The Museum of Modern Art’s show of the Alice in Wonderland film-maker’s art overflows with his distinctive creations, but the organisers have wasted an opportunity to take him out of his rabbit hole

Gallery: Tim Burton at Moma

“That’s the big deer from Edward Scissorhands,” a woman in the sculpture garden of New York’s Museum of Modern Art tells her friend, pointing at an outsized topiary stag based on the one in Tim Burton’s 1990 film. “And I recognise this one from Beetlejuice, when the furniture tries to eat [the characters],” she adds, gesturing at a large, pointy, painted sheet-metal piece that bears a passing resemblance to something from Burton’s 1988 movie but is in fact Alexander Calder’s 1959 sculpture Black Widow.

The attribution might have been wide of the mark but at least a connection was made between Burton and a larger artworld. The peculiar thing about Moma’s Tim Burton show, which has been running since November and continues to the end of April, is how little effort its curators have made to glance backward or sideways to place Burton’s work within a broader context.

Burton has a distinctive sensibility, consistently expressed with wit, imagination and macabre charm, but he is not an obvious candidate for a blockbuster show at one of the world’s most prestigious art museums. Part of the exhibition’s job is surely to offer an argument about why he should be given a platform alongside the likes of Claude Monet and William Kentridge, both of whom also have shows at Moma at the moment, and how his work fits into and enhances a larger cultural narrative. This the exhibition does not do.

Instead, it gives us Burton, Burton and more Burton. You can see why: the man is plainly prodigious and each of the hundreds of pieces on show has its own reasons to be admired – from early Mad magazine-influenced cartoons and public-service posters created by Burton as a teenager in Burbank, California, to props and production work from his movies (Edward Scissorhands’s leather-switchblade costume, The Nightmare Before Christmas’s Jack Skellington figure with his two dozen spare heads). There are also nine new pieces created for the show, from a giant inflatable “Balloon Boy” in the main atrium to the monster’s maw through which one enters the exhibition proper.

The bulk of the work on show consists of drawings, the vast majority offering individual vividness while remaining consistent with Burton’s overall sensibility: there are monsters, aliens, fairgrounds and suburbia; creepy-sympathetic figures that are sharp-toothed, spindly-limbed, bristling with stalks and spirals but often bulbously top-heavy or buxomly dominatrixy. Stark black-and-white stripes alternate with splattered palettes of riotous, even fluorescent colour.

This consistency is striking and limiting. There’s really not that much difference in sensibility and technique between Burton’s latest works and the paintings of alien invasions or monstrous animations created during his adolescence. Impressive stuff for a teenager, no question, but it leaves the show feeling awfully samey. Even the novelty value of glimpses of early or uncompleted projects is qualified by a feeling that if we never saw Burton’s Hansel and Gretel or Little Dead Riding Hood, we can probably imagine how they would look without much difficulty. Nor, a couple of installation pieces notwithstanding, does the show give you the feeling of being in Burton’s world yourself in the way that, say, the unsettlingly immersive 2007 David Lynch exhibition at Paris’s Fondation Cartier, with its disorienting red curtains and grinding industrial soundtrack, did.

All the more reason, then, for the exhibition to look beyond the contents of Burton’s metaphorical garage. There are obvious connections to be made here: with other popular illustrators, such as Charles Addams, Edward Gorey, Ralph Steadman, Ronald Searle and Maurice Sendak; with ideas of childhood, sexuality and outsiderdom that could easily encompass the Grimms, Poe and Freud; and with cinematic movements such as German expressionism and classic monster movies. A Moma film season running in conjunction with the show, called The Lurid Beauty of Monsters, juxtaposes Burton’s features with just these kinds of cinematic reference points (Nosferatu, The Brain That Wouldn’t Die, Tex Avery cartoons, etc). But the response to the main exhibition is a bit like the response you might have to many of Burton’s characters: have you thought about getting out a bit more?

