Visual Art: Charles Saatchi's greatest hits - and a few misses - will shortly be on show in his new gallery next to the Thames. Our critic revisits the past of the future of Brit Art
County Hall, South Bank
“WHAT DO YOU think of the new Damien Hirst?” Back in the halcyon days of Brit Art, the question would have sparked off an animated dispute. But ten years have passed. The name that once meant rebellion has become almost a brand. And who wants a new Hirst when they could have an old one? Who will remember some late-1990s square of Smartie-spotted canvas? Who, on the other hand, will forget a first encounter with A Thousand Years?
Hirst made this powerful piece in 1990, when he was fresh out of Goldsmiths. Maggots hatch and fatten on a butchered cow’s head, metamorphosing into swarms of bluebottles that stumble and veer about their glass space before, colliding with a suspended insect-o-cutor, they tumble, sizzled corpses, back on to the floor. Life’s ferocious futility is trapped in a tank.
And it’s not hard to imagine Hirst, when first he created it, stepping back from his artwork like some modern-day Dr Frankenstein. It’s not hard to imagine that he might, for a moment, have felt quite appalled. But after an initial sense of shock has sledge-hammered a metaphor home, can Brit Art still impress? Or was it only ever about novelty?
Now comes your chance to decide. On April 17 a new gallery opens in County Hall, a short walk from Tate Modern on the south bank of the Thames. The gallery will, in large part, provide a showcase for the collection of Charles Saatchi, who made his name all but synonymous with Brit Art in the 1990s.
Five years ago Sensation!, a show of the work of the young British artists that he had collected, was staged in the Georgian halls of the Royal Academy. But this group of exuberantly radical, brazenly rude, disconcertingly ironic outsiders were to become part of the Establishment. Their codes of behaviour became as conventional, in their own inverted way, as any that might apply in the clubhouse of a Surrey golf course. Shock had been factored in to cultural expectations. And inevitably, by the end of the decade, Brit Art had been declared officially dead.
Now, embalmed, it is brought out again to be displayed amid the sedate Edwardian interiors of County Hall, the former home of the Greater London Council. The sweeping staircases and imposing pillars, the parqueted corridors lined with panelled wood, all provide a setting more easily associated with Old Master canvases than with the contemporary installation and the clichéd white cube.
Of course, a half-hearted effort has been made to crank up a bit of controversy. Saatchi, it has been suggested, aims to upstage Tate Modern, which, while proclaiming its status as the primary custodian of contemporary British art, has not the financial resources to compete with a mogul collector. But the Tate’s director, Nicholas Serota, appears disinclined to rise to the bait.
So, stripped of the trappings of polemic, Brit Art’s icons — Hirst’s shark, Tracey Emin’s bed, Marcus Harvey’s portrait of Myra Hindley done in children’s handprints (making its first appearance since it was attacked with ink and eggs) — stand exposed to rational reassessment.
The visitor is unlikely to be shocked by what he sees. He is more likely to feel a cosy sense of familiarity instead. Together, these images preserve a period in formaldehyde. That’s the way that art works. It infiltrates wider culture, weaving itself into the fabric of an era.
Visitors may enjoy these art works in the same spirit as they might enjoy the come-back concert of some ageing pop idol. They will come along to remember the good old days — and indulge in a bit of sensibility outrage again, tempered, most probably, with a sharp nudge of irony.
And yet, considered individually, there is more to many of these pieces than that. The purpose of visual art is quite simply to be visual. But when it comes to conceptual art, it is precisely this visual element that has so often been overlooked. Packaging was important to the Brit pack, and part of this packaging was the jargon, the accretions of academic rhetoric that surrounded each reproduction in catalogues and the press.
This, over the years, seemed almost to obscure the actual work. By the time you had ploughed through the feminist tracts you almost forgot that when Sarah Lucas stuck a pair of fried eggs on her breasts it wasn’t feminist, it was funny. Seeing her original photograph again reminds you of that.
Of course, some of the art works on display are well known only because they were overpromoted. Hirst’s giant Humbrol anatomy model, Hymn, was only remarkable because £1 million had reputedly been paid for it. And Emin’s bed, detached from the panoply of Turner Prize outrage, looks rather forlorn: the abandoned remnant of a lifestyle that even its former occupant doesn’t appear to believe in any more.
But many of the “golden greats” of Brit art can still stand on their own authority. Hirst’s A Thousand Years still speaks straight to the instincts. His shark — The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living — may look less like some deep psychic predator than a much-patched soft toy, but it still captures those sinister fears that slide under the mind’s surface. Ron Mueck’s model Dead Dad still evokes all the fragile dignity of a corpse, a sense of death’s insignificance when deprived of the trappings of the ceremony. And Gavin Turk’s blue plaque still speaks ironically — if only because he may well really have a blue plaque by now.
This inaugural show is delightfully uncluttered, the art works displayed in a series of former offices. Some rooms may surprise you. A series of John Bratby paintings from the “Kitchen Sink” era is most unexpected. Others may disappoint — it is hard to rouse much enthusiasm for a Peter Davies list of names. But, in a contemporary art scene in which sequestered spaces have become almost synonymous with interminably dull videos, at least you can be sure you won’t find any of these. Saatchi clearly likes to take his visual impact straight up.
He has, in all probability, seen his finest day as the contemporary art world’s “kingmaker”. His new gallery should be less about entrepreneurial expansion, more about the consolidation of his cultural base. Shows by the Chapman brothers, Emin and Lucas are all planned, while Saatchi plans to stage shows which won’t stem from his own collection. Judging by this opening exhibition, the venture will be a success.
But then Damien Hirst, for one, has always understood the importance of the first impact. He it was who first detonated the Brit Art bomb, his early images exploding in the public imagination.
Hirst, at his finest, translates the vision of Francis Bacon into 3-D. But, also like Bacon, he led followers up a blind alleyway. Brit Art, at root, was really only ever about him. By focusing on his work in this inaugural show, the Saatchi gallery employs shock and awe tactics to stunning effect. It will have to fight hard if it is to gain further ground.
- The Saatchi Gallery opens in County Hall, South Bank SE1 (020-7823 2363), on April 17
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