The Saatchi Gallery Moving and Shaking: Not-So-Young British Artists or Loc
Charles Giuliano
A dozen or so years ago, when I first visited the Saatchi Gallery, it represented real effort and commitment. The exhibition space, in a large, one-story industrial space, at 98A Boundary Road in St. John’s Wood, was difficult to reach by tube in an off-the-beaten-track part of London. That first time, I even walked past the entrance a couple of times to check and recheck the address.
With the dramatic flair that one expects from Charles Saatchi, one of the world’s foremost marketing and advertising moguls, the collection has recently been reinstalled. It now occupies 40,000 square feet of vintage, oak-paneled galleries in the historic County Hall, located in the very heart of London’s booming South Bank cultural district.
You can’t miss it. Just walk over the bridge from Parliament and Big Ben and there you are. Just behind the Eye: a giant wheel with gondolas offering panoramic views of the city. Next to a Dali museum. If that floats your boat. Ten minutes from the National Theater, or a thirty minute stroll along the Thames from Tate Modern and the Globe Theater.
On every level, this is a big and expensive calculated move for Saatchi and the Young British Artists he has collected and marketed. What a dramatic change from viewing the works in the former low-key, cost-effective industrial space to this daunting new venue. County Hall seems more suited to Old Masters like Titian and Rembrandt in the National Gallery than New Masters from the embalmed sharks and cows of Damien Hirst to a frozen head of the artist’s own blood by Marc Quinn.
While the setting is daunting and prestigious, it provokes questions as to the calculated strategy of such a staggeringly expensive move. What is behind the move, from a marginally-accessible warehouse to a major museum venue?
Back in 1988, when Damien Hirst, then a student at Goldsmiths, organized Freeze, an offbeat show of his mates, Saatchi boldly opted to sell off some of his prior collection of contemporary international art stars to reinvest, big time, in an emerging generation of scruffy bohemians. They were largely a group of drinking, doping, smoking and groping sods with a heck of a lot of talent. Well, some of them. The punkier and pissier they were, the better Saatchi liked them. The worse the press, the better the publicity.
Former New York City mayor, Rudolph Giuliani, played the rube role perfectly by ranting and raving over the sacrilegious filth, in particular the use of elephant dung in Holy Virgin Mary, 1996, by Chris Ofili. The Mayor’s futile attempt to shut down the traveling exhibition, Sensation, during its run in 1999-2000 at the Brooklyn Museum, only resulted in scads of free publicity and long lines at the box office.
An insight to Saatchi’s brilliantly calculated strategy might be gleaned from the publicity handout for the reinstallation of the collection. A brief note discussing a work by Tracey Emin, I’ve Got It All, is revealing. "Emin is almost always portrayed as a Diana-esque femme tragique. It is rare to get a glimpse of the happy, successful, confident person she has become. I’ve Got It All is a transient, crowning glory, a shameless two fingers up to her critics. Emin has triumphed over all, and has money up the whazoo to boot."
Get that. Bottom line: "Money up the whazoo." So this is all about money. Surprise surprise. Whose money? Well, a bit for Emin. Bully for her. But a huge fat bundle for Saatchi. Buy low and sell high.
What Saatchi bought for a song a dozen years ago is now being ratcheted up to the level of Grand Opera. Thank you very much, Mr. Mayor, and all your fundamentalist, blue-nosed, hacks and slackers.
But now we get to the hard part. Does the work itself hold up to all the hype and bullish marketing? Well, yes and no. As is the case with every generation there is a major sorting out in order.
On the one hand is the critical assessment: the opinion of critics, curators, scholars and experts. But that, ultimately, may be less significant than the performance in the secondary market and on the auction block. The current and future market value is a very different issue than the critical evaluation. Or, more importantly, how the work holds up in the opinion of peers and young artists.
Touring the reinstallation of the collection begs obvious comparisons and conclusions. First and overwhelmingly, the work is too familiar. There is little or nothing new here. We have seen all this before. There is nothing shocking or Sensational this time round. Unless you are the odd tourist wandering in after a spin on the Eye.
