The words slide by around the gallery walls, in a large, looping hand-drawn script, with lots of space between. Anthropology, Criticism, Folk, Formalist, Liberation, Materialism, Myth, Native, Private, Structural, Theory, Unconscious and Violence: these are the guiding rubrics of Keywords: Art, Culture and Society in 1980s Britain at Tate Liverpool.  Based on the late Raymond Williams's 1976 book Keywords, in which over 130 words – From Aesthetic to Work – are accompanied by short essays on their shifting meanings and context, use and definition, this show restages and enlarges an exhibition that first took place at London's Iniva [Institute of International Visual Arts] last year. Almost everything here comes from Tate's own collection, and Tate Liverpool is charging £8 entry for a show of works it already owns. The keyword here is money.  The essays in Williams' book were devious, provocative and full of social observation. Subtitled 'A vocabulary of culture and society', Keywords was both analysis and argument. It was much more than a compendium. The exhibition, by contrast, is all compendium, clever curatorial bluster and pigeonholing.  The artworks jostle and fall over each other to get in line, like kids going to class. In the first room the art all looks a bit cowed and uncertain of its place, getting barked at from the sidelines. In the first room everything is hung on one vast wall running the length of the gallery. Hockney! Get in line, you're next to John Murphy, in Private. Adrian Berg – never mind your post-impressionist palette, you're Structural, along with the geometric systems artists, or British constructionists, or whatever you call yourselves. Folk means anything to do with Northern Ireland and sectarianism. On it goes. Nothing is given space to breathe. Everything becomes an example.  In the second gallery everything three-dimensional is corralled onto three black carpets. You can't get amongst any of it. Where does Myth end and Anthropology begin? I am not sure the curators know; the artists would probably refuse the definitions anyway. Grouping large works by Anthony Caro, Anish Kapoor and Tony Cragg together on one carpet, with the big word 'formalism' behind them, just looks like an accusation. Inadvertently, the notorious 1937 degenerate art show in Munich, in which modernist and expressionist works were displayed in such a way as to make them look as horrible as possible, and were interspersed with hand-painted slogans that served to demonise them still further, had a curatorial aesthetic not so far removed from this. Which is not to say that Keywords is without its moments, however ill-served much of the art may be.  The mode of display runs from the 19th Century salon hang (annually perpetuated in the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition) of the first room, to a kind of pile-up and log-jam of the three dimensional works that feels like an old-fashioned department store display. Focussing on the period between the publication of Williams' book and the end of the conservative government in 1996, Keywords avoids the YBA's, though their rise began in the late 80s, but their absence is not much missed. It is good to see many here who were never darlings of the media.  Certain works stand out – Bill Woodrow's 1981 'Car Door, Ironing Board and Twin Tub with North American Indian Head Dress' is one of his best works. Helen Chadwick's 1986 Carcass, a glass tower filled with composting vegetable matter, is still terrific. Chadwick died in 1996. Both Rose Finn-Kelcey (the show includes documentation of a 1976 performance with a live magpie), and Alexis Hunter (included is unimpressive video of domestic warfare) died within the past fortnight.  One wants to focus, but the show is just too noisy. At best, it does give us a flavour of British art from the mid 70s to the mid 1990s, and a hint of some of the ideas and preoccupations that were slewing around. But it all needs a great deal more unpacking than the fold-out guide (there is no catalogue) and explanatory wall captions can provide. We are left with big words and tantalising glimpses. Keywords looks bizarre, and struggles between words and objects, ideas and things. The uses of language, as Williams's book constantly demonstrates, is always slippery and more nuanced than this exhibition implies.
New exhibition inspired by Raymond Williams book offers an interesting, if ill-served, glimpse into the language of British art