Gore blimey.

One of the striking features of current British art is its predilection for imagery that is violent, life-and-death obsessed, grungy, or plain unpleasant. In several other countries such imagery has been prominent for centuries, but in Britain, where art, even at its most adventurous, has long been of front-parlor politeness, this is defiantly new. Here there is no tradition of writhing Crucifixions, erotically pierced St. Sebastians, or corpse-strewn battle paintings. In the two world wars, for example, the best state-commissioned works by British artists were mostly landscape inspired - we had no Goya or Guernica, no Otto Dix or George Grosz. Only Francis Bacon in this century has captured something of the physical violence of the age - though often in a palette more redolent of a smart Mayfair boudoir than the charnel house decor of our times.

In the current rash of body parts, crime scenes, and gore, there is an unmistakable subtext of drollery, of Hammer-House-of-Horror humor, a touch of Carry On Up the Morgue, which, in typically British fashion, deflects and represses the true violence of the images. And in the best pieces, such as Rachel Whiteread's cast of a mortuary slab, Slab (Plug), 1994, or Damien Hirst's recently shown Still, 1994, a vitrine of gleaming medical instruments, the macabre element is entirely subsumed by the authority and beauty of the works.

One of the most startling contributions to the current obsession with ore is Marc Quinn's Gothic repertory: the infamous cast of his head made from his own blood, and the life-sized, strung-up skein of latex imprinted with his own naked body, like a dangling rubber glove. This inexorable investigation of tightrope mortality, of the life of breath and the breath of life, continued this summer with the showing of Quinn's grimacing, fragmentary self-portrait casts in the Tate Gallery's new space devoted to "Art Now." And his work at White Cube Gallery, another body cast (product of some unlikely mating between Antony Gormley and the late Dame Elisabeth Frink), suggests that Bernini's ecstatic St. Theresa has finally managed a sex change (using Hirst's medical instruments, previously on show at White Cube?) and grown an erect penis.

Priapism hand in hand, so to speak, with violence is everywhere. In Jake and Dinos Chapman's edition sculpture of the severed head of an Italian art dealer, the nose has been given the full Cyrano de Bergerac treatment and become a dildo (giving new meaning to "blowing your nose"). This unruly member and an accompanying video of the head "in use" were on view by appointment at a new multiples gallery, Ridinghouse Editions; its inaugural party went with a bang and a whimper.

But while the Chapmans have a current monopoly on genuinely shocking images of violence and sexuality, other artists are going for more subtle, oblique effects. Earlier this year, Abigail Lane made a two-room installation at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. One room was wallpapered with a pattern of blood splashes and handprints taken from a scene-of-the-crime photo in the New York police files. A tape concealed in a cupboard endlessly repeated the sound of scratching on wood; the casts of a male head and two arms dangled on wires from the ceiling. These elements suggested an "absent presence," the traces of formidable violence transmuted by the coolness of Lane's minimalist staging. Meanwhile, over at Stephen Friedman's impressive new gallery on Old Burlington Street, Anya Gallaccio looped a "daisy chain" (made from huge, bright, real gerberas) throughout one of the spaces, entangling and crisscrossing from ceiling to floor. The flowers' slow dehydration and death was a mournful spectacle as their childhood beauty disintegrated.

All these artists are London based, and it is no accident that they, and some of their contemporaries, such as Michael Landy, with his street-trash imagery, and Mark Wallinger, with his early "down-and-out" references, reflect (without necessarily depicting) the city's seamier side and its return, over the last 15 years or so, to almost Hogarthian and Dickensian scenes of dissipation, poverty, and squalor. Their references may not be as direct as the graphic pictures of London by current novelists such as Martin Amis, Peter Ackroyd, Ian Sinclair, and Will Self, but there is no denying the capital's penetrating influence.

It so happens that a few months ago Ackroyd and I were mugged at knifepoint near the writer's home in Islington. Curiously, I was carrying a copy of the catalogue I had written for Abigail Lane's ICA exhibition (the muggers wisely preferred my wallet to my prose), and the incident took place close to the childhood lodgings of Walter Sickert, a painter about whom I have written extensively. All these fortuitous connections set me thinking about the relations of art and crime against the background of London.

