lives of Wearing's people or what they have to say. The operations of exposure and self-exposure themselves are the objects of reflection.

But then the question is, what kind of reflection? And the problem is that Wearing's recipe is a pretty simple and consistent one: add weirdness. It takes documentary procedures and treats them to a twist of the odd. Her work is all too bound to the aesthetic of the strange, and it's a powerful view, of course. "Strangeness is Truth, Truth Strangeness...", says the modern Keats. But the truth of the weird is empty. And Wearing's work offers a parade of blank looks.

In Signs, for example, you get a series of people who were approached by the artist and agreed to co-operate, each displaying with their self-written sign, the signs quite short, and written presumably without much thinking time, and - most important - with the brief that they can say just whatever they like. It's not surprising that some odd messages turn up and that correlating message with person is hard. But if it seems to demonstrate the radical strangeness or unknowability of people, it demonstrates nothing of the sort. (And it certainly doesn't "give people a voice".) It's simply a procedure designed to generate meaningless dissonance .

Now you may believe - as many works of fiction have insisted - that people are ultimately unknowable. Notice "ultimately", though. Wearing art tends to baulk at first base, presenting people as almost immediately unknowable. Or perhaps this point is being conflated with another one, viz that we often pass people in the street whose lives we find hard to imagine - which is an important fact of life, but we shouldn't mistake such casual puzzlement for inscrutable mysteries of the self.

See how in Homage to the woman with the bandaged face the effects turns centrally on a point of deliberate ignorance. Why is she wearing this bandage? We don't know, and Wearing doesn't know, and her attempted impersonation is - I presume, deliberately - void. Of course we could know. But if we did, that would deprive us of the spooky fun of abstract facelessness.

Wearing's people are the human equivalent of the everyday household object seen from an unusual angle. Sometimes the estrangement effects are overt, like the masks in Trauma and the voice-swaps of 2 into 1. I can't see that these masks - innocent but inexpressive, generally too small for the wearer - do other than add a layer of tears-of-a-clown irony to the painful experiences talked out. But the mother-sons voice-swaps, though evidently borrowed from family therapy role-playing, seem to me the best trick in the show: simply, the business of physically mouthing someone else's account of you is superbly dramatic - but it made me wish it was part of some larger drama.

For the problem with using real found people, especially in such short bursts, is (again) the weirdness-effect of arbitrary ignorance. We could know more about them, we just don't, yet there seems no point to our not knowing. Granted, the problem isn't confined to real people. The only acted piece in the show, Sacha and Mum, maintains our ignorance about its non-specifically distressing events in other ways. But one way or another, a limbo of "dunno" is the recurring scene.

Never more so than in Drunk. Its whole story is decontextualisation. In a blank and featureless studio, of which we see only a bit of wall and a bit of floor, a group of drunks - apparently befriended into co-operation by the artist over a long period - are filmed in black and white. They stagger about, they fall over, they half fight, they hug, they move randomly, they piss, they lie asleep.

Any visitor to the Serpentine Gallery, looking from this sorry spectacle artfully framed in triple-screen projection to his/her generally well-dressed fellow viewers might well be reminded of the last scene in The Rake's Progress, with the ladies and gentlemen paying an amusing visit to the loony bin. But myself, I still prefer not to talk voyeurism, exploitation etc. What I don't like is the way this piece is determined to know nothing. It takes a human subject that everyone is acquainted with and has likely wondered about, removes it to an aesthetic-cum-clinical environment and treats it a specimen of behaviour, a ballet of awkwardly animated forms. One may well say that that the knowledge normally offered by the confessional and documentary media is doubtful and compromised. But pure and studied ignorance, we need like a hole in the head.

Gillian Wearing: Serpentine Gallery, Kensington Gardens, London W2; everyday, to 29 October; admission free

Another Opening, Another Sensation; Spurred by Long Lines and Headlines, London Museums and Galleries Shock Anew

NYTimes

By ALAN RIDING

Published: September 25, 2000

It is far from proven that newspapers sell art, but art certainly seems to sell newspapers in Britain these days. At least that must be one explanation for the enormous space given to London's contemporary art scene by the British press. Newspapers no longer cover major art shows as cultural events but as news stories, while the media's devotion to the celebrity cult routinely turns Y.B.A.'s -- as young British artists are now known here -- into show-biz stars.

