Saatchi pulls in the crowds, but shock factor has disappeared

By Arifa Akbar
Friday, 18 April 2003

The buzz of excitement at the public opening of Charles Saatchi's gallery on the South Bank of the Thames yesterday was not limited to the crowds who were queuing outside.

The buzz of excitement at the public opening of Charles Saatchi's gallery on the South Bank of the Thames yesterday was not limited to the crowds who were queuing outside.

Rumour had it that a swarm of flies had escaped from Damien Hirst's A Thousand Years, a glass case installation featuring hundreds of the insects, as well as a considerable number of maggots, gorging on a decomposing cow's head. Security guards were called to investigate.

Visitors occupied themselves by trying to catch the flies in cigarette boxes to sell to prospective buyers as genuine pieces of Young British Art.

Attendance was brisk rather than spectacular for a city growing accustomed to artistic blockbusters. The most popular exhibits had a 30-minute waiting time. Others were more readily approachable.

A modest crowd of tourists, art students and day-trippers stumbled past what seemed to be a body in a dirty sleeping bag. "Is that part of the show or not?" said one woman, pointing to a cast bronze sculpture by Gavin Turk. The homeless figure, with mannequins of exhausted backpackers and women pushing prams, stood in the entrance hall in an attempt to unsettle the visitors' notion of reality. It was clearly having some effect.

The central exhibition hall, once a Greater London Council debating chamber, and the 22 rooms of the gallery, which house the many "once-shocking" pieces by Hirst, Tracey Emin and Marcus Harvey, held few other surprises for visitors.

"I have seen pictures of most of this stuff so I am not shocked by it. I really just wanted to come and see it all in the flesh," said Rachel Couley, a scientist from London, as she stood aside Harvey's controversial portrait of Myra Hindley.

Animated tourists chattered around visions of surgical equipment in a fish tank, cow dung, Hirst's enormous shark in formaldehyde, bloodied mannequins dangling from trees and Sarah Lucas's Bunny, showing a woman's splayed legs on a chair.

Some visitors saw the wit in the works and chuckled at the exhibits.

A circle of art students fiercely defended the need for such a gallery to exist in a central location. Nicole Regan, 19, studying at Central St Martins college, said: "All of this stuff is brilliant. I have come to study it and it's incredibly powerful. You can get up close to it as there are no barriers. This is a specific British arts movement and it needs to be recognised."

The biggest queues formed around Richard Wilson's exhibit 20:50, in which he fills a room with engine oil. Anthony Murombe, 25, said: "I'm not sure it was worth the 35-minute wait. I am not sure if it was art but it was visually spectacular nevertheless."

Others remained unimpressed by the assortment of severed animal flesh and faeces served up to them. Vicky Ledger from Coventry said she had far preferred the majestic Titian exhibition, just down the river at the Tate. Moving forward five centuries, Betty Harding, 59, felt the irony was too close for comfort. Standing near Hirst's Beautiful, Cheap, Shitty, Too Easy ... she sighed: "That just about sums it up."

Tableau vivant upstages Saatchi's new work

From Times Online

April 16, 2003

By Sam Coates MORE than a thousand celebrity guests arrived at The Saatchi Gallery, the new Thameside exhibition centre in the grand panelled rooms of the former County Hall, last night expecting sensation.

It duly arrived in the form of 200 men and women aged from 18 to 61 removing all their clothes and posing for photographs on the steps of the gallery. They then mingled with the shocked guests and even more shocking exhibits.

Marc Quinn, with the mould of his head filled with his own blood, and the sculptor Ron Mueck — as well as the celebrities, including the actors Stephen Fry and Kevin Spacey.

“I did it because Charles (Saatchi, the gallery’s proprietor) asked me to,” Tunick said.

“I showed him some of my previous work and he immediately invited me to do this. He has already bought one of the pictures which I took at this evening’s event to display in the gallery.”

As with so many of Saatchi’s exhibitors, Tunick is a controversial figure who has organised more than 50 nude installations in his native United States and abroad.

Since 1992 he has been arrested five times while attempting to work out of doors in New York, but every time the charges were dropped.

About 100 of the partygoers left the gallery to watch the display as the nudists, described as “ordinary, extraordinary people” by Tunick, were photographed in various compositions on the patio in front of the Thames entrance. Then the nudists, who were not paid to take part and come from all walks of life, escaped the cold and went inside to mingle.

One participant, Mark Roworth, 32, a computer programmer, said: “We had a quick run through with our clothes on an hour before, but we haven’t practised the whole thing before. I thought it would be a very interesting thing to do; you have to try something bizarre once in your life.”

Alan Yentob, the BBC executive whose clothes remained firmly on during the party, said: “It was a very British occasion. People took it very well, it was an interesting thing to do.”

