Faces In The Crowd
Faces In The Crowd: Picturing Modern Life From Manet To Today
In the 12 decades between Manet's painting of a polite bourgeois crowd in Masked Ball At The Opera, in 1873, and Andreas Gursky's 1998 shot of a seething dance crowd at an open air festival, the figure in modern art has been subjected to various assaults. It has been abstracted, fragmented, blurred and exposed in all its vulnerable abjectness. And that's just in painting.
With the advent of performance and video art, the figure, usually the artist's own, has been humiliated and attacked, literally shot at, smeared with blood and deprived of air and sustenance. Take Paul McCarthy's Class Fool, in which the artist subjects his own soiled body to a series of brutally sexualised acts as the intimate filmed audience look on. It is as painful to watch the discomfort of these onlookers as it is to observe the disturbing spectacle.
Just as in Manet's masked ball, the face in 20th-century art has also been variously disguised, as the artist attempts to come to terms with a new, often alienated, selfawareness. Duchamp as his feminine alter ego Rose Selavy for instance, or Cindy Sherman, and her predecessor Claude Cahun. While the story of modern art can be told in innumerable ways, we know it's a story that's inextricably bound up with the urban experience. With almost 100 featured artists, this exhibition tells one strand of modern art's evolution, and tells it in a powerful and intelligent way. It is, at times, deeply affecting.
Until Mar 6, Whitechapel Gallery, Whitechapel High Street E1,
Tue to Sun 11am to 6pm (Thu to 9pm), £8.50, £4.50 concs.
Tel: 020 7522 7878. Tube: Aldgate East