True, the key variable in all this is perhaps not art, but shock: art and artists are usually only deemed worthy of the news pages if their work or behavior can be presented as scandalous. Thus, given the intense competition among Britain's nine morning newspapers, any art that might conceivably give offense -- say, a maggot-filled cow's head (Damien Hirst) or an unmade bed plus used condoms, soiled underwear and liquor bottle (Tracey Emin) -- is assured of ample coverage.

Young artists, new galleries and old museums all seem eager to play their part in this Faustian bargain: loads of publicity, rising prices for contemporary art and good crowds for exhibitions in exchange for what a British art critic, William Feaver, calls ''headline art.'' Like news, art marketing has become a today operation; whether the product lives any longer than the hype is tomorrow's problem.

So it is that, even before it opened this week, the Royal Academy of Arts's new exhibition, ''Apocalypse: Beauty and Horror in Contemporary Art,'' received press coverage here that even those perennial favorites Monet and Cezanne would envy. It helped of course that the show includes a life-size wax figure of Pope John Paul II being struck down by a meteorite, a large pile of garbage and a jumbled video that includes brief images of live sex (forbidden viewing for those under 18).

The once-venerable Royal Academy is again playing the game, eager to match the success of ''Sensation: Young British Artists From the Saatchi Collection,'' which drew 300,000 visitors in 1997 thanks to massive media attention and a controversy over a portrait of an English child murderer made with handprints of children. (When ''Sensation'' went to the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 1999, it was Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani's noisy objection to elephant dung attached to a painting of the Virgin Mary that ensured the show was noticed.)

Still, in fairness, ''Apocalypse'' is not simply more of the same. It escapes some of the criticism aimed at ''Sensation'' in that it does not show works from the private collection of Charles Saatchi, the wealthy former advertising executive who more than anyone is responsible for the rise of the Y.B.A.'s. Only 5 of the 13 artists in this show are British, only 2 of them -- Darren Almond and Dinos Chapman and his brother, Jake -- are Y.B.A. veterans of ''Sensation.''

What seems not to have changed is the desire of the Royal Academy -- and its exhibitions secretary, Norman Rosenthal -- to cause a fresh sensation, although Mr. Rosenthal describes his intent as that of challenging received wisdom about art.

''On the whole, people like what they know, and the older they get, the more they insist on liking only the things that they know,'' he explained in an interview with The Sunday Telegraph. ''Their minds don't want to open up. They don't want to face psychological, social and aesthetic realities about the world they're living in. They want it to be pretty.'' And he added, ''Art is not there to make the world a better place.''

As a self-supporting institution, though, the Royal Academy does need art that draws good crowds in order to pay its way. (Last year's ''Monet in the 20th Century,'' with 735,000 visitors, was its most popular ever.) And while some of its critics complain that its aesthetic choices are now being dictated by monetary needs, the academy's embrace of contemporary art also reflects its desire to be seen to be in tune with the times. And this necessarily includes a high profile in the media.

The Royal Academy, though, is hardly alone.

The massive publicity that surrounded the opening of the new Tate Modern this spring has already brought more than two million visitors to the converted power plant on Bankside. Tate Britain, housed in the old Tate Gallery on Millbank, recently made a bid for attention by holding its own contemporary show, ''Intelligence: New British Art 2000.'' The steady inflation in commercial galleries handling Y.B.A.'s is proclaimed as evidence that the art boom is here to stay.

This month in the run-up to ''Apocalypse'' the London press opened its columns to a Gillian Wearing retrospective at the Serpentine Gallery through Oct. 29. Ms. Wearing, a video and photo artist who won the coveted Turner Prize here in 1997, does not in fact exploit shock. Rather, her thoughtful work focuses on the clash between external and internal appearances, as in ''Trauma,'' in which mature people wearing youthful masks recount painful moments of their childhood. What caught the media's eyes, though, was ''Drunks,'' a 23-minute three-screen black-and-white video of a group of drunks staggering about her studio.