The chef Nigella Lawson, Saatchi’s partner, kept well away from the naked display. “I didn’t see anything. I was just talking to my friends at the time,” she said.

She added that Saatchi had stayed at home and was probably lying on the bed watching television and reading bedtime stories to her children. The millionaire philanthropist has never been known to attend his gallery openings.

Stephen Fry, however, was more than happy to watch. “I can get this all at home. But I’m still delighted,” he said.

The gallery opens to the public tomorrow.

Brit Art has a new home, but can it still shock?

Wednesday, 16 April 2003

"What really stood out was the hopeful swagger of it all" writes Charles Saatchi in the foreword to a book about his collection of Young British Artists, now in its new home in the old County Hall in London. Which begs an obvious question. What exactly does a swagger look like when 10 years have passed and hopefulness seems neither here nor there any more? Or, more prejudicially, what are you left with when enfants terrible outgrow their infancy?

"What really stood out was the hopeful swagger of it all" writes Charles Saatchi in the foreword to a book about his collection of Young British Artists, now in its new home in the old County Hall in London. Which begs an obvious question. What exactly does a swagger look like when 10 years have passed and hopefulness seems neither here nor there any more? Or, more prejudicially, what are you left with when enfants terrible outgrow their infancy?

For quite a few people, of course, both questions have been answered. It is hard to believe that any private collection has been assaulted as frequently as that hungrily accumulated by Mr Saatchi over two decades. The ink has flown again and again – and not just metaphorically. Marcus Harvey's vast portrait of Myra Hindley took incoming from an outraged citizen, and Damien Hirst's formaldehyde-preserved sheep had black ink poured into its tank. Chinese artists bounced on Tracey Emin's bed, Rudolph Giuliani denounced the New York showing of Sensation, the exhibition that unveiled some of Saatchi's most treasured acquisitions. Brit Art or Saatchi art, it hit the public hard and from time to time its public hit back.

But maintaining a sense of outrage can be as difficult as continuing to be outrageous, and though the Saatchi brand can still pull a glamorous crowd, not all of his star works are as pugnacious as they used to be. Rotting cows' heads and electrocuted flies? Been there. Bedraggled condoms and biological stains? Done that.

In any setting, these once-notorious pieces would now be trying to keep their heads up. In the architectural preservative of County Hall they struggle even harder. The building looks as if it has been incompetently vacated rather than brilliantly occupied. As a marketer Mr Saatchi showed genius in giving Brit Art global reach and name recognition; as a museum curator he shows nothing like the same assurance. The presence of Marc Quinn's self-portrait bust, moulded from the artist's frozen blood, proves that stories about its accidental defrosting were untrue. But the Gallery itself suggests that no amount of formaldehyde can protect shock from the inevitable process of decay.

Naked tableau provides suitably artistic stunt for opening of Charles Saatchi's BritArt collection

By Arifa Akbar
Wednesday, 16 April 2003

The presence of Charles Saatchi's girlfriend, Nigella Lawson, the photographer David Bailey and a host of celebrities at the launch of his new gallery was eclipsed last night by 160 naked models forming an artistic installation on a nearby courtyard.

The presence of Charles Saatchi's girlfriend, Nigella Lawson, the photographer David Bailey and a host of celebrities at the launch of his new gallery was eclipsed last night by 160 naked models forming an artistic installation on a nearby courtyard.

The artistic stunt could have created no better advertisement for the former adman whose gallery at County Hall in London will showpiece the seminal works of Young British Artists.

The nudes, who were arranged into photographic landscapes at dusk near the river Thames by the artist Spencer Tunick, showed that Mr Saatchi has not lost his touch for creating sensationalism around his art.

The naked tableau by Mr Tunick, who has been arrested while photographing such displays in the past 11 years, would have sat comfortably alongside any of the works displayed inside which include Tracey Emin's Unmade Bed, Damien Hirst's shark and Marcus Harvey's Myra Hindley portrait.

Celebrities at the lavish party, which sported a 1,000-strong guestlist, crowded around the naked formation, which included a pregnant woman and another model with a hand in plaster cast, to discuss the pieces's artistic merits.

"It's good to have an artistic reason for watching this sort of thing, and you don't have to pay Soho prices," quipped the actor Stephen Fry.

Mr Saatchi was not there to great his guests as his publicists had expected ("Charles simply hates parties," his spokesman William Miller had said), leaving a Versace-clad Ms Lawson greeted guests from the spectrum of Britain's art and showbusiness establishment.

Ms Emin reflected on her own works of art alongside the model Jerry Hall, the actor Jeremy Irons, the jeweller Jade Jagger, the model Sophie Anderton, and the singer Gavin Rossdale with his wife Gwen Stefani.

