The Jackdaw

Tag: YBA

  • Sense and Sensibility

    HalfordsSo it’s goodbye Cornelissens hello Halfords.

    Laura Gascoigne parks her brush and tries to follow the instructions for flatpack art, but has the picture upside down

    It’s a dull job being a customs officer, sitting on the border twiddling your thumbs until the next teenage drugs mule comes along. So it must have added to the gaiety of nations when in 2010 the EU Commission passed a ruling imposing full VAT import duty on electrical components and household appliances used in art. Henceforth disassembled light tubes from a Dan Flavin sculpture would be charged full whack at 20% of the work’s value instead of the preferential ‘art’ rate of 5%. It might be art when assembled in the gallery, ran the argument, but disassembled in transit it counted as light fittings. Sic transit gloria artis mundi.

    The wheels of the European Commission grind exceedingly slowly, but they’d better sort this one out before it causes tailbacks at Dover while fine art carriers loaded with DIY supplies discuss the finer points of art theory at Customs. Outsider artists have always used materials from hardware stores – nail mosaics are a popular genre, and a sealant Jesus sold a few years ago for £750 – but now that the definition of ‘found object’ has been extended to objects found in the aisles of Wickes, the DIY aesthetic has official sanction.

    We should have seen it coming when Jim Lambie was given planche blanche in 2003 to cover the floor of the Duveen Galleries at Tate Britain in trippy stripes of multicoloured vinyl tape. The previous year, the Taiwanese artist Michael Lin had carpeted the Palais de Tokyo in Paris in giant pink flowers inspired by Taiwanese embroidery. Since then the flooring contractors have been gaining ground, and commercial galleries are now entering the market. Two years ago the Alan Cristea Gallery transformed itself into a flooring showroom with the site-specific installation D.I.Y by Richard Woods, who covered walls and floor “in his trademark vibrantly-coloured and exaggerated wood-grain motif… installed as parquetry”. Naffness being a key ingredient in the DIY aesthetic’s demotic appeal, there is now apparently an art market for parquet.

    When Martin Creed clad the walls and floors of the downstairs toilets at the London Library’s new Mason Yard extension in his trademark vibrantly-coloured patchwork of marble tiles, I suspect he didn’t do the grouting himself, belonging as he does to the ‘You Do It’ YBA boomer generation. Today’s austerity generation of DIY strivers is more hands-on. For the tar and rubber paintings in his exhibition Freedom of Assembly at White Cube, Bermondsey (until July 5th), African American social practice artist Theaster Gates conscientiously developed “good roofing strategies… to arrive at painting or at least to get to the essence of roofing.”

    The aim these days is no longer for a high-tech Hirstian finish designed to appeal to billionaire collectors, but for a low-tech Bodgit & Scarper look – an abject object – worthy of exhibition in a socially responsible public gallery. It’s one in the eye for modernism’s utopian belief in the transformative power of functional form. As Ralph Rugoff said of the 30 international artists in the Hayward Gallery’s 2010 exhibition The New Décor, “what unites them is their ability to transform objects we associate with the everyday – a bed, a shelf, a lamp – into something uncanny and compelling [so as to] open up the discussion about interior space… with interpretations ranging from the absurd to the abject to the lyrical.”

    In this context, the lyrical tends to take the form of nostalgia for the bright new dawn of the post-war DIY movement. Today’s social anthropologists may claim that self-assembly furniture puts the contemporary male in touch with his hunter-gatherer roots – apparently it’s a stag night ritual in Sweden for the groom to bid a final adieu to bachelordom by assembling a piece of IKEA furniture – but wrestling a flat pack to the ground in a drunken stupor is a piece of piss compared with the challenges facing the original DIY pioneers. Their frontier spirit was celebrated in Untitled: Simparch, a 2005 exhibition at Tate Modern in which a group of American artists used instructions from the 1960s popular manual Plywood Working for Everybody to produce a range of exhibits from a ‘Fishing Tackle Cabinet’ to a ‘Storage Headboard’. The Tate described these objects, unfairly I thought, as “elements of an affluent, post-war vision of suburban domestic living” whose need was “fuelled by the ownership of material goods rather than basic necessity”. It seems to me that a fishing tackle cabinet is a must-have accessory for any hunter-gatherer, ditto a cupboard for storing trophy heads.

    But seriously, can this stuff be considered art? Those with doubts on the subject may be reassured to learn that amongst Franz Kafka’s early works was a volume entitled Accident Prevention Regulations in the Use of Wood-Planing Machines, dating from the author’s formative period in ’elf and safety (during which he is also said to have invented the hard hat). A Kafkaesque edge of surrealism is what most DIY artworks appear to aspire to. In 2003 the artist-run gallery Cubitt, at the cutting-edge of plywood as of so much else, hosted an exhibition cheerily titled HEY PRODUCTION! that took its cue from another pioneering handbook, Victor Papanek and James Hennessey’s Nomadic Furniture (1973). The show was organised by the self-styled Copenhagen Free University, a Danish outfit specializing in disseminating “forms of knowledge that are fleeting, fluid, schizophrenic, uncompromising, subjective, uneconomic, acapitalist, produced in the kitchen, produced when asleep, arisen on a social excursion – collectively”. They may have missed the passage in Kafka’s handbook warning against operating machinery when asleep, but fortunately no injury seems to have resulted.

    It’s fair to say that, apart an unhealthy obsession with subverting sideboards and debunking bunk beds – The New Décor included a bed shaped like an LA freeway overpass by Cuban carpentry collective Los Carpinteros – the DIY art movement does no real harm. All art is Do-It-Yourself, after all. If you’re alone in your studio, who else is going to do it? And functional failure is something every artist is familiar with. As the Swiss sculptor Urs Fischer put it in an interview: “As soon as I start to work with materials, things go wrong.” Still, when Baudelaire defined ‘modernity’ as “the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent; the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable,” he wasn’t thinking of plywood, he was thinking of paint, a medium in which an eternal and immutable record of the ephemeral and fugitive can be trapped. DIY art is a whole other ball game: it makes a fetish of the fugitive and laughs at eternity. In Baudelaire’s artistic terms, it’s a game of one half.