Days later the Saatchi Gallery opened ''Ant Noises II'' -- ''ant noises'' being an anagram of ''sensation'' -- to display the latest additions to the Saatchi collection. The show, which runs through Nov. 26, includes works by Mr. Hirst, Ms. Emin, the Chapman brothers, Jenny Saville, Sarah Lucas, Gavin Turk, Ron Mueck and Gary Hume, who were all part of ''Sensation.'' They and assorted other opening night London trendies duly filled the gossip columns.

For newspaper readers, on the other hand, the work given most attention -- ''shocking'' in the category of ''Is this art?'' -- was Ms. Emin's installation, ''The Last Thing I Said to You Is Don't Leave Me Here,'' a reconstructed beach hut representing memories of childhood and recent sexual encounters, accompanied by two photographs of the artist naked. One of these, called ''I've Got It All,'' could not fail to be reproduced: it showed Ms. Emin with splayed naked legs ''giving birth'' to a large quantity of money.

In contrast, the new works by Mr. Hirst, the original Y.B.A. enfant terrible of shark-in-formaldehyde fame, seemed positively tame: a vast ashtray filled with fetid cigarette butts; and a glass cabinet containing medicine bottles labled ''sausages,'' ''mushroom'' and the like. More disturbing was Mr. Mueck's ''Untitled.'' Having displayed a miniature ''Dead Dad'' in ''Sensation,'' his new work is an equally realistic miniature of a man lying in the fetal position wrapped in a blankets.

With ''Apocalypse,'' after the pre-opening media buildup, the opening night fund-raiser, paid for by the Prada fashion house, was another must for the tabloids thanks to the attendance by the actor Ewan McGregor, Sir Elton John, Courtney Love and a host of local celebrities. ''We'd suspected it all along,'' Alison Roberts reported in The London Evening Standard, ''but this was proof: the art world is now more fashionable than fashion itself.''

As for the art, the Royal Academy has given each of the 13 artists a gallery of his or her own (Mariko Mori, a Japanese conceptual artist, is the only woman), with Mr. Rosenthal and the independent curator Max Wigram choosing the works to fit their apocalyptic theme. The very first installation, Gregor Schneider's ''Cellar,'' requires visitors to climb through a tiny trap door into a labyrinth of dank rooms and corridors, a reconstruction of part of this German artist's own home in Rheydt and presumably some sort of metaphor for paradise lost.

Maurizio Cattelan's ''Nona Ora,'' or ''The Ninth Hour,'' is the work showing the pope felled by a meteorite, lying beside broken glass from a shattered skylight that suggests the meteorite's path. (Upset Catholics are assured that the Italian artist is a devout Catholic.) The link to the Apocalypse seems less immediate in Luc Tuymans's oils and Ms. Mori's ''Dream Temple,'' a mysterious octagonal shrine; it is more evident in ''British Wildlife, 2000,'' the garbage collection by the British artists Tim Noble and Sue Webster that, when illuminated, shows them in silhouette at the top of the pile.

Mr. Almond's ''Bus Stop (2 Bus Shelters)'' confronts the Holocaust with an installation that reconstructs the bus stop outside the former death camp at Auschwitz in Poland; in a previous work he photographed the shelter on a damp gray day, first with and then without waiting passengers. Even more direct is the Chapman brothers' truly apocalyptic ''Hell,'' nine glass cabinets arranged in the shape of a swastika filled with tiny figures, naked or dressed in Nazi uniforms, many of them corpses in mass graves.

Chris Cunningham's ''flex,'' quickly nicknamed the ''sex video,'' portrays a more personal hell. Accompanied by loud disjointed music, it shows a couple floating through ether who first fight violently and then make hurried love, albeit all somewhat disguised by rapid cutting and fleshy close-ups. It is Mr. Cunningham's first work of art after a brief career making advertising spots and rock videos.

How the British public responds to this show has yet to be seen, but there must be few newspaper readers who have not heard of it. Reviews by art critics may stir interest, but even negative coverage in the news pages awakens curiosity and draws crowds. For example David Aaronovitch, a columnist in The Independent, poked fun at many of the works in ''Apocalypse,'' but he nonetheless said he enjoyed himself. ''It's innovative, brash, callow, shallow and sentimental, which itself is significant,'' he said.

