Paul Smith: You and whose army?

At first sight, these images look like amateur snaps from any night out with the lads. But look closer. Robin Muir celebrates the work of Paul Smith, a former soldier who's now a key player in the new Saatchi set

Charles Saatchi's first show for the New Year is called "Neurotic Realism Part 1" - a vibrant accumulation of art from the past three or so years: sculpture, painting, model-making, paper cut- outs and the assemblage of golf balls, mop buckets, bin liners and plastic bottles that has produced some startling home-spun installations. The book, The New Neurotic Realism, published by his gallery, is already available. In an accompanying essay, "Don't Stop 'til you Get Enough", the critic Dick Price tells us that "inevitably" in recent times, "the [Young British Artist] cult of personality became tired" and that "art started to look like it was having more fun ... "

Photography is strongly represented in the Saatchi show by, among others, the superb constructed realities of three friends from London's Royal College of Art: Tom Hunter, Hannah Starkey and Paul Smith. The latter, a 29-year-old former soldier in the Royal Engineers, is represented best of all. The catalogue has 19 examples of his work.

Ex-Sapper 24700900 calls his tableaux "constructed fantasies" and the book and exhibition include his latest series, "Make My Night", reproduced here. And, as befits a New Neurotic Realist, fun of a certain kind is at its core: the full horror of a night out with the boys, and all of the terrible stations on the way to oblivion - from shots-in-one at the bar, to more elaborate drinking contests, to fights and stand-offs, to the kebab shop and to the purgatory of the vomit-flecked toilet - the peculiar rites of passage are laid bare.

Re-enacted, too, is the sexual mimicry that often takes place when point- and-shoot camera meets tanked-up primitive: fake fellatio with a cucumber, the exposure of the buttocks, lascivious tongue-thrusting, the mock sex that occurs when someone lines up a pool shot; and, perhaps most bizarrely of all, a sort of tableau vivant of domination and submission, which requires one friend to spreadeagle himself with legs in the air, while from above, another drips liquid into the former's parted lips.

It's all very odd and all very familiar, for Smith has patiently reproduced the variable quality that the machine printing of pictures taken by amateurs throws up: poor composition, bleached-out faces and over-cropped subject matter.

Saatchi bought Smith's last body of work - the clever, highly coloured and parodic "Artists Rifles" - straight from his degree show. These panoramic slices of military life - training exercises, bloodless battle scenes, flag- waving and bravado - and more intimate vignettes of brothers in arms (including the application of battle camouflage with a compact straight from the make-up counter) are stylised and full of irony but with a message that remains serious.

The images came about after Smith was given the job of photographer for his regiment - at that time his credentials for the task were that he had taken evening classes in photography. "It was mostly handshakes, really, but I also went on exercises, and so I ended up with a lot of pictures of people acting out war and playing at being soldiers ... I then started looking at images representing war, and found there was quite a lot of debate as to whether they were real or acted out," he explains.

The cast of "Make My Night" - which like its predecessor has been digitally re-arranged and enhanced on a computer - could be his fellow squaddies from "Artists Rifles" at play. But, like its forerunner, on closer inspection you realise it is Smith himself, acting out each and every participant in this drunken all-male Saturday night. It's a fact that often passes people by at first, much to the delight of Smith.

The series, he suggests, reflects "our initiation into manhood. You get together as a pack and you ... bond. We have little else to help us." Obviously it's a theme which men may appreciate more than women.

And if there is something familiar about it all, then that's because at some point many of us, like the artist's alter egos, have participated in similar tableaux of our own construction, the evidence of which can still be found in our photo albums.

"I fully embraced lads' culture in the army," Smith has said, "and I was ostracised if I didn't take part. I don't see it as either good or bad, but as a common experience - it's pack behaviour." He would like his audience to see the connections. "I want them to say, `God, I've done that.' Everyone who has ever done it, putting a condom over your head and thinking you're unique ... It's common to so many people."

It is perhaps unsurprising in this context to learn that in his first year of a Fine Art degree at Coventry University, Smith made a study of Aboriginal culture - "The whole thing about learning the knowledge to survive and becoming a man" - and spent some time in the Australian bush.

He cites as influences, the aesthetic of painter-turned-documentary photographer Richard Billingham (made famous after the rapturous reception given to his pictures, initially developed at Boots, of his Midlands family) and the constructed narratives of self- portraitist Cindy Sherman and her fellow North American Jeff Wall, along with his two friends from the Royal College of Art. Like Katia Liebmann this time last year (she appears in Saatchi's book, too), and Billingham and Wall the year before (see the Saatchi collection again), Smith has found himself on the shortlist of five for the prestigious Citibank Private Bank Photography Prize 1999 - nominated for his show at the Royal Photographic Society, Bath, and also for his contribution to The New Neurotic Realism. (In 1996, Smith was a runner-up in the John Kobal Portrait Award and also a finalist in the Renaissance Arts Award.)

Charles Saatchi has put Smith on the map, like many artists before him. This thoroughly unmilitaristic and un-neurotic artist says that he is "grateful"

`Neurotic Realism Part I', 14 January to 4 April 1999, The Saatchi Gallery, 98a Boundary Road, London NW8. The book `The New Neurotic Realism', is available from art book shops, priced pounds 24.95. The Citibank Private Bank Photography Prize 1999 exhibition of shortlisted artists runs from 6 February to 3 April 1999 at The Photographers' Gallery, 5 & 8 Great Newport Street, London WC2.