ART: Shark-infested memories
The Saatchi Gallery at County Hall
A memorable Sensation
Where were you when you first became aware of The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living? Fair enough, even by the lowish standards of late twentieth century memorable moments, your first brush with a pickled shark may not quite be up there with, say, recalling where you were when you watched the results from Enfield on that long, feverishly hot night of the 1997 General Election. Never mind. The point is that, whether you follow contemporary British art or not — indeed, whether you follow art full stop — you almost certainly know that Damien Hirst once pickled a shark, that Charles Saatchi bought it, and that when it was shown at the Royal Academy in the Sensation exhibition there was a great fuss about it, and about much of the other work on show as well.
Today the new Saatchi Gallery opens in what used to be London’s County Hall, and this — the double-edged gift of low-level general recognition, most of it associated with shock and outrage — is what they are up against. Like County Hall itself, much of the work here is defined as much by what it once was, how we remember it, as by what we see today. The past, it appears, is not always an easy burden to bear.
Bring back (double) hanging
Not least, it is hard to live up to that reputation for shock value. Much has been made of Charles Saatchi’s decision — the word ‘innovative’ figures frequently — to abandon the austerely white, airy, ex-industrial spaces of Boundary Road for all the Edwardian civic grandeur, variegated marbles and oak-panelled offices of County Hall. But actually there is nothing surprising about it. Sure, there was time in the distant past when showing art (especially famous, expensive art) in something that looked like a warehouse, factory or power station telegraphed ‘transgressive’ and ‘exciting’, but now it is exactly the way everyone expects contemporary art to be seen, all the way from New York’s Chelsea to our very own Tate Modern to Venice’s Corderie, and far beyond, with the only real variable these days being the size, industrial provenance and inconvenience of location of the building in question.
Thus it hardly takes a genius to work out that nowadays it looks marginally more surprising to show contemporary art in something that doesn’t look like a factory. Not that this strategy is particularly new either. Think, for instance, of the obvious but at the same time persuasive good looks of the show that Hans Haacke curated at the V&A a few years back, or as far as that goes, think about every Biennale entry that ended up on the first floor of some magnificent Venetian palazzo, contemplated by a ceiling full of astonished nymphs and outraged putti. It helps, of course, that most contemporary art can be sited and lit for dramatic effect, rather than old-fashioned qualities like surface texture and tonality, and hence can be stuck more or less anywhere; the County Hall setting also fits with the strong tendency towards nostalgic fogeyishness that runs through so much BritArt, with its vitrines and scale models half-remembered from childhood museum visits.
The one thing these brave new hangs will not do, however, is to drop the aesthetic of the white cube, even when confronted with rooms that are oak-panelled and rectangular. But as far as that goes, the new Saatchi Gallery actually has plenty of white-walled, cube-shaped rooms, each hung with a single work. What really would be different, obviously, would be a sort of cabinet-of-curiosities, doubled-hung jumble circa Prague 1560, but that might be a little too radical. So at any rate, the new Saatchi Gallery is a departure, but a departure for which middlebrow taste has long since been prepared, and anyway a departure involving quite a few nostalgic backward-looking glances. Or to put it another way, you can take the curators out of the cube, but apparently you can’t quite take the cube out of the curators.
Spot the Saatchi difference
County Hall is in its own way entirely magnificent, full of war memorials, endless lists of local government worthies and some of the most marvellous creative fireplaces known to civic architecture. It’s an exciting place to visit. With its Apollonian formality, all those obsessive lists and all the compromised history, Charles Saatchi was right to feel drawn to it. There are moments, moving through the new gallery, where Saatchi can be seen to be poking an affectionate sort of fun at the building, although the joke sometimes backfires. In the entrance hall off Belvedere Road are two Duane Hanson pieces, each of which looks real for about a quarter of a second — a real dozing philistine tourist, a real dowdy mum with a pram — until one realises that they are just Duane Hanson pieces, which are exactly the sort of thing you'd expect to find in the Saatchi Gallery. The funny thing here is that Duane Hanson pieces generally derive what impact they have from the sheer unlikeliness of seeing scruffy American midwesterners anywhere near the socially and aesthetically elitist spaces in which contemporary art is shown, whereas in County Hall, where the rucksack-bearing crowds jostle outside, eating fried food and queuing for the Millennium Eye, it is hard to be sure. Meanwhile neither Pimp, Gavin Turk’s painted steel sculpture of, err, a black skip, nor any of the modish if boring works of Daniel Richter really register. It's a potent portent of the fate awaiting many of the lesser works in this collection.