    On this year’s Turner Prize shortlist is a collective of designers and architects calling themselves Assemble who “embrace a DIY sensibility”, according to the Tate. They’ve been nominated for their work with local communities improving a rundown estate in Toxteth, Liverpool and ‘rethinking’ an adventure playground in Dalmarnock, Glasgow. Adrian Searle predicts that making the world a better place through DIY efforts “is something artists… are going to have to be doing a lot more of in the coming years”. He may have a point, but it’s a limited one. DIY efforts can turn pedestrian dreams into reality, but only art can turn pedestrian reality into dreams.

    Laura Gascoigne

  • Overkill: art rising from the dead

    aurel_schmidt_body_swallows worldThings have gone rather quiet on the mortality front since queues stretched around the White Cube block in Mason’s Yard for a sight of Damien Hirst’s £50m sculpture For the Love of God. In those days of skulls and diamonds, Paul Wilks wrote a letter to The Jackdaw lamenting the morbidity of contemporary art, wondering why two horrific world wars had produced “art infused with LIFE” while a record period of peace and prosperity had left a legacy of art obsessed with death.

    He had a point – there was a lot of it about. From Ron Mueck’s Dead Dad and the Chapmans’ Hell to Sam Taylor Wood’s time-lapse films of decomposing fruit and furry animals and Marc Quinn’s endless stream of Blood Head selfies, the art world mood music of the turn of the century was the bells of hell going tingalingaling and the tills chachinging. In those halcyon years of boom before the bust, vanitas, vanitas, all was vanitas. Since then, however, things seem to have moved on. Sam Taylor Wood has graduated from death to sex and Marc Quinn, for his new exhibition at White Cube Bermondsey (until 13 September), has turned his attention from reflections on his own mortality to wider considerations of time and tide in big lumpy sculptures of Frozen Waves à la Maggi Hambling.

    While it’s still too early to speak of a full recovery, the morbidity does seem to be receding. We’ve heard less from the media about that ghoulish reincarnation of Joseph Beuys, Gunther von Hagens, still trotting his plastinated corpses around the globe, and there’s been mercifully little mention of his Russian fellow-ghoul Andrei Molodkin and his plans to boil down human volunteers into oil. Either the volunteers got cold-pressed feet or Molodkin dropped off the media radar. Either way, it seems to confirm the surmise that economic hardship promotes positive art. Good news for Greece, where we can now look forward to a revival of the Age of Pheidias.

    Meanwhile back in Blighty Charles Saatchi – the former financier of the YBA death merchants who made possible The Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living – has been bucking the trend with a silly season exhibition Dead: A Celebration of Mortality at the Saatchi Gallery, timed to publicise the launch of his book of the same title. Bound like a mini-tombstone between fake marble covers with incised gold lettering, this tasteful little tome relays a selection of the Evening Standard newspaper columns in which Saatchi has been jotting his weekly musings on life and death in that strangely disjointed style that makes you think of a clerk in a green visor tapping away at a vintage telegraph machine. Either that or it makes you wonder whether there might not be some connections missing in his brain.

    All the same, he does have a tinder-dry sense of humour (though if he’s advertising for the next Mrs S, ‘DSOH’ may not be enough to swing it) and his chapter headings are chuckle-worthy. Some are laugh-out-loud funny in a Seth MacFarlane cartoonish sort of way – ‘Run Over by Your Own Car, Driven by Your Own Dog’. Some are on the Goyaesque side of macabre – ‘The Answer to Population Expansion and Food Shortages: Eat Children.’ Some are sensibly practical – ‘If You Want to Murder Your Spouse, Use Arsenic’ (don’t throttle her in public). Some are Jesuitical – ‘Get to Heaven an Hour before the Devil Knows You’re Dead’ – and some disarmingly self-mocking – ‘Are You Being Bored to Death by this Book?’

    This is what Saatchi is good at: the attention-grabbing one-liner that sells the product. Like his ES pieces, his exhibition was a string of loosely associated thin ideas. He collects art works like he collects facts, in bulk, and presents them in a similarly disconnected way, without argument. One gallery contained photographs of Russian mafia graves, a bomb in a suitcase and a floral tribute made of scrunched-up copies of the Daily Mail stained with blood and tea. Another displayed a pillar formed of resin casts of dead mice, a fake stuffed skunk in a museum case and a pair of genuine animal skins of a cat and dog. A third was a morgue of grotesque human dummies made of urethane wax, old sweaters and bandages, littered around in a range of abject poses. The only exhibit anyone lingered over was Body Swallows World (2006), a truly terrifying drawing of a forest of creepy crawlies by Aurel Schmidt that made Richard Dadd look like Grandma Moses and the Chapmans look ham-fisted. Otherwise, far from striking mortal terror into visitors (most of whom were too young to have begun to think of death) the tone of the exhibition was as insouciant as the small boy leapfrogging a tombstone in the vintage photograph outside the entrance.

    My father used to tell a story of a 19th century actor whose onstage deaths were so convincing that the audience would clamour: “Die again, Sam!” and he would oblige. The trouble with Dead: A Celebration of Mortality is that the clamour for its brand of snuff stuff has died down. Almost all the work in the show was pre-financial crash and to post-recessionary eyes it looked like death warmed up. Today’s audiences may not have lived through two world wars, but the past seven years have been no party and they want art which, if not life-affirming, has a bit of depth. Young artists have stopped making schlock art about death and older ones with any sense have grown out of it. The former YBA Mat Collishaw – who came to fame with the gory Bullet Hole shown at Freeze and now in the collection of the Saatchi of the Southern Hemisphere, David Walsh – has progressed to subtler meditations on mortality in his 2013 series of photographic still lifes, Last Meal on Death Row.

