Adrian Searle's 30-Year Art Odyssey: From Vermeer to Venice
After writing about art for the Guardian for three decades, Adrian Searle has been asked by his editor to reflect on what he has learned. He admits he is not sure he is capable of that, but he can certainly write about what he has seen. Even as an eyewitness, things become murky quickly, and critics are among the most unreliable narrators.
Memorable Exhibitions and Unforgettable Moments
An unknown woman writes a letter we cannot see, while her maid reacts to something beyond a painted window. Vermeer's Woman Writing a Letter, With Her Maid from 1670-71 makes Searle feel privy to its intimacies, even though almost everything that matters is withheld. You have to make it up, he says, as stories come barging in.
Vermeer at the Rijksmuseum in 2023 was tremendous, forming a chain in his imagination from the past to the present. It began with the big Goya exhibition at London's Royal Academy in 1963, when Searle was 10 or 11. Since then, Goya has never left him. Édouard Manet at the Prado in 2003 and the polychrome Spanish wooden sculptures in the National Gallery's The Sacred Made Real in 2010 are all part of this lengthening list.
Global Art Adventures and Personal Encounters
Searle recalls several Documentas in Kassel, Manifestas in Sicily and Belgium, Zurich and St Petersburg. There have been too many Tate Modern Turbine Hall commissions to count and so many visits to the Venice Biennale that they have all become a watery blur. He also remembers a do-it-yourself exhibition on scraggy wasteground in Glasgow and the council flat near Elephant and Castle that Roger Hiorns clogged with blue crystals.
How could he forget Pipilotti Rist's underwear hung on a washing line at Hauser & Wirth Somerset in 2014? Or going nose-to-nose with the jet fighter that Fiona Banner hung from the ceiling at Tate Britain in 2010? Gregor Schneider's 2004 Die Familie Schneider, with its near identical terraced houses and sets of twins, remains ineradicable, no matter how hard he scrubs.
The Art of Looking and Writing
Searle has spent an afternoon boating on a flooded sculpture deck at the Hayward and an entire night in a gallery on a motorised bed, courtesy of Carsten Höller. He remembers some shows like they were yesterday, only to discover they happened 20 years ago, and he can barely recall what he wrote about last week. Often, the journeys, conversations, and random encounters are as memorable as the art itself.
At its best, art engages you on several levels all at once, as Anni Albers' weavings at Tate Modern did. Looking is an embodied experience as well as a mental process. Sometimes all you have to do is report back, as with Turner prize-winning artist Nnena Kalu's work, which snared him unexpectedly at Cartwright Hall Gallery in Bradford last year.
Reflections on Change and Consistency
In the three decades since Searle started, everything in the art world has ramped up: the money, the glamour, the yachts. But none for him. He could have done deals with global mega-galleries and won big with his Turner prize predictions, if only he knew how to place a bet. He has managed to convince himself that he likes Cézanne more than he once did, though his bathers are still a step too far.
If you do not get an artist first time around, stick with it long enough and they will be back, Searle advises. You can give them another going-over and maybe get it right next time, even if you do not like them any better. As Ceal Floyer once put it in an audio sampling a Tammy Wynette track: Till I get it right, so I'll just keep on.
The Evolution of Art Criticism
For a long time, it felt as if Searle could hardly step out the door without falling over a Howard Hodgkin exhibition or a Francis Bacon knees-up. Time was when editors thought you had to explain to readers what an installation was, but now everything has gone immersive. He remembers stumbling about in an utterly dark room as part of Tino Sehgal's This Variation, surrounded by yelping headbangers, which was more fun than a Yayoi Kusama Infinity Room.
It is expected that both curators and critics will have something new to say every time popular artists get shown. But that is not always how it is. Some artists change but do not get any better. Some get better but never change. Others, like Philippe Parreno or Steve McQueen, change the rules from show to show but remain themselves.
Even consistency can be deceptive, as Georges Seurat's small seascapes at the Courtauld Gallery evidence. They sit on the wall as though caught in crosscurrents of competing thoughts, becoming more unnerving and immersive the more you look. Nowadays, Searle prefers a quiet room with a few Goya sketches or some Seurat conté drawings. Art always changes and always stays the same, he concludes, and even if the art has not changed since your last shot at it, you have.