There is no shortage of commentators ready to trash the entire Y.B.A. boom as a market-driven exercise in self-promotion. ''The shed is Art now, you see,'' wrote Anna Murphy, the arts editor of The Sunday Telegraph, of the beach hut in Ms. Emin's latest work, ''and if you don't understand why, that's because you are not clever or cool enough -- a case of emperor's clothes if ever there was one.'' On the other hand, to draw attention to her article, it was accompanied by photographs of Mick Jagger, Stella McCartney, Steve Martin and ever-present Y.B.A.'s at the opening of ''Ant Noises II.''

Eight iron men, some old Y-fronts and a neon tube

Antony Gormley | White Cube², London Ant Noises 2 | Saatchi Gallery, London

By Charles Darwent
Monday, 18 September 2000

During the mid-1960s, the American Pop artist, Ed Ruscha, began a series of pictures that portrayed the Los Angeles county art museum burning to the ground. Leaving aside the rank ingratitude of this - the museum has several Ruschas in its collection - these works marked some kind of low point in the relationship between artists and art institutions. For much of the past century, the former have viewed the latter with open hostility. The trouble is that modern artists perceive themselves to be modern. Museums, on the other hand, smack of preservation, which smacks of old age. As Gertrude Stein sagely observed of the opening of New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1929, you can either be modern or an art museum, but not both.

During the mid-1960s, the American Pop artist, Ed Ruscha, began a series of pictures that portrayed the Los Angeles county art museum burning to the ground. Leaving aside the rank ingratitude of this - the museum has several Ruschas in its collection - these works marked some kind of low point in the relationship between artists and art institutions. For much of the past century, the former have viewed the latter with open hostility. The trouble is that modern artists perceive themselves to be modern. Museums, on the other hand, smack of preservation, which smacks of old age. As Gertrude Stein sagely observed of the opening of New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1929, you can either be modern or an art museum, but not both.

You might like to bear all this in mind as you walk around two new contemporary art exhibitions in London this week. The first, Antony Gormley's Drawn at White Cube², deals with the whole problem of institutionalisation by using the works in the show to overpower the institution in which it is shown. The second, Part Two of the Saatchi Gallery's "Ant Noises" series, makes you feel that Ruscha may have had a point.

One obvious way for a plastic artist to get back at art galleries is by attacking their physical fabric. Gormley may not have stooped to arson, but his new sculptures - cast, as ever, from his own body - are the next best thing. Since Vitruvius, architects have used the drawn proportions of the human body as a way of generating the proportions of things like White Cube². What Gormley has done is to expose the underlying human aesthetic of the gallery's single room by filling its eight corners - four on the floor, four on the ceiling - with cast metal copies of himself.

These use the extended lines of the artist's body to delineate the lines of the gallery's architecture: thus Gormley's upright torso may follow the vertical join between two walls while his splayed legs point along the horizontal between the walls and ceiling. (A quite different, and inarguably impressive, part of the sculptor's anatomy also plays a role in this process. Either Gormley's hand slipped during casting or Mrs Gormley is a lucky woman.) By turning his own body into an architectural element, Gormley reduces the gallery's architecture to a mere extension of himself. The rough-cast figures are rich in suggestive imagery - Leonardo's Man, Pompeiian mummies, crucifixions - but the trick is that we find ourselves looking not at a set of historic artefacts contained by an art gallery, but at an art gallery contained by a set of historic artefacts. The museological boot is on the other foot.

By contrast, the works in "Ant Noises 2" clearly know their place, which is as tradeable commodities in a private collection. Yes, there are a number of fine new pieces in "AN2". Jenny Saville's Host, a painting of a pig on a slab, shows that controlled lack of control which gives her work a kind of greatness. It isn't the picture's dimensions that lend it authority: it is the unknowableness of Saville's relation-ship to her subject, her absolute reticence about what she paints. Sarah Lucas's The Pleasure Principle, a clever new installation of repro furniture, neon tubing and assorted pairs of Y-fronts, goes in for the same kind of deadpan, although in this case the work has sibylline things to say about British sexuality.