Instead, the main thing that catches the eye in that entrance hall, and a joke that manifestly does work, is Damien Hirst’s spot-painted Mini, which has been positioned halfway down the elegant marble stairway, flanked in bronze and yet more marble, leading up to what used to be the Council Chamber, headed right for the viewer. Silly, light-hearted, good-natured, resolutely non-serious, its allusion to The Italian Job could hardly be less subtle or more parochial. But the mild classicism and resolute dignity of its surroundings certainly give it much more immediate punch than it would otherwise possess. One of the best things to be said for the work collected by Saatchi is that, unlike so much in the art world, it rarely demands to be taken particularly seriously, or if it does, makes its demands in such a way that one doesn’t have to feel bad about ignoring them. In this sense, the spot-painted Mini, with its self-conscious nostalgia, mild shock-value and consanguinity with ‘entertainment’, provides a perfect introduction to what lies beyond, in the Saatchi Gallery itself — establishing, as it were, the all-important Saatchi Gallery ‘brand’ before one heads up the stairs and into the other rooms.
In praise of Charles Saatchi
And this is nothing if not a monument to a particular brand of visual experience, as distinctive and demotic as a good corporate logo. The Saatchi Gallery shows work owned by Charles Saatchi, as well as arranging two types of special exhibitions — retrospectives of A-list BritArtists championed by Charles Saatchi, including Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin, and in the so-called Boiler Room (surely a wink, or perhaps another sort of gesture, at another exhibition space only a short distance downstream?) the work of new artists whom Charles Saatchi finds interesting. As far as I know, Saatchi has paid for this whole enterprise himself — not only the works, obviously, but restoring these elegant interiors and reformulating them as gallery space — rather in the spirit of those great aristocratic collectors of the early nineteenth century who used to open parts of their London houses to all clean and decent-looking people, as much in the interest of advertising their own wealth and good taste as in any attempt at public education or edification — or perhaps those endless entrepreneurs who created semi-permanent ‘entertainments’ in Leicester Square, not necessarily including dwarves, performing Chinamen and calves with multiple heads?
Either way, plus ça change. I can never understand why Conservatives find it so easy to denounce Charles Saatchi just because they often don’t much like the sort of art he collects. Like the also-much-maligned Andrew Lloyd Webber, he has the nerve to put his money where his mouth is, in terms of visual culture. The difference, I suppose — or one of the differences — is that because (unlike Lloyd Webber) the art Saatchi enjoys at the moment is a certain strand of art produced by living artists, he ends up being accused of manipulating the market with his purchases and sales, of blinding young artists with the promise of Saatchi riches and of starving non-Saatchi artists by investing elsewhere. To which the Tory answer surely must be, well, fine, but would it really be any better if a public body were doing these things instead? And wouldn’t it be wonderful if even more people had the wealth, self-confidence and energy to do something broadly similar? And so what if he’s really a sort of super-dealer, running what’s virtually a commercial gallery for which he is at the same time actually able to charge a hefty £8.50 admission charge? For what it’s worth, I congratulate Charles Saatchi for all of these things, and for being marginally less precious about art than so many of his contemporaries; the whining one can sometimes hear over the massed ranks of his ululating sycophants comes mostly from competitors — the Stuckists, the Jackdaws, the Movement for Classical Renewal — who realise he’s outmanoeuvred them once again, while perhaps even secretly hoping to bask for a moment in the warm glow of his enormous, Nigella-enhanced fame.
