Close Up (BBC 2, Tuesday)
Walk On The Wild Side (ITV, Wednesday)
Cutting Edge (C4, Monday)
Love Town (BBC 1, Sunday)
`Don't look at it," John Prime told his wife Joanna, "just feel it." She turned away from it to look at his face. "I am feeling it," she whimpered, "but it's just a bit white at the moment." It wasn't just a bit white. It looked, whatever about the feeling, very white indeed. In fact, it looked like a big, white board. Indeed it was a big, white board - a bigger white board than the other white board which the Primes had hanging on a white wall beside a white fireplace. Abstract art - what can you say?
John knew what he wanted to say: "The investment we've made so far hasn't been at the expense of anything else," he insisted. "I mean, arguably, yes . . . " Joanna, whitening to control her irritation, looked him in the face again. "Arguably, yes," she cut him off, "we could have had more holidays. We could have had a car." Close Up: Collectors looked at people - from amateur enthusiasts to corporate heavy-hitters - who buy contemporary, abstract art. As a flyon-the-canvas documentary, it let the stew of art, commerce, philistinism and elitism speak for itself.
It certainly evoked a range of ideas and feelings. Is it all codology? Are there any coherent criteria (as opposed to relativist, debate-killing, impressionistic responses) which can be applied to appreciation of such stuff? Perhaps the very idea of coherent criteria is considered philistine. Alternatively, maybe the idea that coherent criteria is philistine is, in itself, a philistine idea. Is it all about being an insider, an initiate? Who knows? Can anybody know - in the normal sense of knowing? Or is it all just about putting your money where your feelings dictate?
"It's like modern-day hunting, really," said Vanessa Branson, another collector. "You find your beast and you isolate it." Branson, a very well-heeled collector, has beasts all over her walls. She is, apparently, very sensitive to art, even though her choice of breezy metaphor indicated a rather brutal cast of mind. Then there was Adrian Mullish, Damien Hirst's dentist. Mullish used to fix Hirst's teeth in exchange for art works. Mullish but not mulish, I suppose: work by the Turner Prize-winning Hirst would now get you quite a few mouthfuls of fillings, root canals and crowns (even at Dublin prices!).
For his part, Hirst adopted a humorous but sardonic perspective. He sniggered at wealthy vulgarians who consider works of art to be mere commodities with pricetags. Well, he could say this, couldn't he? He's a kind of guru among young British artists - the embodiment of the qualities collectors seek. Whether or not he has become wealthy because genuine aesthetes or genuine vulgarians have bought his work is clearly of little concern to his bank manager. Either way, Hirst was able to be wry about his good fortune.
We first saw him feeding pigs in his garden. Big, fat, greyish pigs - they just put their snouts into the heaped swill and munched. This may have been simple, on-the-spot contextualising of Hirst's daily life or perhaps it was a savage, mick-taking metaphor for the collecting of contemporary abstract art. If, like the guff about the paintings on view, meaning is a matter of individual impressions, can the same criteria not be applied to pictures on television? Anyway, whatever way you look at it, the munching pigs were funny.
The most striking thing about all the collectors was their lack of scepticism in their own judgments. Whether this indicated certainty or gullibility became another matter of judgment. There was certainly a suspicious sureness - almost a brazenness - about many of their assertions. We saw various members of staff of the international law firm, Simmons & Simmons, "explain" the significance of pictures of magnified sperm, of a couch from a psychiatric ward in a Tavistock hospital, and of headless, torso shots of men wearing suits and ties. Lawyers as art critics? Their confidence in their own interpretations was telling.
And so it went. The programme had begun with the munching pigs and shifted to John and Joanna Prime awaiting delivery of John's latest purchase - the big, white board. It ended with the Primes squabbling before a final scene cut back to the pigs. Whatever about its content, this documentary was as well framed as any exhibit in a prestigious art gallery. But it remained telling that nobody tried to justify ostensibly aesthetic judgments beyond cursory and largely meaningless advice like "just feel it".
There may well be beauty or value (beyond the "it's all in the eye of the beholder" school of evasion) in some of this art. But it was difficult not to conclude that the facility to wield a cheque-book was the determining criterion for unsupported judgments. In that sense, this Chris Granlund work ("documentary" sounds so cheap, dahling!) subtly peeled away layers of taste and pretension to reveal a pretty threadbare canvas under the abstract art market and the guff of the collectors. At least Granlund's minimal intervention was state-of-the-art in documentary terms.
A VERY different "aesthetic" was featured in Walk On The Wild Side. Produced, directed and narrated by Daniel Abineri, it was, in ways, as Dan's utter dominance indicates, a stroll by a control freak. The production and direction were fine but Abineri's narration sounded propagandistically certain - rather like a Pathe News voice-over or an old-fashioned CIA-sponsored film trying to be hip. Still, it was saved by archive footage ranging from a young Elvis Presley wearing eye-shadow to Eurovision-winning transsexual Dana International gyrating while being interviewed in a bubble-bath.
