A New Twist in the Long Tradition of the Grotesque

Marina Warner

• High Art Lite: British Art in the 1990s by Julian Stallabrass
  Verso, 342 pp, £22.00, December 1999, ISBN 1 85984 721 8
• This is Modern Art by Matthew Collings
  Weidenfeld, 270 pp, £20.00, June 1999, ISBN 0 297 84292 7

The heavy in shirtsleeves on the door of the disused Strand tube station was working the phone to a reluctant client who had rented the premises for a rave that didn’t happen and now didn’t want to pay. The man’s job title was something like Manager of Decommissioned Underground Material and I had gone to see him with Michael Morris, one of the directors of Artangel, a company that puts on art events in different media in unusual places. He was trying to get permission to use the runnels and platforms for The Vertical Line, a performance piece devised by John Berger.