Sorcha Dallas

If Modernism has been back in architecture for two decades or so, it is just now hitting the art world. For architecture, the return to Modernism meant back to business: pragmatic form without the social promises of the early and mid-twentieth-century avant-gardes. For the French theorist and curator of Tate Britain’s fourth Triennial in London Nicolas Bourriaud it means that we have left the ironies and cynical reason of Postmodernism in the dust and are welcoming a new universalism and bevy of artists committed to being global creoles. The work of Mr. Bourriaud’s “altermodern,” his neologism and the name of the Triennial, is often socially responsible, very PC, and interactive, or what Mr. Bourriaud once called “relational.”

Curated by young Brit local James Cope, Being and Nothingness offers another strain of Modernism’s return, what I would like to call “neo-modern.” In contrast to Mr. Bourriaud’s altermodern, which promises globalism, Mr. Cope’s neo-modern is decisively English in flavor, with work by seven artists – Kate Atkin, Martin Boyce, Henry Coombes, Edward Kay, George Henry Longly, Toby Paterson, and Clare Stephenson – hailing from the UK. The neo-modern recapitulates the soul searching, skin writhing existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre, the last systematic philosopher in a lineage of moderns that began with Aristotle and hit a high point with Immanuel Kant in the eighteenth century. Mr. Cope has borrowed the name of the show from Mr. Sartre’s 1943 tome on phenomenology.

The art in the exhibition, while otherwise disparate, comes together in a dissonant chord of neo-modernist vogue. In short, the work and its installation look modern. One might confuse a black-and-white photograph of the show for an exhibition on the Upper West Side of New York, Left Bank of Paris, or at the ICA in London circa 1948. A rusted steel mobile by Martin Boyce is very Calderesque; Clare Stephenson’s Xerox collages are provocative throw-backs to Hannah Hoch; Edward Kay’s trilogy of paintings, Matriarch, Wisechild, and Plank Lit from behind an Eclipse, elide European Surrealism of the 1920s into American Regionalism of the 1930s; and Toby Paterson’s Biblotheek is a paean to the Neo-Plasticist paintings of Piet Mondrian.

This, the exhibition’s Neo-Modernism, is its strength and uncertainty: its power of peculiarity. In bringing together painting, works on paper, sculpture and video, Mr. Cope has taken full advantage of the luminous white box of Light & Sie, catalyzing its broad open spaces in ways often left dormant. Mr. Boyce deploys a funky sense of tromple l’oeil in a series of five conceptualist sculptures, Ventilation Grills (Our Breath and This Breeze). They are installed close to the ground as though truly functioning airshafts. The tarnished bronze of the grids offers a cheeky counterpoint to the white walls of the gallery. Installed in the smaller gallery, Mr. Coombes’s three videos are uncanny and unsettling in their referencing of yet another layer of yesterday’s modern, high Victorian hunting culture.