Escapees from the arts in Britain are multiplying: artists of every type resettling the cheap old farmhouses of Northern France, the Dordogne and Languedoc/Toulouse. Location no longer matters very much since the opportunities to show and publish in London itself are limited. Performance Magazine issued its final edition in January. Although the Arts Council is toting around the money for another magazine concerned with the time-based arts, there are no takers. Other British journals are focused on a London-Paris axis seizing on transitory market modes. The radical critiques such as Block and Ten 8 publish infrequently. There is no serious theoretical journal in Europe either. Most are either shiny art-market shoppers-guides, or hermetic writing for a very small circle. Viv Westwood has started her own journal for her fashion and designer friends to provide them with something to discuss other than shop-gossip. Perhaps this type of small circulation specialist text is the order of the day? There is no voice for the arts in England which is all embracing and more than a newsletter.

Indeed, some of the experimental regional public galleries are in trouble as well, chiefly the Third Eye Centre in Glasgow which has closed.

"So what is the news and where is the money?" demands young art. It is impossible to find anything heading anywhere except into mystical or environmental issues. In the past, these have never produced much more than polemics and illustration. In fact, some of the most interesting exhibitions of the past year have been the student shows themselves. The flag of Goldsmiths College is being hauled down: its market success diminishing since art-critics now claim that its type of minimalism is only a mastery of formula supported by brilliant public relations.

Most other final year student work is wild and eclectic. It is futile to steer young British art towards Parisian-style minimalist-conceptualism. It means little in the mood of the time though Gerhard Richter (retrospective, Tate, October—November, 1991) has recently become a significant influence. As it stands, current young art is best seen through a glass darkly. It is large, strident, brutish, revivalist and hopelessly Romantic. There is not one shred of theoretical justification in it. Student shows draw large crowds, a good press and often sell-out (New Art exhibition, London, Summer 1991). The interest in such work is undoubtedly a conscious market move. Names barely out of college with little work behind them are bandied about, such as that of Rachel Whiteread. She casts in plaster the spaces between domestic furniture. Her work is formulaic, describable in two sentences (hence sellable), monumental (hence good value per penny per acre) to the extent that she was a serious contender for this year's Turner Prize. Much criticized by the media, the Prize was awarded to Anish Kapoor. In fact, Whiteread is a half decent artist who only needs time to produce some (quite probably) interesting work.

The British government has handed out a few million pounds recently in order to develop some of their nightmare, regional city centres. It might revive the campaign for a one percent art allocation in architectural re-development. British artists seem unable to take the campaign seriously, nor any other which involves communal action and involvement.

But maybe something is changing: there is some remnant of 'people's power'. While the education institutions and the public galleries produce few answers to the burdening of minuscule resources, the community arts sector has been more active. The Arts Council has devised a Strategy for the Arts campaign. Though little supported by educational foundations or major city galleries, it has resulted in a series of energized conferences and published papers. The intention is to prepare a working document concerned with artists' rights and the character of British art in the nineties. It will be presented to the Minister for the Arts in 1992.

There has been other grass-roots action. Art students have organized a widespread series of sit-ins in some major art schools from Middlesex to Edinburgh. The aims of these 'revolts ' are much narrower than in the case of their historical prototypes of the sixties: now their concerns are strictly educational. Also, the media has largely ignored the unrest, even when art students stormed the Tate at the recent awards of the Turner Prize. Main issues concern cut-backs in art education resulting in an Australian-style amalgamation of institutions into 'universities'. Inevitable results have been the sacking of staff, doubling of student numbers, appalling staff-student ratios (though, in fact, comparable to ratios in Australian education since the mid-seventies) and, not least, a totally farcical lack of working room. (The Vice-Chancellor of Exeter Polytechnic suggested that painting and sculpture students alternate month by month (probably intending to limit the 3-D work to knitting)). Due to lack of room, students in other colleges (such as Wimbledon) are taught every other week, or as at Lanchester Polytechnic had their third term cancelled altogether due to bankruptcy. The Lanchester students successfully took the Polytechnic to court. In consequence MA Fine Arts courses are multiplying in barrow-loads as a means of financing BA studies.