Of Freud (and not Lucian, either)
Back to the works themselves, though. I hadn’t seen the spot Mini before — apparently Damien Hirst is annoyed because it was meant to be driven around London, but instead has ended up in a gallery — but it goes almost without saying that much of the rest of the collection will be very familiar to anyone who has paid any attention to contemporary art in London, or even to tabloid headlines, over the past decade or two. Here, gathered up into one delightfully rambling space, are the canonical works of BritArt, the absolute masterpieces of which are arrayed in a central rotunda which is strangely reminiscent of the apsial altars of some classicised Roman church, with each artist assigned his or her own chapel like so many patron saints of particular BritArt tendencies.
At the top of the pantheon is Damien Hirst. The gallery’s own publicity material actually describes him as ‘the alpha-male of contemporary British art’, and indeed, it is with a major retrospective of his work that the gallery opens. His famous shark is given pride of place, but on the way to the central rotunda the visitor also has to pass between the twelve tanks that make up Some Comfort Gained from the Acceptance of the Inherent Lies in Everything — another Sensation veteran, in which a cow and a steer were sliced into six pieces each, placed in formaldehyde-filled vitrines, and shuffled up with one another — and also has to pass alongside A Thousand Years, in which flies feed on a cow’s rotting head before being electrocuted. Meanwhile there are rooms full of variegated Hirst offerings — spot paintings, butterfly paintings, more vitrines, more arch humour — stretching on beyond.
Whatever else one can say about this, there is an air of something like inevitability about it. There can have been few cases in history of an artist and a patron so completely suited — not just in their sense of what art should do and how art should do it, but also how art ought to be promoted — than Hirst and Saatchi, which somehow makes that ‘alpha-male’ comment, coupled with Hirst’s increasingly vocal irritation at Saatchi, all seem rather pointed. Hirst, whose energetic marketing techniques have become the stuff of legend (as a student, he not only persuaded the RA’s Norman Rosenthal to visit an exhibition he’d put together, but actually drove him there himself) may well feel that he could have done just fine without Saatchi, and that his present stature as an artist did not depend on having caught the eye and imagination of a single mega-collector, and that he’d have made it even without Saatchi. At the same time, though, he has to accept not only that Saatchi still owns most of his major works, but — worse still, I’d have thought — that these works will probably always be associated as much with Saatchi as with Hirst, as much with Sensation as with Hirst’s own Freeze — even that (ouch!) they will stand or fall not on what Hirst intended when he created them, but what Saatchi saw in them when he bought them.
Honey, I shrunk the BritArt icons
Visually, the central rotunda is dominated by Hirst’s huge patinated bronze copy of a child’s anatomical model, titled Hymn and towering above the other art as Hirst towers above the other artists. Famously, Hirst received £1 million for this piece. Strangely, though, it looks smaller in County Hall than it did in Boundary Road, where the ceiling was lower and its bright colours almost pulsated against the white walls. The notorious shark, too, seems diminished — so familiar, now, as to slip suddenly out of one’s attention almost immediately, as if one were ticking off a list of canonical yBa works: ‘right, seen that, on to the next one’. It was only when passing beyond the shark and looking back at the rotunda through the otherworldly blue-green of its formaldehyde sea that one noticed the strangely beautiful way in which the liquid both distorted the lines of the tank itself, and conferred a weird clarity on the works one could see through it: Marcus Harvey’s Myra, Sarah Lucas’s Sod You Gits, Ron Mueck’s Dead Dad. Viewed through formaldehyde, as through the wrong end of a blue-green telescope, these familiar images appeared suddenly more distanced, more objectified, as unreachable as artwork glimpsed in a dream. It was a revelation to discover how much this improved them. Whereas, looking back at them through normal light, they all seemed remarkably flat, inert in their absolute familiarity.
