First published
as “Letter from London: Sensation” in ArtNet.com,
posted October 24, 1997
Virginia Woolf made the improbable claim about the
exhibition "Manet and the Post Impressionists," curated at the
beginning of this century by her friend Roger Fry, that human nature changed
"in and around December 1910." If she had been writing about the
"Sensation" show at the Royal Academy, which highlights
"young" British Art from the Saatchi Collection, she would also have
pulled out the stops of hyperbole. For once the cliché, "it's the show on
everyone's lips," is actually true: every non-art-world friend or
acquaintance wants to know what I think about it and tells me they are on their
way to see for themselves.
I guess that's why its called "Sensation." The official explanation
is that some of the key artists (notably Damien Hirst and Marc Quinn) are mad
about Bacon, who once said, paraphrasing Valery, that "what modern man
wants is the grin without the cat, the sensation without the boredom of its
conveyance." According to the catalogue acknowledgments, the title came up
in a discussion with New York gallerist Jeffery Deitch, who also organized the
simulationist extravaganza "Post Human." Clearly a gent with a knack
for titles.
The show has also proved a sensation in the tabloid sense. Just as the Armory
Show of 1913 had its Nude Descending a Staircase to keep the press busy,
the talking point of "Sensation" is a four-meter-high painting of
Britain's most hated child murderer, Myra Hindley. In the early 1960s, Hindley
carried out the notorious Moors Murders in Yorkshire with her accomplice, Ian
Brady, kidnapping and torturing children, tape-recording their death cries, and
burying them in secret (some still undiscovered) graves. The artist Marcus
Harvey has now made a blow-up copy of the ubiquitous police mug shot of
Hindley, a mesmerizingly sinister picture, which -- if you look closely --
boasts a sickly poignant detail. In the manner of Chuck Close, each pixel is
represented in black, white or gray, only rather than painting these marks
Harvey has printed the paint onto the canvas with a clay cast of a child's
hand.
It's actually a rather impressive painting, and I say that as someone with no
time for his previous work, pornographic nudes done in an extravagantly
painterly style that marries "bad painting" with (his teacher)
Michael Craig Martin-style taped outlines: real Brit Pop cool meets hot
schlock. But Myra isn't bad -- esthetically at least. Morally, opinion
is sharply divided. When the mother of one of Hindley's victims pleaded for the
work to be taken out and the Royal Academy board members voted to keep it in,
four of their number resigned in protest and the director of a child charity
called for a boycott. Needless to say, there are lines around the block!
There's plenty in "Sensation" that has nothing to do with sex and
murder, but there's rather a high quotient that does. Myra has some
ghoulish bedfellows in the pickled creatures of Damien Hirst (there's a shark,
a pig, a sheep, a whole cow, not to mention a cow's head, although the latter
isn't in formaldehyde -- that would have been cruel to the flies!), plus the
amputated shop mannequins in the Chapman brothers transcription from Goya's Desastres
de la Guerra, Matt Collishaw's blow-up photo of a bullet hole in a man's
head, Marc Quinn's self-portrait bust in his own blood, and some porn lifted
from the pages of the Sunday Sport (Britain's answer to the National
Enquirer) in the prurient tableaux of Sarah Lucas.
Hot stuff. But the central quality of this Brit Pop art -- or of the YBAs, as
the generation of late '80s neo-conceptualists who have stolen the scene in
London are now officially to be called -- is coolness. Abjection on ice.
Whether its art about art, or art that goes for the jugular on issues of sex or
death, the defining features of this cool-school are its nihilism, nonchalance
and impersonality.
There is also something undeniably British about the YBAs. As someone who holds
their efforts in generally low regard, I'm coming to realize it's what makes
them so successful abroad: their unique "attitude" arises from a
fusion of the loutish and the aloof which is a national trait, being at once
smarmy, eccentric, sarcastic and laddish.
Saatchi's tastes are far too eclectic to make any meaningful deductions about a
sensibility rooted in advertising. In his time he has gone for such contrastive
art as blue chip American Minimalism (when his ex-wife Doris Lockheart was
around) and sweaty, earnest School of London realism (more his own taste at the
time), New York romantic postmodernism (Schnabel, Clemente) and stiff-upper-lip
British object-based sculpture of the Lisson Gallery stable.
But still, it's hard not to think that the whole YBA phenomenon was waiting for
him. It's not just a matter of Hirst's Thatcherite entrepreneurship, organizing
shows of his generation before they had even graduated their South London art
school, Goldsmiths', sending taxis to the great and the good to ensure their
attendance. (However Saatchi got there, transport wise, he "got
there" in terms of being financially empowered to buy up YBAs by the
show-load by handling the account of the Conservative Party). The affinity runs
still deeper between the art movement that was all about taking on the system
and the adman who did so much to shape it. Brit Pop art is so much about
packaging, about instantaneous recognition, wry amusement, knowing reference to
media images and recent avant-gardist art alike. Just like advertising, it's
ephemeral, cannibalistic, hedonistic.