The space itself is wonderful. One simply never sees contemporary art in such a magnificent setting. There is a great rotunda, underneath a spectacular painted dome, where one views the familiar, Saatchi’s Greatest Hits. Another enormous, wood-paneled gallery splays out the many embalmed sections of a sliced cow by Hirst. Indeed, familiar work but in a dramatic environment that enhances its implied value and importance.
The piece that most clearly and spectacularly benefits by this reinstallation is, 20:50, 1987, by Richard Wilson. The site-specific installation, to which one visitor at a time is admitted, is a room with a waist-high, pool of glistening, smelly black sump oil. Formerly it filled a generic, large room. Now it consumes an antique Baroque space, seeming to seep into the carved wainscoting.
In addition to the grand main galleries there is a series of small rooms, in what must have been offices in the former government building. These, currently, are mostly devoted to pieces by Hirst including the spin art paintings and a huge cigarette-butt-filled ash tray. There are pieces by other artists—some surprising, and others not so. It was interesting to see works by Patrick Caulfield, an artist of the generation that preceded Hirst and his crew. One of these was an interesting variation on Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon Vues de Derriere. There were other inclusions of older artists that reveal Saatchi’s commitment to reach back into the earlier generations of contemporary British art. But this is episodic and the real history of Post War British art is left to Tate Modern, which does a rather spotty job of if. There is a glut of phenomenal, contemporary British art that remains under the radar screen of Saatchi/ Tate.
To view many of the familiar works in the collection is to view the devolving from Sensational, to Old Hat, to outright Tedious. The unfortunate truth is that today’s shock of the new is tomorrow’s old news.
The big portrait, Myra, 1995, by Marcus Harvey, elicited outrage when first shown because of its depiction of a convicted serial killer of children. Done in a pointillist manner using little hands as pixels. Get it. From the vantagepoint of time, it now looks like a bad parody of a Chuck Close painting. In a smaller gallery, a wall of Richard Billingham’s overblown snap shots of his dysfunctional family looks overexposed. It is time for something new from this artist, with his Jerry Springer sensibility. How many times do we have to view Sarah Lucas’s Au Naturel, with its phallic and onic fruits crammed into a filthy mattress as sexual signifiers? Got it. Ok, now move on. The self-deprecating, confessional sexual works by Tracey Emin have gone from insightful to enervating. Yawn. Yeah, I know, she got rich on all this slutty stuff. Similarly, the mutations and mutilations of the brothers Chapman just look ever more clearly to be poorly crafted generic mannequins pretending to be sculptures.
While there is little new here, just what in the Saatchi collection is holding up to time and art history? Well, quite a bit actually. Two artist who are not included in the current exhibition, but are represented in the collection, Mona Hatoum and Rachel Whiteread continue to evolve as major contemporary masters. The fleshy, Rubensque paintings by Jenny Saville get stronger with each exhibition. She is doing better work than what we see in the current Saatchi show. The flat, linear, colorful figurative paintings by Gary Hume have indeed grown on me. They seem to improve with age. Similarly, Chris Ofili’s highly patterned, decorative paintings are ripening nicely. We continue to watch with great interest the photographs and video projects of Sam Taylor-Wood in her frequent New York shows. It would be nice to see new work from sculptor, conceptual artist, Gavin Turk.
We have, however, saved the best for last. The current Saatchi show includes the great masterpiece by sculptor, Ron Mueck, Dead Dad, 1996-1997. It poignantly depicts a small scale, nude, life-like sculpture of the artist’s deceased father, seemingly laid out on a mortuary slab. A riveting and powerful work, we hover over and look down upon it. There will be more to say about Mueck in a future review of the special exhibition of his recent work at the National Gallery.
Staggering out of this stunning and provocative exhibition, our heads spinning, Astrid and I repaired to the McDonald’s next door for coffee, hot chocolate, and a chance to debrief the experience.
