Written by Miquette Roberts
Page 1

This text is also available as a downloadable Word Document (without the images).

By its title alone, this exhibition sets out to be provocative. The very word 'intelligence' might make us think of IQ tests, elitism, or even espionage. Are the artists in this show cleverer than us? Should we be on the defensive or is the work empowering? Does it make us aware of the range of possibilities encompassed by the notion of intelligence? In the following pages we aim to help you explore these questions.

For whom is the pack intended?
The notes that follow can be used by teachers to prepare a visit, or photocopied for GCSE and A-level students to use during their visit.

How should it be used?
It is divided into two sections. The first is a set of questions to debate while going round the exhibition. It is much more fun discussing what is art and what might not be art with someone else, so we suggest students walk round in small groups, making sure they stop regularly for discussion. Encourage them to talk amongst themselves, starting off simply by describing what they notice. From there they will naturally move on to talk about possible meanings. The second section develops each of the questions. You can read it through or use it selectively.

Some questions to think about as you go round the exhibition

• What is meant by Intelligence?
• Can you find the new ingredients in Intelligence: New British Art 2000?
• Do you think an artist should also be the maker of the work? Can you find out/guess which works were made to the artist's orders rather than by his/her own hands? Do you think such information should be included in the display? If the artist is originator but not maker, should he acknowledge those who make the work for him?
• What new materials are being used today? Do you think that art can be made of anything? Words, film, sound, even things that are likely to decay soon?
• How can you define the difference between two objects made of the same material, one of which has an everyday function while the other is declared art? (e.g. film in the cinema/film as art)
• What ideas can you find expressed in the art? Which ones interest you most?

Forming your conclusions
Are there any things which you feel are categorically not art? Why not? (Thinking about the answer to this question may help you define what art is. Try to balance negative with positive. Compare an exhibit you like with one you don't. What makes the first one art for you? What has it got which the other lacks?) Should some of the exhibits not have been allowed into an art gallery? What should a gallery contain? If the group is divided between some who like and some who are critical, suggest a short role play with one person playing the artist defending the work, while the other is the critic. Does this game help both camps achieve greater understanding? Can liking or disliking a work really be considered a viable basis for critical enquiry? Does the "I know what I like" attitude prevent the kind of open-minded questioning which can lead to eventual appreciation?

Thinking about Intelligence in greater depth
What follows can be used either as preparation for your visit or to explore some of the issues further once you have seen the exhibition.

1. What is meant by the title Intelligence?

Artists' intelligence/our intelligence
All art must be intelligent, surely, or it would be a disposable, forgettable commodity. Any worthwhile art, which will survive the test of time, must by definition be intelligent. That is to say that it will either embody ideas or point them out for the viewer to explore. This seems like common sense, but in some contemporary art it is difficult to find meaning, or to know where to look for it. Does that mean that we should condemn it? Or have we simply not understood, or been insufficiently 'intelligent'?

Feeling challenged by art
Is there a connection between the concept of intelligence and New British Art 2000? Does the title imply that Intelligence is a new ingredient in the art of today, which did not exist previously? Is it about the artists' intelligence or ours (as the viewers)? In both cases, we may feel challenged. If it is a matter of the artists being more intelligent than they were in the past, will we be clever enough to understand their work? Or is the boot on the other foot? Are the artists and curators suggesting that they are an intellectual elite, who care little whether we share their esoteric interests? Are we being excluded? Do we care? The possibility of our reacting in this way could explain some public hostility to contemporary art, the 'who do they think they are?' factor. Sarah Lucas says, 'I believe the public does like art, and their stance against it is part of how they like it, they enjoy having a go at it.' Do you agree with her? Do you protest against 'art bollocks' yourself or do you know others who do?

