Written by Miquette Roberts
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This text is also available as a downloadable Word Document (without the images).

5. Using Film as Art (Lewis, Bamgboyé)

What makes the film that I view in an art gallery a piece of art while the one I see in the cinema is film, plain and simple? Sometimes the artist's intention is clear, but in other cases it may be hard to understand the difference, if indeed there is one. Again it may partly be a matter of naming. But, like so much else in this exhibition, it is also about questioning. Traditional cinema involves us in a story, where for two hours or more, we may forget our own circumstances and enter into the lives of those on screen. In many different ways, art film denies us the indulgence of escapism. It forces us to question what is involved in the film's making and meaning.

In his 24 Hour Psycho (1993), Douglas Gordon slowed down the action in Alfred Hitchcock's film so much that the story disappeared. The viewer was no longer absorbed in suspense, instead he had to concentrate on how it was made. It was so slow that it was possible to observe a myriad of details, which had slipped by unnoticed in the original when suspense forced total attention on the plot. But can this appropriation really be art? Gordon took someone else's work and named it as his own art simply because he had slowed it down. It is true that he had transformed the way we view the original, but could we really accept the new "Psycho" as belonging to Gordon rather than Hitchcock?

When we go to the cinema we usually accept the finished product without thinking too much about how it came into being. Gordon's procedure revealed the artistry involved in filmmaking. Mark Lewis has similar concerns. The making of a film is both highlighted and questioned by him. He investigates its different elements, analysing the credits and, in The Pitch, the function of extras employed in making it. He is questioning our acceptance of the dream which film creates, forcing us to think how it is made, what it sets out to do and how people contribute to its making. All this prevents us from being passive viewers. Do we like having our mind stimulated or would we prefer the dream, however unthinking? It can be irritating being forced to evaluate all the time. Because the film does not have to prove itself at the Box Office, the artist can carry philosophical enquiry further.

In Spells for Beginners (1994) on the other hand, Oladélé Ajiboyé Bamgboyé creates film with a narrative which could be the subject of a commercial film or a television programme. It treats the breakup of the relationship between a black man and a white woman. We view Bamgboyé's film as if we were at home inside a room, seeing it on the television. Instead of relaxing, involved in someone else's drama, we are invited to concentrate on and question racial prejudice, discovering how we may be implicated in it.

6. Exploring Art as Thought: race and identity (Shonibare)

Racism is anti-intelligent. It focuses on superficial difference and refuses to look any deeper. In England, Yinka Shonibare is taken to be African because of his dark skin. In fact he was born in London but spent much of his youth in Nigeria. He does not have only one identity. In fact, very few of us do. Shonibare's work, including Vacation 2000, draws our attention to the complexity of identity and naming. When he bought 'African' fabrics in Brixton, he discovered that its motifs were Indonesian in origin and that the fabric was manufactured in Manchester, then exported to be sold in Africa as authentic, ethnic ware! Shonibare uses this fabric in much of his work. He has dressed mannequins in Victorian costume, made of this fabric, evoking scenes of upper class life at a time when black people would be more likely to be servants than masters. As well as questioning the kind of pigeonholing that history has created for people with black skins, he breaks down and questions the division between applied and fine art by creating costumes as art. He does not actually make them himself, explaining that he cannot sew. He commissions others to make up costumes from his designs, out of the fabrics he has chosen.

Investigating Pure Thought: An impersonal art (Johnston, Wright, Craig-Martin, Dean, Creed, Opie)

When you have been absorbed in looking at an exhibition, you may have found that, when you stepped out of the gallery, you continued to view the world as a container of aesthetic objects. You began noticing shapes and colours in your surroundings that would normally be part of an undifferentiated background to your life. Several artists in this exhibition draw our attention to this process, to the act of noticing, identifying and appreciating. We are in an empty room, apparently devoid of art. Slowly, we begin to notice the architecture of the space. Our attention is drawn to it by Alan Johnston's interwoven pencil marks whose geometric shapes are inspired by those already present in the setting. If we look long enough at the drawing, a negative space within it will be revealed. But you will only see by looking attentively. Similarly, in Richard Wright's work, the painted wall draws attention to its own structure, the role of different elements in the architecture. Just as in Mark Lewis' studies of film, we start analysing the elements that contribute to the whole, which up till then had been integrated into the total effect.