There were a few exceptions to this general rule. I’ve seen Chris Ofili’s work on quite a few occasions now — not least, at his magnificent Serpentine show — and have always found a lot to like about his funny, bright, complex, faintly spiky, formally persuasive images. The central rotunda of the Saatchi Gallery included, inter alia, his The Holy Virgin Mary. This is work that will, I suppose, be well-known to anyone who keeps up with the writings of American cultural conservatives, since its appearance at the Brooklyn Museum generated the most enormous fuss when Sensation travelled to the US. At the time, Mayor Guiliani — in those days still widely considered a gun-obsessed right-wing nut-case, and not yet the hero of September 11th — denounced it as an affront to all Catholics, while a surprising number of eminent and generally civilised commentators were reduced to sputtering rage and incontinent use of the word ‘blasphemy’. The ‘official’ problem with The Holy Virgin Mary was that it includes three neat spheres of laminated, decorated elephant dung — only recognisable as such if you already knew that was what they were — and that it also uses tiny cut-outs of crotch shots from porn magazines, although frankly these are both relatively unobtrusive and of some iconographic and formal interest. But actually I've long suspected that the unofficial problem had more to do with Ofili's decision to depict the Virgin as a big black woman, one breast exposed, as was perfectly acceptable in Western art, at least until the Council of Trent — or perhaps a certain sort of critic simply could not believe that such a robustly cheery and positive religious image was not packed full of ironic, potentially nasty freight? Whereas one might easily argue that the crotch shots make a perfectly reasonable point about the literalness of the Incarnation, that the work is celebratory and sweet, and — most remarkable of all — that it actually has enough inherent interest, both decorative and iconographic, that it can hold the viewer's attention for more than a minute or two. And as I was beginning to discover, this is not a quality shared by the majority of works in the Saatchi Gallery.
Big is beautiful
Also in the central rotunda were two paintings by Jenny Saville, Hybrid and Trace. Again, I warmed to these. In Boundary Road, it was Saville’s use of colour, more than anything else, that had always charmed me — those endlessly shifting pinks and mauves and violets had the effect of warming the white-walled rooms, making the brick walls seem soft — humanising those faintly antiseptic spaces. So it was interesting to see that in a more richly polychromatic environment, she could still hold her own. The cheap objection to Saville is either that her work is too derivative, or too limited in its scope. Well, for what it is worth, I think she actually handles paint far better than Lucian Freud has done for a very long time, and what is more, has a better sense for how to use scale than he ever did, but at the same time that she should observe with concern his gradual but apparently ineluctable death-by-mannerism, and should draw the appropriate conclusions. What I have never understood, though, is what it is that Charles Saatchi sees in this subtle, technically proficient painter. Is it just a series of really big nudes — big both in terms of scale, and perhaps more ‘transgressively’, in all their fleshy generosity — complete with nipples, folds, tufts of hair? Is it the shock-horror hint of bondage or rough abrasive sex that the witless press notes for the show seemed to find everywhere, but which frankly don’t seem to me to have much to do with what’s actually there on the surface of the canvas? The answer, perhaps, is unknowable, but there’s skill and concentration behind Saville’s better work that makes it stand out from much else in the Saatchi Gallery — and that tends to highlight the limitations of its near neighbours in the central rotunda. Saville easily transcends any freakshow misunderstanding of her work that may have landed her here.
The headachey smell of success
Ofili and Saville had both managed to survive the move to County Hall. There was only one work that really seemed to me actually to have gained strength by being placed in this new context. That was Richard Wilson's 20:50, an installation that's more or less impossible to describe in such a way as to do justice to its weird magic or disorienting qualities. Basically, it's a sea of sump oil filling up a room, but with a steel walkway built out into it, so that the reflective surface of the oil is exactly even with the top of the walkway at about waist height, so that one seems to be stepping out into a sea of something reflective, beautiful and dangerous that one can't really understand. It sounds like a stupid conceptual gimmick, but actually it works because it does not depend on acquiescence with its 'concept' in order to make an impact. My companion at the Saatchi Gallery the other day is not one of those people afflicted with an undue reverence for the proprieties of contemporary art. Nor had he seen 20:50 before. But when he returned from the walkway — at County Hall, they only let one person out onto the walkway at a time — he told me that it had taken him a few seconds before he had actually understood what he was seeing. It ended up being far and away his favourite work in the entire collection.