In early August 1888, the repeatedly stabbed body of a prostitute called Martha Turner was discovered in a house off Whitechapel Road in the East End district of London. Over the following three months the mutilated bodies of five more women were found, but the murderer, "Jack the Ripper," never was. The crimes have been attributed to a variety of suspects from Queen Victoria's grandson, the Duke of Clarence, to, in recent years, Sickert. Evidence for the latter's involvement is easily refuted, but suspicion hangs about his name like a bad smell, particularly as his best-known painting, The Camden Town Murder, 1907-09, alludes to another horrific killing of a prostitute in 1907: Rarely has domestic crime been so menacingly evoked in British painting as in this compact little masterpiece. For the most part, however, connections between art and crime, squalor and dissipation, run underground, then suddenly erupt as you look more deeply into the context and history of particular works, figures, places, and institutions.

The Whitechapel Art Gallery, for example, opened in 1881 in a schoolhouse and moved to its present location in 1901. This distinctive Art Nouveau building was erected as part of a do-good plan to raise the standards of education in a district whose plight had come under urgent public scrutiny partly as a result of the Ripper murders. The gallery aimed to show contemporary art in tandem with the provision of educational facilities, a program sustained ever since.

Walking into the summer show you were immediately confronted with an image of the flagellation of Christ, his bound body surrounded by whipping tormentors. Luca Cambiaso's drawing hung next to one of Jasper Johns'" 0 through 9" series, 1961, a violent juxtaposition that nonetheless high-lighted their similarities. And on the opposite wall was Toulouse-Lautrec's study of a prostitute in bed, drawn just a few years after the Ripper murders - a case eagerly followed by the artist and his friends in Paris.

These works were part of an engrossing exhibition of line drawings from ancient Egypt, China, and Japan to the present day, taking in almost all the great names of Western European art. The nearly 200 works from public and private collections that constituted "Drawing the Line" were chosen by the artist Michael Craig-Martin. He was incredibly fortunate in the loans he secured - Leonardo, Raphael, Titian, Rubens, Rembrandt, Delacroix, Turner, Ingres, Degas, Matisse, and Picasso all crowded the walls alongside Philip Guston and Carl Andre, Marcel Duchamp and Franz Kline, Bruce Nauman, Louise Bourgeois, and Richard Long. Twosomes and threesomes flirted across the centuries, finding their common denominators in geometric precision or wild abandon, flowing or staccato line, mesmerizing repetition or the minute accumulation of disparate facts. The violence of the act of drawing, its hit-and-run immediacy, was one of the show's strongest impressions. Coupled with the exhibition's refreshing disregard of chronology, geography, and stylistic homogeneity, the shock of the familiar was triumphant.

If you go southwest of Whitechapel and cross the Thames at Southwark Bridge, on your right is Bankside, a much blitzed, patched, butchered, and forlorn stretch of London parallel to the river. In medieval London it was a place of entertainment, packed with taverns and brothels, until they were closed down in the 1540s by, surprisingly enough, Henry VIII. Later that century they reopened along with several theaters, bearbaiting pits, and pleasure gardens. In the early 1600s, bearbaiting had been run at Bankside by the actor Edward Alleyn. In 1626 Alleyn bequeathed his picture collection to Dulwich College, the school he founded in south East London. This collection would later become part of the first public art gallery in England, which is now renowned for its works by, among others, Rembrandt, Rubens, and Poussin.

Crime and "pleasure" went hand in hand at Bankside, and the nearby Clink Prison was filled with, according to one contemporary source, "the lowest vermin." In the following centuries, dissipation gave way to industry, and one of the last monuments to the industrialization of this stretch of the Thames was completed as recently as 1963. Bankside Power Station covers eight acres of this former pleasure ground and is famous, appropriately enough, for its massive, phallic brick tower (325 feet high). Soon declared impotent and virtually disused since 1981, it is now proposed as the Tate Gallery's new Museum of Modern Art, to open in the year 2000 after conversion by the Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron. (See Richard Flood's interview with Nicholas Serota, director of the Tate Gallery, on page 33 in this issue.)

At present, the Tate's old building on Millbank is chronically short of space. Although. ideally, a site ought to have been available nearer that gallery, the Bankside proposal will help regenerate a colorless area and give the new museum a clear identity. Its colossal size will allow for a comprehensive display of 20th-century art, as well as for the installation of prestigious exhibitions from the international circuit (in which London is frequently bypassed). The British collection, for the most part, will remain at Millbank.

