The Galleries: Playing with history

Clothes were important for 60s art, as in this Peter Blake self-portrait. Picture / Tate Britain

London has done it again. Forty years ago, Auckland Art Gallery played host to an exhibition of contemporary British art and now Tate Britain has sent some of the same paintings and similar works, with photographs added to evoke the context.

Back then, the art was the latest thing. Now it is art history but still a splendidly playful show called Art & the 60s, at Auckland Art Gallery until July 2.

Poet Philip Larkin hymned the 60s with, "Sexual intercourse began/In nineteen sixty-three/Between the end of the Chatterley ban/And the Beatles' first LP."

He had a point. There had always been many connections between sex and art, but in the 60s eroticism became much more open. It is all in this show.

Aspects of it recall the fuss over 70s exhibitions like the Tachist show. It included artists such as William Green, who textured the paint on his canvasses by riding his bike over them. A furore began when it was covered in a Ken Russell documentary called Making an Action Painting. A splendid aspect of the Art & the 60s exhibition is that we can see the film and others like it.

The Tachist show was followed by another exhibition which included paintings here again from the Tate, notably work by David Hockney and Bridget Riley.

What was then modern art and more than a little shocking is now history and in the textbooks.

Nothing in this show now has much power to shock although it is immediately recognisable and still admirable. Although the poet says "Sex began in the 60s", what really happened was an abandonment of timidity. Timidity, disguised as restraint, had always been part of British art of the 20th century in contrast to the wilder shores of expression visited by artists in France, Germany and the United States. Swinging London of the 60s changed that. Nothing in this show is timid and that helps the work retain its appeal.

Hockney was not timid when he painted himself as a raw, shackled figure like something by Frances Bacon locked in a Typhoon tea packet. The packet is the jail of his past.

As a student he maintained the ritual of tea-making, using the same brand as his mother. It was all linked to his schooling by the blackboard at the top of this inventively shaped painting.

He is not timid about homosexuality in the famous big painting of a nude man in a shower, or timid with California minimalism in A Bigger Splash.

There is nothing timid about the way Richard Smith's huge, red painting Gift Wrapped thrusts from the wall in big three-dimensional forms based on the vivid advertising of cigarettes.

There is nothing timid in Joe Tilson's Vox Box, where the voice shouts from behind big wooden teeth and red lips.

Even the detail is not timid. Peter Blake, in many ways the most conservative and academic of these artists, has no hesitation in painting his self-portrait in denims and sneakers. Clothes took on special importance. Allen Jones, renowned for his sexy paintings, has a couple embracing. The painting is called Man Woman and the couple are defined entirely by their clothes.

Americanisms are everywhere in this show, mostly of American popular culture. The references to American art are oblique - like Blake's The First Real Target which is a swipe at Jasper Johns' target paintings.

The key to this art was the bold attention to ordinary things rather than high-minded subject matter. This is exemplified in Clive Barker's Splash from 1967, which is an ordinary tap, an ordinary bucket, and ordinary ball-bearings, made art by being chromium plated and stilled forever as sculpture in a gallery.

Billy Apple, from Auckland, who was at the Royal College of Art with many of these artists, takes the transformation of the everyday and ordinary into art to an extreme with his plastic apples, bronze apples and even, in this show, some real apples. He also breaks timid boundaries by using the carrying power of neon tube. Much of this comes under the heading of Pop Art which really began in Britain and was taken up enthusiastically by the Americans.

The confident size of many of these paintings was something that changed art in the 60s. When Peter Phillips makes a big painting of a fruit machine it also works as a bold abstraction, and John Hoyland's big red abstraction, uneasy in reproduction, looks magnificent in the gallery.

The show is completed by photographs which show war, political dissent and the beginnings of celebrity culture.

The 60s enlarged our visual experience with an energy and invention that lives on in this show.