But would the magic work for someone who had seen it before? Remarkably, it did — even more so than it had done years before at Boundary Road. Here, perhaps, County Hall has an innate advantage over Boundary Road, in that a room full of sump oil is perhaps more surprising in a local government building than it would be in an old paint factory, but it also has to be said that it simply looked magnificent. At Boundary Road, the oil had nothing to reflect other than white walls and a skylight, whereas at County Hall it could mirror the mantle, the oak panelled-walls and the grungy cityscape intruding at the windows with all the crazed literalness of a dream. The only downside was that the smell got everywhere, permeating distant corridors and giving the delightful gallery attendants headaches. By contrast, A Thousand Years had no smell at all, whereas by the end of Sensation its distinctive smell had become one of the abiding memories of the show.
But — and here's the important point — while 20:50 seems to have thrived on its translation to a new venue, much of the rest of the work looked much less interesting than when I had seen it before. I don't think it was the installation, either, which was lyrical and sensitive in places, if a bit slapdash in others — I think it is actually a defining quality in the sort of work Charles Saatchi likes.
The Disappeared
But before considering why this might be the case, it is worth flagging up a little-discussed point — the art that has been edited, quietly but firmly, out of the Saatchi pantheon as held up for reverence in County Hall. Where, for instance, is Rachel Whiteread, who surely by any standard is a more important artist than, say, Matt Collishaw or Fiona Rae, and whose Untitled (Orange Bath) looked so marvellously sepulchral at Haunch of Venison Yard recently? Where is Richard Billingham, whose faintly exploitative but frankly mesmerising photos of his dysfunctional, tattooed parents were such a memorable part of Sensation — almost as memorable as his attempts to justify them in terms of a formalism the austerity of which would have made even Clement Greenberg slightly nervous? And where, for that matter, is Martin Maloney, with the smart-slacker studied ineptitude that will surely someday assure his work's place amongst the most obvious graphic evocations of 1990s London?
Probably the answers to these various questions are all unbelievably complex, intimately connected with the larger-than-life personalities that were also such a part of Sensation: all those grungy-yet-gorgeous, hard-partying boys and girls who (or so the folktales have it) were always getting drunk together and going to bed together and putting on Freeze and Minky Manky and all those other legendary warehouse shows together, who all looked (at least in Johnny Shand Kidd's photos, anyway) like refugees from Dazed and Confused, and whose interlinking mythologies had played their own part in the re-glamorisation of London's visual culture. In the words of yet another of those seminal yBa shows, Some Went Mad, Some Ran Away. Others are simply doing very well outside the Saatchi velvet prison, thanks very much. But it is hard to avoid the impression that this pruning-back, however it came about — and Saatchi's famous willingness to sell things that bore him surely comes into it — has the effect of tilting the collection even more in the direction of the kick-in-the-balls demotic, and perhaps even the simply-very-famous, at the expense of more complex, unhurried, even inaccessible pleasures.
... and the Should-Have-Disappeared
How else to explain some of what has stayed in? Some of this work is simply hopeless. Sarah Lucas, for instance, is given great prominence — what's the point of all that? Or Jake and Dinos Chapman's Great Deeds Against the Dead — a weak piece by these intermittently interesting artists, which comes across as silly and boring? Or, at the less famous end of the scale, why bother at all with David Falconer or with Grayson Perry's tedious pottery?
