This is a well curated overview of innovation in the production and distribution of politicised art since the French revolution with the emphasis on post-war European collectives and community arts groups. There are some surprising omissions though, such as kennardphillipps, Trust your Struggle, The Yes Men (and others) and very few paintings. A studio copy of David’s ‘Death of Marat’ stands out for the warmth of its colour harmonies and the sensuous immediacy of the paint handling, but it’s more or less alone in this context.

It shouldn’t surprise me that our state cultural institutions seem to find the idea of a revolution in artistic means more fascinating than the political content of the work, and the issues addressed in this exhibition jostle each other like shouters at a public meeting. It’s debatable whether we need another small display of Bauhaus artifacts and designs at the expense of say some of the agitprop material produced during the Thatcher years or anything at all about current cuts and conflicts. I guess that’s what happens when fear of upsetting the vested interests of the patrons leads to curatorial self-censorship. Or maybe they just didn’t want it to be too relevant.

So this is a survey that emerges from Walter Benjamin’s side of the debate as eloquently stated in ‘The Author as Producer’, as opposed to Georg Lukacs’ strategy of infusing the traditional forms of art with revolutionary content. Speaking as a painter, I’d like to have seen some socialist realism, whether Soviet, American or East European and not because I want to live in a Stalinist nightmare, but because I think most people who look at art  have probably had a go at making a painting, enjoy looking at them, and can ‘read’ them and make their own minds up. The problem with identifying artistic radicalism with a radicalisation of the means of production is that you lose most of the audience along the way. Relational aesthetics (or audience participation to you and me) is no substitute for content driven work that people want to look at.

Nevertheless, this is an challenging show that reminds you how many artists manage to keep politics out of their work altogether and why so much contemporary art seems so vapid as a result.