A Small Heatwave in Wolverhampton

Heatwave, takes its title from the British Situatonist International movement referencing original work of May 68 and current practice.' The reference to the British Situationist Intemational in the title is misleading (Heatwave had a short lived 'reladonship' with SI) and none of the older artists in this exhibition, Terry Atkinson, David Bainbridge, Lindsay Anderson, Jenny Holzer were members of SI. Only two of the works on display: Bainbridge's video 'Hardware (Ml)' and Lindsay Anderson's film 'If', which is projected in a corner of the gallery, are from 1968. Current practice is represented by a clutch of yBa's (David Burrows, Lucy Gunning, Hypgnosis, Calli Travlos, Gavin Turk, Mark Wallinger)

Nevertheless the bringing together of two generations of artists working with 'attitude to revolutionary tradition' - however that is defined - begins to open up sum interesting aspects of post - 68 British art. Not least of which is the pairing of two of the founding members of Art and Language (Atkinson and Bainbridge) which suggests the need for a revision of A & L diat corrects die version offered by Harrison and others. For whilst Atkinson has continued since die 60's to exhibit and publish widely, Bainbridge like the other progenitor of Art and Language, Harold Hurrel (who is not included in dlls show) have to all intents taken a dormant position/role.

Bainbridge's 'Mai' 1998, displays two watercolour drawings and text; the images of work/workers in a brick works is autobiographical; die text, an enlarged reproduction and call to action by die International Trade Union Movement against the Multinational Agreement on Investment (M.A.I.), (issued Berlin, 1998) serves to locate Bainbridge's practice firmly in the unfashionable and everyday. Despite the spectacle, spin and sensation die proletariat (what an unfashionable word) are still with us trapped in a world of commodity production, and consumption and low pay.

In 'Language on Art' by Calli Travlos the videoed interviews run for 1 hour on die question 'what is the function of art?' Bainbridge parry's the question with enquiries about die interviewers (Calli) status and intentions: 'Who are you?... and 'I don't speak to journalists.' In a spin dominated business, Bainbridge's refusal of die oxygen of publicity; his distrust of journalists and the mutual lubricating of career and position is timely and overdue. Principled resistance to the wave of 'Blairite - cool Brittania' - and the seeming limitless licence of yBa's inflexion on and about the world brings one up short.

David Bainbridge's recently rediscovered film/video of Ml, shown here for the first time, is of an interactive sculpture proceeding through the various forms of interaction its programme allows as its state changes according to the activity of the gallery visitor. In Ml and 'The Wild Think' 1966, by Terry Atkinson, an eight page 'novella' (with one page missing) practice that was still ostensibly grounded in the visual arts is becoming increasingly porous to influences from other areas. The philosophical input is evident and so as Bainbridge notes is the debt owed to the development of Tottenham Court Road as a retail centre for new and used electrical, electronic, electromechanical and electro hydraulic components and devices.

The notes on Ml in Art and Language, Vol 1, No 1, predicate the situation of an alien being from another galaxy being invited by a gallery entrepreneur to 'show some work'. Coming •from another culture that knows no art to speak of he seeks the brocards operative for earth-artists. ... 'Upon reflection however, it occurs to him that a fundamental condition operative in all the galleries he visited was the lassez alter manner in which the visitors were allowed to make their encounters of the art-works.'

Encounters/encountering is a favourite strategy of the yBa's in this show. Burrows, Gunning and Wallinger exploit expectation and misunderstanding in different degree so that encountering their work is like bumping unexpectedly into a frightening drunk, bellowing incoherently, who is merely asking for a light.

In 'My favourite personalities, (Bubble Gum Portraits)' David Burrows exploit presentation and the throw away. Two large photographs of the dismembered heads, sculpted from chewing gum, of Tony, Cherie and George Michael respectively are presented on large red wool covered panels that adds a macabre touch. Leaning slightly angled against the gallery wall the panels generate a sense of unease - today's 'heroes', tomorrow a minor impediment sticking to the bottom of a shoe. The original sculptures, I was told, are being kept in the school office giving out a sweet smell and exuding a permanent Blairite sheen.

Lucy Gunning's seven and a half minute video, 'Climbing around my room', 1993 is positioned at the entry to the University Law Lecture Theatre. The exhibit appears to show that Gunning is not climbing around the furniture and fittings of her room but actually is traversing and finger wedging herself around the inside of the television screen itself. Press releases from the Waiting Room are becoming collector's items. The first, promoting the inaugural exhibition of second generation yBa's, was slipped to Private Eye's 'pseuds comer'. The guffaws around the University however became muted when the Waiting Room, in something of a coup, was the first gallery to exhibit Gillian Wearing following her Turner prize award. The unease and the on camera shuffling of the participants dressed in police uniform in Wearing's 'Sixty Minute Silence' reflected institutional discomfort.

The Waiting Room - with its veneered ceiling amid the concrete patios of the University's 70's brutalism - overlooking the Wolverhampton ring road is a setting that has its attraction:

(Nanterre?) The darkened interior (all the better for seeing the videos) creates an atmosphere that is furtive, temporary and elusive. This is the setting for yBa and its progenitors, huddled like an early grouping of Christians attempting in a hostile environment to keep the faith alive. As the exhibition notes conclude: 'Heatwave haunts the promise of the Modem, with its hopes for the unexpected, new and better revealing a delusional pathos of the future'. Under the contemporary conditioning that all but overwhelms. May 1968 has become a memory. Mass education has reinstated with a vengeance the 'old space' of traditional approaches and the victory of the purely visual: Heatwave just serves to remind that there is still under the tarmac, the beach.

John Myers is a Midlands based lecturer and artist.