Simeon Barclay: The Hero Wears Clay Shoes, review – Alluring journey through the 1980s

Your reaction to this show may depend on what the Eighties mean to you. The multimedia installation teems with references to that decade, prompted by Simeon Barclay’s memories — he was born in 1975.

There’s a strong sense of the disjunction between reality and aspiration or fantasy that dominated discourse then and influences us today. One work features the killer scene in Alan Bleasdale’s brilliant 1982 TV series Boys from the Blackstuff, about unemployed men in Thatcher’s Britain, in which Yosser Hughes, the tragi-comic protagonist, meets the flashy Liverpool footballer Graeme Souness in a bar. Here, the image is split and between them are sheets of aluminium with painted images of glamorous Eighties women, one of them Kristin Scott Thomas. Fashion plays a significant role: the face of Isabella Rossellini, such a crucial figure then as model and then actress, appears etched in brass amid a minimalist lightbox. Nearby, a video compiles excruciating ads for Calvin Klein’s Obsession.

A screen breaking the space is wallpapered: on one side are The Specials, among the UK’s first mixed-race bands, on the other is a drawing from the Viz comic strip Fat Slags, overlaid with images of a gymnast and a dancefloor. A collage sits on the wall, which includes Jerry Mouse, that famous picture of Vinnie Jones grabbing Paul Gascoigne’s crotch and a catwalk still featuring extravagant shoes, along with the text “swamp rat”. Some of the references are lost on me, but perhaps that’s the point, this being partly a journey into Barclay’s personal hinterland. Much here has a broader significance, evoking the staples and shifts in British identity and society, not just the cultural wallpaper of Barclay’s youth.

Until Nov 5 (020 7887 8888, tate.org.uk)