New Contemporaries is an important show, one of the few genuinely helpful exhibitions in the art calendar.
Started in 1949 and toured annually around Britain, it presents a selection of work by artists at the beginning of their careers, either still at art school or just graduated. Its value lies in the evidence it provides of the directions in which young art is heading and, in the good years, in unearthing the talents in a generation. David Hockney, Antony Gormley, Helen Chadwick and Damien Hirst all showed at New Contemporaries.
But being important is not the same thing as being good, and most years this venerable event offers a confused and messy experience. This year’s incarnation continues that tradition, although if you drink a pint of vodka before going in and squint, you might perhaps imagine more coherence than usual and recognise a shared ambition to think interestingly about the world.
The show is peripatetic and pops up all over Britain. This year’s version has returned to one of its signature locations, the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, where it has had some of its best years. In recent times the ICA has largely given up on the visual arts and turned itself into a chatting venue for film buffs and literati. It is a loss. There is a genuine need in London for a location that offers something grittier and fresher than the yuppie galleries and enlarged museums.
So it is good to see the latest New Contemporaries being fresh and gritty in flashes, while remaining as messy, inchoate and jejune as ever. It is what young art and the ICA are for.
A useful thing to notice here is the materials young artists are using. It is always telling. The tedious lament that echoes annually around the Turner prize — “Where have all the paintings gone?” — fails to take into account the ludicrous price of oil paints today. A big tube of lapis lazuli blue from Michael Harding retails at £480. A decent tube of cadmium red costs £159. To be an oil painter in 2025 you need to be a merchant banker, not an art student.
So, not surprisingly, New Contemporaries is low on painting and high on homemade assemblage, messy stuff from the skip, conceptual trickery and the cheapest, handiest art school material of all — video. All you need to make video art is an iPhone, and off you go.
The ICA has grouped most of it in a dark room in the lower galleries where you can skip from seat to seat like someone playing Musical Chairs. The problem with video art is, of course, the time it takes to watch it. Those of us who love art for its power to summarise can only sit there grudgingly waiting for a climax that never comes.
Fergus Carmichael’s Rhadinace, a video lament on the passing of the oil rigs in northern Scotland, is particularly laborious and slow. As the rain falls and the day passes, the inhabitants of a grim oil rig town gather at the water’s edge and build a symbolic bonfire to say goodbye to a spooky and toxic past. The sentiments being expressed are commendable — the despoiling of the earth is one of the chief themes across the show — but the half-hour of misery inflicted on us by Carmichael’s gloomy video feels like time stolen from life.
Much more cleverly and brightly, on the same sort of subject, Tom Fairlamb’s The Current Current of Current is a complex piece of gadgetry hanging from the roof, which ends on a pool of artificial fish twitching creepily on the floor. Nothing specific is being said about the unhealthiness of fish farms or the toxic presence of electric cables in the sea, but those are the things you are prompted to think about.
Art made out of rubbish, a predictable resource for the cash-starved art student, is as popular as ever. Anna Howard decorates old cardboard boxes with designs adapted from The Grammar of Ornament, Owen Jones’s classic 1856 manual of world design. Sara Graça gives us a beaded curtain hung with non-beaded objects that demand to be leaned into and examined.
I liked Sophie Lloyd’s cartoon figures sitting humorously on cartoon plates. They are made out of what looks like stained glass but turns out to be sugar and lead pretending to be stained glass. The artist’s aim, I read, is to comment on “the insatiable nature of passive media consumption” and to lament how it has turned us into “dopamine junkies and influencers”. I didn’t get any of that. But I admired the jocular inventiveness of the stained-glass sugar dolls.
The standout work in the show is another video: I Love You, Life. I Hope It’s Great Again by Yang Zou, one of a notable number of Chinese students included here, because that’s where the money is in art schools today.
Set mostly on the Trans-Siberian railway, his fascinating film tells the story of a journey he made from China to Russia. His ambition was to follow in the footsteps of his uncle, who had met a Russian girl, fallen in love with her and absconded to the Soviet Union, causing shame and anger in his Chinese family.
The journey on the Trans-Siberian train is recorded in intimate detail and offers rare insights into everyday Russian life. We are so used to seeing front-page Russia on the news, it is genuinely informative to go behind the headlines and feel the lives of everyday folk. The film even manages to conjure up a surprise ending.
Yang Zou too has fallen for a Russian girl. And is on his way to see her.
New Contemporaries is at the ICA, London, to Mar 23