The reclusive impresario breaks his silence to tell Richard Cork why his chamber of horrors is really a place for all the family
Saatchi, busily putting the finishing touches to his anniversary exhibition called New Blood, says that “the old gallery was fantastic. But I felt that I could do shows there while sitting on a deckchair on holiday in Margate. I needed a challenge.” Pausing from his labours, he admits that “this building may be too much of a challenge. But I’m getting used to it now. I love hanging around here.”
Indeed, he does. Before we meet I am aware of the reclusive multimillionaire’s silhouetted figure as he darts around, suddenly appearing in the distance and then, just as swiftly, vanishing through one of the many doorways. County Hall is a labyrinth, and it can prove disorientating. Even while we talk, Saatchi shifts restlessly and several times jumps up to pace the corridor with brisk, impatient steps.
Saatchi speaks quickly, but in a low-toned voice. A famously shy man, who rarely gives interviews, he nevertheless delights in talking about his enthusiasms. When he does so, his face becomes animated. The intensity of his gaze belongs to a man who knows how to stare long and hard at the images that fascinate him.
His County Hall adventure has been an outstanding success. More than 600,000 visitors have paid between £6 and £9 since it opened last April. “I’m thrilled with it,” he says. “We don’t have uniformed guards, only young invigilators. People are more sophisticated about contemporary art than the Daily Mail would like to think. And I’ve learnt that you don’t have to put barriers around lots of the works. We do get thuggish schoolboys visiting sometimes, but nothing has been damaged.”
To test him out, I ask Saatchi if I can touch one of his latest acquisitions: young Matt Calderwood’s Rope, which rises enticingly from the floor to the ceiling.
Although it looks sturdy enough, this deceptive sculpture is made from one mile of lavatory paper. Calderwood spent ages painstakingly twisting it, driven by the desire to fool us into thinking that the “rope” is real.
Children will undoubtedly want to climb it when New Blood opens next week, and the lavatory paper is far too vulnerable to bear their weight. But Saatchi allows me to touch it and becomes excited at the thought of young visitors encountering his collection. “The best thing is when school groups come round,” he says. “Very few of them came to my old place, but I do get a warm glow now thinking that children are visiting an art gallery and not yawning.”
Is he, I wonder, turning into a crusader for the idea of converting British schoolchildren into art devotees? “Nobody wants to be called a crusader,” he replies with a wry grin, “but it is terribly nice to know that I’m opening their eyes to contemporary art. Word of mouth is the key thing in bringing them here. If museum people wonder why people don’t rush to their contemporary shows, the answer is that the public doesn’t like dry and over-intellectual work. Looking at art should be accessible and fun.”
Judging by the popularity of County Hall, most visitors agree. But Saatchi would never be content to leave his collection in a becalmed state. He has altered much of the display. Only the work in the great circular chamber, where YBA icons such as Damien Hirst’s shark and Tracey Emin’s bed still reside, has largely escaped Saatchi’s appetite for change.
“I think of that room as a shrine,” he says, “but I’m not really in the shrine business. It would give me nothing to do at the weekends.”
So the other spaces have been rethought, none more dramatically than the first grand room that visitors will encounter. Here, in a space formerly inhabited by the Chapman brothers’ apocalyptic vision of Hell, we are greeted by the sound of grunts and low, painful groans. The sounds come from Francis Upritchard’s Save Yourself, which features a mummy trussed in strips of white cloth and lying on a stretch of raw ground, exposed by the removal of parquet flooring.
Sometimes singing in a crazed, unearthly voice, the mummy has a gold cigarette pack stuffed incongruously in his waistband. But the pack appears empty — the lack of nicotine probably adds to the mummy’s desperation.
Saatchi relishes work by young artists prepared to explore a sense of crisis. While Upritchard evokes a remote past, Daniel Richter’s nearby painting, Gedion, shows youths looking for trouble in a bleak city street. They quarrel, strip naked or encourage voracious dogs to join the conflict.
Some of the most rasping images that Saatchi has acquired recently can be found in smaller, white-walled rooms leading off the maze of corridors. In one of these spaces, Tim Noble and Sue Webster magnify their reputation as enfants terribles by displaying two multi-coloured neon figures.
Girlfriend from Hell and Puny Undernourished Kid confront each other on opposite walls. Both these cartoon-style figures are covered with graffiti. She has “angry bitch” and “good shag” scrawled on her body, while he is peppered with “wanker” and “sod off”.
Saatchi, it is clear, has lost none of his fascination with the rudeness of youth. He has never been afraid of brash self-exposure in art, as his Tracey Emin collection proves. And he continues to acquire work that, like the notorious Myra Hindley portrait, is capable of causing offence.
The latest controversial image, Stella Vine’s bloodied painting of a heroin addict, Rachel Whitear, who died in 2000, has provoked widespread anger before the show opens. But it reflects Saatchi’s long-standing preoccupation with death, a recurrent theme in the new display.
The most repellent of his purchases is David Falconer’s Vermin Death Star, a colossal fragment of meteor debris covered in entwined rats. Marooned in a clinical room of its own, it could hardly be more gruesome. But when I ask the 60-year-old Saatchi about his obsession with mortality, he shrugs and says: “it’s such a good subject, and it’ll always be with us.”
New Blood is a busy and bewildering show, ranging from outrageous shocks to surprisingly restrained paintings by older artists such as Luc Tuymans. “You never know what’s coming next,” Saatchi says, “something new and rude by Noble and Webster, or something classic by Tuymans. I’m not one of those who think that painting has died on us, and I’m planning to do a show of the most interesting painting around.” He also wants to stage an exhibition of Clyfford Still, one of the finest, yet least-known, American abstract expressionists.
Although Saatchi has problems with abstract art, one of his greatest memories is seeing the Still exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. But he is quick to dispel the suspicion that he is falling back on the art of the past.
“I won’t let go seeing all those grisly shows of new work,” he says. “What’s so thrilling about London is that you can visit El Greco at the National Gallery and all the other museum shows, and then go somewhere disagreeable in the East End, where there is always something new. Interesting art keeps popping up in Britain, infinitely more than in America.”
So why is London, the capital city of a nation traditionally suspicious of innovative art, such an effective breeding ground for new work? “Because we’ve got very few really good dealers. That’s a big plus. In New York, all the artists have dealers, whereas there’s very little in the way of a market over here. So the young London artists put on their own shows. Almost everything new in this show wasn’t seen by me in a dealer’s gallery.”
Saatchi continues to visit the most out-of-the-way warehouses, searching for new, unknown artists. He has a 50-year lease at County Hall, and looking at art is his life. “I’m constantly at it here, and I’m always wanting to visit churches when we go on Italian holidays. I keep boring my wife, telling her we must go off for a two-hour drive and see some paintings by Piero della Francesca.”
He remains committed to the County Hall experiment. “I haven’t been outside for days,” Saatchi says. “I think you can only be really effective if you concentrate, and I fiddle around here all the time.” And with that he darts off into the welcoming shadows.
New Blood opens at County Hall, Belvedere Road, London SE1, on March 24 (020-7823 2363). Four volumes of Richard Cork’s writings on modern art were published recently by Yale
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