After Eton he sold fire extinguishers, then he sold us Emin and Hirst. As Jay Jopling adds the final touches to his revamped White Cube 2 gallery, he's already looking ahead to another opening in the market
- The Observer,
- Sunday September 22 2002
- Article history
Now, 10 years on, Jopling is consolidating his operation, moving his original tiny cube of a gallery from London's St James's to its satellite premises in Hoxton Square in the East End. There, in a classic piece of Jopling performance, two new storeys have been added to his gallery's original building. The cube components of the building were fabricated in Manchester, transported by lorry to Hoxton and then craned into place.
'Some people watching were convinced that the two new storeys were really a Damien Hirst sculpture being installed,' chuckles Jopling, 'because the prefabricated parts have got all the shelves and vitrines built in like one of Damien's office pieces. It's a radical way to build.'
Hoxton Square was closed off for a week, but it's not the first time Jopling's White Cube gallery has brought the place to a standstill. Two thousand people attended the opening night of Tracey Emin's exhibition there last year, for example. If Jopling loves to sell, still more he adores stoking the fires to bring his ideas to life.
Jopling, now 39, learnt salesmanship through a holiday job in his late teens, selling fire extinguishers door to door. 'I really enjoyed it, so I took the fire extinguishers back to university, got a lot of people working under me selling them, and I'd then take a commission on what they sold.' His technique was so successful that he could sell fire extinguishers to people who already owned them and the fire extinguisher company offered him a directorship.
'I learnt a trick that if you poured lighter fuel on your sleeve and then lit it, you could get everybody's attention very quickly. And then just holding this small fire extinguisher you could extinguish the flames: it was very dramatic and a very effective hard sell.'
Like a fire, Jopling is hard to halt once he gets going. He speaks smoothly and hypnotically, drawing the listener along in his wake. Like a politician on Radio 4's Today programme, he resists interruptions and skilfully deflects questions by shifting the subject to one that suits him better. If this can be frustrating, you have to admire the chutzpah. In fact, even Jopling's father, Michael Jopling, Margaret Thatcher's one time Chief Whip and Minister for Agriculture, was astounded by his son's audacity in selling fire extinguishers. 'Fire extinguisher salesmen were the only people my father used to almost chase off the farm in Yorkshire,' says Jopling, laughing. 'They were such pests.'
He grew up on a 500-acre farm in North Yorkshire, went to boarding school in Scarborough at the age of seven and then to Eton. His patrician background is typical for an old-school art dealer or Christie's boy, if somewhat more unusual for one operating in the apparently egalitarian contemporary art market. Alan Clark, for example, ascribed to Michael Jopling the infamous description of Michael Heseltine as the sort of person who had to buy his own furniture.
'It was a great quote,' says Jopling, 'but my father immediately and publicly stated he'd not said it. It was a horribly arrogant comment, but at the same time very amusing.
'That Sloane sort of thing never really appealed to me,' he adds. 'I always wanted to combine business with culture, and the establishment with the avant-garde: those four elements are very true to me.'
On the day we met, Jopling had returned from a holiday at Elton John's villa in Nice with his wife, the artist Sam Taylor-Wood, and their daughter, Angelica: anything further from a Sloaney mini-break is hard to imagine. Jopling and his wife are often photographed in the company of celebrities. It may be 'New Establishment' but this beau monde is not inhabited, one imagines, by many of Jopling's Eton contemporaries.
Even at Eton, he was different. He formed a theatre company which he took to the Edinburgh Fringe, staged art exhibitions and founded a literary magazine to which he persuaded Bridget Riley to contribute a cover. At the age of 14, Jopling bought his first work of art, a limited-edition Gilbert & George book for £16 from the Anthony d'Offay gallery. He continues to collect contemporary art but says that it was at this point that he decided he wanted to work with living artists. So he studied history of art at Edinburgh University where he started dealing on the secondary art market and working with Glasgow-based artists.