The problem with "AN2", though, is the same one on which Ms Stein so wisely put her finger. When the Royal Academy staged its "Sensation" show in 1997, it blunted the edge of that group of artists whose whole point was their edginess. In trying to make the RA look like a happening place, "Sensation" made us think of Damien Hirst as a potential Academician. Anagramising "Sensation" into "Ant Noises" suggested that the Saatchi Gallery had spotted this trap and was, like, hip enough, man, not to fall into it. What actually made "Ant Noises 1" the success it was, though, was that its central work - Hirst's Hymn - seemed to set out to subvert the Saatchi Gallery.

Hymn, you will recall, was the 30-foot anatomical doll for which Charles Saatchi paid £1m. Hirst's work responded by being so very big that even Saatchi's titanic spending-power (and his gigantic showing-space) was dwarfed by it. Hymn only just managed to squeeze under the pitched roof of Boundary Road, suggesting, Ã la Gormley's iron men, just where the power lay in this particular patronal exchange. The outsized Hirst ashtray in this latest show, Horror at Home, just doesn't cut the mustard. Without Hymn at its centre, "Ant Noises 2" is merely the collection of a very rich man: some of it good, some of it bad, but all of it Saatchi.

Antony Gormley: White Cube², N1 (020 7930 5373), to 14 October; "Ant Noises 2": Saatchi Gallery, NW8 (020 7328 8299), to 26 November

From unmade bed to Whitstable beach hut, Tracey Emin makes an exhibition of herself

By David Lister, Media and Culture Editor
Wednesday, 13 September 2000

Tracey Emin manages to remain the enfant terrible of British art at the age of 37 as she belatedly comes to terms with her body in the latest exhibition of Young British Artists.

Tracey Emin manages to remain the enfant terrible of British art at the age of 37 as she belatedly comes to terms with her body in the latest exhibition of Young British Artists.

Although the word "young" sits ever less comfortably with the likes of Damien Hirst, Emin, Sarah Lucas and co, the work in the exhibition Ant Noises 2 at Charles Saatchi's London gallery shows them still more than capable of being shocking, perplexing and just occasionally uplifting.

Emin, whose celebrated unmade bed features in the exhibition, also has an evocative new exhibit. It is a Whitstable beach hut she bought with her artist friend Sarah Lucas and reassembled. It comes complete with photographs of herself taken inside the hut, without any props or indeed any clothes. The photographer was her boyfriend and fellow artist Matt Collishaw.

Looking at the two exhibits before last night's private view, Emin, who was wearing a striking leopard-skin dress, reflected: "The bed has become an iconic image. When I look at it now I don't see my bedroom. I see all the success it's brought me."

The beach hut, she said, reminded her of her youth. She grew up in Margate and travelling between London and Margate on the train the first piece of coastline she would see was at Whitstable. She also used to love playing in sheds.

"When I talked with Charles Saatchi about the exhibit," she added, "he though the hut was fantastic but they wanted pictures for the catalogue and that is how the pictures of me came about.

"I used to hate my body. I detested it. Now I'm shagged out and nearly 40, I love it. I never used to have any control over it, I suppose, but when you get older you do. I always wanted to change my eyes, being so short-sighted, so I had the laser operation."

Charles Saatchi has paid £75,000 for the beach hut exhibit, which is entitled The Last Thing I Said To You Is Don't Leave Me. He has also paid £150,000 for the unmade bed called My Bed.

Tracey Emin said that she thought the central exhibit by Damien Hirst in the exhibition was "one of the best pieces of work he has made in a very long time".

The work entitled Contemplating A Self-Portrait (As A Pharmacist) is a steel and glass evocation of an artist's studio but presented with the clinical look of a pharmacy. Jenni Blyth, curator at the Saatchi Gallery, said it was "a confessional, romantic piece but with a stark contrast between the wistful romance and the sleek lines of the pharmacy".

Host, a painting by Jenny Saville of a headless figure, part girl part pig with multiple teats, continues Saville's preoccupation with pig organs being used for human transplants. The painting, just completed, was still wet yesterday. Ms Blyth said: "Jenny came back to touch up two or three of the nipples."

The exhibition, Ant Noises 2, is at the Saatchi Gallery, Boundary Road, London, NW8.