Meanwhile work by John Bratby and Paula Rego comes off badly in these surroundings. Their paintings look uneasy and at odds with the prevailing aesthetic, if only because everything here encourages literal-minded attention to subject-matter rather than execution. And since both Bratby and Rego depend on technical ability as much as anything else to lift their work out of the category of 'mere illustration', once prolonged exposure to the Saatchi Gallery has bludgeoned the viewer into simply scanning for a quick message and then moving on, back into the realms of pointless illustration these paintings go. It's a shame, really, because Rego, at least, deserves better. And while we are on the subject, Gary Hume's elegant near-abstraction Begging For It could have done with something better than the sort of cupboard it cohabits with a lesser painting — and anyway, why is this the only Gary Hume work in the gallery?
It's that bed again
There are a handful of cases where reasonable artists are done no favours by the way in which their work has been installed. Here the obvious example is Tracey Emin. Charles Saatchi has given her a prominent niche in the central rotunda; presumably this is a token of favour, but if so, it misfires miserably.
It isn't that Emin's work is weak, exactly — it is simply that the context is all wrong for it. Even as a young student, Emin realised that Emin per se was to be her great subject, and erected an enjoyable and occasionally funny museum to herself long before anyone ever heard of her. In doing so she demonstrated what has turned out to be a stubborn vein of good sense and aesthetic sensibility. To get the most out of Emin's work, the viewer has to suspend a certain sort of disbelief — to enter imaginatively into the conceit that being inside the experience of this gap-toothed girl from Margate might be incredibly interesting.
Thus at Sensation — because once again, in County Hall, one found oneself returning to that first experience of these works — Emin's most notable piece was Everyone I've Ever Slept With; in order to enter the tent and read those famous names, one had to get down on one's knees and creep cautiously into a little opening, and somehow the implied gesture of deference galvanised the whole experience into something significant. Here, however, there is only the famous bed with a famous appliqué work above it, but penned off in one of the rotunda's little side-chapels, the effect is curiously alienating, like reading a page of a clinical report on the wellbeing of someone one used to know well. For Emin to work, we need to be able to walk all around her outpourings, to move in a fully Eminised work, to experience a sort of intimacy that was impossible here.
Little and large
Ron Mueck also came off badly, if for totally different reasons. Unlike much contemporary art, his hyper-lifelike, waxwork figures always seem to attract enormous public enthusiasm every time I have seen them on show. Perhaps it is because there is nothing very difficult about them. Their main thrust is perhaps not sophisticated, but all the more bracing for that. It is the recognition that even really normal things, like the pores on a nose or the hair on a leg, can look frightening and unnatural when seen at an unaccustomed scale. Undoubtedly, Mueck has grown proficient in skills borrowed from the makers of special effects, and in part I suspect the public admires his manifest professionalism, but at the same time, part of his charm is the gruesome fascination of staring at one's own face in a magnifying mirror and thinking 'Ugh, can that really be right? Do other people have that, too?'
But as ever, one turns back to Sensation. Dead Dad was one of the genuinely popular successes of the exhibition, and rightly so. The tiny figure, ever so faintly blue, looked so aged and yet because of its size, so infantile and in need of protection, that it was hard to look away, while the tiny scale not only distanced the figure, but hinted at a fascinating note of psychic aggression on the part of the artist, or perhaps the observer. How could we all leave this old man, so tiny, so dead, lying there on the ground with everyone staring at him? Because everyone did stare at him. At Sensation, Dead Dad seemed always to have a flock of real-sized real-life people clustered around the little figure like mourners or curious bystanders, their manifest normality making its relatively subtle shift of scale and context even more startling.
In the central rotunda of County Hall, however, Dead Dad seemed much less interesting. The problem? So much of the work in the central rotunda hinges on being out of scale — Mueck's own Mask, Hirst's Hymn, Lucas's Human Toilet, Saville's heroic figures, Harvey's Myra, even Hirst's 14-foot shark — that suddenly one couldn't be sure if Dead Dad was small or was perhaps just dwarfed by its surroundings. It was, in other words, an insensitive installation, doing damage to a reasonably strong work. Dead Dad needs a room of its own, and soon.