The guestlist extended itself to old Tories Michael Heseltine and Michael Howard, figures who served as a reminder of Mr Saatchi's important contribution to the success of the Conservative Party. He masterminded the party's election campaigns with his brother Maurice at the beginning of Margaret Thatcher's reign as Prime Minister.

Guests navigating the labyrinthine rooms of the old GLC building praised the shocking artpieces and defended Mr Saatchi's vision for a gallery that houses Britain's most contemporary works of art, in spite of the criticism it has received from some quarters.

Standing next to a work by Hirst consisting of a cow's severed head in a glass cage, the record producer Pete Waterman said: "I love this stuff ... maggots and all. Art should make you look deeper, and this does."

Pickled works by Hirst as well as a fish tank containing a computer, a birthing bed and rooms with coloured discs are scattered through the gallery, interspersed with works by Ms Emin, Hiroshi Sugimoto and Jake and Dinos Chapman's montage of mutilated mannequins.

The gallery, which hopes to attract up to 750,000 visitors a year, will open its doors to the public tomorrow, and marks Saatchi's relocation from St John's Wood, north-west London. It overlooks the Houses of Parliament and is a short walk from the London Eye, two of the capital's biggest tourist attractions.

A star-studded launch fails to quell doubts over Saatchi gallery

By Louise Jury, Arts Correspondent
Tuesday, 15 April 2003

The launch party will be an advertiser's dream. With a guest list topped by David Bowie, Alan Bennett, Jeremy Irons and Tracey Emin, tonight's celebration to mark the birth of the Saatchi Gallery is guaranteed the headlines its owner has made a career out of generating.

The launch party will be an advertiser's dream. With a guest list topped by David Bowie, Alan Bennett, Jeremy Irons and Tracey Emin, tonight's celebration to mark the birth of the Saatchi Gallery is guaranteed the headlines its owner has made a career out of generating.

But as the gallery's collection of seminal works by Young British Artists was previewed yesterday, ahead of the its opening on Thursday, it remained clear that Charles Saatchi's ambitious venture is not receiving the unanimous acclaim that greeted his riverside rival, Tate Modern, when it opened three years ago.

In part, it is human nature being grudging. The nation appeared to will the success of Tate Modern after the Millennium Dome debacle.

Mr Saatchi, by contrast, is a multimillionaire advertising guru with a feted girlfriend (the TV chef Nigella Lawson), who helped persuade the country to vote for Margaret Thatcher ­ the woman who, of course, made his gallery's home in County Hall possible by abolishing the Greater London Council.

But the cavils cannot all be put down to sour grapes. Even Damien Hirst has dismissed the gallery as a "waste of time", because most of the work has been shown before.

Art critics, too, have voiced doubts. It has been said that County Hall, with its chambers and offices, is a very unpromising space for exhibitions. Its rabbit's warren of rooms, some so inhospitable that only one piece can be exhibited, is a world away from the open white spaces that Mr Saatchi has made his trademark.

Its listed building status and its miles of wood panelling and corridors presented problems for Mr Saatchi as he set out to showcase his unparalleled collection of Young British Artists.

Mr Saatchi has had to adopt some innovative hanging manoeuvres in the difficult space to do the artwork justice. Some paintings have had to be displayed on easels, others hang from the roof on ropes and shockingly modern pieces by Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas have been given old, ornate frames.

A marble staircase leads to the most famous works ­ Damien Hirst's shark, Chris Ofili's elephant-dung Virgin and Marcus Harvey's Myra Hindley portrait ­ which compete in the central rotunda.

In a juxtaposition of the old and the new, the visitor must march past a long list of County Hall soldiers killed in the First World War before they reach the shark or Emin's unmade bed.

"The building is a curator's nightmare," observed the Telegraph's Richard Dorment, while Waldemar Januszczak of The Sunday Times found himself longing for the pure, clean spaces of Tate Modern. "If kitsch is the new cool, then it may take a few visits to come around to it," he said.

The Independent's Tom Lubbock has, perhaps, been the most damning. "The old GLC building is powerfully inhospitable. The curating is abominable, An extraordinary, historic flop," he wrote.

"With some exceptions, Saatchi art ­ bright and shiny, shitty and bloody, rude and jokey ­ is an adman's art: high impact, quick yield, attention-grabbing, short attention span. It often doesn't ask to be looked at more than once, and it has been exhaustively exposed. What should this gallery be ­ a mausoleum to the momentary?"

Yet Mr Saatchi ­ who may not even attend the launch party ­ evidently thought critics were likely to grasp his vision. News reporters were kept away while critics were given early admission. And, to be fair, some have revelled in the gallery. Even Brian Sewell, the Evening Standard's hard-to-please commentator, approved. "The now notorious exhibits that seemed so stark and startling in the white light and vast irregular spaces of the paint factory, now seem so homely, settled and comfortable," he said.