    One essay in Saatchi’s book tells the cautionary tale of American news anchor Christine Chubbuck who shot herself on screen in 1974 in protest at her channel’s obsession with gore. There’s only so much death a body can take. Even Damien Hirst, whose obsession with mortality may well be genuine, has stopped trying to flog a dead horse – with or without golden hooves – and started looking on the bright side of the life cycle. It began with that hideous series of Fact Paintings (2005-6) painted from photographs of the caesarian birth of his third son Cyrus and has continued in The Miraculous Journey, the recent sequence of equally hideous bronzes of developing foetuses commissioned as street furniture by the Qatari Royal Family in the run-up (they hope) to the 2022 Doha World Cup. Ironically, this is one case where funerary monuments to dead Nepalese workers might be more appropriate.

    Washed-up celebrity artistes end up in Vegas; washed-up celebrity artists end up in Doha. It’s no coincidence that both are deserts. On home turf, meanwhile, Hirst is following in the footsteps of his old patron Saatchi and seeking a new form of artistic immortality as a philanthropic museum owner. His free gallery in Newport Street, Lambeth, opening in October, is being built to house his morbidly titled Murderme Collection, but its inaugural show will be a life-affirming exhibition of paintings by his old adversary John Hoyland. Cheer, up everyone! There may be life after death.

    Laura Gascoigne

     

     

     

  • The way we are now – why ‘avant garde’ is now an obsolete term

    McQueen copyThe Times – God bless its little cotton socks – has just been celebrating the triumphal return of the 1990s as a creative force. “Suddenly contemporary art” it crows, “was part of popular culture. The Royal Academy’s landmark Sensation show in 1997 was a turning point.”

    It was so indeed, but not exactly in the terms the article intends. Here in Britain, Sensation marked perhaps the very last moment when it was possible to talk about an avant-garde in the visual arts with any appearance of authenticity. The show was widely hailed as the beginning of something – as the moment when the visual arts in Britain turned over a new leaf, as the moment indeed when British artists surged to the very forefront of innovation, displacing both the French and the Americans, who, each in turn, had carried forward the baton in the race to create what was entirely and indubitably new.

    Looking back now, the exhibition seems, on the contrary, to have marked the instant when the hands of the clock moved on, and the whole notion of avant-gardism ran out of steam. To quote the Times once again: “The beginning of the decade was all about exhibitions in abandoned warehouses and empty office blocks. By the end, thanks to Damien Hirst and his gang of barricade-storming rebels and Charles Saatchi, the ad-man-turned-art-dealer, it was more champagne and cocaine and exploding auction prices.” Only a little further on was the day when Tracey Emin RA, once high priestess of the YBA Movement, would celebrate her 50th at Annabel’s, London’s most establishment nightclub, in the company of Princess Eugenie, granddaughter of H.M. the Queen.

    The avant-garde came late to Britain, and imploded late. Long before 1997 there had been signs that the impetus to innovate was beginning to falter. It is, I think fair to say that most of its energy was already exhausted towards the end of the 1970s, when the terms Post Modern and Post Modernism came into vogue. Art was no longer defined by its urge towards novelty, by its eager embrace of some definition of the new. Instead, it was characterized by its relationship to what already existed in the recent past. This impulse has been further defined by the fashion for ‘appropriation’ – that is, for making exact copies of images that already exist as a paradoxically innovative act.

    It is possible to look at the present situation in the visual arts using several different perspectives. One is the immense expansion of the contemporary art world. The old avant-gardes were confined to Western Europe and the United States, with perhaps an acknowledgement of what happened in Russia in the first two decades of the 20th century, and a dim consciousness of certain developments in Latin America. This expansion owes much to modern communications – first to the fact that colour printing became radically cheaper, which led in turn to the birth of the musée imaginaire or museum without walls. Secondly, to the digital revolution and the birth and rapid growth of the Internet, which has made possible the immediate diffusion of images from a huge variety of different sources. Google, and ye shall find.

    This means that it is increasingly hard to see any clear direction in the general progression of art. If we are looking for the proverbial ‘shock of the new’, it often seems that the shock of the exotic (something unfamiliar, coming from a culture very different from our own) will do just as well instead. It is, of course, necessary to acknowledge, when saying this, that the original 20th century avant-garde made free use of certain exotic sources – look for example at the relationship between Cubism and what Picasso described as “l’art négre”.

    Of course there is yet another paradox here, which is that the appeal of African tribal art to Picasso and a group of his artistic contemporaries was precisely its (to them) hermeticism – the fact that they in fact knew little and cared less about what the tribal artists were trying to express. Now we not only see too much – we are also in a position to know too much. Just go to Google, and ask the right questions. It is impossible to resist asking, knowing that the answers are within such easy reach. Today there is really no such thing as an innocent eye.

    Another important factor here has been the influence of official institutions – in particular museums of modern and contemporary art. These offer one of the main channels through which contemporary art now reaches a mass public. One may argue that television and the Internet are in practical terms just as important, but the fact is that these institutions see themselves as being entitled to govern the agenda. Their priorities are set by two things. First, those in charge of them (though they may vigorously deny this) see themselves as the high priests of a cult. A lot of the more characteristic manifestations of contemporary art, as presented by official organizations, now quite openly call for the response, “Lord, I believe – help Thou mine unbelief.” Or, in more demotic form, “I believe you – thousands wouldn’t.” There are, notoriously, often no objective correlatives that can be used as measures of quality, or even of interest.

    Secondly, museums – not surprisingly – feel a strong sense of responsibility towards those who supply their funding. The problem here is that the givers of money often tend to measure success in brutally populist terms. How many people are coming through the doors? What is the demographic breakdown, in terms both of generation and of class. Are a full range of taxpayers getting their money’s worth?