The unbearable lightness of BritArt
Dead Dad is a work with some capacity to stand the test of time and to battle against adverse circumstances. But much of the work in the new Saatchi Gallery is, I think, virtually doomed to fail, not so much because of the installation, but because of its own qualities — the mixture of fame, hype and attention-seeking superficiality that characterise so much of the art on show at the Saatchi Gallery. Marcus Harvey's Myra, a huge portrait of Myra Hindley made up of children's handprints in newsprint shades of white and grey, is a case in point. Like The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, it has also lost something since it appeared in Sensation. There's plenty to be said about whether this painting ever should have been created and about whether it should be shown. Certainly the mother of one of Hindley's young victims found it deeply offensive. Putting aside all the usual free speech arguments that we all know by heart by now, one can't help but think that somehow a combination of good manners and basic human sympathy should have stopped this work from appearing then, or indeed, appearing now.
Be that as it may, however, assuming that the work is supposed to make some sort of impact — visual, intellectual, whatever — something has been drained out of it here. As ever, though, I could not help making comparisons with how it had looked in Sensation. By the time I saw it, not only had there been an enormous media storm over the propriety or otherwise of the image, but the work had actually been attacked. For that reason, on the day I visited Sensation, the painting was flanked by two guards. Common sense insisted that they were there to protect the painting from us, the viewers, but at the same time, on a subliminal level it was hard not to feel that actually the guards were there to protect us from her. For just a moment the painting — and in formal or technical terms it is just dull; there is nothing to be said for it — really did take on a sort of scary, iconic force, and really did prompt something like contemplation of the power that mere images still possess. In County Hall, six years later, there were no guards. The real Myra Hindley was dead. Stripped of its aura of danger, the work just looked like an arch allusion to the work that had caused all the fuss at Sensation — although of course it was the same canvas, paint, stretchers, title — everything except the sense of occasion, the aura of outrage, and perhaps for some (we've all met them) a faint glow of self-congratulation occasioned by being able to rise above boring issues of good and evil in the interests of 'art'.
Of one-night stands and long-term affairs
In his final, brilliant book, The Ephemeral Museum, the late Francis Haskell did much to reveal the mechanics of that increasingly prominent feature of the cultural skyline, the Old Master blockbuster exhibition. While Sensation was clearly anything but an Old Master show, one or two of Haskell's points are nonetheless relevant here. Haskell points out, for instance, that much of the excitement of the blockbuster comes from its temporary nature per se. One can't just put off going to a 'must-see' special exhibition because the weather is bad, or because it means standing in a long queue of people just like you, or because one simply doesn't feel in the mood, since all blockbusters these days are marketed as 'once in a lifetime' opportunities to see whatever 'treasures' or 'masterpieces' have been herded together to drawn in the punters.
In fact for some, the queues, overpriced tickets, strange opening hours and cattle-drove viewing conditions become part of the ritual and indeed the charm of the occasion, perhaps through some subliminal confusion of personal mortification with moral improvement or manifest virtue. One is, after all, suffering for art, showing commitment to whatever it is one has come to see as well as gathering up a store of anecdotes that should see you through several months' worth of upmarket dinner-parties. On a more elevated note, there is always the chance that the knowledge that one is unlikely to see these things gathered together again will force one to look that much more carefully and to remember that much more.
So in some ways the temporary exhibition heightens the quality of the art-viewing experience. Yet at the same time it inevitably limits the range of experiences on offer. It's a much-observed fact that the work that all but leaps off the wall to meet you one day might well look flat and dead the next. Works of art change not just with light and atmosphere, but with mood or even the company in which you see them. There are moments in life when even a mediocre Dan Flavin piece can look life-affirmingly good, but then there are other days when there is nothing one would rather do than sit in front of Poussin's Man Killed by a Snake with slightly damp eyes, avoiding the guards' pitying smiles. Permanent collections offer this sort of scope, but the problem with a temporary exhibition is that one never has a chance to test out the works, or the combination of works, in quite this way. Temporary shows are, by necessity, one-night stands, whereas permanent collections are much more long-term affairs. The former is about momentary excitement and need not be about much else. The latter had better be about quite a lot else, able to encompass a lot in terms of random mood-swings as well as slower sorts of change and development, or else it won't work for very long.