Kenneth Anger’s crazy, gorgeous, disturbing films almost landed him in jail. The avant-garde pioneer talks Simon Hattenstone through all his demons

The gallery is so tiny I think I’ve walked into somebody’s front room. A 10-minute film plays on a loop. Weirded-out rock stars who look like Mick Jagger, or who are Mick Jagger, preen, strut and do their late-1960s satanic thing. White dots form a pyramid on a black background, naked boys lounge on a sofa, marines jump from a helicopter. There’s a cat, a dog, an all-seeing Egyptian eye, people smoking dope out of a skull. A synthesiser makes an unbearable noise. There are no words, no story.

Around the screen, in London’s Sprüth Magers gallery, a bunch of 21st-century trendies and stoners are watching this film, called Invocation of My Demon Brother, in awe, their ages ranging from late teens to late 80s. Next door, hallucinogenic photographs eyeball you from the wall. You walk in, you walk out – and the show’s all over in a flash. It can only mean one thing. Kenneth Anger is back in town.

Anger is a Hollywood legend. He has created some of the most disturbing, gorgeous, crazy and influential films ever, even if he has yet to make a feature. This great avant-gardist is also a writer, best known for Lalaland’s two most scurrilous gossip digests: Hollywood Babylon 1 and 2; the first was published in 1965, banned immediately and not published again until 1975. Among the books’ more scandalous passages are allegations that Lucille Ball started Hollywood life as a prostitute; that James Dean had a “disconcerting interest” in a 12-year-old boy; and that Bette Davis killed her second husband.

We meet at a London hotel that smells of cabbage. Anger is 83 years old; his hair is jet black, his shoes red, his trousers tan. One eye is bigger than the other, and his face is unlined. He is both beautiful and grotesque: Warren Beatty meets Frankenstein’s monster. Anger wasn’t always an outsider. He trained as a dancer, and as a boy danced with Shirley Temple. He was handsome enough to have been a leading man. But he did not want to be part of the system. “There was a possibility of going into the industry, but there was a very unpleasant atmosphere in the early 50s, the ridiculous witch-hunt of reds. I wasn’t a communist, I just found it very unpleasant.” His voice is a cat’s purr.

Although he made films as a boy, Anger’s earliest surviving work is 1947’s Fireworks. This appeared three years before Jean Genet’s groundbreaking homoerotic prison masterpiece, Un Chant D’Amour. Fireworks features a young man (Anger) wet-dreaming a sequence in which he is seduced/gang-raped by a group of sailors after he tries to pick one up. As with all his films, there are no words, and the story, such as it is, has a dramatic music score. The camera lingers on his apparent erection – which turns out to be a model of an African soldier. Blood pours from his eyes as he is pulverised by the sailors, and a firework explodes from his zip. His heart is ripped apart to expose a ticking time-piece. It’s not only surreal and scary, it is devastatingly beautiful.

Astonishingly, it was made in the McCarthy era. Anger was arrested on obscenity charges following its release. The case went to the California Supreme Court, which declared the film to be art. Anger made it in his parents’ Beverly Hills home when they were away at an uncle’s funeral. “I just put the furniture in the garden and the living room was the set. Luckily it didn’t rain.”

How did public screenings go? “Well, it was shown to an elite audience,” Anger says. “Among the people who came was James Whale, the British director of Frankenstein, and I became friends with him. Dr Alfred Kinsey, the sex researcher, also came. I became friends with him, too.” Did his parents see it? “Um, no. My grandmother saw it. She was like my sponsor: she bought my camera for me. She said it’s terrific. She was a painter.” Did he know what he was trying to do with films? “Well, I knew all about French avant garde, so I was the American avant garde.”

Six-packs, scorpions, swastikas

Anger was born Kenneth Anglemeyer in 1927. His father worked for Douglas Aircraft and his brother went into the airforce, but it was his grandmother who was his inspiration. She took him to exhibitions, introduced him to art and film. At Beverly Hills High school, he remembers looking out of the window watching The Song of Bernadette being made at 20th Century Fox next door. He was friends with Harry Brand Jr, son of Fox’s head of publicity. They would swap Hollywood gossip during break.