Sensational blast from the past

Some Sort of Genius: a life of Wyndham Lewis by Paul O'Keeffe (Jonathan Cape, £25, 682pp); Wyndham Lewis: painter and writer by Paul (Yale University Press, £40, 583pp)
Lawrence Rainey
Saturday, 9 September 2000

Artistic London is a-twitter these days. Journalists are scouring the fine-arts degree shows, eager to spot "the new sensation," to sniff out "the next Damien Hirsts and Tracy Emins," and to guess "What will Charles Saatchi be hanging on his walls this autumn?" Such reports confirm what many have long suspected: that the contemporary art world has capitulated to the culture of instant celebrity. Young students scarcely earn a BA before they discover they must take a crash course in public relations. One wonders, however, what their imaginary instructor would tell them to make of Wyndham Lewis, arguably the greatest British painter of the period 1900 to 1945. He could only be deemed an object lesson in failure. Never has a career been so spectacularly mismanaged.

Artistic London is a-twitter these days. Journalists are scouring the fine-arts degree shows, eager to spot "the new sensation," to sniff out "the next Damien Hirsts and Tracy Emins," and to guess "What will Charles Saatchi be hanging on his walls this autumn?" Such reports confirm what many have long suspected: that the contemporary art world has capitulated to the culture of instant celebrity. Young students scarcely earn a BA before they discover they must take a crash course in public relations. One wonders, however, what their imaginary instructor would tell them to make of Wyndham Lewis, arguably the greatest British painter of the period 1900 to 1945. He could only be deemed an object lesson in failure. Never has a career been so spectacularly mismanaged.

Born in 1882 in Canada, Lewis moved to England with his family aged six. His American father soon left, and Lewis's English mother started a laundering business in north London. Lewis was enrolled in the Slade School of Art at 16. Though he received a prestigious scholarship, he proved a troublesome student. In a gesture of deliberate defiance, he lit a cigarette just outside the office of the director, violating the strict regulations against smoking. He was promptly seized, flung through the school's double doors and told never to return. No degree show for him.

For the next 10 years Lewis lived a bohemian life supported by his mother, much of it abroad in Madrid, Munich and Paris. He published his first short story in 1908, and by 1910 seemed poised to become more a writer than a painter. But in 1911 he contributed to his first group exhibition. His works were immediately noticed by critics. His taut draughtsmanship was unmistakable, and already by 1912 he was producing works that drew on the latest idioms of modernism to create a personal style: strange automatons, their faces locked in rigid grimaces, stagger through disturbing fields of piercing arcs and angles.

It was a propitious moment. In 1910 Roger Fry had staged his famous Exhibition of Post-Impressionism, while in early 1912 the first Exhibition of Futurist Painting took London by storm, prompting unprecedented debate about contemporary art. Lewis admired the polemical onslaught which the Futurists had mounted and resolved to be every bit as truculent in shaping a movement of his own. It was his good fortune to team up with Ezra Pound, whose canny sense of polemics and publicity served Lewis well. In 1914, they launched Vorticism with Blast, an avant-garde journal bristling with pugnacious manifestos and typography.

Lewis was becoming a celebrity. His room decorations for the Countess Drogheda had been highly publicised, promising access to the rich and influential; he was even making "cubist" fans for a dinner held by Lady Cunard, the celebrated hostess. His serious work also received acclaim. Roger Fry and Clive Bell had singled out his paintings for praise, and the wealthy New York collector, John Quinn, was waiting in the wings.

Unbeknown to any of these, Lewis was leading a double life. Olive Johnson, a sometime "shopgirl" and "waitress", gave birth to his first illegitimate child in 1911 and his second in 1913. Both were entrusted to Lewis's ageing mother, with Lewis promising what he could from his erratic earnings. In 1919 and 1920, he produced two more illegitimate children, duly sent off to a "Home for the Infants and Children of Gentlepeople", with Lewis undertaking to pay.

To conceal his private life, Lewis developed an elaborate system of rotating flats and studios. Typically he rented a single furnished room as his private abode; a second that functioned as a studio for painting; and a third or even fourth to store books or host social occasions. A tenancy rarely lasted more than a few months. Chronically behind on his rent and beleaguered by creditors, Lewis fled from flat to flat.