    The result has been a rush towards supposedly populist forms, chief among them performance art and video. The problem here is that what museums deliver using these media, often in spaces not very suitable for the purpose, compares unfavourably with what the audience gets from better established forms of artistic expression that overlap – i.e. with theatrical performance (nowadays often very radical and imaginative, in addition to being a great deal more disciplined), and things seen in cinemas and on television. In addition to this, where film is concerned, the technical resources available outside the museum or fine-art context are often much richer and more sophisticated. Money talks ­– this is why the best television commercials often far outstrip, in terms of technical finesse, anything presented as ‘artist’s video’.  It is no wonder that a number of artists who made their reputations in that field have now made the transition to being career film directors. The recent career of Sam Taylor-Johnson offers a case in point.

    It is worth noting, in this context, that looking at painting or sculptures is, in general, a different kind of looking from looking at video or even at performance. Video demands that you look from a fixed point of view, and the same is true of many, though not absolutely all, examples of performance art. Video and performance both impose a fixed time span on the audience. With paintings and sculptures the situation is different. You look from the angle and distance you choose. You look for a moment, or for a much longer span. You are free to walk away, then look again from a different viewpoint. Both physically and psychologically it is a very different kind of experience.

    In this connection it is perhaps worth noting that Tate Modern’s current director, Chris Dercon, is due to leave the institution in 2017, to become director of the  experimental Volksbühne theatre in Berlin. In recent months, Tate Modern, having made a big deal about providing new spaces for performance art, has gone rather quiet on the subject. One wonders if its enthusiasm for this art-form will survive Mr Dercon’s departure?

    A conspicuous feature of the contemporary art world as we now have it is its close alliance to the fashion industry. To a large extent, this is something inherited from the earliest phases of the Modern Movement. One thinks in particular of the huge impact made by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes on the Paris fashion industry. The impact of the Ballets Russes on the leading pre-World war couturier Paul Poiret is well known, but the influence was more general than this. Maison Paquin, for example, hired Leon Bakst, one of the chief Ballets Russes designers, to sketch ensembles for its collections. Chanel had a Russian phase, with outfits that echoed the shapes of Russian peasant tunics.

    During the past year, probably the most successful exhibition staged by any major London museum has been Savage Beauty (see illustration) at the V & A, a retrospective devoted to the work of the designer Alexander McQueen. More than 480,000 people saw it, and special late-night showings had to be laid on for the two weekends at the end of its run. Public enthusiasm for the event is, in current circumstances, not surprising. The fashion industry commands powerful PR. It is also much less bound by theories and intellectual constraints than the art world and it certainly has no inhibitions about luxury, and no shame about the money required to support luxury. Yet fashion is conservative in this sense – it gives you something to ‘see’. However ridiculous some of its visual inventions may be, fashion design never neglects the purely visual effect.

    Wear it if you can afford it. Wear it if you dare. And you can be damn sure that people are going to look at you and that they will probably remember what they saw.

    Fashion designers also, as it happens, have much less self-consciousness about ‘appropriation’ than today’s would-be avant-gardists. Fashion designers have always been magpies – they borrow without shame and recycle without inhibition. The point, for them, is to give what is borrowed a new twist. If the audience doesn’t recognise where a particular idea or effect originated, so much the better. With appropriation-art the opposite is the case. You have to know what is being so sedulously copied, otherwise you’re out of the loop.

    One refuge for avant-garde aspirationists, lacking visual inventiveness, has been to take refuge in supposedly radical politics. The visual arts have had an uneasy relationship with politics ever since the French Revolution. It was particularly strong in France during the first two-thirds of the 19th century, and reached a kind of climax in the days of the Paris Commune. This involvement, and the price that could be paid for it, is illustrated by the career of Gustave Courbet.

    There was certainly political involvement between some elements of the visual arts avant-garde and the political left during the first half of the 20th century, but the relationship was always uneasy, as the history of the Surrealist Movement amply illustrates. One still gets a great deal of talk on this subject today. The current Venice Biennale, due to finish on November 22nd, features continuous readings from the three volumes of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital. Whether anyone will pay attention to the words of this text – anymore than most of the traditionally religious pay attention to the actual words of the Mass when recited in Latin – must, I think, be seriously in doubt. In fact, left wing events, safely quarantined in museums, are now a familiar form of preaching to the converted. A good example, here in London, was Mark Wallinger’s installation, State Britain, which won the Turner Prize in 2007. This was a faithful reconstruction of the Peace Camp by the late Brian Haw, which existed for a while out in the open, directly in front of the Houses of Parliament. The Tate Britain web site rather smugly notes that: “Mark Wallinger’s work is noted for its succinct social commentary and political resonance.”

    Yes, indeed. And forgive my asking, but if this now almost-forgotten work ever had any real political impact, in which location would that have been more likely to happen?

    The avant-garde, as we once knew it, is as dead as the proverbial dodo. It is not going to rise again like Lazarus. It’s time we looked for something else, even if we don’t yet know what that is. London is now, for better or worse, a world metropolis. It is full of bright young artists from everywhere you can think of, all enthusiastically making work – much of which can be at least loosely described by the two nouns ‘painting’ and ‘sculpture’. Definitions can wait. Forget the museums. Go to the bustling galleries in Shoreditch and take a look.

    Edward Lucie-Smith

    September/October 2015

  • 1988 … Year zero

    1988 … Year zero

    … when branding and art formed a marriage of convenience, argues artist John Kelly.

    1988 is the seminal year, the year that our concepts of art, money and values changed irredeemably.