Mr Saatchi justified his decision for moving to the city centre from the smaller gallery on Boundary Road in the north-west London suburb of St John's Wood by saying: "I gave up Boundary Road because I got to the point where I no longer had to agonise about how to hang [the art]."

But the gains that a base on the South Bank will give toMr Saatchi are clear. Millions already visit the neighbouring London Eye. The potential number of visitors that the £8.50-a-head show could attract is enormous.

And everyone agrees that if YBAs is what you are after, Charles Saatchi found them and bought them. He created the market that he is now marketing to the masses.

Karen Wright, editor of Modern Painters magazine, thinks the new gallery will introduce more people to the art. "It's an amazing space and I think it's going to get huge numbers of people," she said. "It will make people sit up and think about contemporary art in a new way. Hats off to Charles. He's investing a lot of money and time and effort."

Britart stars turn on patron Saatchi

Advertising millionaire's new gallery, due to open this week, is shunned by two of his most celebrated protégés

By James Morrison, Arts and Media Correspondent
Sunday, 13 April 2003

As Charles Saatchi makes final adjustments to the opening displays in his new gallery this weekend, two of his most celebrated protégés are threatening to spoil the party.

As Charles Saatchi makes final adjustments to the opening displays in his new gallery this weekend, two of his most celebrated protégés are threatening to spoil the party.

Chris Ofili, the Turner Prize-winning artist renowned for his innovative use of elephant dung, is preparing to sell one of his most impressive works to Saatchi's arch-rival, the Tate.

Meanwhile, Damien Hirst, Saatchi's most famous "find", has dismissed the new gallery – which launches this week – as "pointless" and "a waste of time".

The artist has also confirmed that he will miss its opening night – despite the fact that its first exhibition will be a retrospective of his work.

Hirst told Time Out magazine: "I think it [the gallery] is pointless. Most of the work has been shown two or three times already. It's a waste of time."

Saatchi is said to be unflustered by the twin snubs. However, they are bound to take the shine off the launch of the millionaire advertising tycoon's much-anticipated new gallery, which officially opens on Thursday at County Hall, the cavernous former GLC headquarters on London's South Bank.

The piece Ofili is planning to sell to the Tate is Upper Room, a collection of 13 paintings of monkeys based loosely on Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper.

When shown at the Victoria Miro Gallery last July, it was widely acclaimed, with critics dubbing it "monkey magic" and praising the way it "pulses with energy".

At the time, Ofili, a publicity-shy individual, made it known through the gallery that he wanted Upper Room to end up on display in a public institution.

Now it has emerged that Sir Nicholas Serota, the director of the Tate, has approached private patrons to ask them to help raise the money needed to buy the paintings.

As Ofili is a member of the Tate's board, the gallery is not allowed to use its own acquisition fund to secure his work. However, it is understood that the artist has agreed to hold back from selling Upper Room to any other buyer until the Tate has been given a chance to drum up its estimated seven-figure asking price.

Neither the Tate nor Victoria Miro galleries would comment on the prospective purchase, but sources told The Independent on Sunday: "The Tate is very keen to buy Upper Room, and it's been talking to some of its supporters about making donations towards its cost.

"Chris has made it clear he wants it in a public institution – not in the Saatchi Gallery – and he has agreed to wait while the Tate tries to raise the money."

Though Hirst and Ofili may not be giving the new gallery their personal endorsement, it features plenty of their work.

Among the Hirst works on show are his infamous sliced cow and shark in formaldehyde, and Hymn, the giant plastic anatomical doll Saatchi bought for £1m.

Ofili, meanwhile, is represented by Holy Virgin Mary, the notorious "elephant dung madonna" painting condemned as "sick stuff" by Mayor Giuliani when it was displayed in New York as part of the Sensation exhibition.

Not all of Saatchi's Britart discoveries have put a dampener on his latest project. Tracey Emin, who once condemned his work on the Conservative Party's 1980s election campaigns, even as he bought her unmade bed for £125,000, said last week: "I think the new gallery is fantastic – much better than I expected it to be."

Sadie Coles, another artist said to have questioned the nature of Saatchi's patronage of the arts in the past, commented: "I had reservations, but I think Saatchi's new gallery is fantastic, an incredibly personal vision.

"Saatchi is treating the art of the Nineties generation like Old Masters. He has the best work by the artists he believes in and you can see his commitment."

Britons spent £6.7bn on art last year – more than ever before – a new survey has revealed, writes Malaika Costello-Dougherty.

This figure represents £180 for every man, woman and child in the UK.

The findings come in a poll commissioned by Prospects 2003, an annual nationwide arts prize.

"The public no longer feels threatened by contemporary art, but sees it as something that they can understand and enjoy," said Susie Allen, chair of Prospects 2003.

Familiar sensations!

From The Times

April 9, 2003

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

By Rachel Campbell-Johnston

Saatchi Gallery
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