In his teens, he founded his own film society to screen obscure European movies. By the time of Fireworks, Kenneth Anglemeyer had disappeared. The sole opening credit reads: “A film by Anger.” Was it a name that reflected how he felt? “I just condensed my name,” he says. “I knew it would be like a label, a logo. It’s easy to remember.”

It is Anger’s use of music as a substitute for dialogue that marks him out from other film-makers of his time. He set 1954’s Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, inspired by Coleridge’s poem Kubla Khan, to Janácek’s Glagolitic Mass. His most famous film, Scorpio Rising (another sadomasochistic montage of bikers, beatings, six-packs, scorpions and swastikas), has possibly the greatest pop soundtrack in movie history: Fools Rush In, My Boyfriend’s Back, Blue Velvet, Hit the Road Jack, He’s a Rebel. Scorpio Rising would later encourage Martin Scorsese (in Mean Streets) and David Lynch (in Blue Velvet) to use pop songs to help tell a story.

Lucifer Rising, a celebration of pagan ritual featuring Marianne Faithfull, had a soundtrack written from prison by Bobby Beausoleil, a convicted murderer and an associate of the Manson family. Wasn’t Beausoleil a boyfriend of his? “He was a friend. We lived together.” Has he known a lot of bad boys? “I seem to be attracted to bad boys, but I never let it go too far. In other words, there’s always, ‘OK, it’s time for me to move out.’” I ask Anger if he was a bad boy. He smiles. “I was a smart boy. Too smart to be involved in badness.” He has always preferred badness by association.

Anger was also a friend of Anton Szandor LaVey, who founded the Church of Satan in the 1960s. Is he a satanist? “No, I am not a satanist. I am a pagan. Satanism is another thing.” But, I say, people look at your dystopian films, with their myriad references to the devil, and assume you are a devil-worshipper. “Well, I can’t help what people see in them,” he says. Were you playing with ideas or was it your belief system? “Well, I suppose, a belief.” In what? “Underneath it all is an appreciation of nature.”

In Lucifer Rising, Faithfull plays Lilith, a demon. It was Anger’s most expensive film because it involved a trip to Egypt. “I said to Marianne Faithfull, don’t bring any drugs because they’ll execute you. So she hid her heroin in her makeup box underneath her face powder. I think she was powdering her face with heroin.”

‘Hollywood is a dried-out prune’

Anger often found it hard to finance his films. This is where the Hollywood Babylon books came in useful. Although it took him years to get them past the lawyers, they became bestsellers. Many of their stories are still disputed. For years, we have been waiting for Hollywood Babylon 3. Anger says it is written, but it’s on hold. “The main reason I didn’t bring it out was that I had a whole section on Tom Cruise and the Scientologists. I’m not a friend of the Scientologists.” He says today’s Holly-wood is a dried-out prune of a place, its stars not even worth gossiping about. “I covered most of the people who were interesting to me in the first two books.”

Not only is Anger still filming in his 80s, he tells me he is in the middle of a purple patch, having recently made a number of shorts: one about military uniforms called Uniform Attraction; another about football warmups called Foreplay; and a third, Elliott’s Suicide, about his friend, singer/songwriter Elliott Smith, who killed himself in 2003 at the age of 34. “He stabbed himself in the heart after a quarrel with his girlfriend. It’s the most ridiculous reason to kill yourself.”

Although Smith’s songs feature in Elliott’s Suicide, it is a film without dialogue. After all, why change a winning formula? Actually, there is one thing I have always wondered: does Anger ever watch, say, Lucifer Rising and wonder what the hell it’s all about? He smiles for a long time, casting his mind back over all those years, all those films. “They are close to being dreams – and in dreams, you don’t have to analyse what everything means.”

Kenneth Anger is at Sprüth Magers, London W1, until 27 March. Then touring. Anger appears in person tomorrow at Tyneside cinema, Gateshead. Details: avfestival.co.uk

He was the anarchist of 1980s design, but the technical wizardry in his current London show feels over-polished and out of touch

Unless you die young, it’s difficult to be a hero for ever. Heroes are commercialised. They succumb to what Norman Mailer called “exhaustion of the will”. Or they simply go out of fashion. And that’s what happened to Ron Arad – or at least, that’s what we thought had happened. But the Israeli-born, London-based designer of bold, sculptural furniture has never been more ubiquitous. In the last year, a major retrospective of his work has bounced from the Centre Pompidou in Paris to the Museum of Modern Art in New York, recently landing at London’s Barbican.

