ARTS
Art
Long live the new!
Ian Dunlop welcomes another generation of young artists with the power to shock us Twenty years ago I wrote a book called The Shock of the New. It was about seven exhibitions which have come to be regard- ed as turning-points in the history of mod- ern art and in the cultural history of the countries where they took place. They included the first Impressionist exhibition, the Salon d'Automne of 1905, in which the Fauves were shown, and Roger Fry's post- Impressionist show in London in 1910. My idea was to study the reaction of the public to new movements in art and the response of the professionals — artists, critics, col- lectors — and to explain why these move- ments were, for the most part, greeted with derision and hostility.
The book did reasonably well, winning a prize and dying a natural death on the remainder shelves, but the title lived on and was used by Robert Hughes for his television series on modern art and by countless sub-editors in a variety of con- texts: the Shock of the Nude, the Shock of the Pseud, the Stock of the Stew, etc.
When I wrote the book at the end of the 1960s I more or less assumed that people were no longer shocked by the new. In London we had been through a turbulent time. Almost simultaneously we were exposed to Pop, Op, Kinetic and Colour Field painting. David Hockney, R.B. Kitaj and Bridget Riley emerged from the Royal College to have their first exhibitions and two young dealers, Robert Fraser and John Kasmin, opened their doors for business. There were plenty of opportunities for crit- ics like myself to express shock at declining standards, dismay at the garish imagery and horror at the antics of a few demented individuals at the first 'happenings'. There were doubters around, people who laughed at Kenneth Noland's targets, who thought Warhol was a 15-minute wonder and could not see the difference between Lichten- stein's paintings and the comic strips they derived from, but on the whole the critics were a tolerant lot and if we were shocked by the new we did not want to show it. My anger was aimed at the fuddy-duddy insti- tutions which appeared to preside over public taste: the Royal Academy and the Tate Gallery.
Having survived the Sixties and sheathed my critical pen, I thought we had seen the end of the avant-garde tradition. New art had surely lost its power to shock and we would never again see people made angry by an exhibition. How wrong I was. Having watched The Spectator's critic Giles Auty barely able to conceal his anger in a televi- sion debate with Sarah Kent and Nicholas Logsdail, having read the Evening Stan- dard's headline denouncing the Gober exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery as `penile dementia', and having argued (in a mild way) with a lady arts page editor on the merits of Richard Long's stone circles at the Tate Gallery, I am convinced a note of anger has entered into the critical debate on the state of contemporary art. Could it be that some of our critics are once again shocked by the new? If they are, I am delighted. On the principle of no smoke with fire and no anger without a cause, I suspect that once again in London we are witnessing a burst of artistic activity. History never repeats itself, but we can glimpse a number of parallels with the 1960s and hear the same arguments — only the names and places have changed. Instead of the Royal College, the breeding- ground for new talent is the Goldsmiths' College, for Hockney read Damien Hirst, for Kasmin read Jay Jopling, for the Whitechapel Gallery read the Saatchi Col- lection and the Serpentine Gallery.
Which are the exhibitions to have caused all the fuss? There have been several shows at the Tate — Richard Serra, Richard Long and the Turner Prize exhibits; there have been ones at the Serpentine Gallery, including the current shocker by the Amer- ican Robert Gober; there was Gravity and Grace organised by the Arts Council, and there have been two selections of young British artists at the Saatchi Collection on Boundary Road. These exhibitions were certainly not free from silliness — if you look back at the first Impressionist exhibi- tion, it had mediocre work by a number of artists never heard of again — but they did display work which had the power to sur- prise and shock even the most sophisticat- ed spectator. Consider two works from the Saatchi Collection, Marc Quinn's self- portrait and a piece by Damien Hirst shown last year. The Quinn piece, undoubtedly a macabre object, consists of a model of the artist's head made of his own frozen blood. The Hirst work, `A Thousand Years', is constructed from two glass cham- bers which contained the rotting head of a cow surrounded by a swarm of live flies. How disgusting! True. Even Francis Bacon, whom I saw looking at the Hirst piece a few months before his death, seemed at a loss for words. (What a photograph that would have made: the encounter between the old priest of shock and the new enfant terrible.) But these works are not art, it will be said. There I would disagree. Quinn's work is a traditional subject expressed by novel means. Hirst's piece is a memento mori, a theme which goes back to the 16th century and beyond. In Britain we like our artists to be craftsmen and to do things with a pencil or a brush which our children cannot do. When young artists say to hell with drawing and to hell with paint on canvas, they touch a raw nerve, particularly among critics who themselves aspire to some skill with the pencil and the brush. It is an attack with a familiar ring. Monet and his friends were criticised because they used dabs of uncon- nected pigment and did not tidy up the sur- faces of their canvases in the way that academic artists had been taught to do. Critics were angry with the Fauves because Matisse and his friends painted the sea red and people's faces purple and green. Are we angry with Damien Hirst because he constructs his memento mori from a cow's head and real flies rather than creating the illusion of a cow's head in the manner of a Spanish artist of the 17th century? The trouble is that kind of painting cannot be bettered. Even Picasso, who possessed the technical skills to rival any artist, chose his own methods when he painted those haunt- ing still-lifes with a sheep's skull in the 1940s. It would be absurd for a young artist today to try to paint like an artist from three centuries ago. It is much better for him to find a new way at looking at an old theme, and even use shock tactics to make his point.
In a recent article in these pages, Charles Moore took a young lady sculptor to task because she thought art should disturb. `Why?' he asked. The answer is that nobody would pay much attention if artists did not. We are bombarded with visual information and the artist with something to say has to grab our attention by any means at his disposal, which may include photographs, wax models, cow's heads and any old rubbish.
Forget the argument about materials, say the critics, this new art is i gigantic con perpetrated by the new art establishment, which consists of a small number of critics, artists, curators and collectors. Nicholas Serota is attacked for supporting contem- porary art at the Tate, Charles Saatchi for buying works by young experimental artists, and the Lisson Gallery for showing concep- tual and minimal art. We forget how dowdy and dispirited a place the Tate Gallery was after the war, how few collectors for any art at all we have in Britain, how commercial galleries like the Lisson and the Anthony d'Offay gallery, which put on superb shows, depend on collectors from abroad to stay in business. The young know differently. They are not easily fooled and they are going in ever-increasing numbers to the shows dis- missed as puerile, elitist and difficult: 31,000 went to see Gravity and Grace at the `There's a wonderful surface patina on some of these older drunks. . . Hayward Gallery, 5,000 more than expect- ed; the Lisson Gallery survey of conceptual art Out of Sight, Out of Mind got four or five times the normal number of visitors, and the Saatchi Collection on Saturdays is packed. Long live the shock! Long live the new!
Ian Dunlop is head of the art advisory service of the Citibank, London.
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