From the East-end to a Dead-end?
By Sarah Tennant
The exhibition reflected our blind struggles to keep up with a world which ran rapid circles around the insignificance of our own lives and left a bewildered society breathless and impatient. The proclamation of alienation as a symptom of modernity has been part of a dialogue in Western art since Baudelaire wrote of its ‘shock and intoxication’ in The Painter of Modern life back in 1863. Although the reception Sensations received was both a mixture of novelty and despair, for the YBA’s it was in one sense the real end of their existence as underground artists and the beginning of a public association with the silent but deadly leader of contemporary art dealership, Charles Saatchi. It would be wrong to say that the artists, especially Hirst, didn’t know what they were doing when they sold their work to Saatchi. Back in the early 1990s at gallery openings, Hirst would apparently run up to dealers and critics screaming and yelling, a very literal and evidently effective way of self-advertising. He understood ‘the game,’ the lurid transfer of art in the studio to art in the gallery (or Saatchi’s own house). Its temporary existence as commodity had to be ignored if one was ever to make money. Once Emin had finished unmaking her bed, it was Saatchi who got to lie in it.
After the last firework had been let off for the Millenium celebrations, art was faced with a new century and a refuelled sense of anxiety. After the lucrative success of Sensations, the Royal Academy curated the Apocalypse exhibition in 2000, where perhaps the strongest piece was Hell by the Chapman Brothers. Arranged in the shape of a giant swastika, hundreds of model figures swept across a bleak landscape. On closer inspection the spectator sees battalions of Nazi troops mindlessly slaughtering defenceless people. Hillside trees are replaced with mass gravesides, and corpses roll through scenes of their now past fate. In its horrific detail of blood and gore, decapitations and crucifixions, we may be unsettled but we are never totally repulsed as the size of the figures means that our nausea is tempered with an image of two juvenile school boys who may have watched one too many horror films and naturally wanted to explore their own levels of violence with dioramas and toy soldiers. But it is also a scene from Bosch as it revels in tortured forms, and Pollock, as from a distance its use of colour builds up a series of abstract patterns and arrangements.
Unfortunately the title of this exhibition proved to be semi-prophetic with the events of September 11th two years later. Artists were flung back into a similar position as their ancestors after the Second World War – where can art go after this? How is one now to interpret Hell after 9/11? For many artists it marks a before and after. We spend so much time examining, theorizing and interpreting history that in one sense it becomes something safe, something to be nostalgic about. The present appears as a vast matrix of mystery, black from a war we don’t understand and grey because good and evil seem to mix all too easily these days. As the Global Village seems to have become more like a Global Hamlet, never before have we been such direct witnesses. But alongside a despair at what seems like an interminable anger lashing out on the most innocent and helpless, there is something altogether more compelling about society today and if we can’t quite put our finger on what it is yet, then let’s describe it as a different kind of excitement which is driven by a restlessness. This anxiety appears frequently in the work of British artists. This may not be the same sensation which the artists making the Affiches for May 1968 described as ‘something in the air.’ That series of demonstrations generally proved to change very little, so perhaps contemporary artists would be reluctant to use their work in such a direct protestation.
In Bad Miracle (2002), John Isaacs’ describes his sculpture as an accumulation of "all the bad things I have not just done but seen, heard, or read about from friends, television, newspapers, etc. and made them visible, this figure stands as a visible effigy to-for want of a better word-evil." It is based on a self-portrait of the artist as grotesquely obese, covered in ulcers and pustules. His over-consumption afflicts his own body to such a degree that he seems to be on the verge of literally collapsing into his own bands of skin. But standing up on a plinth as a big dollop of human flesh, Isaacs’ sense of the absurd also reveals a perverse humour, which, like the Chapman Brothers Hell, doesn’t depress us into thinking that the human condition is forever doomed. Bad Miracle is almost like a personal confession for Issacs’ as he admits that he sits in the hands of the media, as vulnerable and exposed as the next person.
Recently the nomadic art group MOT set up camp at Unit 54, Riverside Studios in the outer regions of Hackney for their exhibition Cruel Fat. Complete with a menu which offered ‘Don’t Swallow Special Squid,’ the curators constructed their own version of a fast food restaurant where foam fries and burgers were flung over the floor and left to stare eerily up at the spectator with their own pair of stuck-on eyes. Sarah Lucas’ oversized Spam was a greasy take on both minimalism and consumerism. Cruel Fat is made out of card and foam, cheap lighting effects, scraps of wood, and a lick of paint. But it is also an intelligent criticism of a consumer society which tends to lapse into lazy mode at every available opportunity. We have forgotten how to taste, how to look and how to pay for our food. One imagines John Isaacs’ figure in Bad Miracle would be at the front of the queue for this fast food restaurant.
Just beyond the site of this exhibition is Hackney Wick, which according to local sources, has been bought out by Richard Branson in preparation for the extension of the Euro Rail in a few years time. A lot of artists have already moved away from the East-end – perhaps in order to avoid having the Virgin logo stamped on any of their work – and headed South of the river towards places like Camberwell. But the East end is still a maze of artists studios and galleries and as yet has been left untouched by Starbuck’s capitalist wand. It is has long been the ghost of what was once a 19th century industrial sprawl, but its empty warehouses and factories have remained the urban backdrop and home for artists since the 1960s, most famously perhaps for Gilbert & George who still live in Fournier Street. Today the artists and the art itself seems to be in a transitory mode. Although there is an exasperated sense of ‘what have we done?’ there is always a view over an East-end brick wall.