Are we intelligent in our viewing? (The 'twenty second' phenomenon)
This is about the length of time surveys have revealed that visitors usually take to look at an artwork. Stopping for twenty seconds is not much different from walking very slowly along the street. How much can we really assimilate in such a short time? Probably just enough for "the brain to discount the continual changes and extract from them only that which is necessary for it to be able to categorise objects," according to neurobiologist Semir Zeki. If you are looking at a painting by Turner, for example, twenty seconds is long enough to notice that it is a beautiful landscape, in the same way that you might feel a momentary thrill at seeing a poster of an exotic location, featuring sun and sand, on the underground. The moment passes and is quickly forgotten. Like the work of all great artists, Turner's paintings operate at many different levels. His beautiful landscape has been chosen to express certain ideas which will only reveal themselves to us slowly as we look and ponder the significance of what we see. One way of interpreting the use of the exhibition title Intelligence may be that this is a demand on us, the viewers. The work of art can only succeed if the creativity of the artist is met by a creative response in us. Is this a legitimate view? Our individual response will differ, depending on what we bring to the artwork. In looking, we each bring our personal story to bear on the stories contained within the artwork.

Does it help or is it necessary to read about art in order to appreciate it? Or is it visual knowledge and understanding that we must cultivate? If you are able to see several examples of an artist's work, will it help you pick out the themes which matter most to him or her?

The process of looking and thinking
There are several stages involved in looking at and assimilating a work of art. The first crucial stage is engaging with it in order to find out more. In traditional oil paintings, colour plays an important part in arresting our attention by attracting us to the work. When we move through a gallery we are likely to go straight to those works whose colour composition seems to call us to them. If that initial appeal is not present, we may move on and the artist will have lost one viewer. This exhibition contains very few paintings. Certain artists purposely exclude the 'come over here' strategy. In some cases we have to be quite alert to notice that an artist has made an intervention at all. This exhibition does make demands on us. It asks us to be very conscious of the relationship between the space, the art object and us, to forego the sensuous appeal of oil paint and demands that we think about what is there and what it might mean. Intelligence is all about such questioning in response to the artist's questioning.

Giving the exhibits time
To be intelligent in Intelligence, we must give the exhibits time and thought. It's not fair to criticise if you haven't thought about what the artist is trying to say. Talking recently on television, Tate Director, Nicholas Serota, said he often initially registered as an irritant works that were later bought for the Tate Collection. He first thought, 'this is not art'. But then, having looked carefully at the work and questioned it in his mind, he waited. Those works which would eventually be acquired for the gallery were ones which kept teasing his mind. He found that he could not forget them. Try this test yourselves. See which pieces you are still discussing with your friends in a week's time.

2. What are the new ingredients in the work?

Is the shock factor something new in art?
Recent art has often made headlines in the newspapers, with Mark Quinn's frozen head made with his own blood, Damien Hirst's dead animals preserved in formaldehyde and Marcus Harvey's Myra Hindley painting, to mention a few examples. There is nothing new in art possessing shock value. Hostility to the Impressionists is perhaps the most famous example of artists whose ideas appear to have been ahead of their time. Their ideas, which appeared so shocking at first, are now so well accepted and integrated into our culture that they have almost lost their punch. Art that shocks is not new in itself. What is new is the increasing importance of the media - advertising and television, for instance - in our culture. Both trade on shock as a way of selling their products. The tabloids enjoy whipping up so-called art scandals. Charles Saatchi, famous as collector and promoter of a group who became known as Young British Artists, works in advertising and collects the work of artists who often shock us into thinking. Today's artists have grown up in this environment. Their work often interacts with advertising, being influenced by it and influencing it. Gillian Wearing's Signs that say what you want them to say not signs that say what someone else wants you to say (1992-3) continues to inspire today's advertisers, despite her protests at their plagiarism. In it, people were photographed holding up signs describing their inner feelings.

