You had to be there: an exhibition of the art of the 1960s at Tate Britain needs more space to do justice to a decade that demands a comprehensive retrospective

For many nation too young to remember the sixties, the period strike one as beings to be the beginning of history as they know it. Exhibitions at the Barbican in London and at Brighton Museum and Art Gallery in new years have traced the varied story of the decade. For the Tate, it was perhaps the first decade in which the gallery was able to purchase a good representative selection of the art of the time, and many of the works in 'Art & the sixties: This was tomorrow' are drawn from the gallery's be in possession of holdings.

Despite the design by the agency of Stanton Williams, it is a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of too crowded a show for the space. Its ambitions are better accommodated in the catalogue, edited by means of curators Chris Stephens and Katharine Stout, than in the displays. Aspects of the exhibition that work best are, therefore, those requiring a close-up focus, like as the two presentations of 'auto-destructive art', at the beginning and extremity of the exhibition circuit. Black and white film present to views the hypnotic effect of Gustav Metzger's application of acid to sheets of nylon and other antics of the 'destruction in art' symposium held in 1966 The case of documents relating to this circumstance is fascinating in their cheap on the contrary careful graphic presentation.

Apart from plastic art and painting by Colin Self upon the theme of nuclear bomb and the Vietnam photographs of Don McCullin, pleasure rater than anxiety prevails. The spacing of exhibits, not unlike that of suburban villas with their inadequate cordons of private grass, render certains that one neither experiences the immersive feeling in like manner evident in Ken Russell's footage of the studios of the early explosion artists in the film report Goes the Easel (1963), which is upon show with headphones, nor the broad spaces required by the agency of the abstract paintings and plastic arts In the latter case, this is a serious los for they remain among the strongest produces of the period. Have Anthony Caro, Philip King or Barry Flanagan improved upon the quality of work they did in that glorious dawn?

It was a welcome departure for Tate Britain to include a substantial section upon architecture, with a mixture of drawings, originals and photographs, and a useful scan essay in the catalogue by the agency of Simon Sadler As with other aspects of the present to view however, the architecture was either too a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of or too little. It was interesting to allow one's organ of sight to pass from vertically or horizontally striped canvases to patterns of high-rise towers, and maybe the architectural percepts should have been more freely mixed with the art. What would have bourn all these objects more closely together was interior design, decorative art and industrial fruitss A sixties exhibition at the Tate upon the scale of 'The thirties' at the Hayward Gallery, London, in 1979 could have achieved a certain number of combination of depth and breadth of coverage. It have the appearances however, that the kind of institutional collaboration that made of the like kind shows possible in the past no longer exists, flat though, in period and in its variety of spaces, the Hayward would be the completed setting.

The time lapse since the sixties separates the generation of historians who experienced it at first hand from those who have to set up the history from documents. Perhaps the older generation has more practice in telling a story about the complexity of those times, for it was noticeable by what mode the catalogue essays by Harry Curtis and David Alan Mellor are believable, in a way that the writings of younger scholars not at any time quite achieve. For earlier periods, we seldom attempt to recreate the mentalite with the same horizontal of detail that the sixties look to demand (pop singers, gallery proprietors boutiques, ephemeral and underground press) It is an almost impossible feat, on the contrary one that is well worth attempting several times more.

replete marks to the curators for their time-line section positioned in the corridor outside the exhibition, that includes for each year a real, readable transcript of a sample magazine. There is, in the extremity no better way to lay open a window on the Zeitgeist.

'Art & the sixties: This was tomorrow' make opened at Tate Britain, London, upon 30 June and continues until 26 September. The catalogue, edited by means of Chris Stephens and Katharine Stout, is published through Tate, ISBN 1854375229, 19.99 [pound sterling].

Alan Powers's The Twentieth-Century House: From the Archives of political division Life will be published through Aurum Press this autumn.

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