Dance on the eve of destruction

IF I have learned one lesson as a writer about contemporary art, it is not to remember too much. The art world has a short memory, and young artists don't like to be caught out when they recycle things. On the other hand, contemporary art cultivates a certain cloying sentimentality about carefully selected past epochs.

"Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive ..." In Britain, the main beneficiary has been the Sixties, now just far enough away to seem like a golden age. Believe me, I was there, and it wasn't.

A new show at Tate Modern, Art The 60s: This Was Tomorrow, wavers between analysis, sometimes quite sharp, on the one hand, and gushing approval on the other. The organisers are torn between trying to give the public what they think it expects - basically Pop Art and The Beatles as young mop-tops - and what they themselves find more interesting and important, such as the Destruction in Art Symposium, of 1966.

As I went around the show, I was struck by the resilience of the celebrity culture that the Sixties invented. One wall, for instance, is devoted to images from David Bailey's A Box of Pinups, published in 1965. Most of the celebs he chose have displayed astonishing durability and are still with us today - those that are dead, such as Jimi Hendrix, live on in our imaginations.

But what a strange lot they seem in Bailey's close-up portraits - sniggering, tittering, rolling their eyes like so many frightened horses.

Today's A-list accept their celebrity with greater equanimity. They can draw upon collective experience - a clear idea of what life and the hungry media will throw at them.

Being a celeb in those days involved risks that don't exist now. The old establishment, political and social, had not yet crumbled and there were moments when it vengefully roused itself.

The Profumo affair was one example - it is recalled here by Lewis Morley's photograph of a nude Christine Keeler astride a chair.

Other instances were the attempt to ban DH Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover and the Rolling Stones drugs bust in February 1967, which resulted in a jail sentence for Robert Fraser, a leading art-dealer. The raid and its aftermath were commemorated in Richard Hamilton's Swingeing London, showing Fraser and Mick Jagger handcuffed together, trying to hide their faces from the intrusive lenses of the press.

The image is the subject of a pompous comment in the exhibition catalogue: "With Swingeing London 67 Hamilton captured and immortalised a moment of modernity, exploiting the iconic nature of the image to the full and ensuring it remained in the public consciousness. The depiction of a bound Jagger and Fraser, two men of differing histories caught in a shared compromise, appeared to encapsulate the social and cultural cross-fertilisation indicative of Sixties London." This drum-roll of empty polysyllables does not get one very far - it's art-prat-speak at its worst - but the image stays with one, nonetheless.

Where the show - perhaps surprisingly - is at its most honest is on the subject of Sixties architecture. Clearly it would like to present the art as both innovative and successful, but doesn't have the heart to tell all the fibs that would be needed.

Many of the most characteristic buildings of the period were technically flawed and socially disastrous. Typical constructions were huge tower blocks, sometimes combined into large council estates.

The exhibition features Erno Goldfinger's Trellick Tower "a triumphant Constructivist-Futurist composition" according to the catalogue. The label on the wall admits that, having failed as housing for the working class, it is now, with up-to-date security, a desirable residence for the better off.

Much the same thing happened to Denys Lasdun's cluster-block Heeling House in Bethnal Green.

With new penthouses on the roof and a glass entrance provided by a private developer this is now "a luxury East End residence".

Where the rich haven't rescued them, the fate of some of these Sixties housing schemes has been grim. The future of the Park Hill estate in Sheffield, with its long vulnerable walkways, is now, the label tells us, "dependent on costly but necessary conservation work".

THE middleclass liberals of Sixties, with their utopian dreams about a working-class whose lifestyle they knew little about, produced the flaking architectural monsters we see around us today, many of them ripe for demolition after only 40 years of use.

If the impression made by Sixties architecture is brutal, that made by much of the art is pallid.

The curatorial team have done their best to be even-handed.

They include the Pop images that everyone will expect - Peter Blake bedizened with badges, Richard Hamilton and Joe Tilson well to the fore, but Hockney sidelined as not proper Pop. They also have a go at reviving the corpse of British abstract painting of the time. Some names have slipped below the horizon. William Green, author of a dismally sludgy bituminous picture-ofnothingand-very-like "shot to fame in the late Fifties as Britain's premier action painter".

