Sentenced to the Saatchi

From The Times

October 25, 2005

By Derwent May SO CHARLES Saatchi’s gallery has finally been expelled from London’s old County Hall. It seems a pity, because the charm of the absurd permeates this gallery. The current exhibition consists of large, aggressive paintings — and these ferocious works hang, astoundingly, on the walls of little 1920s committee rooms, each still with its rusting coal fireplace and clock over the mantelpiece.

What is less charming is the commentary in the gallery’s Picture by Picture Guide and in panels beside the pictures. These comments are almost unintelligible, written in a mishmash of old Marxist sociology and fashionable media analysis, with curious glimmers of Walter Pater’s aesthetics and St Augustine’s theology thrown in.

There is a painting of a two crashed cars wrapped round poles. The guide’s comment is that “alluring in its sterile beauty . . . (it) promises nothing beyond our commodified conception of the infinite: a terrible fascination glimmering with airbrushed newness”. Of an untitled painting of what looks like an Oxford don in his mortar board, by Thomas Scheibitz, we learn that “in Scheibitz’s world of synthetic replication and commodity signifiers, even people are reduced to ideologically pragmatic form”. There are 64 paintings, and 64 explications.

There is, of course, nothing new in art critics using language as nobody else would. George Orwell remarked long ago that if one critic writes about the extraordinary blackness of a painting, while another praises its exquisite whiteness, we no longer think that they contradict each other.

But no one should write sentences such as those in the Saatchi guide. With considerable effort, you can prise some sort of sense out of some of the remarks, but even that seems to have an extremely tenuous connection with the pictures. Imagine a person who came here hoping that these paintings might give him some up-to-date insight. If he read the captions, he would go home scarred for life.

In very small print at the end of the guide the “text” is attributed to Patricia Ellis, without any indication of who she is. But the gallery’s owner must surely take responsibility for these verbal monstrosities. So move your works to Chelsea, Mr Saatchi, and good luck to you. But before you go — in the words of the shocked Dudley Moore in the old Dud and Pete sketches — “Wash your mouth with soapy water!”