Unrepeatable experiences
This is why, I think, the suggestion that the Saatchi Gallery is, as many have claimed, some sort of 'challenge' to Nicholas Serota and Tate Modern is basically a mistaken one. It is true that while wandering around County Hall, one is reminded fairly forcibly that Charles Saatchi still owns virtually every important piece of the strand of British art that made most impact in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s, from which it is easy enough to conclude that the Tate owns none of it. So the Saatchi Gallery exposes a gap in the Tate's collections. To which the easy answer is simply, is there anything out there that doesn't expose a gap in the Tate's collections? The Tate has more gaps in its collections than anything else; virtually the one consistent feature in its history is the uncanny ability of its Trustees to fail to acquire anything that, in retrospect, it might have been thought desirable for them to acquire, while much of what they own is not very good anyway. Tate Modern, though, will continue to get by, because for all its manifest and embarrassing failings, it is the only thing in London that even aspires to possess an encyclopaedic, international, modern and contemporary art collection of any scope — well, that, and latterly, because its architecture still looks sexy, its see-and-be-seen potential is formidable, and because the views from its Members' Room are some of the best in London. (Bizarrely, the Saatchi Gallery doesn't even have a cafe.)
Unlike Tate Modern, the Saatchi Gallery is a one-note instrument, and if that note is occasionally amusing, perhaps even stirring, it does not take long before it starts to sound repetitive and maybe even a bit flat. Once one's heard the punchline of the joke once, how many times does one want to hear it repeated? Or is there anyone out there who really wants to spend hours pouring over the surface incident of a Peter Davies piece, or admiring the workmanship behind a Hirst spot painting, or pondering the subtle message of Lucas's Sod You Gits? Probably not, I'd have thought. So while I'd certainly advise anyone interested in the British art of the 1980s and 90s — indeed anyone interested in the way in which one man with a sharp eye and a bulging wallet can alter the course of a nation's visual culture — to visit the new Saatchi Galleries once, I'd be amazed if many people end up wanting to make a second visit. The more you look, it seems, the less you see.
This isn't necessarily an indication that BritArt is somehow all rubbish. It depends what one wants out of art — what the 'brand', as it were, is all about. And the answer to that could hardly be clearer. Charles Saatchi has been quoted as saying that unless a work catches his attention more or less instantly, he doesn't buy it. Fair enough. After all, it is hardly surprising to find that one of the most successful advertising men of all time demands, in his own phrase, art that is ‘headbuttingly impossible to ignore'. But the awkward truth is that, with art as with people, it is not unknown for a strong first impression to dissolve, with the passage of time, into a mess of shallowness, boredom and disappointment — whereas the work (or person) who comes across as quiet, difficult or off-putting is the one you end up thinking about for a long time afterwards. And this has clear implications for the Saatchi Gallery. Works such as these, depending so completely on making an unforgettable initial impact, are thereafter doomed to a series of ever-diminishing half-lifes of interest, their charisma growing fainter with each successive encounter. The County Hall setting, the gala launch party and Evening Standard headlines can momentarily boost their interest — but for how long? Jade Jagger, after all, won't be there every day; the naked people from the launch party have put on their clothes and gone home again. No matter how often someone tries to revive it, the hype will always die down again. In the end, one's left with the art itself. And that, sadly, now looks limited by what were from the start its defining qualities, over-familiar to the point of obscurity, and locked in what must surely be a losing battle with the legacy of an increasingly distant, legendary, unrecoverable past.
The Saatchi Gallery at County Hall (tel: 020 7823 2363) is open from 10.00 am - 6.00 pm Sunday through Thursday, and 10.00 am - 10 pm on Friday and Saturday. Tickets cost £8.50 (£6.50 concessions).
Bunny Smedley is ERO's arts editor.
Bunny Smedley, April 18, 2003 01:55 PM