He "readily acknowledged his debt to Pollock and the French painter Georges Mathieu".

Remember him? He was the one who used to ride a bicycle across his canvases. I wonder what sort of reception I'd get if I arrived at the Sotheby's or Christie's reception desk, with a sticky black William Green tucked under my arm? If I offered to bring in a Pollock, they'd send a chauffeur- driven Rolls and an armed guard, just to make sure I didn't get lost on the way.

Better-remembered artists in this category fare little better in the show.

Robyn Denny still looks like a rip-off of the next-to-last period of Josef Albers. Hoyland, a good colourist on his day, is poorly represented by a not very typical picture.

John Plumb is an intellectual doing dry-as-dust work for other intellectuals. The paintings by the brothers Cohen, Harold and Bernard, are both bitty and fussy. Saddest of all, are the New Generation sculptors who made such a splash at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1965.

Their work falls between two stools - that is, it tries to reflect the new consumerist ethos of the time in the materials and colours employed, while remaining firmly abstract. I pass one of these sculptures, only bigger, nearly every week near Fulham Broadway station. I've forgotten its title but I think of it as "the giant toast-rack", which is what it resembles.

The author is Philip King, now President of the Royal Academy.

The Tate has a warehouse full of this stuff, given to it by Lord McAlpine, who collected it for a while with the avidity with which little girls collect Barbie dolls.

When he tired, the museum was left, so-to-speak, holding the Barbie.

It doesn't put examples on show very often.

The curators, who are not named in the catalogue except in fulsome prologue by Stephen Deuchar, appear to be drawn from the Tate's pool of house wine: Chris Stevens and Katherine Stout are the names, for what it's worth. Stevens and Stout have set out to find ancestors in the art world of the Sixties for today's Turner Prize avant-garde - hence their celebration of the Destruction in Art Symposium. As a witness to some of the symposium's events, I can say that it was good fun at the time - there was a definite frisson in bashing stuff around and breaking things up.

The real extremists among us, however, were not British but imported members of the Viennese Aktionist group. Hermann Nitsch ritually disembowelled and crucified the carcass of a lamb and showed a film of the manipulation of a cow's brains against a penis.

You will understand what I mean about not remembering too much - this kind of thing makes Damien Hirst look a tad secondhand. In those days, it was the police who got excited, not Mr Saatchi. The organisers of the event, Gustav Metzger and John Sharkey, were arrested. Metzger was fined Pounds 100 for indecency, quite a sum in those days.

Revising these events, I am inclined to conclude that the British Sixties were pretty much second hand in terms of the epoch.

Nitsch and Wolf Vostell and Gunter Brus supplied the really memorable gestures at Destruction in Art. When poets performed at the great Albert Hall poetry reading of 1965, it was the Americans, such as Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti and Corso, who were the stars.

The British were the proverbial "little dogs following a brass band".

The real poetic energy in this country, as Ginsberg himself recognised, was at that moment in Liverpool, not in London. One of my happiest memories is of dancing ring-a-rosy in a Liverpool nightclub at three in the morning, accompanied by Adrian Henri and three very fat tarts. Henri, a poetpainter of considerable talent, is one of the real omissions from the show, though he is mentioned in the catalogue. His paintings have a freshness and attractiveness often missing from what is on view.

ESSENTIALLY, the British Sixties were a charade. A charade of protest, with CND marches and demonstrations against the Vietnam War. A charade featuring a new kind of apparently classless celebrity. A charade of liberal values, exemplified by those tower blocks. A charade of female liberation - the exhibition makes much of this subject, though it contains remarkably few works by women, and quite a large number, especially among the photographs, where women are being manipulated by men. If anything really offends me, this is it. Otherwise, much of the Tate show is just rather silly, in a self- evidently dated way.

. Edward Lucie-Smith's most recent book is Art Tomorrow (2002).

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