Arad is one of the design world’s few nameable stars. Most people will probably know his Tom Vac chair (1993), a rippled plastic armchair on steel legs that once abounded in cool restaurants. Or perhaps his bestselling Bookworm bookshelf, a flexible ribbon that holds your books in a spiral. But these are merely the outward signs of his commercial success. He also works as an artist, selling one-off pieces for sometimes hundreds of thousands of pounds, and as an architect and teacher. Over the last decade he has been hugely influential at the Royal College of Art, where he was head of the Design Products department until last year. Arad wasn’t interested in teaching people how to be professional industrial designers: he wanted to teach them how to think for themselves, and a generation of designers graduated wanting to work just as he did – as a designer-maker, free from the technical constraints set by manufacturers.

To understand Arad the hero, visitors to the Barbican show should head straight up to the mezzanine galleries to soak up his early work from the 1980s. There they’ll find a stereo and speakers encased in concrete, which look as though they’ve been hauled off a building site or hacked from a sea wall. Can you imagine a rougher envelope for all that delicate technology? So much for the precious, garish styling of the designer decade. Arad, recently graduated from the Architectural Association, had broken out of architecture to do his own thing. His work was raw and muscular, but also rich and clever.

It all started with an old leather car seat bolted to some scaffolding pipes. The Rover chair (1981), an emblem of Britain’s fading car industry spliced with some DIY high-tech structure, was an instant punk icon, the furniture equivalent of the Sex Pistols’ ransom-note typography. Before Arad had even noticed any connection to the prevailing counter-culture, Jean-Paul Gaultier was knocking on his door to buy six. He went on to hammer metal into clunky thrones such as the Tinker chair (1988), and turn looped steel sheets into a parody of your auntie’s upholstered armchair in the Well-Tempered chair (1986). It was visceral stuff, and what’s more, it looked like he was having fun.

Fast forward two decades to this show, and you see the Rover chair again – except this time it’s made of flawless chrome. The sheer shininess of it epitomises everything that went wrong with design in the noughties. Galleries were falling over themselves to produce ultra-expensive limited editions for a growing collectors’ market buoyed by the economic bubble. You want your chair in Carrara marble? You got it. The bling world of design-art was too often about expense for the sake of it. It was an upgrade of materials, but not of imagination.

None of that is Arad’s fault. He had been blurring the distinction between design and art for decades, and we should thank him for it. It’s not boundary-crossing that’s the problem, it’s the fact that the edginess of Arad’s work has been replaced by a flabby, over-polished mannerism. It’s too slick. Take a series of recent rocking chairs called the Voids (an apt name): no doubt they are technically impressive, but whether they’re made of tiger-stripe acrylic or lacquered aluminium, there’s no disguising that the designs are utterly vacuous. His architecture is even worse – this exhibition gives him so much credit for also being an architect that you wonder whether the curators have actually looked at these buildings. They’re heinous: scaled-up, self-indulgent gewgaws.

Arad has been an early adopter of new materials and technologies – he used rapid prototyping (a method of 3D printing using plastic resin) to make a series of fruit bowls, and he incorporated text messaging into a chandelier for Swarovski – but often abandons them before he’s achieved anything of substance. The show is a celebration of his magpie ingenuity, but you won’t find much under the surface. Arad’s work is all technique. It’s pure expression through materials, form and movement. That means you can only judge it using taste. One of his giant rocking chairs (he loves rocking chairs) or overblown bookcases will bring someone a sudden jolt of pure joy, while the person next to them will yawn. He’s the design equivalent of Marmite.

The superbness of it all is part of the problem. It’s so bombastic that it doesn’t leave you any room to be you – Arad is too busy blinding you with who he is. There is no sociological dimension to his work; it’s not about people, it’s about him.