In his final year at university, in 1985, Jopling and two friends organised a charity art auction which raised £250,000 for famine victims in West Africa. Jopling went to New York to ask art stars such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Julian Schnabel and Keith Haring to donate their work. If he didn't think their offerings were good enough, he would demand another piece and often get it. Few could resist his force of personality and, likewise, the glamour and excitement of the New York art-star system may have sown the seed within Jopling of a strategy to come.
Following a brief flirtation with film-production, Jopling started working with artists such as Damien Hirst and Marc Quinn, putting on warehouse-style shows from his Brixton home. When Nicholas Serota formed a think-tank upon his appointment to the Tate in 1991, Jopling was asked to join it. 'I was very flattered to be included in this meeting to discuss how we got the newspapers to take contemporary art more seriously,' he recalls. 'Yet it seemed to me that if the tabloid press was only interested in ridiculing contemporary art, then get them to ridicule it properly, so that people actually take notice.
'So we got the Daily Star to take a bag of chips to one of Damien's fish in formaldehyde pieces which was then on show at the Serpentine and photograph it as the most expensive fish and chips in the world. Stunts like that forced people to know about the art and if they know about it, then that encouraged them to go and see it, and then they were forced to take a view. It certainly was a way of getting art into the public arena.'
Jopling's artists were responsible for some of the pieces, like Hirst's shark suspended in formaldehyde, which became icons of the Nineties. There was Marcus Harvey's Myra , an image of the Moors murderer made from children's handprints, Marc Quinn's Self, a mould of the artist's head made from his own blood, and Tracey Emin's My Bed. Key to Jopling's strategy was not only to enable the art to be made, but for it to be seen by as many people as possible. He understood the value of a high public profile to those considering investing in a nebulous market.
Likewise, Jopling persuaded Christie's to invest in his potential by giving him free use of their premises in the heart of London's most prestigious art trading street, Duke Street, St James's. Jopling smiles appreciatively as he remembers his sales pitch when, at the age of 29, he approached Christie's director, Christopher Davidge. 'I'd found out that Constable had been given a free studio by Christie's. Then we discussed how there weren't many contemporary art galleries this side of Piccadilly. I told him that I had some very interesting young artists, we talked a bit about them, and he was prepared to take a risk on me, for which I'll always be very grateful. And for five years they let us have that front-room. Very quickly, things started to snowball and we started to expand and do lots of different outside projects, as we continue to do.'
Now the 40-square foot gallery is closing after 10 years, which Jopling says was always his intention, but he seems sad to lose its flexibility: artists were only ever shown once, shows could be turned around at short notice, and overheads were low.
Yet since the opening of White Cube 2 in Hoxton Square, in May 2000, just before Tate Modern was launched, Jopling has been struggling to control a sprawling operation. Some have criticised his programming for its lack of coherence. His 25 staff have been spread across four different offices; now they'll all come together in the Hirst-style installation on top of White Cube 2.
The new-look gallery opens with an exhibition by White Cube star artist Gary Hume, and the launch of a new project space, 'Inside the White Cube', programmed by an outside curator with a changing exhibition each month. But Jopling is not standing still. He has bought a defunct electrical substation in Mason's Yard, opposite the original gallery, which he wants to rebuild. 'How many opportunities are there to build a free-standing building in this area? I'd love to do that - it would make a great gallery. All being well, we'll move in there in two years' time. If we don't get planning permission, we'll move on somewhere else in the West End.'
He is consumed by a passion for business and hates sitting still. The build-up of his energy as we talk is almost visible, as if he is itching to be released into some adrenaline-stoking deal. 'Sam says my epitaph should be, "All sense of hurry, gone", which is from my favourite Larkin poem. But I wouldn't have it any other way, it just feels right. And you know, the art market is very competitive; there are a lot of opportunities for artists, and it's important to grow with them. Their position just in terms of how they are looked on as artists is much more substantial than we ever imagined or thought possible. I've chosen to work with living artists, which has its own pressures, but if I had not had this gorgeous accident of being in London at just the right time, I might as well be selling anything, even fire extinguishers.'
· Gary Hume, 26 September onwards, White Cube 2, 48 Hoxton Square, London N1, 020 7930 5373: www.whitecube.com.