    It was the year I came to London as a 23-year-old artist, having taken an opportunity to play league cricket in London. It was a chance for a young Melbourne man to explore his ancestry and the art and culture of Europe while enjoying the quintessential English game. I would set off in the morning, along the Boundary Road, then lunch in the pavilion at Lord’s, and finally off to the Tate Gallery, only interrupted by comedian Harry Enfield’s 1988 ‘Loadsa Money’ character. Enfield pointed up the greed and vulgarity of a changing society. Gordon Gekko was another;

    “The point is, ladies and gentleman, that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right, greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, for knowledge has marked the upward surge of mankind.”

    But the film that made ‘loadsa money’ in 1988 was not Wall Street; it was Rain Man, starring Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman. Rain Man is about a performance car salesman yuppie named Charlie (Cruise), who is furious when his estranged father’s estate, worth millions, is bequeathed to a mental institution. To his shock, he learns he has a brother in the care of that institution. The brother, Raymond (Hoffman), is an ‘autistic savant’ whose obsession with airline safety records results in a cancelled flight and a road trip across the United States.

    Cruise personified the yuppie – the young upwardly mobile, urban professional who in the late 1980s began to inhabit all spheres of life, including sport and the arts. The rise of the yuppie was the result, to some extent, of the creep of managerialism, a business philosophy that spread across the globe through government and business. Master of Business Administration (MBA) programmes churned out thousands schooled in a scientific approach to management.

    “Managerialism is the belief that organisations have more similarities than differences, and thus the performance of all organisations can be optimised by the application of generic management skills and theory. To a practitioner of managerialism, there is little difference in the skills required to run a college, an advertising agency or an oil rig. Experience and skills pertinent to an organisation’s core business are considered secondary.”(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Managerialism)

    1988 furnishes an interesting – albeit failed – example of managerialism: the attempted takeover of Britain’s fourth largest bank by an advertising agency, Saatchi and Saatchi. This agency was synonymous with the 1979 election of the Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher herself, thanks to their ‘Labour isn’t working’ campaign poster and three successive Conservative victories. In 1988, Saatchi and Saatchi launched a takeover bid for the Midland. The agency, created and controlled by brothers Charles and Maurice, were at the forefront of corporate takeovers using financial mechanisms that often deferred payment until future profits arrived. Their targets were not just other advertising agencies; they also bought management companies such as The Hay Group (1984) and Cleveland Consulting (1987). Unfortunately in 1988 the idea of an advertising company running a bank did not sit comfortably with The City; it was described in fact as “insane hubris” by financial journalists. Its failure followed the stockmarket crash of 1987 and the resultant recession badly harmed the Saatchis’ reputation and would eventually see the two brothers depart from the company that bore their name.

    The late 1980s also saw advertising agency revenues hit by further restrictions on cigarette promotion. Advertisers were unable to refer directly to the product or show people smoking it. It created a paradigm shift in the ad business that in some circles was compared to art, for it relied heavily on aesthetics and concepts placed indirectly in the mind of the consumer. An example is purple silk juxtaposed against a pair of scissors or a gash; this was the code for Silk Cut cigarettes. Charles Saatchi had a long-standing interest in art; Saatchi and Saatchi had the Silk Cut account.

    “Then, in 1988, Charles Saatchi left his wife [Doris Lockhart Saatchi]… Something of the nature of their divorce may be deduced from the fact that Charles Saatchi’s current entry in Who’s Who makes no reference to Doris Lockhart’s ever having even existed.” (Darwent, Charles. Pieces from a confessional, The Independent, 18/10/1998.)

    Lockhart is described as:

    “a sophisticated woman who spoke several languages, knew a great deal about art and wine… She became known during their marriage as an art and design journalist, with particular knowledge of minimalism.”

    1988 is also the year that the business philosophy of branding took hold. The influence of ‘brand equity mania’ would last decades. From footwear to footballers, everything could be branded, including art and artists. In business the defining moment

    “…arrived in 1988, when Philip Morris purchased Kraft for $12.6 billion – six times what the company was worth on paper. The price difference, apparently, was the cost of the word ‘Kraft’. Of course Wall Street was aware that decades of marketing and brand bolstering added value to a company over and above its assets and total annual sales. But with the Kraft purchase, a huge dollar value had been assigned to something that had previously been abstract and unquantifiable – a brand name.” (Klein, Naomi. No Logo, Picador books, 1999.)

    1988 is such a seminal year because of the changes not only in business practices but also in politics. After the cricket season had ended in England, I was wandering around the galleries of Europe while the Iron Lady made her Bruges speech on Britain’s relationship with Europe. This is widely seen as the birth of Conservative Euro-scepticism. As she travelled home, Margaret Thatcher read Sir Roy Griffiths’s report, commissioned by her government, on the National Health Service. It was titled Community Care: Agenda for Action. Griffiths’s business expertise lay in supermarkets: he was vice-chairman of Sainsbury’s. However as a champion of managerialism, this report was to mark a change of direction in the way in which Britain administered psychiatric care. Before Griffiths

    “Mentally ill and mentally handicapped people were generally sent away to large forbidding institutions … many patients became worse rather than better and ‘institutionalised’.  However, there was, in a true sense, asylum for people who could be ‘strange’ in private.” (NHS History; see www.nhshistory.net/shorthistory.html)

    After Griffiths, asylums and psychiatric wards were closed and responsibility for this type of care was transferred to local authorities, where case managers were waiting. The philosophy soon spread throughout the western world and a battle for language ensued. Patients became ‘clients’ and ‘stakeholders’, while ‘benchmarking’ and ‘quantitative reports’ and ‘qualitative reports’ were stacked high.

    Coincidentally it is around this time that the authorities began to increase the funding for contemporary art. Public galleries and artist studios began to proliferate. Is there a link between the way psychiatric care was handled in the community and the proliferation of contemporary arts?  After all, art spaces allow people to act strangely in public, all under the eye of a dedicated management structure.