Critics admit that much of the best fine art, in fact, is appearing in the context of British graphics and design (including photographic practice). This is just about the only working space in which consistent attention is paid to the relationship of high art with the media and technology. Hence, it involves the only real discourse of a post modernist kind in current British art. The Photographers Gallery in Leicester Square leads the way in showing art which experiments with the high technologies. In comparison, the exhibition Signs of the Times (MOMA, Oxford; Leeds City Art Gallery) purporting to be a resume of British technological art of the past decade, hardly developed beyond video and slide shows. The images and screens were stacked up in a formalist exercise like a Nam June Paik of the late seventies (limited undoubtedly by financial resources). It may have been a sign of the British economic recession, but it was hardly a gripping analysis of the actual potential of art/technology. No computer art, for example, was included.

The Illustrators Gallery in London (Colville Place) is drawing increasing attention. Their Three-dimensional Illustration exhibition showed sharp wit, refreshing inventiveness and, often, discursive personal content. The gallery is consistent in the high quality of most of its shows. The 3-D group exhibition in its use of objet trouvé, word play and small scale personal theatre broke through all definitions of the limits of the illustrators art. The Images 16 show touring the country at the moment displays the most acute recent American and British commercial design. Well worth a visit.

Otherwise the icons of the seventies and eighties have now been definitively enshrined in the British canon of art: and what an emasculated whimpering of late macho modernism hooded in arte poverishness!... Bill Woodrow, Tony Cragg, Richard Long still pacing about (but chiefly indoors nowadays), Andy Goldsworthy playing with autumn leaves and bunches of grass, tiptoeing through flower petals: conventional academic formalism pretending to criticize itself. It represents well the horribly antiquated machismo of British institutions in which feminism is retreating at the heels of the blushing English roses to an extent unthinkable in Australian academia and cultural practice.

Of all the galleries and institutions, the Arnolfini in Bristol most consistently maintains a profile of social and artistic radicalism. Far more vital than the Institute for Contemporary Art (ICA) in London or the Icon in Birmingham, the Arnolfini is a genuine social space. As Bristol's major student assembly point, the Arnolfini bursts with noise, bodies and disorder. The crowds fight for tickets to even the most obscure American performance teams (such as the rather dull and passe but extravagantly billed Goat Island from Chicago). Queuing for the Animation Festival demands considerable physical stamina. With an excellent bar and book shop, it is an exhilarating complex which includes the Watershed cinema and arty-shops across the wharf. Shows have included the one and only post-modernist icon in England, Amikam Torem. He has actually found an answer to the problematic relation of the object and its painted image. Quite simple, you can make an image of a chair out of the wood-shavings of the chair itself. Q.E.D. At last something more than 'questions'. Like dried-out spiders, the wispy skeletons of the original objects sit in front of their painted cannibalistic images.

Probably more important in the long term was the Arnolfini's long series of British, multicultural, women's art. It is astonishing that critics can ignore this issue in a consideration of British art given the enormous population of Africans and Asians. Such work is very little known except for some photography and important dance work. The Arnolfini's Round Dance exhibition ran for three months in late 1991 with performances and conferences.

Australian Aboriginal art itself drew great attention in last summer's London exhibitions. There was prolonged exposure at the specialist Rebecca Hossack gallery which shows all types of Aboriginal art, though the urban painting is rarely seen here. The massive Barbican exhibition of work, Songlines, (showing mainly Western Desert acrylics) rapidly sold out its catalogue. It was much discussed by the critical press in a surprisingly informed way.