3. Is the artist as shaper of knowledge rather than producer new?

The background to the artist/craftsman debate
All Turner's ideas are expressed by the artist's manipulation of a paintbrush, his choice of colours, his composition. His hand transferred the ideas from his brain on to the canvas. The artists Alan Johnston and Richard Wright, in this exhibition, push themselves to extreme limits when making their marks, which are obliterated at the end of the show. The film-makers do their own editing, which is a manual skill, although many rely on the expertise of others when dealing with other aspects of the process. For other artists, however, theirs are the ideas but they employ other people to execute the work. Does this bother you? Do you feel that being an artist means being a craftsman as well? You may think that it is no good having an idea if you cannot realise it yourself, because it is only by experimentation that you will make discoveries/find limitations which themselves will contribute to the final appearance of the work. The discovery of difficulties through the process of making can produce the creative stimulus to overcome hurdles or to be guided by them to look in another direction. Yet throughout the history of art there has been a tradition whereby an artist can be principally an originator, in charge of a team which executes the physical labour for him. In our own time it has been common practice, from Henry Moore to Damien Hirst. Moore made small maquettes as a guide to his assistants who created the final piece of sculpture much enlarged. Recently Damien Hirst gave orders for a children's toy, originally produced by Humbrol, to be greatly enlarged. He gave it a name 'Hymn', and hey presto, it was transformed into a work of art (although he is being sued by the original creator). The qualities of a small object are completely transformed when it is remade on a gigantic scale but it may be impossible to determine in advance exactly what the difference will be. In her recent display in the Duveen galleries, Mona Hatoum clearly thought that the manufacture of an enormous Mouli-Julienne kitchen gadget would transform it from a tame piece of domestic equipment to something terrifying, but scale in itself does not necessarily make for terror. The rounded shapes and associations with the pleasures of making food may produce a different sensation.

Thinking rather than making
The justification for relying on others to carry out your ideas is that it is the thought that matters. Thought processes and ideas are highlighted in this exhibition. Is it possible to tell which artists have actually hand-made their art? Should they acknowledge their craftsmen assistants as co-authors of the work? You have to be successful in order to be able to pay your craftsmen. This means that the Damien Hirsts of today were craftsmen until they could afford to pay others. This can be their justification. They have gained the knowledge of materials, processes and skills, they feel, to allow them to conceive of the finished work which others will realise on their behalf. Do you agree with them?

Making as much as thinking: Hierarchies in Art (Sarah Lucas, Jeremy Deller and Alan Kane)
Sarah Lucas describes the London, working class community she grew up in as one 'where art was only recognised as such if it demonstrated dexterity, skill and time-consuming labour'. Is the belief in craft skills class-based? Sarah Lucas implies that it is. Is its antithesis an upper-class arrogance that says that only the thought process matters? Sarah Lucas creates a new, ironic version of craft when she spends hours covering objects (such as cars - see Life's a Drag Organs in this exhibition - and lifebelts) with cigarettes. A century ago she might have spent an equivalent amount of time stitching embroidery with coloured threads. Both activities are time consuming and demand a certain amount of skill. Lynn Barber described Sarah Lucas' laborious process in an article in The Observer. 'She puts a smear of Uhu glue along the cigarette then bends it slightly to fit the curve of the lifejacket and sticks it down. Sometimes, when she comes to the end of a row, she cuts the cigarette with a scalpel to fit. In the two hours I am with her, she only finishes about three rows although she is working steadily all the time.' Part of the reason why we may admire an old embroidered sampler is that it has stood the test of time. The embroidery decays slowly whereas the cigarettes are unlikely to retain their pristine appearance for long. This is fitting, as they are themselves emblems of a gradual decay into death and the cars that they cover can cause instant death.

