The end of the world as we know it

Even before it opens, the Royal Academy's new show is under attack. But there's more to Apocalypse than squashed popes and tortured Nazis, says Adrian Searle

Adrian Searle
Guardian

Thursday September 21, 2000

There are two ways into Apocalypse, the much-discussed new exhibition at the Royal Academy. You can either walk in, or you can crawl. Norman Rosenthal, co-curator of this exhibition with Max Wigram, invited me to take the latter route. Concertinaed through a grubby, cramped little hatch on my hands and knees, I found myself in a narrow, dank, rubbish-strewn and dimly lit maze. Unsure which way to go, ducking and bungling my way through, I turned and turned again, following what little light there was. Poking my head into a cement-lined cell, I found myself reflected between greasy mirrors, a head in a grim void. Moving on, crab-wise, I finally wormed my way out.

This is not so much a habitation or an art installation as a model of an artist's mind, his ever inward-digging bolt hole. Gregor Schneider's Cellar (1985-99) is a version of the house where he lives in Germany, a house he has altered and goes on altering all the time, constructing within it hidden rooms, false windows, spaces within spaces. It is a series of illusions and traps, a sinister lair. How the artist lives, one can only imagine with reluctance and trepidation. There is apparently a room in Schneider's house whose sound-proofed door can be opened neither from within nor from without, should it slam behind you.

There is a way out here, a stumble into the larger space of the darkened gallery that contains Schneider's structure. Did the air-kiss-and-tell socialites at Monday's exclusive Prada party at the Royal Academy snag their rags on the rough concrete, rip their tights and spoil their creases on the dirty floor of Schneider's contribution to the show? Heavens, I do hope so. Did the conversation pall in the room where the Holocaust happens, the table-top world that Jake and Dinos Chapman have spent two years making, corpse by corpse, violation by violation? I have no doubt. Nor that the cognoscenti parked their expensive behinds on the polished wooden slatted seats of Darren Almond's shiny glass-and-aluminium bus shelters, which are eventually to be installed in Auschwitz. Almond's work is expressive because of its normality, its hygiene, its cleanliness, its sense of forgetting.

Mike Kelley's installation, on the other hand, is a false memory, a reconstruction of the photo of a play in a high-school yearbook. The original photograph is scary in itself, and Kelley has upped the ante, producing a perfect simulacrum of the set - a dingy room containing a rumpled bed, a stupid sculpture on a plinth, an oven with an open door. He has also produced a play, shown on video, whose two participants, closely modelled on the original photo, act out a dark and funny two-hander. Like Endgame, or Steptoe and Son, or Joseph Losey's 1963 film The Servant, the play acts out two lives trapped in the room. It deserves several viewings. It is mannered, twisted, obscene and hilarious. Suicide, Sylvia Plath, ass-fondling, power games and art are its subjects, all done in an early-sitcom style.

Like Jeff Koons's work, and like Richard Prince's paintings with stupid old jokes stencilled on them, Kelley's installation digs into the familiar world of the American banal. Whether Kelley wants to be heir to Edward Albee or David Mamet is another matter. Bleak as hell, made bleaker yet by its hilarity and ponderous cliches, Kelley's work has a lightness that most of the rest of the show tries for but can't quite manage.

In Chris Cunningham's new video installation Flex, life and death and sex are given a booming Aphex Twin soundtrack. Bodies are beautiful, against interstellar smoky blackness. It is terribly compelling and exciting, but where does it leave us? Looking at a woman with her mouth mashed in and red with blood from a man's punch. His foreskin peeled back in close-up, prelude to an atavistic fuck. It is as though Cunningham was trying to live up to the show's full title, Apocalypse: Beauty and Horror in Contemporary Art.

Looking at Wolfgang Tillmans's photo of a rose, a rose bleeding red into its white background, I cannot but find it, in the context of Apocalypse, sick, like Blake's rose, like a bloom of blood on a sheet, the tell-tale fleck in the sputum. Tillmans's virulent towering cloudscapes, updating John Martin's eschato- logical 18th-century paintings, are born of aeroplane-window views, stains in the developing tank. In the age of Aids (from which Tillmans's lover died) maybe his work is about grabbing beauty where you can, holding on to moments, seeing beauty or the poignant in the simplest things. The tenderness of his images shines through.

As does the malaise in Luc Tuymans's paintings. The reddish-green light, the shapelessness of his rendering of pillows, the bare bulbs dangling in Lamproom, the banality of his image of a folkloric festival, are all some way repulsive. His painting of a cloth embroidered with stilted leaves and flowers, tobacco-stained yellow and hopeless (they have, like Lady Bertram's needlepoint in Mansfield Park, little wit and no beauty) points to the same thing: a sort of disgustedness. They deal, in a certain way, with corruption, in which the bourgeois taste for painting is implicated. There is a deceptive relationship between the image and the manner of its articulation, the work's actual subject and its motif.

