Saatchi's new show promises to excite the Vice Squad again

By Louise Jury Media Correspondent
Friday, 27 April 2001

The attentions of the Vice Squad have clearly not left the Saatchi Gallery nursing any inhibitions. Its first exhibition since being raided by officers investigating complaints of obscene exhibits opens with an animated sequence of a modelling clay heroine pleasuring herself.

The attentions of the Vice Squad have clearly not left the Saatchi Gallery nursing any inhibitions. Its first exhibition since being raided by officers investigating complaints of obscene exhibits opens with an animated sequence of a modelling clay heroine pleasuring herself.

The police investigation six weeks ago into allegations that photographs of children were indecent has not deterred the gallery, owned by the advertising entrepreneur Charles Saatchi, from repeatedly showing the video of close-up masturbation by the artist Liane Lang. Jenny Blyth, the gallery's curator, defended its inclusion in the show by saying it was clearly not real. She said: "It's definitely not flesh. We perceive it as a humorous piece. It's the world of Wallace & Gromit and to use these materials in this way is so unexpected."

Ms Lang, a graduate of the Goldsmith's College that produced many of the Young British Artists, said she did not think people would be outraged. She said: "I never intended it to be offensive. There is also a distinction between showing adult sexuality and children."

The gallery came under fire last month from tabloid newspapers and a few unnamed visitors who protested that photographs by Tierney Gearon of her children were indecent. But the Crown Prosecution Service decided there was no case to answer.

The next exhibition, titled "New Labour", opens to the public next Thursday, chosen because of the initial expected date of the general election.

Emin back on the helter skelter of self-absorption

By David Lister Media and Culture Editor
Thursday, 26 April 2001

Tracey Emin, the leading member of the studiedly controversial Young British Artists, presented her first solo exhibition in London for four years yesterday.

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The business of being Tracey

Tracey Emin, the leading member of the studiedly controversial Young British Artists, presented her first solo exhibition in London for four years yesterday.

Once more using her own life as an art form in itself, she showed embroideries containing details of her sexual experiences, a video of the artist trying to meet her mother and a helter skelter as a throwback to her childhood days in Margate, Kent. The last was one of the very few new works in the exhibition. But the venue for the exhibition, the White Cube² Gallery in the East End of London, was, she claimed, notable.

Emin said: "This shows that artists are moving from the West End of London to the East End. There is a new community springing up here."

The exhibition is entitled "You Forgot To Kiss My Soul" with the reproduction of the Margate helter skelter at the centre of the gallery. Honey Luard, of White Cube², explained that it was "a fairly self-explanatory statement about the symbolism of the helter-skelter to life".

Emin, who last year sold her bed with its dirty linen to the art collector Charles Saatchi for £150,000 and then her reconstituted Whitstable beach hut to him for £ 75,000, says of her home town: "Being a virgin bride in Margate was not an option. You got broken into."

Emin's tent exhibit entitled Everyone I Have Slept With 1963-1995 contained the scrawled names of people she had slept with, including friends and relatives and sexual partners. It is not included in the new exhibition. Instead visitors can see a papier mâché Concorde, three new appliqued blankets, some neon displays, drawings and two videos, one of a conversation between Emin and her mother.

Emin was a Turner Prize nominee in 1999 and was recently awarded the eighth Cairo International Biennale Jury Prize.

Her home town, meanwhile, is trying to raise £13m for a Turner centre, which would show some of her works and those by contemporary Kent artists. Emin could yet see some of her works exhibited alongside those of Turner.

Giuliani creates 'decency panel' to keep art clean exhibits

By David Usborne in New York
Wednesday, 4 April 2001

Aspiring artists hoping for exposure in New York need to take care. If your work risks causing offence to the city's mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, or a group of his friends about to be appointed to an official "decency commission", you may be chased out of town. Steer clear of all religious depictions.

Aspiring artists hoping for exposure in New York need to take care. If your work risks causing offence to the city's mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, or a group of his friends about to be appointed to an official "decency commission", you may be chased out of town. Steer clear of all religious depictions.

The creation of the commission is Mayor Giuliani's latest big idea in his battle to keep New York's museums on the moral straight and narrow. Or that is how he sees it. Civil liberties groups consider it an illegal assault on the free expression rights of artists. For them it is censorship.

Apparently, Mr Giuliani intends his commission to root out works of art from the city's 34 publicly supported cultural institutions that may cross the line into obscenity. But where does that line lie? If there should be such a line. The panel members are buddies and aides of the mayor, who leaves office at the end of this year.

Mr Giuliani first frothed about so-called obscene art in 1999, when the Brooklyn Museum of Art opened Sensation, a collection of Saatchi-owned works, which included a black Madonna spattered with elephant dung. Mr Giuliani suspended city funding and tried to have the museum evicted, until a judge stopped him. When the museum hung a photo-parody of the Last Supper with a nude black woman in the place of Jesus he called it "disgusting".

Barbara Handman, director of People for the American Way, said yesterday: "The mayor has dragged the city through one costly, losing battle after another, as he persists in his attempt to become chooser-in-chief and impose his choices on the rest of us."