Sarah Lucas Life's a Drag Organs (detail) 1998 2 burnt cars, cigarettes, glue © Sarah Lucas, courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London

There still exist embroiderers in the present day, who work in a traditional way, as if the world of cars and cigarettes did not exist. They bring a sense of history continued, unchanged and uncriticised, into the present. History is the stuff of museums, but has traditional craft a place in an art gallery? This is the kind of enquiry which informs the work of Jeremy Deller and Alan Kane in their Introduction to Folk Archive 2000. They see the continuation and adaptation of traditional skills of craftmaking into the twenty-first century as a heroic endeavour which should be celebrated. It is authentic culture with significance for individuals and communities - a riposte to the corporate culture of the Dome, for instance. They force us to question attitudes whereby we compartmentalise different activities, seeing craft as separate and inferior to 'fine' art while also making distinctions between craft and kitsch. Deller and Kane force us to consider and question such pigeonholing by juxtaposing activities normally seen as utterly distinct. On another occasion, they have focussed on the British brass bands which originally came into being in mining communities. The coalmines have closed but the bands remain, like phantoms of another age. Jeremy Deller asked the brass band to play contemporary acid house music, thereby bringing about a meeting of what might seem like alien cultures. Art involves constant appraisal of the past, matching and contrasting it to the present. Deller's work has been described as walking 'a fine line, stepping up almost to the brink of mockery'. On balance, the two artists' work is more about celebrating the creativity of individuals working against the uniformity of mass consumer culture. But what do you think? Are brass bands and acid house art or should they be placed back into their traditional roles?

4. What new materials are being used today?

Artists have always been interested in the new. The Pre-Raphaelites, for instance, used new pigments created with chemical dyes as well as vying with the new art of photography. But art for them meant painting and sculpture. Now it can be film and video or even a ball of crushed paper. Deller and Kane's boundary breaking is an important feature of today's art in which words, sounds and films can step out of their watertight compartments. The artist assumes the right to plunder the world of any material at all in order to make art. Very often his or her intervention is minimal.

Using Words to make Art (Douglas Gordon)
Douglas Gordon does not invent his subject, he finds it ready-made. In List of Names, first made in 1990, he used 1,440 other people's names, and inscribed them around the gallery walls. They were names of all the people he had ever known. In 2000, ten years later, the list comprises just over 3,000 names. Some of the original ones have gone, those belonging to people whom he no longer remembers or forgets at the point of making. Others have been added. A list of names can only become art if the viewer collaborates with the artist. It needs our involvement to become art but how do we make it so? Think how the words affect you? Do you find yourself picking out some of the names, famous ones, and wondering whether the artist really knows them? Do they stand out on the wall like focal points animating the pattern of otherwise 'dead' words? Are there any relationships apparent between the names, perhaps more of one gender than the other? Do you think that a name has a flavour to it, does it immediately conjure up a person? Think about the names of your friends. Do they fit them well or are there some which seem mismatches?

After a while, if you lived in this room, would you forget all about the words, would they become as invisible to you as wallpaper, or would you feel claustrophobic, as if surrounded by chattering people who would not go away?

Does the idea of a list of names have other associations for you, such as the lists of people to be remembered in prayer, or names on a war memorial? Does this list have something of the finality of death about it? Would you like to make your own list of names? Which names would you choose? Can you think of another way of making a visual address book?

Following the legacy of Marcel Duchamp, naming is part of this exhibition, making the decision to name something as art, which could be considered something other. Eventually - but not too quickly! - you will decide in your own mind which of the exhibits you will name art.

Using Speech to make Art (William Furlong)
Many years ago William Furlong began investigating people's speech. He collected and edited conversations by artists, curators and writers on audio tape. At that point, he was recording history, not making art. He found himself increasingly fascinated by the way people express themselves as well as by what they say and, gradually, he realised that his investigations into speech could become works of art in their own right. From listening to others talk, he would create his own sound patterns. His identity had changed. He had started out as a researcher and turned into an artist. How had this happened? Mainly through his decision. By naming his activity art rather than history.

His installation is placed in the last room. It is made up of recordings of the artists represented in the exhibition. You can compare the artists' vision with how you experienced the work. Spend some of the time observing the way the artists express themselves. What can you deduce about their personality? Is the installation art? Or do you think that Furlong is a magpie plundering other people's jewels and calling them his own?

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