The 100 million [pounds] or more needed for the cost of the Bankside development will be met from the public and private sectors, but the proposal has been encouragingly listed for consideration by the Millennium Fund Commission, which supports projects with money from the National Lottery, the weekly lucky-numbers game instigated at the en of last year. Lottery hysteria grips the country each Saturday and produces huge revenues for good causes. The arts will get their cut (going against the grain of public preferences), and let's hope the commission favors Bankside in its proposed shortlist (announced as this issue goes to press.) The idea of a museum devoted to what a majority of the population despised - Modern art - built on the site of brotherls and gaming houses, and funded by the national mania for gambling, has a wonderfully British ring to it.

What of the Tate Gallery on Millbank? Here, too, art has risen on the ashes of crime. The Tate was built on part of the site of the largest prison in Victorian London, the Millbank Penitentiary, which was surrounded by what Charles Dickens called "a melancholy waste." The prison was closed in 1890, and in 1897, when the sugar refiner Sir Henry Tate funded a gallery for Modern British art, kick-staring the collection with his own, mainly exercrable acquisitions, this was the site chosen by the government. Since then the Tate Gallery has assumed responsibility for the national historic collection; it has taken on the Turner Bequest and become the national home for Modern art; it has huge educational responsibilities; it hosts the Turner Prize, and it has a duty to show recent international art. Like a confused, elderly dowager, it doesn't quite know which hat to wear for what occasion.

The Tate's major summer show was "Rites of Passage" (Simon Watney, "Focus," Artforum, September 1995). This was Stuart Morgan and Frances Morris' personal anthology of the body as vessel for finde-siecle disaffection. Works by Joseph Beuys, Robert Gober, Louise Bourgeois, and John Coplans formed the high sports, giving the exhibitions a true metaphoric gravitas. Susan Hiller's installation, An Entertainment, 1990 - four video projectors and sound in a square room - is 26 minutes long, during which huge colored images from a traditional Punch-and-Judy puppet show are thrown against the walls; the soundtrack evokes a seaside audience as well as the murderous doings of Mr. Punch with his thrusting nose; entertainment cliches ("Oh yes, he is!" "Oh no, he isn't") are menacingly intoned. Memories of Edvard Munch and James Ensor, Bruce Nauman's Clown Torture, 1987, and the cruel caricatures of Regency London all spring to mind in Hiller's absorbing disquisition on ritual and myth, vicious comedy, violence, and death.

The brutality of what passes for entertainment still erupts in London life, and Hiller has unnervingly traced one of its histories. What she may not have known is that one of London's last Punch-and-Judy booths was to be found a few hundred yards fro Millbank, near Lupus Street, Pimlico. In 1869, it was shut down "by order" because of the "unbecoming display of ruffianly behavior" that its performances encouraged among spectators on summer evenings.

MARTIN MALONEY ON THE CLASS OF `95

GRANGE CORP

DAMIEN HIRST, GARY HUME, Sarah Lucas, Fiona Rae. London's Goldsmith's Collge launched a whole generation of international acclaimed artists in the late `80s. Back then, conceptual artists and Tate Gallery trustee Michael Craig-Martin nursed Goldsmith's future art-stars through their degree course. He left the college in 1985, but now he's back as Millard Professor, heading up a staff that includes Simon Linke, Lisa, Millroy, and Liam Gillick - all successful Goldsmith's alumni who've gone back to school to help out with the new undergraduates.

This year the mood of the degree show alternated between fuck-me sexiness and fuck-you aggressiveness. Taking its lead from trash art and grunge, the graduating class of 1995 cops the authority of street style to redirect its fear and loathing of Modernism. While the late `80 graduates looked to the clean-cut conceptual work of the `60 and `70 for insperation, the current crop of Goldsmith's originals boast pedigrees that are decidedly less grand, turning to the upbeat side of street-smart culture; television, glossy magazines, and wannabe lifestyle.

Humble means, however, don't preclude big ambitions - and the high-impact work made the most of its low-budget style. The best works of the 100 artists on show had a kind of quirky, homemade look that traded on the myths that brought their makers to art school in the first place. For Jun Hasegawa that meant glamour; her giant cutout female figures, painted in gloss paint on board, successfully mixed that flat color and graphic lines of Japanese manga comic-book art with the innocent, sexy frivolity of fashion magazines.

