Review of the Week: The 90s: Art and Fashion

Tate Modern, London SE1, until 14 February 2027

The lobby of Tate Britain’s exhibition The 90s: Art and Fashion is wallpapered with photographs of some of the luminaries of those disciplines in that era: Sarah and Tracey in their anarchic shop, Kate and Naomi hanging out, smoking. Wannabe by the Spice Girls, and then Virtual Insanity by Jamiroquai, blast from the room’s playlist. This combination of sound and vision feels out of step with the laudable aims expressed by the show’s curator, former Vogue editor Edward Enninful, that it is “not an exercise in nostalgia but… a form of critical reflection”. It feels like an antechamber of reminiscence. 

Sentimentality is, of course, an inevitable danger when influential figures look back at the exciting moment in which they forged their cultural identity, but the time does feel ripe for an analysis of a decade that has been contorted by myth. In their introductory statements to the show,  Enninful and Tate, while acknowledging that a definitive overview of the 90s is not possible, seem genuinely intent on representing “a broader landscape of practices and voices that shaped the period”, rather than just the narrow cluster of figures who represent the cliche. 

The first artwork we see is promising in this sense: Jim Lambie’s Zobop (1999) provides the floor to this introductory gallery, its contours mapped with stripy pop-coloured tape. Seeing his work at the start of the exhibition should augur well for the inclusion of one of the decade’s most thriving UK art communities, Glasgow. But it turns out that this opening salvo is at once an early sign of the paucity of critical rigour in the exhibition and a red herring, in that, remarkably – embarrassingly – none of the other luminaries of that Glasgow scene (Douglas Gordon, say, or the late Christine Borland) feature. It is a huge oversight. Indeed, with one or two exceptions, the show should be called 90s London: Art and Fashion. 

Perhaps Enninful and his co-curators could not find an obvious connecting thread to fashion in art made outside London. Because it soon becomes clear that the very concept of this exhibition, and pointedly its location, undermine its ability to be a serious examination of its subject. When it was announced, I was not alone in wondering why Tate appeared to be attempting a V&A show. Being exhibited at Tate means that the fashion elements always have to be tethered to art, and vice versa, in a way that wouldn’t be necessary elsewhere. And while there are plenty of individual artworks to admire – by Sonia Boyce, Mona Hatoum, Sarah Lucas, Chris Ofili and Barbara Walker, among others – almost none of them feel shown to their best, or even adequate, effect. You end up with a middling cover version of a V&A spectacle.

I felt supremely aware in every room of an attempt to elevate the kind of fashion photography that Enninful commissioned during his magazine years to the level of the artworks here. This is particularly egregious in two spaces at the heart of the show. The first, called Body Shock, attempts to “suggest bodies in states of crisis and transformation”. It gives a huge wall to several images from a 1998 shoot for the Face, styled by Isabella Blow and shot by Sean Ellis, which are a hideous mishmash of misty Pre-Raphaelitism and fantasy illustration. They’re shown alongside items from various couture collections by Alexander McQueen, whose presence in armour in Ellis’s photographs “channels his rebellious spirit and raw creative energy”, according to the hagiographic label. 

Close by are a poorly placed lightbox work by Helen Chadwick and a series of sculptures and an installation by Hamad Butt, the latter shoved to the end of the room, limiting our ability to walk around them. Butt and Chadwick confront the body and mortality in poetic and political ways that couldn’t be more contrasting to Ellis’s hackneyed photographs and McQueen’s theatrical garments. The juxtaposition, and the overwrought dramatic lighting, debases and neuters them.

The neighbouring gallery, called Less Excess, meanwhile, attempts to draw crass, excruciating parallels between reductive forms made by artists including Rachel Whiteread and Damien Hirst and the pared-down aesthetics of some of the era’s fashion design and photography. To equivocate Whiteread’s uncanny poetic distillation of body and object in Torso (1988) – a plaster cast of the interior of a hot-water bottle that renewed minimal, post-minimal, conceptual and performance traditions of earlier decades – with Craig McDean’s photographs for a Jil Sander ad campaign that used subdued lighting and distinctive make-up effects is utterly absurd.

Even when its intentions are admirable, the show falls flat. A room labelled Nation’s Finest looks at Black artists, photographers and designers and notes that the Cool Britannia phenomenon of the mid-to-late 90s was a “patriotic myth” that was overwhelmingly white and largely ignored the work of Black artists and the experience of Black people. Here is the clunkiest yet of the pairings, with Ofili’s magnificent and tragic No Woman, No Cry (1998) – a tribute to Doreen Lawrence in the form of a Black woman who cries tears containing collaged photographs of her murdered son Stephen – displayed close to a plush cabinet of Ozwald Boateng’s suits. Why not separate them more? Ditto Keith Piper’s searing analysis of patriotism and Black sporting bodies next to footage of a Joe Casely-Hayford runway show.

Proof of the success of a more judicious, less jarring hang is in the neighbouring room, devoted entirely to Steve McQueen’s magnificent early film installation Bear (1993). Here, McQueen himself engages in a naked wrestle with another Black man, veering from aggression to tenderness, all captured on a camera that lurches and stumbles along with the bodies. This is a stark contrast to the treatment of another video masterpiece elsewhere, Mark Leckey’s Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore (1999), which is tossed away on a tiny monitor amid a room of rave and club-night photographs. 

Leckey’s film is only partly about the 90s club scene and subcultures around it. It also prominently features 70s northern soul dancers and 80s casuals. It is, as Leckey has said, a ghost film, a deeply melancholy reflection on youth, music and mortality. Given the same treatment as Bear, it would have made a suitably elegiac – and, yes, critical – coda to a room evoking the ecstasies and fantasies of the thousands of people in the photographs who are now, at the very least, well into middle age.

All of which is to say that the Tate could, and should, have done a searching, rigorous 1990s survey, which looked objectively at the art of the era in the context of its social history, what has survived from the hyped YBA period and what was overlooked. I feel sure that the curators that provide Enninful’s support team could do it admirably. It is a great shame that this show, which somehow manages to be cacophonously overstuffed and painfully slight, means that is unlikely to happen for another generation.

Ben Luke is the Nerve’s art critic. An art historian, critic and broadcaster, he hosts the podcasts A brush with... and The Week in Art and is a contributing editor at the Art Newspaper