Even a successful show couldn't rectify his indigence. A major exhibition in 1921 yielded £616 in sales. But when gallery commission and studio costs were deducted, Lewis was left with £54. Lewis's next major exhibition didn't occur until 1937. This time he had borrowed so much from the gallery in advances that he still owed it more than £400 at the sale's end. The gallery retained seven canvases at half their estimated price, leaving Lewis with £12. That went to his solicitors, who were fending off Lewis's illegitimate son, now 26 and a petty criminal threatening to "come to the Leicester Galleries and make myself known".

During the early 1920s Lewis had turned to portraiture to make money. He also took up writing in earnest. His massive volumes of political-cultural criticism, The Art of Being Ruled and Time and Western Man often lapse into tiresome jeremiads. His novel The Childermass offers flashes of brilliant writing and pages of dreary speechifying. The Apes of God is a mordant satire on wealthy bohemia, blemished by ugly undercurrents of anti-Semitism. Over and over Lewis asserted the modernist credo that art is infinitely superior to life. His career, instead, was an endless dramatisation of life's revenge.

In 1930, after a three-week jaunt to Berlin, Lewis cobbled together a biography of Hitler, the first in any language. Most reviewers damned its sloppy writing and poor research, a few praised its impressionistic vivacity. But by 1933, when the climate of opinion had irrevocably altered, passers-by would spit at shop windows displaying the book. His reputation was permanently damaged.

He continued to write travel books, novels and topical commentary, as well as to paint some of the finest portraits of the 20th century. In 1930, he married Gladys Anne Hoskins. The wedding was kept secret, and many friends didn't know of her existence until after the Second World War.

Desperate to change his luck, Lewis left for the US and Canada in 1939. Things went no better, and commissions failed to materialise. By late 1941, he excused his delay in replying to one correspondent by explaining that he couldn't afford the stamp. The next year there was a three-month period when Gladys couldn't leave their one-room flat because she lacked serviceable shoes.

Despite these conditions, Lewis developed a curious fondness for Americanisms, which he carefully recorded in his diaries. "The other day I caught myself saying golly, for instance." He added: "I must be careful not to talk like that!" Yet when one correspondent asked Lewis about a new suit he had acquired for a special occasion, Lewis proudly replied, "I think it will be a lulu".

When he finally returned to England in 1945, the arrears on rent from his London flat and unpaid rates amounted to over £600. "I am tightly held in the jaws of the Rating Authorities and my obscene landlord," Lewis reported. "They are evidently cutting up my body between them."

They were not the only forces assaulting his body. Lewis was going blind. For some years a tumour had been growing in his brain, slowly crushing his optical nerves. X-ray treatments failed to arrest it, and surgery might have proved fatal.

Lewis completed his last portrait in 1949, and two years later publicly announced his blindness when he resigned as art critic for the Listener. His last years were spent writing the novels Monstre Gai and Malign Fiesta. In 1956, only eight months before his death, he was taken to the Tate Gallery for the private viewing of a major retrospective exhibition. One observer noted tears in the blind man's eyes.

Paul O'Keeffe has written a magnificent biography of Lewis, rich in revealing anecdote, with a dark sense of humour that relishes the many ironies of Lewis's life. He traces the tragicomedy of Lewis's bungled career in abundant detail, with all its squalor and bittersweet dignity. This will be the definitive biography of Lewis for decades to come.

Paul Edwards' book is an academic study which marches chronologically through the paintings and the many books, tracts, and novels. The tone is reverential to the point of tedium, oddly out of synch with Lewis's quirky humour. But it contains 179 colour plates, the most complete survey available of Lewis's oeuvre, and is worth owning on those grounds alone.

Rumour has it that the Tate is considering a major exhibition of Lewis's entire career. One hopes the project will go ahead. Aspiring art students would learn little about networking with Saatchi and David Bowie. But they might get a salutary lesson in the grim power, at once compelling and horrible, that such a reckless faith in art could unleash. Could anyone have such faith today?

