Recycling the avant-garde

One overcast afternoon in late July I took a train to Norfolk. It seemed a good time and place to catch up on the state of the avant-garde. My goal was the British Art Show 8, currently spread over several venues in the centre of Norwich and due next month to move on to Southampton, the final resting-point on its slow progress around what remains, for the moment at least, the United Kingdom.

Not having caught the exhibition at its previous stopping points, Leeds and Edinburgh, I thought this would be a suitable place to see it since Norwich is a town of art historical pedigree — home to Cotman, the Cromes and Michael Andrews.

In 37 years of peregrinations around Britain this is the very first time the show — an attempt at regular intervals by the Hayward Gallery to access newish art being made in Britain — has ended up in East Anglia. But, finally, on display in Norwich Castle Museum, plus on many floors and corridors of Norwich University of the Arts, is a multiplicity of works by 42 artists. Among them are a set of pictures made from a patchwork of old fur coats by Simon Fujiwara and several benches devised by Alan Kane from gravestones for visitors to rest upon.

One theme the avant-garde is preoccupied with at the moment, it seems, is recycling. That’s not unreasonable since a great deal of artistic innovation is deft recycling: of ideas, materials, idioms. The notion of the avant-garde itself has been around for long enough to count as an antique. Temperamentally, however, I’ve always had an instinctive sympathy for the opposite, the arrière-garde. And so, incorrigibly prejudiced in favour of painting and sculpture as I am, the works I liked best at Norwich tended to be those employing the most archaic idioms.