For Alexis Harding it was the romance of the garret. He produced shattered grid paintings, their messy, crinkled surfaces like unmade beds or overused cushions, in an attempt to convince us he's a yob with a poet's soul. Teresita Dennis looked to the good life: her paintings combined a technical finesse she picked up from an interior-decoratings handbook with the frantic energy of an earnest art student, adding a twist to a popular British theme: the domestication of abstraction.

Meanwhile, at least two students, Dirk Lambert and Yael Feldman, produced hip-lifestyle video works. Lambert danced lazily in front of a black and white grid, referencing Agnes Martin and Cy Twombly, while updating Eadward Muybridge's studies of movement for the disco era. Feldman's three short films packed the punch of television commercials. Her friends dressed up and lip-synched to Thelma and Louise and Breakfast at Tiffany's while the artist mimed to A Vivien Leigh love scene. For art students, it seems, hair, clothes, and makeup still hold the same allure they always did.

Leisure, alternative lifestyle, and hanging-out hedonism are the refreshingly unaffected concerns of the new batch of Goldsmith's students. Despite the art school's international reputations, the class of 1995, have gone their own way - without miming in any obvious ways the style or strategies of their celebrated forebears. The success of the work is in the student's quest to tell the worlds who they are, or who they want to be, not in style or technique. I admire their confidence.

JONE SAVAGE ON THE BRITPOP SCENE

MAJOR MUSIC

London, pop metropolis, is periodically celebrated in song and lyric. which in turn redraw the capital's psychic map. You only have to hear Kinks vignettes like "Dedicated Follower of Fashion" and "Big Black Smoke," or Clash commniques like "London's Burning" and "White Riot," to freeze the city in 1966 (the spiritual emptiness beneath the "pretty colored clothes") and 1977 (inner-urban speed surfing, social/political polarization). Here are the twinned totems of white British pop: Mod and Punk.

In the last few years the inner city has been an unpopular pop location: those touched by the post-House explosion demanded physical and mental space - and despite a battery of legislation employed against them, ravers can still be found in places where inaccessibility is the key, on mountains and wide beaches. Too far away for most people, so the cycle turns back to inner London - this time to Camden Town, the London equivalent of New York's St. Mark's Place.

The new syndrome is summarized by Stephen Duffy's new single, "London Girls," heavily stylized pop/rock performance that harks back to early David Bowie. Duffy's lyrics delineate the treadmill of the latest Britpop poet laureate: "London town on Tuesday lunchtime: get the paper. Maybe this time - indiecators [sic] indicate a trend: your way. You're front page news."

Welcome to the curiously hermetic, overmediated world of Britpop. Initiated by Suede (who sang about "the love and and poison of London" back in 1992), industrialized by Blur on their 1994 album Parklife, and fine-tuned by Elastica, this is a febrile, highly specific genre. Within a multicultural metroplis where the dominant sounds are swing-beat, ragga, or jungle, Britpop is a synthesis of white style, with any black influence bled out: the guitar-centricity of late-`80 indie rock, the social commentary of the Kinks, the laddish dandyism of the Small Faces, the smart-dumb spikiness of Wire, whose presence looms large over Elastica and the latest music-press sensations, Menswear.

Scanned close, Britpop reveals itself as a suburban, middle-class fantasty of London street life, with exclusively metropolitan models. A petty nationalism hangs over the style, like the pollution that cloaks Camden: it's as though techno and grunge - both of which originated outside the U.K. both of which offered a strong formal/emotional challenge - never happened. In response to the full-on emotions of Nirvana, we get ... parlor games, uncomfortably reflective of the fly-blown conservatism of John Major's government.

When in doubt, the English retreat into formalized poses, sardonic irony, childlike surrealism: the video for Menswear's new single, "Daydreamer," shows the teenagers spooking out amid train sets, bunk beds, ventriloquist dummies. Laughable, you might think, yet, with its queasy, claustrophobic undertow, "Daydreamer" holds a mirror up to London, a city where people "flounder drowning," where social life is reduced to the stark choice: "pull you out or drag you under?" While tinkering around with archetypes, Menswear have it upon a British pop absolute: the primal privet-hedge perversity of suburbia in southeast England. Out of this seemingly arid environment, exotic blooms will grow.