In the international cycle of exhibitions, triennials are curious hybrids. On the one hand, they represent a departure from the biennials that provide an update, within a specific local context, of current international output for an equally international audience, since they require a longer period of research and development. On the other hand, they follow each other in such rapid succession that they cannot provide the same detached, retrospective review of trends and directions in contemporary art as, say, Documenta and the British Art Show, which take place every five years, or the presentations of the Sculpture Project in Münster, which are a full decade apart. The Tate Triennial is, moreover, a very recent newcomer to this genre of exhibition, still establishing its identity as a showcase for British art, the first instalment, Intelligence, having been held in 2000, and the second, Days Like These, in 2003.

However, because the Tate Triennial is held by an art institution that is actively involved in collecting, it has the great advantage of being able to reflect, at regular intervals, on the concerns and conditions of current art production, especially trends in Britain. Tate also has the benefit of being able to present the exhibition within the larger context of the museum's own collection, which provides a constant source for the reinterpretation, reiteration and reconsideration of earlier works.

This sits particularly well with the main focus of the approach taken by many of the artists in this exhibition. For in current art production there is a distinct tendency towards the reusing or recasting of cultural materials, whether from art history, film, music, architecture and design, or from theoretical and socio-political domains. Such an approach encompasses painting, sculpture, photography, drawing and performance. This Tate Triennial has therefore been configured around the themes of appropriation and repetition. While these are well-recognised strategies most commonly associated with postmodernism, the Tate Triennial identifies a significant reinvigoration and transformation of such processes in current practice. Artists today are forging new ways of making sense of reality, reworking ideas of authenticity, directness and social relevance, looking again into art practices that emerged in the previous century. We have invited artists representing several generations – including Peter Doig, Douglas Gordon and Liam Gillick, who participated in the previous two triennials – to partake in the exhibition, all of whom explore these themes in one way or another and whose work we regard as providing important points of reference for the younger generation.

However, this does not mean that a linear arrangement underlies the exhibition. On the contrary, the various approaches to the use of reference material can be detected across the different generations of artists represented in the show. The subjective and formal explorations of the older artists, and their transformation of existing imagery, forge a link with many of the younger participants. Ian Hamilton Finlay's layering of philosophical ideas, cultural and classical forms with the re-politicising of images, for example, has certain affinities with the works of, say, Michael Fullerton (who paints contemporary figures in the style of Thomas Gainsborough), and even with the remix of images, topics and practices in the installations, objects, films and performances of Cerith Wyn Evans. John Stezaker's serial collages, aimed at a 'reparation' of modernist deconstructions, create points of reference with the all-inclusive, anti-hierarchical works of Djordje Ozbolt, or with Luke Fowler's use of archive material to explore the history of the English composer Cornelius Cardew's Scratch Orchestra. Peter Doig's paintings – constructed from a mixture of his own photographs, found images and references from art history, film and popular culture – can be linked to and contrasted with the reactivation of romanticism in Christopher Orr's bleak and barren renditions of the sublime. By transferring her radical exploration of production conditions in the porn industry to the context of art, Cosey Fanni Tutti shows numerous affinities with the inherently critical parallel activities of such artists as Liam Gillick and Lucy McKenzie. The latter borrows democratically from any number of sources to find new forms of representation, while Gillick's radical fictionalisation of historical facts points towards a renewed political awareness in artistic practice. In Muzi Quawson's photographic documentation of a family in Woodstock, meanwhile, historical 'reality' itself is shown to be a form of fictionalisation. And in addition to these inter-referential loops and repetitions, another form of repetition constitutes an important aspect: the revisiting of an artist's own works. In his installation and related performance, for example, Marc Camille Chaimowicz brings works first made in the 1970s partly into the present tense by inserting new elements in combination with slides and photographs documenting that past.

Of course, repetition is not in itself new to art history, or to cultural practice in general. Its forms have ranged from the classic reiteration of motifs, on a spectrum between tribute and pastiche; from collage, montage and appropriation to sampling, file-sharing, morphing and digital reproduction. No less varied than the types of repetition themselves are the ways in which they have been applied as strategies throughout the course of art history. These approaches may take the form of highlighting existing codes or revealing the innate artifice of a work in order to deconstruct or demystify it as an object. They may be used as a counterpoint to subjective formulations, as a form of de-identification and thus of critical praxis, as a subversion of power structures, or as a critique of institutions and the conditions under which art and culture are produced. They may also be used as a multiplication or extension of self-identity.