The reason why this show feels out of touch is that we’ve moved on. Sure, Arad helped erode the boundaries of design, but which boundaries are we interested in? If design is going to rediscover its sense of purpose, it has to crossbreed with other disciplines, from biotechnology to healthcare. The most interesting contemporary designers are already crossing those thresholds; Arad, though, feels like he’s been left far behind.

Fifty “women to watch” have been selected for the Cultural Leadership Programme by a panel of judges including choreographer Wayne McGregor, broadcaster Jenni Murray and playwright Kwame Kwei-Armah. Good to see such superb names as Kate McGrath, director of theatre producers Fuel, and Emma Stenning, executive director of the Bristol Old Vic chosen. But there are some significant omissions: I’ll also be “watching” such women as Kathleen Soriano, who has taken over from Norman Rosenthal as exhibitions secretary at the Royal Academy of Arts; inspired curator Polly Staple, director of the Chisenhale Gallery in London; and Jackie Wylie, the young creator of an interesting programme at Glasgow venue the Arches.

Jenny Holzer’s bold new show draws on US military memos and torture techniques. Adrian Searle is left feeling paranoid

A river of words runs across the floor. “I swim in her,” say the 10 lanes of yellow text, streaming through the semi-dark. “I sing her a song about us.” How lyrical, you think. I am looking down from an interior balcony at the Baltic in Gateshead. Below me words flow by, disappearing when they hit the base of a wall, as if sliding under it. There are too many words, too many thoughts to hold on to: “I step on her hands”; “She tightens and I hit her”; “I wash her out”; “I can ruin your life.”

This exhibit, called For Chicago, is a compilation of 13 different text works made by Jenny Holzer between 1977 and 2001. The phrases bloom in my mind, filled with monstrous possibilities. As you read, the voice in your head becomes by turns lover, mother, creep, sadist, rapist, murderer. Snag on a particular phrase and, as you watch it slide away, you’ll miss what’s coming up behind. Occasionally, the words blink on and off, or stall and reverse. It is hard to keep up, even though they glide by at a walking pace, silently. The phrases you don’t quite catch matter as much as the ones you do. You can drown in all these words.

For Chicago forms part of the largest exhibition of Holzer’s work to be shown in Britain. The artist has a good feel for the potent phrase, to set the mind racing or stop it dead. All these snatched fragments, whispers and threats read as aphorisms, commands and confessions. The tone is always flat and declarative. There are no adjectives, only statements. It might almost be a kind of poetry, but Holzer has always insisted she’s no poet.

Born in Ohio in 1950, Holzer had a lonely childhood. She taught Sunday school and wanted to be a painter. But her art, and her reputation, began as a kind of rumour, with lists flyposted anonymously on the streets of New York in the late 1970s: “Abuse of power should come as no surprise”; “Murder has its sexual side”; “Stupid people shouldn’t breed”; “Protect me from what I want.” Holzer’s Truisms proliferated on stickers, posters, T-shirts, even on metal plaques. They’ve since been carved on stones, projected on to buildings around the world, and appeared on the sides of trucks – infiltrating the planet in stark capital letters. Holzer continues to recycle her Truisms; lately she has been disseminating them on Twitter. She could be selling something. Whatever it is, it breeds mistrust.

One early Truism is writ large on the side of the Baltic. “The beginning of the war will be secret,” declares the huge red-on-white banner, facing Newcastle across the Tyne. The war between Newcastle and Gateshead is no secret, but when did it begin? When does any war really begin? I stare at the sign blankly and begin to worry.

Holzer’s work fills two floors. Her 1970s Truisms and her Inflammatory Essays reappear in Monument, spilling out purple, red, white and blue light as the words flow on. Beyond are two old tables bearing neatly arranged bones, which appear to be human; some wear engraved silver bands. You have to get up close to read the engravings, your nose inches from the bones. “To fuck her where . . . ” I read on one band; and “. . . head explodes” on another. The silver winks brightly against the brown and ivory bones. You’ll never get to the bottom of this forensic nightmare, but it’s all a bit too gothic for me.

