Art - Julian Stallbrass on an eccentric exhibition that exposes elitist snobbery

Wander into any smart gallery in London's West End and you will see paintings showing the patterns of suburban wallpapers and fabrics, or hand-made replicas of mass-produced statuettes, or photographs - by Martin Parr, say - of the doings and the possessions of comfortable but (sotto voce) somewhat vulgar folk. From the same cloth as these works are woven come the "Thrift Store Paintings" collected by US artist Jim Shaw, currently on show at the Institute of Contemporary Arts.

With a well-developed sense of eccentricity and absurdity, Shaw has long been amassing these paintings, sold off cheaply by their owners. Many "thrift store paintings", avidly collected by many people or sold at jumble sales and on market stalls and swapped like bubblegum cards, have no appeal for him. It is the weird images that attract him. Shaw has found some truly strange things: a picture of a toilet roll and a little flower floating in a patch of suffused light, almost in the manner of mid-1920s Leger; animated statues and rebel robots; a giant lemon on a chain; an artist being shot at by a hunter. Each item has been endowed with a literal, deadpan title (originally, says Shaw, only so that curators could tell which was which): Pink Poodle and Hydrant with Text, for instance, or Savage Warrior with Newsprint Face Holds Ears Clamped Shut. Sometimes the titles carry a hint of interpretation. An admittedly grisly portrait of a woman throwing what is meant to be a winning smile over her shoulder is entitled Psycho Lady. Often, however, the eccentricity of these works is less to do with their subject matter than the way it is handled. There are clumsily painted displays of adolescent fantasy, sweet pictures of animals, and ill-advised attempts to emulate expressionist, abstract and surrealist works.

Yet there is something else, less commented upon, too: a consistent conceptual inventiveness. Eccentricity is one of the regular paths to artistic success, after all, and if pursued with more training, material and consistency, many of these visions could find a place in the contemporary art world. If the ambitions of these painters are punctured by a lack of specialist skill, by poor materials, or by being confined within too small a frame, it is because their makers lack resources, not intelligence or inventiveness.

While Shaw's published statements show little trace of condescension towards his collection of oddities, over the years, his project has shifted in meaning, partly through being displayed in galleries, rather than libraries, where it had its first airing, and partly because the collection is now offered for sale, as if it were Shaw's work and his only. His method of appropriation denies Shaw contact with the painters, and it is no accident that such procedures are common to artists who draw their material from the general populace. Both changes push the collection away from its origins and towards the art elite.

The pictures, although salvaged from low-level circulation and hung in a prestigious high-art space, are not treated kindly at the ICA. They are evenly and gloomily lit, lending their surfaces a murky, seedy air. They are hung, hundreds of them, closely together in ranks, so viewers must strain their necks to look at some, stoop for others. This was the method of hanging used in 19th-century salons, but it is remote from contemporary display, in which each work is given a generous hinterland of nothingness and picked out with its own custom lighting. The works are loosely grouped by genre, so that all the cod-surrealist paintings, for instance, are herded together, reinforcing the impression that these works are mere examples of a type.

A clear assumption lies behind the display of this collection: that the well-informed, visually adept visitors to the ICA will treat these fetishes of the popular psyche with amazement, condescension and amusement. Those who believe that the division between "high" and "low" culture has been disposed of in an egalitarian, postmodern compact might take heed of this show, which functions by bringing the two poles into contact, offering those who have scaled the cultural heights a thrilling glimpse into the abyss of the average.

Usually, these viewers would be suspicious of such an ethnographic method of display, and swift to condemn it if applied to the products of an alien culture, yet that perspective is hidden when the method is turned upon a fragment of our own. The assumption is that these paintings are the products of Sunday painters who fondly believe that they can make DalIs for their living rooms; that they are the results of pitiful petit-bourgeois and suburban aspiration - odd flowers grown in the culturally stifling air of endless provinces.

There is an obstacle to looking at these paintings, though: we know nothing at all about the people who made them - their identities, intentions and knowledge; their degree of self-awareness; their sincerity or irony; not even, in some cases, whether they are children, adolescents or adults. So who is to say whether some clumsy painting is simply that, or part of a laborious joke? Whether the extraordinary images on display are really fantasies or critiques of fantasies? Whether these painters are genuine primitives (as some have dubiously claimed) or faux-naIfs practitioners? Knowing nothing of these artists or their projects, these abandoned or misplaced artefacts remain dumb.

Faced with the paintings we can, of course, choose our own interpretation. Many of the pictures demonstrate a simple yet self-conscious, utopian yearning for common pleasures unsullied by the demands of mundane, administered life, for the enjoyment of children, pets, flowers and the bodies of beautiful women. Drawing on elevated examples (including Brueghel and Manet), Ernst Bloch, theorist of the utopian, described such yearnings as an attempt to summon up an eternal "Sunday pleasure". If the visions Jim Shaw has collected seem deformed or even monstrous to sophisticated eyes, this is precisely because the demands of working life deny the resources of time, training and material to their makers.

Although it says nothing about popular taste, the exhibition is instructive in other ways. It speaks eloquently about the dependence of art on explanations which must be added to the work itself, a task normally shouldered by artists, writers, salespeople and gallery educational staff, and of how much those explanations lean upon views about the intention of the artist. Shorn of such methods of elaboration, these paintings become vacuous and fugitive things. Filling that vacuum of interpretation, however, is reliable art-world snobbery, which this show tellingly exposes.

Jim Shaw's "Thrift Store Paintings" is at the ICA, The Mall, London SW1 (020 7930 3647) until 5 November

Post your comment

Please note: you will need to login or register before you can comment on the website