Lawrence Rainey is professor of English at York University

Private View: Ant Noises 2

By Richard Ingleby
Saturday, 9 September 2000

"Ant Noises 2" shows Charles Saatchi's latest acquisitions by his favourite artists, or at least those artists he has worked so hard to establish in the past decade: Tracey Emin, the Chapman brothers, Damien Hirst, Gary Hume, Sarah Lucas, Jenny Saville, Richard Patterson and Gavin Turk.

"Ant Noises 2" shows Charles Saatchi's latest acquisitions by his favourite artists, or at least those artists he has worked so hard to establish in the past decade: Tracey Emin, the Chapman brothers, Damien Hirst, Gary Hume, Sarah Lucas, Jenny Saville, Richard Patterson and Gavin Turk.

A number of the works are famous, not least Emin's bed and the Chapmans' 12-headed monster girl, but some of the more interesting pieces are shown here for the first time. Most are on familiar themes of sex and death, but there's a less jokey element in several pieces, and even a degree of thoughtfulness in the Chapmans' 83 etchings based on Goya's Disasters of War.

Gary Hume is represented by two shiny new paintings, Gavin Turk by a modelled self portrait as Che Guevara, and Tracey Emin by an old beach hut that she owned 10 years ago, reconstructed in the gallery. Apparently, Emin is too attached to the hut to leave it on the beach - or maybe she realised she could flog it to Mr Saatchi. Whatever her reasons, it brings an engaging, almost melancholic mood to the show.

Saatchi's new sensation will be a windfall for regional galleries

By Jojo Moyes, Arts and Media Correspondent
Wednesday, 6 September 2000

First he shocked the art world with the likes of Damien Hirst. Then he grabbed headlines with the exhibition of his "Sensation" collection. Now Charles Saatchi is raising eyebrows again - by giving away his artworks.

First he shocked the art world with the likes of Damien Hirst. Then he grabbed headlines with the exhibition of his "Sensation" collection. Now Charles Saatchi is raising eyebrows again - by giving away his artworks.

The advertising mogul turned art patron, who kick-started the young British art movement, has donated 39 works to lesser-known galleries and museums. A world away from the Royal Academy or his Saatchi Gallery in St John's Wood, the works, worth an estimated £200,000, will appear in locations as exotic as Swindon, Swansea and Belfast.

The museums were chosen in discussions between Mr Saatchi and the National Art Collections Fund, which acted as a conduit for the donations.

The recipients are the Swindon Museum and Art Gallery, the Glynn Vivian Art Gallery in Swansea, the New Art Gallery in Walsall, Aberdeen Art Gallery, Leeds City Art Gallery, Paisley Museum and Art Galleries and the Ulster Museum, Belfast.

The donation includes works by Katherine Dowson, Marcus Taylor, Daniel Sturgis and Keith Wilson.

In the past two years Mr Saatchi has now given away just under 300 works and yesterday he suggested he was going to donate even more. In a statement he said he was delighted to make the gift through the National Art Collections Fund, which distributes works, or grants, to institutions across Britain. "We hope to continue to make gifts to both the Arts Council Collection and the Art Fund, to enable the work of young British artists to be seen and held in public collections across the country," he said.

Jenny Blyth, curator of the Saatchi Gallery, said: "Overall, the hope is to find good homes for as much interesting young British art as possible. You see a lot of young British art in London; it's important also that it's seen regionally."

Sir Nicholas Goodison, the chairman of the National Art Collections Fund, said: "Charles Saatchi's gesture will make a real difference to those regional museums and galleries that are keen to collect contemporary art, but lack the funds to do so. These works will bring great enjoyment to many visitors."

Not all artists are likely to be happy to find themselves donated to lower-profile institutions. Some found that to have works bought up by Mr Saatchi in large numbers and then sold or given away lowered their market value.

But yesterday the galleries were celebrating. Peter Jenkinson, director of the New Art Gallery in Walsall, said that its commitment to living artists had been hampered by budgetary restraints. "In common with many galleries ... we have sometimes lacked the funds with which to make purchases. The Saatchi gift is therefore a wonderful and unexpected windfall, a real boost to Walsall's collection at a moment when - at long last - we have beautiful new spaces in which to show contemporary art."