feeling listless

Art Sometimes the only reaction to an exhibition is ‘I don’t get it.’ More often than not it’s within a contemporary art installation, but every now and then can be a retrospective. While it’s possible to divine some talent in Paul Nash (Tate Liverpool until 19th October 2003), and in some places that his technique was quite defined, the overall feeling of this retrospective is the sheer blandness on display. The most effective works are those created during The Great War, in particular one large canvas filled with the anger of war. There is also a small display of pen landscapes from the 1920s that are interesting in a telephone doodle sort of way. But everything else seems lost in pastel shades; the images feel flat and lifeless, disjointed and lacking in vividity.

But parts of the exhibition do stand out. The eye is immediately drawn to the photographs which sit in the corners of some room. The basis of the paintings on display, they have a technique and interest that is missing from elsewhere. They are hardly mentioned in the accompanying leaflet but are worth hunting out, especially a shot of some abstract stones piled on a carpet on the roof of a car. It’s startling, surreal and unexpected and disappointing that space couldn’t have been found for more of this work.

Once you’ve seen the photos, it would be worth making a beeline for the video room in which a series of connected film work is on display. Here we find the recently remade Night Mail, the classic short about a postal train journeying from Glasgow to London (‘This is the night mail, crossing the border, bringing the check and postal order …’) – the sound quality of the print is awful, so Auden’s words are shattered, but the images are amazing, and Benjamin Britain’s music is intact. Also worth seeing is the fabulously dated Out of Chaos, an early documentary about war artists with footage of the National Gallery in 1942. It has one of those narrations filled with rhetorical questions (‘Do you think this couple come here very often?’) It’s ironic that in an exhibition of painting, the examples of newer forms are those which you will remember most.