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‘Makes Tracey Emin look conservative’ … Rose Wylie’s Pin Up and Porn Queen Jigsaw.
‘Makes Tracey Emin look conservative’ … Rose Wylie’s Pin Up and Porn Queen Jigsaw. Photograph: Tate Britain/PA
‘Makes Tracey Emin look conservative’ … Rose Wylie’s Pin Up and Porn Queen Jigsaw. Photograph: Tate Britain/PA

Sixty Years review – Tate's all-female rehang pulls its punches

This article is more than 4 years old

Tate Britain, London
Tate’s first display of work by female artists from its collection contains some great art, but is too shallow to shake things up

All of the works in Tate Britain’s new display, taken from the collection and covering the last 60 years, are by women. Although not chronological, the temporary rehang takes us from pop artist Pauline Boty’s portrait of the novelist, playwright and artist Derek Marlowe, to new works by Monster Chetwynd. Boty’s Marlowe has a group of cropped women’s faces suspended above him, like flashes of memory or male fantasy. Chetwynd’s photomontaged self-portrait has a bat on her head. Chetwynd as Crazy Bat Lady may be a gag about bats and belfries, but she remains self-possessed and unknowable. I can’t keep up with her continuous name changes (previously she was Marvin Gaye Chetwynd; earlier still, Spartacus), but that’s probably the point. She is a moving target, not wanting anyone to pin her down. This is a good stratagem. This display won’t be pinned down, either. It is all over the place.

Crazy Bat Lady by Monster Chetwynd. Photograph: Tate Britain/PA

The trouble with most museum display exhibitions is precisely that they rely on what is in a collection, and collections are dependent on vagaries of taste, on what museums can afford, and where, precisely, they are looking. It is a surprise to learn that the late Susan Hiller’s room-sized 1983-84 installation Belshazzar’s Feast, The Writing on Your Wall, which incorporates a video of a burning fire, was the first video work the Tate bought. This is less telling than depressing.

According to the Tate, this display is part of its commitment to increase the representation of women across its galleries. But there is no real depth here, no focus, no real questioning of the canon. You want it to shake things up, but it doesn’t. Unlike the exhibition elles@centrepompidou 10 years ago, it is not a serious look at a museum’s collection from a female point of view, probably because Tate’s holdings haven’t historically been consistently strong enough.

Elsewhere, with exhibitions such as WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution, held in the US a decade ago, and more recent shows of Latin American art by women, black radical women’s art, shows of female abstraction, and, more locally, Herstory, a small but telling international show of women artists from the collection of Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, held in Rochdale last year, we have seen few, if any, large-scale, in-depth group shows of art by women at Tate.

That said, there are some great things here – from Gillian Wearing’s terrifying short 1996 video Sacha and Mum, in which a mother alternately attacks, humiliates and reassures her adult daughter, to Gillian Wise’s smart little painting Looped Network Suspended in Pictorial Space, a kind of visual conundrum which I first saw at the Hayward in a 1974 show of British painting. Out of more than 150 artists, there were only around a dozen women in that exhibition. In the catalogue, their lists of solo shows were described as “one-man exhibitions”. How far we have come.

Susan Hillier’s Belshazzar’s Feast, The Writing on Your Wall. Photograph: Tate Britain/PA

Mary Martin’s 1966 Inversions, with its 96 canted reflective aluminium panels, that flip and angle against a black background, a Bridget Riley vertical stripe painting and Alison Wilding’s 1991 Assembly are shown in such a way as to relate to recent works by Tomma Abts and Alice Channer. But as soon as we pick up a thread we drop it again. Dawn Mellor’s paintings of policewomen from TV dramas, and a huge Rose Wylie canvas, both make Tracey Emin’s drawings look conservative, and Monster Chetwynd a model of rectitude. Twists like these are good, but I don’t know if they’re intended. Rose English’s video and outfits from her 1975 performance in which a group of female performers appeared at the Southampton Horse show in 1975, and performed a human equestrian routine in high-stepping hoof-shoes and with combed tails, makes us want to look again at performance art in the 70s.

The female family relations in Wearing’s work, in the three-generational conversations between Zineb Sedira, her mother and her daughter, in Sedira’s 2002 video Mother Tongue, and Georgina Starr’s conversations with her alter-ego doll in a video shot in a Netherlands hotel room provide the beginnings of unfinished stories. So do the idea of home and territory in the works by Rachel Whiteread, by Hiller and by Mona Hatoum. But there’s too much jumping about from one thing, and one medium, to another. I can only hope this display is a preamble to something more substantial, less heterogeneous, that goes beyond the collection, with all its blind spots and omissions; something with more extended thematic links, more complex confrontations.

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