Influential contemporary art exhibition held every five years opens at Hayward Gallery, featuring work by Roger Hiorns, Sarah Lucas and Wolfgang Tillmanns
Adrian Searle visits British Art Show 7 at the Hayward gallery and deconstructs Matthew Darbyshire's installation on consumerism
http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/video/2011/feb/16/darbyshire-british-art-show-video?intcmp=239
Some visitors to the seventh British Art Show – staged every five years and one of the visual art calendar's highlights – will be correct: that is indeed a naked young man perched on a park bench watching a fire go out.
He will not be there all of the time, however, and most people will have to make do with looking at the bench. The work is by Roger Hiorns, one of 39 artists chosen to take part in what is intended as a showcase of the best contemporary art from the last five years.
Since 1979 the show, organised by Hayward Touring, has over the course of a year visited four different cities across the UK, this time opening to acclaim in Nottingham where it attracted 114,000 visitors. The Guardian's Adrian Searle, who has seen them all, called it "the best British Art Show I've seen".
Remarkably, it is has not been seen in London for 21 years. "It is an amazing survey of British art and it is crazy that London audiences have been deprived of seeing it," said Hayward director Ralph Rugoff. "It is long overdue – and we won't wait another 20 years."
The show opens today and includes work by well-established artists such as Hiorns, Sarah Lucas, Wolfgang Tillmans as well as less well-known artists, some not even attached to commercial galleries.
Curators Lisa Le Feuvre and Tom Morton were thrown together two years ago in a kind of "arranged marriage" to seek out the most significant contributions to contemporary art over the last five years.
On their first meeting they both wrote down 10 artists they thought should be in the show. To their relief, nine out of ten were the same. They then agreed that they would agree on every single artist "otherwise you just end up horse trading", said Morton.
Le Feuvre added: "We very much wanted this to be 'an exhibition' rather than a survey. In the past some of the British Art Shows have tried to identify a movement or a trend and we feel really strongly that when you're doing something in the moment that it's happening, you can't do that, it's impossible.
"We're living in the present so all we can do is look, analyse and make a proposal for what we feel is really important."
Having said that, the pair have noticed 'tendencies' rather than trends. "An interest in history is one," said Morton. "Another is an interest in narrative, another is quite serious research-based work – a move away from the one-liner, a move away from the spectacular in any kind of obvious sense."
The show is a big deal for all the artists. "Lots of the artists in the show remember the British Art Show from when they were teenagers or at art school ... [It was] the first time they encountered a mass of art," said Le Feuvre.
• The British Art Show runs at the Hayward Gallery, London until 17 April and will be in Glasgow, 28 May-21 August, and Plymouth, 17 September-4 December.Art and design
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