    An example appears in 1988 with the opening of the Tate’s satellite branch in Liverpool, a precursor of the much bigger Tate Modern in 2000. However, in a sense  Tate Modern also begins in 1988, when its champion, Nicholas Serota, was appointed director of the Tate. In his application for the job, Serota clearly identified the changing management culture. His application

    “…analysed the various areas of Tate work and proposed future stratagems to deal with the imminent crisis caused by restricted government financial support, changing public sector management expectations and increasing art market prices. He saw many areas of the Tate’s operations in need of overhaul…” (Taken from Wikepedia where it is referenced as being from Spalding, Frances (1998). The Tate: A History, pp. 245–252. Tate Gallery Publishing, London.)

    Jay Jopling, Damian Hirst’s dealer takes up the story:

    “After Nick Serota became Tate director [in 1988], he called a meeting because he was concerned about the media lampooning contemporary art. I was very flattered to be asked. Damien had just done a fish cabinet, I invited the tabloids, the Daily Star took a photograph with a bag of chips and ran the headline ‘The world’s most expensive fish and chips’. I thought it didn’t matter if the tabloids were negative – they’d force people to take a view, bring contemporary art to people’s attention. All that is redundant now – artists are household names, part of people’s lives. I certainly didn’t imagine when we started that it would be a business like this.”

    “Jay Jopling’s father, Michael, a landowner, was Margaret Thatcher’s first chief whip in the House of Commons…” (Wullschlager, Jackie. Lunch with the FT: Jay Jopling. See www.ft.com)

    With the political landscape changing, Britain’s relationship with Europe cooling, branding and managerialism spreading, asylums closing and art spaces opening, Cool Britannia was on its way.

    Because 1988 is such a seminal year, it is here we begin our discussion of Damien Hirst. In that year, he was a second-year art student managing his first exhibition, Freeze, a warehouse show of fellow Goldsmith students in London. Hirst organised the advertising and production and participated as an artist. One of his fellow students in the exhibition, Angus Fairhurst, wrote an essay afterwards: Some went mad and some ran away, the great majority stayed faithful until physical death. Hirst used an edited version of this title for a curatorial project at the Serpentine Gallery in the early 1990s. Both artists were branded Young British Artists (YBAs) and attracted support from Charles Saatchi, whose assistance led to fame and commercial success for Hirst and some other YBAs, though not Fairhurst. In March 2008, 20 years after he wrote his essay and on the last day of one of his few solo exhibitions, Fairhurst ran away to Scotland, where, in a wood, he hanged himself.

    Ever since Irving Stone’s 1934 novel Lust for Life, art, money and psychosis have been closely related. Google the words ‘creativity’ and ‘mental illness’ and you will find a plethora of musicians, writers, painters and the odd comedian who all paid the price of their creativity. The list is not exhaustive. Currently on show at the Tate Modern are Damian Hirst and Yayoi Kusama. Hirst has said:

    “There are so many different ideas it can often feel like the outpourings of an insane mind.” (www.damienhirst.com/texts/2009/feb–takashi-murakami)

    And The Guardian newspaper reported:

    “Kusama’s work cannot be disentangled from the mental health problems she has experienced. She admitted herself to a psychiatric hospital when she returned to Tokyo from the US in the early 1970s and from 1977 has lived voluntarily on an open ward, building a studio across the street and commuting back and forth on a daily basis.” (Brown, Mark. Yayoi Kusama arrives at Tate Modern with a polka at Damien Hirst. 7/2/2012: www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign)

    Kusama is in her eighties and has had a signature style – dots – since before Hirst was born. She was asked about Hirst’s dots. She replied:

    “… I am very happy that the polka dots that I started using have become a symbol of love and peace around the world with everyone joining hands to use them together in this way.”

    When I see Hirst’s manufactured dot paintings, I do not think of peace and love, I think of Enfield’s Loadsa Money. I Googled the names to see if anybody else had made the connection and was surprised to find only one other person had.

    “And did anyone else think Hirst resembled Harry Enfield’s Loadsa Money character in that embarrassing-for-all-concerned Noel Fielding doc? Walking around going, “That one’s worth a million. I got two million for that. Nah, I don’t care about money. Got seven hundred large [ones] for that one.” (See the comments to this Guardian article:) www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/apr/18/damien-hirst-butterflies-weirdly-uplifting)

    Hirst spent years establishing his Loadsa Money character, using the media at every opportunity and staying closely linked to Charles Saatchi. In the mid-1990s it was hard to open a London paper without reading something about him. He was everywhere and for reasons not always connected to art. Diary columns discussed where he was eating and with whom, all the while associating him with money. It seemed orchestrated, pervasive, a type of covert or guerrilla advertising, a branding exercise. Somebody was making Hirst a household name or, at the very least, a minor celebrity (I even remember an interview with him in our antenatal newsletter in 2000).

    Why would it be important to make one’s name so recognisable. We might find the answer in an interview with Hirst himself. Before going to Goldsmiths, the artist worked on a building site. As he tells it, the foreman ridiculed his name and called him Steve instead. For two years he was subjected to this identity abuse. Maybe this event instilled in Hirst a determination to have his real name recognised. He has succeeded. Damien Hirst is often called the most successful artist in the world.

    To reinforce his image and to court publicity, Hirst was outrageous. He had a shark killed and encased in formaldehyde, and is reported to have once stuck a cigarette in his penis in front of journalists. [It was a chicken bone under the foreskin in a Dublin restaurant. Ed] He was daring, a showman, an artist of immense ambition, intelligent, savvy, prolific, but most importantly always associated with large amounts of money. Whether it be his bar bill at the Groucho or the sale of his latest work to Charles Saatchi, it was all in the media. As Kusama generously didn’t, he even threatened to sue British Airways for using coloured dots in its company advertising, which didn’t lead to the courts, but only to more publicity.

