The 20th Century: How it Looked and How it Felt
Tate Liverpool
Until end April 2009

“The thing I don't understand about art is...”

The speaker, who stormed away taking the rest of his sentence with him, was just one of many audibly bemused visitors to The 20th Century. This hugely ambitious exploration of the whole of the century’s art - a period in which artistic practice became increasingly challenging for the public - contains a decent dollop of photography, underlining the medium's artistic importance.

“Have you seen that Keith Arnatt – it's absolute crap”, said another gent, who was becoming visibly irate. His comment would have been more appropriate if the curators had selected Arnatt's artful Dogturd series instead of Trouser-Word Piece, an admittedly difficult juxtaposition of image and text about the nature of photographic meaning. I can only guess at what he made of Hans Bellmer's surreal photograph of La Poupée (The Doll), tied to tree like some sexually provocative amputee from the future, or Edward Kleinholtz’s Marriage Icon, a series of narrative paintings about courtship punctuated by a sexually explicit photograph. Sexual overtones persist in Cindy Sherman’s harrowing Untitled #97-100, where the serial self-portraitist looks as if she has just been assaulted.

The centrepiece of the whole exhibition is an entire room of Warhol silkscreen prints (which of course are all photographs), including Marilyn fading from vivid colour to feint black and white, Mao Tse-Tung, and the Electric Chair series, where Warhol comments on one of the key debates of the day seemingly without taking a position on it. Other highlights include Bruce Nauman’s Studies for Holograms a-e (pictures of performance art with lips), Walid Raad’s My Neck is Thinner than my Hair (100 news photographs of the aftermath of car bombings, or are they?) and Willie Doherty’s The Bridge (huge images of opposite ends of the same bridge).

“These people get paid a fortune for all this sh*t,” said one woman as she headed for the exit. Perhaps not for everyone, but for a (thoroughly partial and institutional) overview of how photography has been used in artistic practice, this is well worth a look.

Review by Simon Bowcock