BRITAIN, as the Beck's-shortlisted artist Olivia Plender notes in her satirical fanzine, The Road to Ruin, tends to view contemporary art as a competitive sport. Once, Beck's Futures was a skateboarding event: youthful, innovative and more concerned with prowess than prizes.
In Glasgow this year, it is in danger of becoming the synchronised swimming of the art world: a bunch of well-trained and muscular practitioners reduced to mugging their way through the motions.
The quality of this year's nominees isn't bad at all, with figures such as the intriguing painter Daniel Sinsel, sculptor Richard Hughes, Newcastle's lively Matt Stokes and the wonderful and unquantifiable Sue Tompkins from Glasgow, but the exhibition itself is nothing short of grim. This year all three shows, in London, Bristol and Glasgow, run simultaneously and it may be that the format, timescale or quite possibly the budget simply stretches the artists too thin.
Perhaps the background troubles at the CCA, forwhom this is an offsite venture in a private development at 73 Trongate, have contributed. Perhaps London gallery the ICA, who preside over arrangements, can't sustain their energy up north.
Matt Stokes, for example, showed his lovely film, Long After Tonight, in London but for Glasgow we get his rather dry, Real Arcadia, a long-standing investigation into a moment in pop culture history, the "cave raves" of the acid house movement in the Lake District.
Richard Hughes is represented by two understated sculptural installations, a pile of old doors and a sinister lava lamp, cleverly cast objects, rather than found materials, which don't add up to quite enough. Blood'n'Feathers, the Glasgow-trained duo Jo Robertson and Lucy Stein show the dreariest of their riotous paintings, presumably because they're overstretched with shows in London, Bristol, Glasgow and a coincidental Edinburgh solo show. Pablo Bronstein's architectural fancies combine intellectual investigation with baroque and rococo f lourishes, but he is showing two meagre drawings. There's an inescapable sense of work being dragged out either from storage, or from the studio, before it's fully formed.
Sue Tompkins, at least, has taken the challenge seriously by preparing a new and sizeable installation of text pieces and paintings, working on the repetition of the phrase, "the girls created themselves". Daniel Sinsel's paintings are coy and sinister. BedwyrWilliams injects the lone moment of humour with his series of satirical tyre covers for four wheel-drive vehicles.
It's never fair to make sweeping judgments about an exhibition based on brief technical hiccups, but fairness is sometimes overrated and gut reaction is important.
On my second visit to the show, on a prime-time Saturday afternoon, two works weren't working due to technical failure; a third had a crucial soundtrack that wasn't running, simply because no-one had noticed it had stopped. The welcome was just too cool for a high street site bound to attract visitors from beyond the usual art audience.
It contributed to a general sense of malaise and a sense that this year, in Glasgow at least, Beck's Futures is failing to do justice to the generation it purports to support.
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