    Having, since 1988, used the press to create name recognition – the brand – by the mid-1990s Hirst realised he needed someone from outside the art world to help him exploit his commercial potential. He found this person in Frank Dunphy, an Irish businessman who trained as an accountant. It is a perfect example of managerialism. Dunphy seemed to know little about art, but was expert at extracting favourable contracts for his showbiz clients. In a recent interview (My Life in a Spin, Tim Marlow in conversation with Frank Dunphy. Chichester Art lecture series 2011) he spelt out how he saw ‘Damien Hirst’ as a ‘brand’ he had helped create and commercialise. Dunphy instigated the Pharmacy and later the Sotheby’s auctions, and says his business acumen was instrumental in Hirst’s work becoming intrinsically linked to and defined by its ability to create ‘loadsa money’. For Hirst  this was important:

    “…I had no money as a kid and so I was maybe a bit more motivated than the rest. I used to argue with Angus [Fairhurst] and Sarah [Lucas] about that all the time when we were starting out and struggling. They’d say: ‘You’re obsessed’ and I’d be like, ‘It’s important’.” (O’Hagan, Sean. Damien Hirst: ‘I still believe art is more powerful than money’. The Guardian, 11/3/2012)

    He put it more succinctly when he said:

    “Money is massive.”

    Hirst is no longer a YBA: he is a middle-aged artist embraced by art institutions. If you look at Hirst through orange-tinted glasses, he resembles Alex Delarge in Anthony Burgess’s Clockwork Orange. The 1988 Freeze exhibition of young artists casts Hirst as the “…leader of a gang of Droogs: he is clearly the most intelligent and fearless, and the one who comes up with most of the ideas.”

    Hirst’s journey from punk artist to global brand is not unlike Delarge’s metamorphosis from dysfunctional youth to an instrument of government.

    The Blair government’s experimental programme in the late 1990s was ‘Cool Britannia’, which was begat by ‘Creative Britain’, an earlier government strategy that saw the YBAs used, along with Britpop, to promote Britain.

    Creative Britain was an explicit campaign to brand the UK a ‘cool’, creative place to be. The Culture Secretary of the day was quoted as trying to define the government’s relationship with creativity:

    “What it can do is try to nurture it, encourage it, aid its expression, help it achieve maximum impact, and assist society at large in the understanding and appreciation of what is created.”

    These ideas went global. Australia picked up on this trend and in 2001 Prime Minister John Howard launched a report (prepared by Saatchi and Saatchi), Australians and the Arts. Howard declared that the arts needed to “better communicate”, but went further by saying he wanted the Australia Council and the report to “…mould the presentation of the arts, the content of what is produced, the way it is communicated…”

    Howard probably expressed a little too honestly the underlying agenda of what government was up to. The UK was a little slicker; however, the desired results were still the same: the Blair government had

    “…a deep awareness of global shifts in economics and labour, the government was clear of the direction of the initiative and the reasons for launching a new cultural policy experiment. No government can stand idly by and ignore the potential this has to uplift people’s hearts and at the same time to draw in a major economic return to the country.”

    Fast forward to 2012: Damien Hirst is invited by the Tate and (now Sir) Nicholas Serota to undertake a retrospective as part of the Cultural Olympiad which would run alongside the London 2012 Olympic Games. For all it is a sporting event, the Olympics are also a branding vehicle for the host city. They are not the Olympic Games: they are the London Olympic Games and since the LA games in 1984 the Olympics have been overtly commercial. Hirst’s retrospective is the Tate’s showpiece, connecting the most famous artist in the world to an influx of international visitors, also an overtly commercial project. Just look in the gift shop: “for those who cannot stretch to the £36,800 skull, there is a set of 12 china plates for £10,500, a spotted skateboard for £480, a deckchair for £310 and a butterfly-print umbrella for £195. Butterfly-print wallpaper costs £700 a roll.” (Singh, Anita. Damien Hirst retrospective: Tate gift shop charges £36,800 for plastic skull, Daily Telegraph, 1/4/2012)

    Some would question whether Hirst’s overly branded work should carry the label ‘art’ at all. But it is

    “…because art is determined by institutions with a monopoly of taste, art is only art when it has passed through certain mechanisms. Since money is the accepted medium of exchange for the transfer of power, of which taste is one manifestation, art is only art when it has been exchanged for money. Transactions will, by definition, take place within the system. Art has by extension, therefore, latent art potential when it rests in a conduit before sale, and is therefore not art if it fails to appear in an art market conduit.” (Sigurjónsson, Njörður. The Language of Arts Management: Ontological, Theoretical and Methodological Reductions.)

    Art reflects the culture in which it is made and culture is one of the three pillars of the Olympic movement, the others being (obviously) sport and environmental sustainability. Which in itself raises an interesting question, for Hirst is famous for having wild sharks killed and placed in formaldehyde. Is this meant to highlight the unsustainability of wildlife being indiscriminately killed for entertainment? Do Hirst’s cigarette installations reinforce some abstract health message? Perhaps his drug cabinet installations reflect the prevalence of drugs in sport, or his coloured dots echo the Olympic rings? Such irony is pressed flat by the PR. The Tate is putting this exhibition on because

    “Hirst is widely regarded as one of the most important artists working today and has created some of the most iconic works in recent history.”

    The difference between ironic and iconic is only one letter. The Tate can make its own press release become fact, simply by stating it; it is that powerful. Therefore it is important to understand the underlying rationale of this institution.

    “3.1: Tate’s mission is to increase public knowledge, understanding and appreciation of British art from the 16th century to the present day and of international modern and contemporary art.” (The Tate’s mission is drawn from the 1992 Museums and Galleries Act.)

    We must acknowledge that the Tate is very successful at its mission. Its global influence is enormous and began back in the days of Empire (it opened in 1897) and is today next door to its financial equivalent, The City. In its own words, the Tate;

    “… provides a platform from which you can speak to an audience of millions – opinion formers, industry leaders and consumers alike. Choose a Tate exhibition and together we can build a package to mirror your brand, ethos and style.” (Brand Building, Tate web site.)