Over the last decade, Holzer has stopped using her own words (and those of US poet Henri Cole), turning instead to declassified statements, letters, reports and memos from the US military. The conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan now preoccupy her. As well as making ever more complex arrangements of LED signs, Holzer has started painting again – often direct copies of US government papers she has collected through the Freedom of Information Act. These frequently terrifying documents outline interrogation techniques: sleep deprivation, white noise exposure, open-hand strikes low-voltage electrocution, muscle-fatigue inducement.

Other documents appear to argue about the ethics of such treatment. In an exasperated memo, one officer writes: “I spent several months in Afghanistan interrogating the Taliban and al-Qaida. Restrictions on interrogation techniques had a negative impact on our ability to gather intelligence.” The arguments go back and forth between the moral high ground and calls for “the gloves to come off”.

What is troubling about these documents is not what one reads, but what has been blacked out: great swathes of text have fallen to the censor’s pen; some pages are almost all black. Holzer was alert to the fact that these censored documents had the geometric look of suprematist paintings, and reworked them accordingly. One canvas of black rhomboids bears only the handwritten words “water board”. I stare at the blackness, and imagine the cold technical description of this form of torture that probably lies buried under the impenetrable blackness. Other paintings reproduce enlarged palm prints of detainees and enemy combatants.

This material also works its way into her newer LEDs. There are reports of beatings and cholera, people with bags over their heads, displaced civilians without food or water, people handcuffed and forced into agonising stress positions. The flatly written reports churn through Holzer’s machines. The absence of the larger context for each fragment is important: Holzer’s work infers a complex, often malevolent totalitarian world. In the end, it’s all too much to take in – what one is left with is atmosphere, and in my case, a creeping sense of paranoia.

The combination of paintings and luminous, flickering LED works does not, however, work well. The jumps are too great; the two forms need separate spaces. But does quibbling over form matter? I think so. Holzer knows there’s a difference between a Truism sticker and a light projection on a building, between a techno-fairground of LED and a painting. The words come at you differently. It’s the difference between a whisper and a scream, a song and an order, the word on the street and the words in your head.

Jenny Holzer is at the Baltic, Gateshead, until 16 May. Details: 0191 478 1810.

A new exhibition celebrates the work of Ronald Searle as he turns 90. Steve Bell on what makes him Britain’s greatest living cartoonist

When I first wrote to Ronald Searle with the idea of an exhibition focusing on his reportage work, he was polite but sceptical, pointing out the difficulty of locating artwork that had been scattered across continents. The idea for a show at the Cartoon Museum, where I have been on the board of trustees for some years, fell into abeyance until the approach of his 90th birthday; this time we proposed a more general exhibition and I was delighted when he responded positively.

I was thrilled to the point of almost dislocating my own jaw when a portfolio bulging with Searle originals arrived at the door. This turned out to be only the first batch. The sheer quality was astonishing, and this work, mainly reportage, forms the core of the exhibition. Another generous loan from his daughter Kate and son John ensured that all the other aspects of his long career, including St Trinian’s and Molesworth, were not neglected.

What I had not reckoned with was Searle’s own meticulous preservation and annotation of his own collection, and the fact that he has clearly hung on to his own best work. His archive consists of papers, books, sketchbooks and thousands of drawings, along with works by Gillray, Rowlandson, Cruikshank, Leech and Pont, and most of it is now held at the Wilhelm Busch Museum in Hanover, Germany.

Anita O’Brien, the curator of the museum, and I had an opportunity both to visit and study the large archive in Hanover, and to talk to the man himself at his home in Provence. What struck me most of all was his utter commitment to his own art and his lifelong (and, I would say fully justified) conviction of its significance. In the past he has described his brand of graphic satire as “a minor, parasitic art form”, but I don’t believe a word of it. Searle has a very clear-eyed assessment of his worth.