As one would expect from art that is all about statement and style, collected
and even installed by the world's leading advertising executive,
"Sensation" looks pretty swank, although it was a crowded hang. And
of course, once one gets over the "freak show" aspect, it is clear
that there is a range of sensibilities here that belies neat generalizations.
Rachel Whiteread's Ghost -- a solid concrete cast of the negative space
in a living room -- is unquestionably the most resolved, substantial and satisfying
use so far of the single idea that defines her career (more dynamic and
contained than her better known, destroyed commission, House). As if not
intrinsically odd enough, Ghost took on a new incongruity in the august
surroundings of Burlington House, with its ornate ceiling decorations: the room
Whiteread had cast was suitably nondescript and dour, matching her vision. More
to the point, displayed in the company of Richard Billingham's large color
photographs of a dysfunctional couple in their squalid proletarian dwelling
(the artist's parents at home), the sculpture assumed a new sociological
resonance.
Another artist undaunted by sentimental proprieties in the display of his
family is Ron Mueck, whose Dead Dad is a silicone and acrylic Duane
Hanson-like realist mannequin of his recently deceased father, naked and spread
out like Holbein's dead Christ. The twist in this genuinely shocking (and
actually quite moving) piece is that the figure is shrunk to approximately
one-third life size, save for the hands and genitals which are slightly larger.
In contrast to such sensitivity, Gillian Wearing's video of a midget taking a
bath is simply prurient, "sensationalist" and -- if you can take
another pun -- wearing on one's patience.
Naturally, there is plenty more "body art" (this is the '90s!) with
the highest quotient of flesh coming from Jenny Saville, who paints obese women
after the style of Lucian Freud and then proceeds to inscribe things into the
painted flesh. In one piece it's liposuction lines, in the next a feminist text
written in mirror writing. This latter was originally supposed to have a mirror
facing it, so that one could read the text if looked at in the reflection, but
not if you wanted to gaze at the paint "in the flesh," a thought-provoking
choice to leave with the viewer. But against the artist's wishes, Saatchi
discarded the mirror after he bought the piece. (As she now paints under direct
contract to the collector, Saville can't have been overly distraught at this
subversion of her authorial independence, which seems odd for a feminist
painter concerned with control and the gender problematics of paint.)
When "Sensation" artists really get going with sex the results can be
pretty dire. Tracy Emin, for instance, sews the names of Everyone I Have
Ever Slept With 1963-1995 into the inside of a camping tent, along with
some texts of interminable gibberish about her unremarkable childhood in a
South Coast town called Margate. Her friend Sarah Lucas (with whom she once ran
a thrift store in East London) goes one better, arranging on a mattress two
melons and a bucket on one side and a cucumber and two oranges on the other, to
suggest the reproductive organs of the respective sexes. In contrast to such
forgettable drivel, a sculpture by Jane Simpson of a rather voluptuous dressing
table, covered in gesso, with red lipstick-like marks rubbed here and there,
and with a refrigeration unit set into the furniture filled with gently
steaming ice is subtle, suggestive, intriguing. The problem is that the tone
for the show is set by the nonentities, which leaves the likes of Simpson with
her ice box out in the cold.
Most of the rest is decidedly chilly art about art, smarmy, referential and
soulless. There are rather too many one-liner jokes that are often unfunny.
Simon Patterson takes the familiar map of London's Underground (actually a
classic of 1930s graphic design) and replaces the tube stop names with
arbitrary lists of historic personages or current celebrities. Glenn Brown does
meticulously flat, brushless copies of other modern artists, of a bravura
painterly Frank Auerbach for instance, or a Dalí -- a familiar trope of
postmodern appropriation, so familiar it is no doubt troping the trope. Gavin
Turk has a waxwork of himself dressed as Sid Vicious (the punk singer) posing
as Elvis as painted by Warhol. Wow! But then what do you do, once you've had
the "sensation" of these recognitions? Funnier, and more satisfying
because there's something to do with it once you have got the joke, is Keith
Coventry's all-white painting in the style of Robert Ryman which, on closer
inspection, is actually a realist depiction, after a photograph, of a former
Tate Gallery director explaining modern art to the Queen.
Then, mixed in with these referentialists (whether they reference themselves,
their libido, or other art is ultimately academic) are a few painters actually
concerned with paint, and with such old fashioned formal issues as light,
texture, optical effect. Of course, they blend in with the art-about-art people
(Gary Hume with his paintings of doors on doors in door-paint for instance) but
at the same time, they stand as a race apart. Simon Callery's bands of thin,
close vertical lines are luminous and graceful in an Agnes Martin sort of way,
while Mark Francis's arbitrary array of pulsating black balls against a white
ground can be seductive and intriguing. What do they have in common with
pickled sharks, embroidered tents and dismembered mannequins? Why are they
here? Just because of their age, passport, and Charles Saatchi's checkbook?
There are other painters (even young and British, but not in the Saatchi
Collection) in whose company they would make more sense, precisely because the
viewer's vital sense -- sight -- will not have been blunted by the dazzle of
mere sensation.
"Sensation" at the Royal Academy, London, Sept. 17-Dec. 28, 1997.