Maurizio Cattelan's joke sculpture of the Pope, a life-size and realistic sculpture of the pontiff floored by a meteor that appears to have crashed through the glass roof of the gallery, may be found offensive. This act of Cattelan - not God, nor an indifferent universe - is no more troubling, nor funnier, than many of the cartoons one finds in newspapers in Catholic countries. Impeccably staged, it presents a very old kind of apocalyptic vision - of horsemen and fires in the sky, heavenly portents and divine retribution - that we might have thought had disappeared. Yet only this week a Liberal Democrat was promoting a Star Wars offensive against falling rocks and cosmic debris. Plus ça change - Cattelan's work is a see-once-then-forget-it gag. That so much effort has gone into it renders it monumentally absurd.

Tim Noble and Sue Webster's spotlit pile of rubbish bags and detritus casts a shadow image of the artists on the wall - as a prelapsarian couple on a country hillside. Like Mike Leigh's Nuts in May, or Beckett's ever more hopeless peregrinations through bogs and corncrake-inhabited fields, this tableau associates the bucolic with the road to heaven or hell. A road, in this case, paved not with good intentions, but with pure crap. And what are the couple thinking, up there on the hill? I imagine their heads filled with air, or with the endlessly spinning images in Angus Fairhurst's hand-drawn film animation, with its mesmerising cycle of proliferating forms, which wheel, wiggle, multiply and mutate. The forms become overlaid as they turn, ending up with a rotating circle of jumbled black scribble. Being mesmerised can be trance-like and transcendental, which I guess has a kind of beauty in it. Or it can be distressingly repetitive, like an inner voice saying the same thing again and again till you'd chop your own head off to make it stop. Or the whole experience can be merely irritating, and watching Fairhurst becomes a scopophilic version of picking at a scab. His work makes you want to run amok through the galleries, beating other visitors about the head with your Acoustiguide. Time for my medication.

The works that - I can only guess - are intended to show a modern idea of beauty are at best horribly pretty. I was too tall to crouch in a praying position in Mariko Mori's high-tech, translucent pagoda, and had to sit with my knees somewhere up about my ears as though I were straining on a potty. Before me, on a curved, womb-like screen, water rose and fell, rain twinkled, jewelly little shapes flickered and swam. This 3-D multimedia experience (you'll have to queue, probably for hours) is all the more tiresome and pathetic for the effort that has gone into it. It bought out the inner child in me, the one that wants to smash things up.

Ditto Jeff Koons's paintings of kiddy toys in their world of popcorn, plastic smiles and gaily coloured balloons. This is a heaven made of Mylar. It is impossible to know whether Koons is celebrating childhood's world of grimacing, wide-eyed plastic, or if he is telling us something about the horror of our formative, Toys R Us years.

His room comes directly after Hell, the Chapmans' concentration camp diorama, in which mutants run the camp, and the Nazis are the victims. One traces a thread between Koons's infantilism (which makes us realise that children don't inherently like this stuff, but have it imposed on them by adults) and the pre- adolescent grisliness and black humour of the Chapmans' evil world. Hell is a grotesque spectacle of the unconscionable. So too, we must remind ourselves, is Schindler's List. Spielberg's attempt to be sensitive was as meaningless as the Chapmans' impulse to horrify and entertain, which at least has the merit of honesty about our voyeuristic urges. Dealing with the Holocaust as imagery for art, the movies, or literature is inevitably difficult. Hell is saved - if salvation has any meaning here - by the gags, the ludicrousness of it, the impossibility of treating its subject fully and truthfully, without becoming mawkish, mendacious or prurient. The Chapmans' answer is to go too far, which is perhaps not even far enough.

In his 1967 book on the apocalypse, The Sense of an Ending, Frank Kermode observed that it is only the outward signs of apocalypse that have changed with the centuries, and that its threat has always been felt to be imminent. "It is commonplace to talk about our historical situation as uniquely terrible," he wrote, "but can it really be so? Many of [our predecessors] felt as we do. If the evidence looks good to us, so it did to them. Perhaps if we have a terrible privilege, it is merely that we are alive and are going to die, all at once or one at a time." This is either itself a common-place, or it is profound. It only matters if this knowledge helps us live more fully. If this show is anything, it is also either banal or profound. Perhaps it is both, but not always in the way it was intended.

Apocalypse is at the Royal Academy, London W1 (020-7300 8000), from Saturday to December 15.