For many decades, autobiography was a certain no-no in the visual arts. Ad Reinhardt, who painted monochrome canvasses in the (naïve) belief that these voids of colour transcended the smutty pettiness of daily life, came up with this little corker: 'the laying bare of oneself, either autobiographically or socially, is obscene.'
So, if the likes of Ad Reinhardt thought that autobiography was 'bad taste', it was because they were so conceited that they thought that 'taste' in art wasn't just a matter of fashion. Art used to be all about trying to find something more profound than fashion - something more profound than daily life and the passing trends of popular culture.

Which probably accounts for some of the repulsion that was felt towards autobiography. I mean, if you think 'art' transcends all the practicalities of daily life, then someone putting up their life as art - as if to say that their life has been so special as warrant that very exalted status of 'art' - is just way too narcissistic.

To put it tersely, Sarah Crowest's 'Love and Dissimulation' is an autobiographical show of the most obvious form: snapshots of her and her family's lives. Yet her particular achievement has been to do such a thing, with all its potential for calamity, in a manner that is acceptable.

Actually, it is more than 'acceptable': it is fantastically warm, perceptive and acute about being a person. These snap-shots allow us a whole lot of little glimpses into what makes Sarah Sarah. And, if this sounds like the kind of thing that might be grand if you know and love the artist but mean nothing to you if you've never met her, the photographs have been organised to tell stories and make narratives in a manner that is clear and easy to relate to.

She tells it all with a shrug and a but what can you do? chuckle about how bloody emotional and silly life can make us. One part of the show involves pictures of her from the 'seventies and 'eighties with changing looks and hairdos. Accompanying them are photo-shopped images showing what she might have turned into today if she had stayed in the kind of headspace she was in when those photos were taken: crazy, exhausted, battered, desperate etc.

Some might detect a little hint of some old adages in the show: that Blakean dictum, 'the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom'; the sort of formula for making art of 'I've seen a lot of love and lived a lot of life,' which, in itself, never makes for great art.

However, Sarah's autobiography works because it doesn't try to exalt her life into something sacred and overly meaningful; it's just a simple reflection on some of her experiences. The tradition of 'fine art' as we have known it - a profession pursued by individuals who seriously think that what they do is sacrosanct and for the good of mankind - is dead and buried.

If movements like pop art didn't manage to convince a section of the public dedicated to art that life is more interesting than art, then perhaps the record-breaking crowds that flocked to see Tracey Emin's My Bed in the 1999 Turner prize might have helped them to cotton on.

James Strickland

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