He was talented enough in his youth to get paid work as a cartoonist on the Cambridge Daily News from the age of 15 in 1935. Soon he came to the notice of the editorial board of Granta, where he began to be used regularly. His work from this time is fairly conventional, owing more than a little to HM Bateman, and gives little inkling of his future style, but his seriousness of purpose is evident. He was beginning to earn nearly as much as his railwayman father, yet felt a strong need to improve his drawing, so secured himself a scholarship to attend the Cambridge School of Art, where he studied and drew constantly until the war intervened. He enlisted in the Royal Engineers in 1939 and carried on drawing.

The German artist George Grosz was “a very great influence” and a small but beautiful volume of his work accompanied Searle throughout his wartime travails, for, other than a brief spell of action manning the rearguard of the British retreat down the Malay peninsula, he spent the entire war as a prisoner of the Japanese at Changhi on Singapore island and as a forced labourer on the notorious Burma railway in what was then Siam.

This profound and brutal experience changed everything for him and is still clearly with him to this day. The drawings he made and managed to preserve, at great risk, provide not only a unique record of a hellish experience but also demonstrate an astonishing artistic transformation.

He told me: “I desperately wanted to put down what was happening, because I thought if by any chance there was a record, even if I died, someone might find it and know what went on. And in the end I was very lucky. At times I was so ill that I couldn’t draw at all. You’re doing 16 hours a day rock breaking and you’re exhausted. You come back and have a bowl of rice. You have no light, but you have fire, a big fire keeping the mountain lions away, and snakes perhaps, and by the light of the fire, I made the drawings. I didn’t have a watch or anything, so you just lie down in the tent until you were dragged out the next morning to go back to the rock breaking. And so all these drawings, some of them very bad, were all I could do in a state of exhaustion.”

After years of war and starvation, Searle returned with two things driving him on: “What can I eat . . . and how can I live?” His comic work had continued, but had now acquired a darker quality. It soon found outlets, and St Trinian’s, the first cartoon of which was drawn in Changhi, became a huge success. Through the 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s, his reportage continued, some of it real, some of it imagined, but all of it mercifully now paid for by a whole array of publications from Punch and the News Chronicle in the UK through to Holiday and Life magazine in the US.

Searle still works every day, his pen scratching and swooping and his ideas still flowing. Until only two years ago his work still appeared regularly in Le Monde and, he says, it is budgetary cutbacks that have caused him to be laid off, rather than any diminution of enthusiasm or energy on his part.

These most recent works are in themselves a kind of imaginative reportage, anatomising the great issues of the day in full, resplendent absurdity. His line is still vibrant, still questing, and drawing still absorbs him utterly. Searle and his wife Monica, a couple bubbling with zest for life, show no signs of flagging before his centenary. Perhaps by then his unique body of work will be given the space and resources that it deserves in one of the great galleries of the country of his birth. It is a depressing indictment of the condition of our visual culture that the Searle archive should now be ensconced in Hanover without so much as a batsqueak from any of our great art institutions of state, who had the opportunity to acquire it for the nation but never took it up.

What marks Searle’s work out is genuine wit, intelligence and unabashed ambition. He is our greatest living cartoonist, with a lifelong dedication to his craft unequalled by any of his contemporaries. His work is truly international, yet absolutely grounded in the English comic tradition. It is the highest form of conceptual art, but devoid of any of the pretence that usually accompanies such a notion. Which is to say it is extremely funny, but not all the time. It cuts to the essence of life.

Eight artists shortlisted for UK’s richest visual arts prize

The work of eight artists competing for the UK’s richest visual arts prize went on display in Wales today ‑ and none could be accused of triviality.

There was no sight of a light being turned off and on at the preview opening of the fourth Artes Mundi prize exhibition in Cardiff. This was big subject art tackling subjects from post-communist social order to consumerism and globalisation.

The prize of £40,000 is one of the most lucrative in the world and the biggest in the UK. It is presented every two years and, while it may have a lower profile than the Turner, for example, its status and importance in the world of contemporary art seems to grow each time.

Importantly, the prize provides a platform for international artists yet to make a big name for themselves in the UK. This year, nearly 500 were nominated from 80 countries.

Tessa Jackson, founding artistic director of Artes Mundi, said one aim had been to increase “the level and scope” of contemporary art on display in Wales, and one direct result has been the decision to create a dedicated space for it in the national museum from next year.

