Art Now Cornwall

Went to Tate St Ives to see Art Now Cornwall the other day. What a load of rubbish. Well alright, not all of it, but a lot of it. Not that the numerous paintings on show were particularly rubbish in themselves, but art NOW? Is this it? It's pretty sad if it is. Paintings that look like they belong in the 1950's or worse still the 1980's abounded - I couldn't see much development between then and now in many of them. Symbolism, abstract expressionistic derivatives, modernism - boring. Where's the new exciting stuff? There was some (but not paintings), but they seemed a concession, an adjunct to the rather sentimental looking choice of the Director and Curator that forms the bulk of the exhibition. Susan Daniel-McElroy (Director) and Sara Hughes (Curator) seem to be at pains to point out that the exhibition is not a survey, but a curated sample of what's going on in Cornwall. They mean what's going on in Penwith, the district that Tate's in. Out of the 28 artists work on show I don't think there are many living or working outside of Penwith. Cornwall's a big county, 100 miles long and made up of 7 districts - but I guess Art Now Penwith doesn't have quite the catchy, crowd-pulling potential of a name like Art Now Cornwall...

So just what is this show about? It didn't seem to be particularly cohesive, and was running alongside small galleries of Francis Bacon and Bryan Pearce works, and the inevitable modernism in St Ives, none of which seemed to add and anything to each other or any context to the Art Now Cornwall show. It all left me feeling a bit nonplussed. The title seems to be a complete misnomer; you go along expecting cutting edge stuff, stuff that's representative of this century, but I didn't leave feeling that was what I'd got. "Cornwall has relatively few sculptors..." it states in the catalogue introduction and if you used the exhibition to guide you on this you'd think it was true, given the number of paintings on show, but amongst my peers there's a dearth of painters. So I'd say, again, all the exhibition shows is that there are a lot of painters in Penwith - which is hardly surprising given the number of commercial galleries and paying tourists in the area. It all seems a bit of an odd swansong for the retiring Director to bow out on; a kind of miss-hit compared to some of the punchy contemporary shows at Tate's other venues, which is what a lot of us were hoping for, but obviously didn't get.

All that said there is some exciting work worth going to see, if you haven't already seen it in some of the artist-led shows that have been on in recent years. There's Amanda Lorens' Tango Provado (2007), a very sensual video installation that's easy to miss because of it's odd siting in the foyer area; Lucy Willow's Dust Rug (2007) which is slowly disintegrating over the period of the exhibition; Andy Currie's installation My Lucky Star is a Rubbish Scorpion (2004), worth seeing just for the different ambiance it has in a museum rather than the crumbling school room I saw it in at the Eek exhibition last summer, and finally Harriet Bell's Six Black Objects (2005) - it does what it says on the tin, but they are wood and guess what...WAX! (You know how much I love that material!) It's also worth a trip to the gallery to see the Francis Bacon of course - wow, now that's what I call painting!

Art Now Cornwall is on at Tate St Ives until 13 May 2007.