Michael Craig-Martin, an older artist, has been influential for a new generation of students at Goldsmith's College, where he has taught since 1974. His work makes us consider the way that, consciously or not, we view the world around us as signs to be interpreted. Each object that enters our field of vision is automatically assigned meaning by the brain. Sometimes we may realise this when something we 'knew' to be one thing, turns out on closer inspection to be something quite different. Craig-Martin's black and white wall paintings are made like impersonal diagrams, forcing us to concentrate on what is represented rather than on what the painter feels about them. The artist also makes us consider the associations that spring to mind in connection with everyday objects by juxtaposing these with references to art works or film clichés. Can you understand the references? If you are not a film lover, if you do not know the history of twentieth century art, you may feel excluded, not sufficiently 'intelligent' to understand. Are you willing to make the effort required to decipher these things and to work out the clues, or do you prefer the artist to provide the sensuous brushmarks and colouring which will draw you into a work?

These artists seek to transform the spectator from a passive recipient, submitting to an assault on the senses, to a questioning intelligence. They move us away from the Romantic idea of the artist as a genius whose uniqueness is expressed in brushmarks, choice of colours and composition. Instead they aim for something impersonal. Tacita Dean is exceptional in her use of Romantic subject matter but allies herself to her contemporaries in the way she makes her subject speak for itself with minimal intervention. The lingering Romanticism resides in what she selects, inspired by chance or passion: the sound of sea birds, the wind and the sea thrashing against the shore. Her approach, however, is unsentimental, that of the detached investigator. She is fascinated by the defeated ambitions of the amateur yachtsman, Donald Crowhurst who died in a round the world race in 1969. She discovered Bubble House (1999) on Cayman Brac in the Caribbean where she had gone to film Crowhurst's wrecked trimaran.

The feeling of powerlessness in the face of nature, which was a feature of Romanticism, is explored by Susan Hiller in a modern context. She makes us experience what it is like to be held totally within the grip of emotion. In those circumstances, do we remain intelligent or is fear the enemy of reason? Witness plunges us into the kind of utter darkness rarely experienced in street-lit towns. The fearful viewer finds her way, fumbling in the dark, wondering whether she is alone, and as she moves, voices heard through speakers tell her of strange sights which cannot be rationally explained. Fear engendered by the paranormal is echoed by our own fear within the installation.

Romanticism is put firmly to one side as we are gripped by the puzzles Martin Creed presents. He introduces enigmatic statements into our surroundings using neon, a material usually associated with advertising. It has the same impersonal look as a factory made object, appearing factual rather than individual. The pediment of Tate Britain currently bears the words 'the whole world + the work = the whole world'. If this is a fact, what does it mean? Does it mean anything? Does it mean that the work has no effect on the world, since it does not alter the equation, or might it mean that the work is part of the real world not just the world of art lovers, that the work of art belongs to everybody's world. The words which flash on and off as you approach the exhibition (Work No. 220: DON'T WORRY 2000) were originally sited on Chelsea and Westminster Hospital (although in a slightly different format). People passing by them to enter the hospital had cause to worry. But their friends were probably trying to reassure them by saying those very words. Positioned outside the Intelligence exhibition, DON'T WORRY confronts our fears and might undermine our faith in the authority of the gallery space. It suggests the very sentiment that it instructs us to deny.

Like Martin Creed, Julian Opie (who created the recent hoardings round the Tate Britain Centenary Development) creates art objects that share some of the qualities of the modern world. He features banality, sameness and repetition, creating the same kind of shiny plastic world as we encounter on motorways and in computer games. The giant faces in vinyl on the Tate hoardings were based on individuals he knows but in his hands they lost their individuality to become anonymous generic human types, the gallerist, the student and the schoolgirl. They became the kind of people who would fit a soulless urban environment. The gallery installation in this exhibition creates an apparent paradox: an art gallery (usually an expression of individualism) which is as impersonal as a supermarket. Have you ever felt that the whole world could be seen as a gigantic supermarket in which a number of prototypes are endlessly repeated? An outrageous idea? After all, art, like humans, does have its own archetypes. Artists look to the past for inspiration and constantly investigate the same fundamental ideas. Opie exaggerates uniformity and soullessness to create a world where everything is a clone. Perhaps its most worrying feature is that this vision is not presented as nightmarish: it is too close to reality.

We have always had to use our intelligence to appreciate art but since the advent of conceptual art the emphasis has been on thought, questioning and analysis. The sugar coating has been removed: the temperature of today's art is cool. The curators chose the title Intelligence to refer to the idea of artists gathering information from their experience in the world and processing this data into a certain form of intelligence. Their ambition is to show contemporary art as a form of knowledge about the world with which we can engage. They envisage all types of intelligent response - raw, emotional, physical as well as thoughtful. Is intelligent an apt description for the works in this exhibition? If not, how would you define an intelligent art?

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