Exhibitions
Sensation (Royal Academy, till 28 December)
Is the game up?
Martin Gayford
It seems to be a feature of life these days that at regular intervals one is deluged by a tidal wave of hype. The latest, of course, cooked up by the art world, concerns the exhibition Sensation at the Royal Academy. This, so the story goes, is the most exciting thing to hit London in decades, perhaps, artistically, ever. It's fresh, hip, cool, bril- liant. The newspapers have been full of it, sometimes several stories a day, and not just about the 'controversial' Myra Hindley painting. In the press and all over the place have been images of the artists themselves, so youthful, so unstuffy, getting drunk at par- ties and in other ways manifesting their superiority to the older, stuffier, duller Royal Academicians, for example. 'I've got to like at least some of it, after all I'm young,' an intelligent literary fellow, appar- ently in his mid thirties, explained to me. In the Royal Academy courtyard the queue had already formed on the first day. No doubt they will be there until Christmas. Personally, I was staggered by Sensation, staggered by how little it all added up to. Like any reasonably assiduous art person, I had seen most of the exhibits before — in some cases several times. For some years, to be honest, I had been trying to believe there was something exciting going on here. It would be nice to think so. But the unintentional effect of seeing all this dis- parate young British art gathered together is to diminish it.
Far from being a sensation, the show is a damp squib. From the first room one is haunted by an obscure sense of familiarity. There are, in fact, several associations. Right at the beginning, Sensation leads off with that staple British favourite, animals In art. But, since the animals in question are Mark Wallinger's dead-pan paintings of racehorses and Damien Hirst's shark, the effect is more of a provincial natural histo- ry museum. That shark, by the way, like all his taxidermy, looks much less striking and impressive in its fishy flesh. Indeed, it is hard to suppress the idea that it is actually made of nylon or something, like an over- sized soft toy; while the wires which hold it up, invisible in photographs, destroy that eerie sense that it has been suspended in the act of swimming.
But it is in the second room that the real resemblance clicks. Where else does one see this combination of disparate, mainly very bad paintings, hung together? These unconnected objects dotted about in unsuitable classical rooms? That's it, of course — at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition. Admittedly, the exhibits in Sen- sation are allotted much more space; in fact, the show is beautifully hung. But I would not like to say that the general level of quality is any higher. On the contrary, I suspect.
In a climate in which the death of paint- ing is widely proclaimed, it comes as a mild surprise to discover that this super-trendy show is visually dominated by paintings, even if most of them are rotten. The other leitmotif is Hirst's chopped-up livestock, which uniformly, like the shark, fail to live `Begging For It; 1994 by Gary Hume up to their photographic images — which is a notorious sign of dodgy art.
Walking round Sensation, even a paint- ing fan might begin to wonder if the game isn't finally up. Chris Ofili, for example, notorious for a naughty image of the Madonna, is a sensationally bad abstract artist. Richard Patterson is not much bet- ter. Marcus Harvey's paintings are uni- formly atrocious, ironically with the exception of the Myra Hindley picture, which makes a serious, even a moral point, albeit in a pretty plodding way. The good painters — Jason Martin, Simon Callery, Mark Francis — tend to be so discreet that their work is almost indis- cernible amid the surrounding hubbub. Martin's consists of monochrome canvases with textured surfaces, Callery's of very thin pastel stripes. And several of those who looked as if they were going to be good have gone off badly. Jenny Saville is still painting enormous women, on an enor- mous scale, but the new ones don't look nearly as good as the ones from the early Nineties. Gary Hume has never done any- thing as good as his early paintings of hos- pital doors — both abstract and absolutely real, like Rachel Whiteread's casts which tie with Hirst's polka dots as the best paintings on show, which, unlike the taxi- dermy, look better in the original than in photographs.
Going off badly is an affliction not only of the painters in the show (perhaps it's all the parties these young British artists have to go to that wear them out, or maybe it's the general failure to come up with more than one or two ideas). Rachel Whiteread has not recently done anything as striking as 'Ghost' (1990), her cast of a complete room. The innumerable casts of the under- sides of chairs and stools, apparently exe- cuted in Turkish delight, look utterly uninteresting (like a lot of these pieces they lose a lot outside the cool, minimalist spaces of the Saatchi Gallery). Tracey Emin, as far as I can see, was always bad. Her tent embroidered with the names of everybody she has ever slept with can only be of interest to those concerned.
The other major shortcoming of many artists in this show — apart from not being any good, and going off — is thinking that being shocking is enough. This misconcep- tion is articulated by Norman Rosenthal, the RA exhibitions secretary, in his cata- logue essay. 'The chief task of new art,' he writes, 'is to disturb [the] sense of comfort' we feel with, say, the Impressionists. Real- ly? The chief task? Surely, that makes it all too easy. Such disturbance may be a by- product of new art, but to be worth our attention that novelty must also be true, beautiful, original, imaginative. It is often argued that it is impossible now to shock the sensibilities of an art public jaded by eight decades of Dada and whatnot. Pieces such as Mat Collishaw's photograph of a bullet hole in the top of someone's head prove that it is always possible to come up with images that make the beholder feel a bit sick. But that is clearly not enough.
The exhibitions secretary, according to reports in the press, also subscribes to the romantic fallacy that no work of art can be immoral. The Chapman twins, Jake and Dinos, seem out to prove him wrong with their sculpture of a number of naked little girls, fused together, and with facial fea- tures in some cases replaced by sexual and excretory organs. To argue that anything that can be depicted should be, and that the result will automatically be moral and good, is simply to set a challenge to artists — how nasty can you be. The Chapman twins are brilliant at being nasty, but no good at anything else. Their work would be dangerously corrupting if paedophilic Mad- equates were likely to stump up £7 to get into the RA. As it is, it's just bad art.
The more one wanders around, the more one feels that there is really precious little in common between these artists. Admit- tedly, they do not represent all young British artists, just the collection of one hugely successful advertising man. But, on the other hand, maybe that's the clue. The freshness, the bracing, the disturbing, nov- elty may not really exist — but they add up to tremendous PR. There is only one chef d'oeuvre at the RA, and it's not a work of art. It's a truly great masterpiece of adver- tising.
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