ART / A small step for man: James Hall on the pecs being flexed in 'Visualising Masculinities' at the Tate, London and 'Declarations of War' at Kettle's Yard, Cambridge

Since the last century, the visual arts have been pervaded by predatory and militaristic metaphors. In English- speaking countries, the language of photography and film-making centres on the terms 'load', 'aim' and 'shoot'. According to the OED, the first recorded use of 'shoot' - meaning to take a snapshot - occurred in 1890. Six years later, the sexual politics of the term were being exploited in a Punch punch- line: 'I even bless the Kodak now with which, dear Nell, you 'shot' me.' By and large, however, the camera has been regarded as a quintessentially male weapon. As such, its apotheosis occurred in the film Peeping Tom (1960). Here a male photographer murders his female models with a knife that projects from the front of his camera.

A comparable change occured in the language of fine art. Despite the many guises adopted by modern artists - revolutionaries, dandies, anarchists, aesthetes, technocrats and mystics - almost all wanted to belong to the 'avant-garde'. This term, which meant the vanguard of an army, was first used in relation to art in the 1830s by the French Utopian socialist Henri de Saint-Simon. He designated artists, scientists, and industrialists as the elite leadership of the new social order.

An early manifesto for the macho militancy of the modern artist is The Artist's Studio (c 1820), painted by the French Romantic Horace Vernet. A huge room is crowded with young artists and discharged Napoleonic soldiers. Vernet is fencing with one of his pupils; another blows a horn. A disciple of Gericault stands nearby, stripped to the waist for bare- knuckle boxing. Appropriately enough, the only artist to be shown working at an easel is J N Robert-Fleury, a painter of bandits. The artist's studio is at once a mess, a battlefield, and a boxing ring. The most famous heirs to this tough-guy tradition are the Italian Futurists: 'The essential elements of our poetry will be courage, audacity, and revolt . . . We will glorify war - the only true hygiene of the world - militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of anarchism, the beautiful ideas which kill, and the scorn of women.'

The military and political implications of avant-gardism have been criticised before now. But the most recent and sustained assault has been launched by feminists. Where artists were once awarded brownie points for the quality of their colour, line or invention, they are now increasingly marked according to the levels of authoritarianism, sexism or sadism in their art and life. John Richardson caused quite a stir in his biography of Picasso with his critique of sadism in the Blue Period paintings. Moreover, the modernist idea that the individual avant-gardist engages in a violent Oedipal struggle with the old order of things is unfashionable. Aesthetic pacifism and symbiosis are preached, even if they are not always practised.

'Visualising Masculinities' at the Tate Gallery is an unashamedly didactic attempt, using wall captions and 14 works from the permanent collection, to explore the representation of men in art since the mid-19th century. The organisers, Virginia Button and Andrew Stevenson, explain in the accompanying leaflet that their aim is not to 're-affirm any dominant notion of 'heroic' masculinity'; rather, they will 'highlight the variety of ways in which male artists have approached male subjectivity and questioned its conventions and fictions'.

In trying to find images from the past that might be deemed PC today, they see New Men where hard-core feminists would only see Dirty Old Men. George Elgar Hicks's Woman's Mission: Companion of Manhood (1863), John Everett Millais's The Order of Release 1746 (1852-3) and Stanley Spencer's Double Nude Portrait: The Artist and His Second Wife (1937) are all deemed to signal 'a crisis of faith in the conventional premises of masculinity across a wide historical period'.

The Millais shows the release of a Jacobite rebel imprisoned after the defeat at Culloden in 1746. The rebel's barefoot wife is shown handing a release form to a British soldier. Madonna-like, she cradles a child, while her knackered husband slumps over her shoulder, his right arm in a sling. A dog jumps up excitedly to greet its long-lost master. Millais's terse realism and bold tonal contrasts were admired by Delacroix, and when the work was shown at the Royal Academy in 1853, a policeman was hired to control the vast crowds.

According to the wall caption, 'the unflinching expression on the woman's face suggests that she probably sold her body, and therefore her virtue, to secure her husband's freedom.' The pamphlet goes further: Millais portrays 'man's inactivity, showing the woman as taking control over events'.

This is broadly true, but much of the force of the image is dissipated through its taking place in the past. A modern equivalent would be a western like Dances with Wolves, in which losers from a previous century (Red Indians) are patted patronisingly on the back by descendants of the victors (Kevin Costner). The Jacobites are historical has-beens, so it is safe to be nice - especially to their wives and dogs. Oddly, the organisers fail to mention the main reason why The Order of Release came to be regarded as a dangerous picture. The model for the final painting of the Jacobite's wife was Effie Ruskin, the neglected wife of John. When Effie applied in 1854 for release from her marriage in order to marry Millais, the picture was seen in a much more disturbing light.

The show contains work by a wide range of artists - Watts, Sergeant, Epstein, Bacon and Hockney. Yet it is nowhere near as interesting or entertaining as it should have been. The selectors have been much too literal-minded. Abstract art has been excluded, and scant attention has been paid to the way in which technical procedures and media contribute to the 'visualising of masculinity' in modern art. Moreover, there is nothing by women artists.

Plenty of macho mileage has been got out of American post-war abstraction. There is a painting by Jackson Pollock, but it is a small early figurative work, entitled Naked Man with Knife. This surrealist psycho-drama is all very well, but Pollock's subsequent method of dripping and pouring paint directly on to a huge canvas laid on the studio floor was the apogee of Dionysiac abandon. He wasn't nicknamed Jack the Dripper, nor did he drink like a fish and wrap his car round a tree, for nothing.

Media, too, can say something. Just outside the exhibition, we find two rusted cubes of Cor-Ten steel by the American sculptor Richard Serra. The floor of the Tate had to be reinforced because they weigh 40 and 50 tons respectively. There is an unfortunate photograph of Serra in the catalogue. He stands with hands on hips, his athletic body kitted out in tracksuit top and jeans. He stares implacably towards the camera, unfazed by a vast sheet of rusted steel that cuts diagonally across the lower half of his body, shooting priapically from his hip. Rusty it may be, but, as the avant-garde knows, rust never sleeps.

The Imperial War Museum's collection of 20th-century art is second only to that of the Tate Gallery, in terms of size. Since 1980, under the auspices of Angela Weight, the IWM has collected contemporary art works dealing with war, politics and social unrest, and mounted a lively exhibition programme. The latter is currently under threat.

Work by 16 contemporary artists from the collection can be seen in an impressive show at Kettle's Yard in Cambridge. Roseanne Hawksley's Pale Armistice (1991) is a circular wreath formed from layers of white wedding gloves. At the bottom are three artificial lilies interwoven with small bones. The work is haunting because of the mixed feelings it inspires towards the dead. Individually, these limp and ghostly hands are pitiful, but taken en masse, they are cloying. Their fingers seem to cling to the present like white fungus.

War is frequently seen as a primeval force of nature. In Michael Sandle's Piranesian etching Submarine Monument - Sunken Version (1976), semi-circular discs ripple out from the sides of a rectangular monolith. Yet the abiding feeling is of brooding power, rather than of a crippled sub pouring out petrol. One thinks of a squid spurting ink, or of the contours of a flat fish. In Gilbert & George's Victory March (1980) postcards of WW1 and WW2 military parades are neatly juxtaposed with postcards of similarly choreographed English gardens. The implication is that both manipulate the viewer aggressively. One thinks of Scottish artist Ian Hamilton Finlay's aphorism - that a garden is not a retreat, but an attack.

(Photographs omitted)