    We can take on board the notion that Kraft = cheese without too many qualms: however, a living artist as a brand does not sit so comfortably. Nor does it really tally with Hirst himself, who made his reputation as an anti-conformist while brands – by definition – conform. Damien Hirst is a set of irreconcilable ideas, a contradiction in terms.

    Unless we think of him as a dead artist. Then it is much easier for us to accept him as a brand: his mission as an artist would be over and no work could come forth to contradict the established brand identity. So maybe, conceptually, Damien Hirst is dead. He did once say:

    “‘No way. Museums are for dead artists. I’d never show my work in the Tate. You’d never get me in that place.’” (O’Hagan, Sean. Ibid..)

    It is quite clear that Damien Hirst will continue to be a successful and internationally recognised artist. His retrospective at the Tate will ensure this, and will also make loadsa money. The figures will so impress the managerialists running institutions across the globe that they will buy it in. This will please the Cameron government, who will see it as exporting cultural product; within a short period of time, it will be as a blockbuster in other countries, including Australia. The Tate, the British government, the British Council will promote this work and Hirst will fly the flag of ‘Creative Britain’. But should we believe in this work when one of the main protagonists, Frank Dunphy, has stated that Hirst’s work is simply a brand, and therefore could also be anti-art?

    “I don’t give a damn” might be the reaction of any artist to criticism. Hirst the artist is under no obligation to explain himself on why he does what he does. The question that needs to be asked is why our art institutions, in particular the Tate, are not asking and exploring the science of Hirst, and examining how that reflects the era we have recently lived through. After all, it is its mission to help us understand the work. But how can the Tate do this when it is intricately interlinked into the business of it?

    Nobody can argue that Science Ltd, Damien Hirst’s company, working with Tate Enterprises, is not a fantastic business synergy and a powerful economic efficiency. From the box office to the shop, this co-production between two successful commercial companies is guaranteed to make money. However this synergy creates a strong suspicion that the visitor has been recast as a consumer, rather than as someone seeking greater knowledge and understanding of British art. The question is worth repeating; how can the Tate fulfil its stated mission when it is intrinsically involved in the commercial exploitation of that same work? Especially when considered in the light of its recent statements, viz:

    “Our objective is to secure enough money to support our ambitions, aiming to increase the amount of self-generated income and to maximise grant-in-aid, combining entrepreneurial flair with strong financial management.” (2007-2008 Annual Report, Tate Gallery.)

    But what are its ambitions? Recently it has wanted to expand physically and has created new spaces behind the Tate Modern by redeveloping old oil tanks connected to the former power station.

    The oil tanks are the first phase of an expansion project that will eventually see another 10 floors built above them. After the Cultural Olympiad, they will be reopened periodically while work continues towards the planned overall opening date of 2016. Serota would not be drawn on fundraising.

    These ambitions need money and one might ask at what point management’s need for money compromises the institution’s stated raison d’etre, or, as Eddy puts it, in Absolutely Fabulous when talking to an art gallery assistant: “You only work in a shop, you know. You can drop the attitude.”

    Maybe it is necessary to look at the psychology of what has happened to understand what has gone on. Could it be that the catalyst for Hirst’s career was Charles Saatchi separating from his wife, with her interest in minimalism? Was it Thatcher turning away from Europe and an advancement of a separate British identity? Was it the rise of brand culture, combined with shifts in advertising culture? Was it the introduction of managerialism? Was it the appointment of Nick Serota? Could it be that Harry Enfield created Damien Hirst out of his Loadsa Money character? Maybe I need a psychologist?

    Leon Festinger is one of the 20th century’s great experimental psychologists. His groundbreaking work, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, explored the notion of irreconcilable ideas. Hirst and the Tate are a case in point. Hirst has been dismissed by esteemed critics across the globe, yet his success and fame simply keep on growing, with the assistance of art institutions such as the Tate, which, instead of interrogating the art, actually assist in exploiting it. Why? Self-interest is a powerful motive, as any evolutionary psychologist will tell you; management is first and foremost about survival, followed by expansion.

    So how does Festinger’s theory help us explain why the Tate benignly contributes to the narrative that is ‘Damien Hirst’ the brand? Festinger developed his cognitive dissonance theory after he infiltrated a group of doomsday cultists who believed an alien – Sananda – had communicated the date and time of the end of the earth. Luckily for them she (the alien, that is) would swing by in her spaceship to save the true believers a few moments beforehand. They gathered together at the appointed time, having disposed of all their earthly goods.

    Festinger’s initial question was simple: what would happen after the prophecy failed. Logically, the group should have disbanded in acrimony. However when the predicted time of doom passed, the group, which was led by an ordinary housewife, albeit one with a direct line to Sananda, did not break up: on the contrary, the cult solidified, explaining the failure on the basis that its prayers had saved the world (Sananda had informed them of this). Incredibly, the cult grew as a result.

    Festinger explains it thus:

    “The psychological opposition of irreconcilable ideas (cognitions) held simultaneously by one individual created a motivating force that would lead, under proper conditions, to the adjustment of one’s belief to fit with one’s behaviour – instead of changing one’s behaviour to fit one’s belief (the sequence conventionally assumed).” (Slater, Lauren. Opening Skinner’s Box. Quieting the mind; The experiments of Leon Festinger, Page 113)

    The Tate managers seem to regard the public as members of a consumer cult who will not only flock to watch artists being strange in public, but will actually pay to see it – and then consume the merchandise. We can trace the progression of this thinking from Thatcherism, Saatchi and Saatchi, New Labour and its re-branding of ‘Cool Britannia’ through to the opening of Tate Modern in 2000. They have successfully commercialised and normalised activity that might have once had you ensconced in an institution. And what of all the players?

    “Some went mad and some ran away, the great majority stayed faithful until physical death.”

    John Kelly

    The Jackdaw September – October 2012