Many of the artists in Tate Triennial combine visual codes and imagery from competing rather than connecting sources. Rebecca Warren, for example, draws from a variety of influences, ranging from Edgar Degas to Helmut Newton and Robert Crumb, to create roughly- modelled clay figures that explore our understanding of the figurative ideal. Nicole Wermers similarly adopts a combination of styles to create her hybrid forms. In the work of Enrico David, Daria Martin and Alan Michael, many historical versions of repetition have been reactivated in the sense that they have been reloaded with topical narratives and ways of reading. This occurs within a diverse conceptual framework that often employs not just one aspect of repetition but several. David's practice, for example, encompasses traditional artistic media such as bronze casting or painting in tandem with craft practices such as marquetry, book- binding or the design of a printed silk scarf, while Martin refers to Russian Constructivism and the works of Oskar Schlemmer and Sonia Delauney. Michael's borrowings move without constraint between different painting styles, contemporary film and the world of fashion. These appropriated forms are adapted into a personal vocabulary that both reflects and differs from traditional techniques.

All of this begs the question as to whether these current strategies of repetition constitute a nostalgic look back to the ideas of early modernism, or if they have more in common with postmodern theories and the aesthetics of appropriation that emerged at the end of the twentieth century. It may be, for example, that the interest in spiritualism, romanticism and counter-cultures exhibited by artists like Orr in his melancholy landscape paintings, or Olivia Plender in her revisitation of nineteenth-century spiritualism, can be seen as a bid to take up where the unfinished revolutionary projects of modernism and the social utopias of the early twentieth century left off. The cross-pollination of the formal syntax of modernism engaged by David, Ryan Gander, or Eva Rothschild in her elemental abstract sculptures, could be seen in a similar light. Or it may be that the strategies adopted by artists such as Cosey Fanni Tutti, Gander's self-referential commentary, or Tino Sehgal's insertion of actors into the gallery, can be considered part of the tradition aimed at a revision or transformation of given structures, such as the institutional critiques of the 1980 and 1990s. Angela Bulloch's use of forms and narratives from different fields such as art, film and design, certainly subverts systems of order and control, investing them with a poetic lyricism while at the same time exposing how society is constructed and regulated.

In an important sense, however, neither theory is applicable. For what seems clear is that the approaches to reference, appropriation and revision that informed twentieth- century art are now being constructively applied to the present-day situation in a way that is as distinct from pastiche or tribute as it is from collage and montage and even from postmodernist quotation. The artists in this exhibition are not merely wallowing in a withdrawal into the realm of the personal, the subjective and the retro-loving. Nor are they indulging in a collective show of earnestness that does little more than pay lip-service to issues surrounding today's chaotic and global political climate. Influenced by the transformation of society and daily life in general, they are offering new and different models for serious social and political engagement.

Since these new strategies of repetition weave a fabric in which the art form can no longer be easily distinguished from reality, nor filtered communication differentiated from authenticity, artistic approaches that critique the difference between media, reality and systems of reference may now be obsolete. Hence, in dealing with the world's many and diverse interfaces, artists are deploying repetition as a tool, rather than as a finished product. What is undergoing revision here is not the object itself, but the way in which it is interpreted – with all the concomitant ideals, utopias and meanings.

In a publication on the American artist Sturtevant, whose replicas of classic modern artworks make her one of the most radical exponents of repetition, Udo Kittelman neatly encapsulates the approach taken by the artists in this exhibition. 'The brutal truth of the work is that it is not copy [sic].' ¹ She uses originals, he writes, 'as a source and a catalyst ... to expand and develop our current notions of aesthetics ... and open space for new thinking.' ² As the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard expressed it in his work Repetition of 1843: 'that which is repeated has been – otherwise it would not be repeated – but the very fact that it has been makes the repetition something new.' ³ He also pointed out that 'If one does not have the category of recollection or of repetition, all life dissolves into an empty, meaningless noise.' ⁴ The work in the Tate Triennial is not about making postmodern gestures of irony, wit or caricature; it is about finding new narratives within hegemonic codes and inventing fresh meanings within the noise of modern life.

Beatrix Ruf

Translation: flett–schelbert