Between Elvis and the surgically-constructed Dana, a chronological fast-forward of androgynists included, among others, David Bowie, Marc Bolan, Lou Reed, Roxy Music, The Rocky Horror Show, the New York Dolls, Freddy Mercury, Adam Ant, Soft Cell, Boy George, Holly Johnson, and Annie Lennox (as an example of the somewhat rarer creature: a woman cross-dressing as a man). There were punks too and, of course, the egregious Malcolm McLaren as ever spouting opinions as certainties. Given his characteristic sureness, old Malc could easily cut it in the world of abstract art collecting.
Mind you, he was rounded-upon by a number of other contributors, who insisted that he stole the punk image by combining elements of Richard O'Brien's The Rocky Horror Show with the dog's dinner style of the New York Dolls. The intensity of these opinions was no less than those that you might expect in a row between the most precious, agenda-driven scholars arguing over the identity of Shakespeare. But for the most part, it was all good fun, a nostalgia-fest of gender-bending, wild make-up and spangled spandex.
Abineri cited Bowie as the Main Man - the high-point of this ultra pop art. Old Top of the Pops footage of Bowie performing Starman certainly suggested a moment of coalescence between waning psychedelia, emerging glam and self-consciously bizarre sexuality. More important, of course, his music at the time was actually good. Afterwards the decline into shock-rock began to accelerate towards the alarming (ignorance as art?) parody of Adam Ant and on to the sadomasochistic, video orgy of Holly Johnson and Frankie Goes To Hollywood.
At one stage, somebody (surprisingly, it wasn't Malcolm McLaren) mentioned "the aesthetic of punk". Having seen Col- lectors, it was tempting to think that the word "aesthetic" has mutated, in pop culture as well as in abstract art, into a kind of synonym for overconfident assertions dubiously grounded. In the same way as so many rock critics and commentators glibly use the word "liberated" when, at this stage in history, they simply mean "promiscuous", "aesthetic", in circles which have an obvious proprietorial agenda towards the term, typically sounds more aggrandising than evaluating.
Still, there were some good sounds - whatever about the variable visuals - in this one. Nobody wanted to dwell too long on the central truth that mere gimmickry to attract attention in a competitive market was, in reality, very often the driving force. Maybe Freddy Mercury singing I Want to Break Free in laced corset, leather micro-mini skirt, fishnet tights, stiletto heels, curly wig and fulsome moustache is art. Or maybe it was just Freddy acting the maggot and having the crack. Whatever the case, this account of pop's mascara-ed history reminded you that few people could have realised just how big that closet was when the first gay and bisexual people started coming out of it.
FEW people probably realised how thriving was Clapham Common's gay sex industry until former Welsh secretary Ron Davies made his career-ending visit there. Cutting Edge went to the south-London park to produce an impressionistic portrait of the place and the people who use it. It wasn't all about furtive, gay sex but much of it was filmed in Baghdad green (you know, the screen colour generated by night-time shooting with infra-red cameras, synonymous with bombing attacks on Iraq). Patience, it would appear, is a necessary quality for people seeking casual, Clapham Common thrills.
We saw men waiting under trees for Cupid to arrive. Just waiting and watching. It was, in fairness, a more contemplative scene than exists in bars or clubs. But it looked both boring and dangerous. Others went cruising or prowling. "I've never met anybody who is not a romantic," said one young man waiting to be picked up by a stranger. You had to hope he doesn't, but it all looked like a risky gig. The impression of isolation and disconnected individuals just waiting to collide with other isolated and disconnected individuals was reinforced by the decision to use no commentary. For long stretches, viewers waited in mutual silence.
There were a few other characters featured. A trio of urban Last of the Summer Wine types played chess in the common's cafe. It all bespoke loneliness. A typically moody, big city saxophone soundtrack occasionally intensified this mood when it didn't transmute it into self-indulgent cliche. But the documentary minimalism of this one was excessively stark. OK, we got the sense of waiting, of killing time, and the moon reflected in the common's pond was also an appropriately moody touch. But a full hour of this stuff was ultimately as frustrating for viewers as a blank night for the expectant hopefuls.
FINALLY Love Town, screened for Valentine's Day, was about old-fashioned heterosexual love and lust. It followed three couples to Gretna Green, Britain's traditional quickie-marriage capital. There were no Las Vegas-style Elvis impersonators here - just Jim the blacksmith in a kilt (arguably a kind of Caledonian gender-bender, I suppose. Still, if you suggested that, he'd almost certainly hit you with his anvil). You could understand why people forsake the fuss of even minimally traditional weddings to get the gig done in Gretna. But it was difficult to reconcile participants' expressed desires for privacy with their welcoming television cameras to broadcast their tying of the knot to millions.