Exhibition of the week Steve McQueen: Year 3
Duveen Galleries, Tate Britain, London SW1 (020-7887 8888, tate.org). Until 3 May
Steve McQueen’s latest project “is an idea of immense simplicity and great potency”, said The Guardian. McQueen, both a Turner Prize-winner, and the winner of an Oscar for 12 Years a Slave, decided to photograph as many of London’s seven- to eight-yearolds as possible. Every primary school in the capital was approached. The result is 3,000 Year 3 class photographs depicting 76,000 children – about two-thirds of the total cohort – now on display in Tate Britain’s majestic Duveen Galleries (and also, for a limited time, on advertising hoardings around the capital). “They come from state and private primaries, special educational needs schools, and pupil referral units.” The result is both a document of “childhood’s slow morph into imminent adolescence” and “a celebration of this city’s diversity”, said Eddy Frankel in Time Out. It’s something of a racist’s nightmare: “a brazen, forthright, unapologetic celebration of multicultural London”.
The show brings home quite how “massive” London is, said Nancy Durrant in The Times. Consisting of 3,128 framed photographs from 1,504 schools – exactly 76,146 children in all – this “mammoth” installation “fills every available wall in this grand neo-classical hall, in seemingly endless grids that reach up to the ceiling”. McQueen has chosen Year 3 because he believes it represents a turning point in life: the moment at which “true childhood” starts to give way to something altogether more “serious”. You can’t help but be “moved”: it takes a while to dawn, but these children are “the people who will sweep the streets, run the boutiques, pay the taxes, argue the cases, rob the houses, drive the buses, fly the air ambulances... and drive London’s economy in 20 years’ time”. Some will die before their time. “It is a portrait of fragile possibility.”
The regularity of the images initially gives the display a “uniform” look, said Laura Cumming in The Observer. Yet after a while, small details become apparent: “skewed ties, missing teeth, the wild child, the double act fooling about in the back row”; in one photo, we even see a child “jubilantly singing while the teacher tries to maintain the conventional silence”. Perhaps most touching of all, every single school group will at some point be brought to visit the show, allowing children who “may have never left their borough, let alone set foot in a gallery” to see themselves on the walls of a great museum. Who knows: perhaps the experience might just inspire the “next generation of artists”. Ultimately, this is a work of art “unassailable in its emotional immediacy and grandeur”.