Such interest in Australia is part of the ever strengthening Romantic revival in the UK. The Neolithic cult and the quest for Britain's prehistoric past is allied to anxiety about environmental issues. The neo-pagans are British patriots to an extreme and there are many echoes in pseudo-art as well as a huge interest in sculpture parks, such as Grizedale in the Lake District. One can almost describe it as a pilgrimage mentality.

In this context an elaborate but subtle staging of alchemical theory was made at the Square Chapel in Halifax (As Above So Below) by Glen Unwin under the auspices of the Henry Moore Sculpture Trust (a major source of funding for British sculpture throughout the country). A disused Non-Conformist church on various floors shaped as a perfect square was flooded with shallow water tanks. In these the artist placed chemicals, salt solutions and wax whose crystallization refracted light from the windows. Illuminated chemical alembics were placed in the alcoves. Painted symbols and reflected light on the ceilings from the chemicalized water were photographed and published as a type of artist's book. The images are pure beauty. Far more sensuous than Sigmar Polke's intellectual exploration of alchemy, Unwin showed a profound understanding of alchemy in both the original installation as well as in the photographs.

Other work at the Henry Moore Sculpture Studio was less successful. A work by Alison Wilding Exposure ignored the raison d'être of the space as installation studio and used it instead to show individual self-contained pieces. It was both conceptually weak as well as visually frustrating. Magdalena Jetelova, on the other hand, produced thunderously massive, burnt, oak tables: awesome by reason of the enormous installation problems alone. Her concepts were better resolved, however, in the accompanying water installations and in photographic works accompanying her dinosaurs' refectory. They referred to and used the underground river of the Studio in visual tensions of compression and light. The best of the Studio's installations have been sensitive experiments with surface and light which, though site-specific, have recorded personal history in relation to the human body. The Studio is pleasingly branching out into workshop and educational activities as well as running an outstanding bookshop.

The best of the art 'from the summer into the late autumn had the character of a fun fair to suit the new mood of the British for abandoning their hitherto castellated homes.

As the London art and theatre world closed for the summer, the great Japan Festival took over in Hyde Park and practically every other venue in the country. Billed as a country little known in the UK (!!!!), Japan took over for weeks of (almost free) film, displays, dance and performance with the performance group Sankai Juku and Japanese photography at the Barbican a particular hit.

Another fun fair was offered at the Pop Art Show at the Royal Academy. With its record-breaking entry for the open Summer Exhibition, the Academy was in the public eye for the first time since at least the 1890s. In fact, the British establishment was letting its hair down all summer: London as a Blackpool-on-the-Thames for art. Prince Charles was thrilled by the new extension to the National Gallery (the Sainsbury Wing). So were the summer tourists cooled by its pietra serena walls, cafe, restaurant and shop (half the new complex) and hotted up (for variety) by IRA bombs in the autumn.

Even the ICA has glamorized itself: shiny new cafe. Its tight little shop now offers the only decent spread in London of European art and design magazines. It's still a problem as to what to DO at the ICA, other than gawp passively at the great names in post-modern art and literature opinionating on a rostrum. More workshops are needed to occupy the arty unemployed, although their recent very late appointment of an education officer promises to fill the gap.

Saatchi and Saatchi continue to be one of the few places in London where it is possible to view regular displays of important post-modernist American art. In contrast, the ICA retrospective of Bruce Nauman was disappointing and did little credit to a major figure best described as an 'artists' artist'. A formula is used by impoverished galleries to attract crowds in which some huge 'name' is staged, while saving on costs by importing only the most transportable examples of their work.

At the ICA the show consisted mainly of Nauman's drawings and his filmed performance and video work, rather than attempting a reconstruction of his installations. Admittedly, in Nauman's case as an artist difficult to categorize except under a general 'conceptual/body art' label, the drawings are critical. But since at least three important books on his art have existed for some years, it is time for a re-interpretation of the work for a more general public, especially in relation to language theory. Eclectic... undefinable... unpredictable... irreverent... brutish... childish and playful... Nauman is an exemplar for current young British art, but the ICA produced drawings for old connoisseurs only.