“There has been an enormous thirst for what we do and it has been one of the national museum’s most popular exhibitions,” said Jackson. “Beyond Doctor Who and dinosaurs even.”

It will be an impressively well-versed visitor who knows the names or work of any of the shortlisted artists. Jackson said: “It has been a very conscious decision to bring together artists who aren’t necessarily part of the London or commercial scene. We want a different range of players. People don’t necessarily know the names of the artists, but they get very engaged with the work and the content of it and what it’s about.”

Jackson agreed that all of the artists tackled serious subjects, but said the show was not po-faced. “There is amazing humour in some of the work,” she said. “I don’t fish, but there’s a bit of tickling going on here.”

All of the artists this year were shortlisted for their skill in reflecting the politics that surround them, and there was a strong showing by artists from formerly communist countries, including the Albanian Adrian Paci; the Bulgarian Ergin Çavusoglu; the Russian Olga Chernysheva; and Gulnara Kasmalieva and Muratbek Djumaliev, from Kyrgyzstan.

The latter pair, who explore ordinary life on the new Silk Road, were not at the prize preview after they were denied visas. The other artists are the Peruvian Fernando Bryce, who has lived in Europe for almost 20 years; Chen Chieh-yen, from Taiwan; and Yael Bartana, from Israel.

Many of the exhibits show the continuing strength of film and video art. Bartana, for example, has on display her most recent work, a film called Wall and Tower, in which she imagines the return of the 3 million Jews who lived in Poland before the Nazi occupation.

We are the “same but changed” says the orator as Bartana re-enacts the building of a wall and tower in the heart of Warsaw. This new Jewish settlement quickly has barbed wire round it and although it has a welcome sign, it is anything but.

Bartana has called herself an “amateur anthrologist” and examines tricky subjects. “I’ve been exploring anti-semitism, the Jewish and Polish relationship, the economy of responsibility and guilt,” she said.

So far, Bartana said she had managed to avoid hostility to her work. “The Polish project is more complicated and touching on some deep wounds. I’m expecting some more difficulties than before, maybe.”

The exhibition at Cardiff’s national museum, which opens to the public tomorrow, provides a snapshot of each artist, but they will be judged on their work over the last five to eight years. The winner will be announced on 19 May.

If the party is to reconnect with its soul, it needs to revive the passion for culture that seems to have ended with Michael Foot

Michael Foot was a name I knew long before I was old enough to vote Labour. My dad’s fading paperback copy of the first volume of Foot’s biography of Aneurin Bevan was one of the familiar volumes on the bookshelves at home. I don’t think I knew he was a politician, but I did know he was a writer. Much later on, as a sixth-former, I read his collection of essays Debts of Honour – well-written and sensitive homages; model essays. Foot was the real thing: a cultured radical. But how many of those are left in the Labour Party?

I hate to be a party pooper. If Gordon Brown’s political renaissance continues and he holds the line at the general election, I will be ready with the champagne. I’ve never voted for any other party and never will. But what happened, please, to the culture and learning that once flourished on the British Left? Where is the Labour passion for poetry and language that Foot epitomised?

Correct me if I am wrong, but I can’t think of a single convincing book or article on an artistic, literary, musical or architectural theme that a leading and current Labour politician has published since 1997. I can’t picture anyone in the cabinet who has a prominent passion for Keats – or even Bob Dylan, for that matter. They all seem completely cultureless. There may be a lot of economic learning in New Labour, but a zeal for the arts (as opposed to a desire to be associated with fashionable art) is nowhere to be found.

I’m not accusing them of lacking taste. I’m accusing them of lacking soul. Art, in the end, is the vehicle of feeling: Foot had deep feelings that he could perhaps express better by writing history and criticism than he could by leading the party. And surely the philistinism of the Blair and Brown years has been a reaction against what might have seemed the impotent intellect of old Labour.

But please: if the good news holds and Labour really does have an electoral future, let’s bring books – and passion – back into it. The history of our working-class ancestors is what makes many of us vote Labour; and we get at that through poetry, because it is a feeling.