Those unfamiliar with the auction world might not find it remarkable that an artist should choose to sell his art directly with an auction house in an exclusive sale. However, it is uncommon. In fact, it’s almost unheard of. Before Damien Hirst’s one-man auction at Sotheby’s in London on 16 September 2008, the last artist to have such an auction was Pablo Picasso in 1993, and he had little to say on the matter as he died in 1973. Living artists generally shy away from auctions as there is a good chance the work will not sell, which is embarrassing but, more importantly, an auction may destabilise their market prices. Generally, auctions are supplied by collectors who, for one reason or another, sometimes a death or a divorce, want to get rid of their art in exchange for the cash.
What Hirst did was incredibly risky. The art world was shocked but, accustomed as we were to being shocked by Hirst, we waited to see what the outcome of the sale would be. At least it would be a good show, with 167 lots presented over 2 days.
There is another reason September 2008 stands out as being memorable. The day before the auction, the financial services firm Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy in what was already clearly a start to the global financial crisis. Here we were, with the financial world threatened with ruin and the auctioneer’s gavel poised and ready to begin the bidding while spectators gathered, shaking their heads in pity for Hirst who was surely about to lose his shirt. After all, who would spend money on art now?
The sale was a roaring success. Only three lots did not sell and over £40m was spent by buyers from all corners of the globe. And Hirst laughed all the way to the bank. He had, once again, made history. Sotheby’s were also very pleased and surely relieved. It was a risky venture even without the ominous financial situation. Sotheby’s is a global company with auction rooms in New York, Paris, Hong Kong and London. Could this success have happened had the sale been staged in New York? Or Paris? It is, of course, hard to speculate, and there are those who would argue that with the rise of the internet, the location is irrelevant. However, the fact remains that it is hard to find a city as uniquely placed in the global arena as London, and it is why London is, arguably, the centre of the art world.
Geographically, London is positioned centrally on the world map, the English-speaking hub of Europe and therefore at the crossroads of East and West, with easy links to the Gulf and at a midpoint between America and Asia. The access afforded by London’s major airports is significant. Attracted to London’s thriving financial district, another global centre in London, rich collectors gather here to use London as a meeting point to discuss business. Once deals are signed and sealed, they will pop into the galleries and auction houses to pick up their trophies. Though the art market runs in parallel to the financial market, it operates comfortably alongside it, and London’s physical location is a contributor to this symbiotic success.
Another factor in the city’s success is its wealth. London has been a wealthy city for over a thousand years. Unlike many cities whose fortune has waxed and waned, London has managed to be consistently rich, which has helped to establish deeply rooted financial institutions and a bountiful array of cultural societies and venues. The UK has four of the top ten most-visited museums in world, and all of them are in London. Even when Britain was in crisis during the various wars throughout its history, London has managed to remain largely in the black.
The network of museums and galleries which this wealth has afforded has contributed to London’s importance in the art world. Art schools, institutions, galleries, auction houses, museums, academies, foundations, charities, studios and exhibition spaces are abundant in the city, each exhibiting art at every level, from students and young artists to established artists of all kinds, whether experimental or mainstream. Museum curators, art dealers, small-time collectors and mega art spenders all have a place here, catered for in venues which are often among the best in their field. This network is ever growing and hugely impressive, and those who navigate it will attest to a sense of collegiality across the board. The museum directors and curators from the big established institutions visit graduate shows in support of the new generation of artists, while the mega collectors donate funds to help small, independent spaces to prosper. This makes for fertile ground not just to explore the arts but also to make a career within the industry.
Another reason that London is such a strong centre for the arts is the art schools.
These institutions offer a great service to the fabric of London. Most of them are centrally located, keeping the city young and vibrant, and they are full of inquisitive creative minds. They are numerous and, although not all their graduates become great or known artists, this means that the creative industries in London are well staffed. The teaching standard is high, with excellent members of staff and visiting lecturers. These include artists and art-world professionals who impart their knowledge and know-how to the next generation.
According to an Arts Council England report commissioned from the Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR) in 2016, the arts and culture industry was responsible for £21.2bn in direct turnover for England, and £10.8bn in Gross Value Added, with £8.6bn of this generated by the visual arts market segment of the industry. The creative industries account for almost 1.5% of the UK’s GDP, with the arts sector responsible for almost 0.4%, and these figures are growing annually at a steady pace.[1] Investing in individuals choosing to study creative subjects has become a profitable choice for the city, as well as for the country.
Compelling as the case for London as the centre of the art world might be, it is not the only world capital to be well positioned geographically and financially, nor is it the only place with good institutions and a ready supply of creatives. Historically, Paris had been the centre of the arts, with its bohemian lifestyle attracting those who would become the nineteenth- and twentieth-century’s greats – Renoir, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Toulouse-Lautrec, Matisse, Picasso, Joan Miró and many more – as well as great thinkers and philosophers.
With the emergence of Abstract Expressionism after the Second World War, closely followed by the colourful Pop art movement in the mid-1950s and 1960s, the focus of the art world’s attention shifted to New York. Europe had been ravaged by the two world wars and though many artists remained there and responded to the situation in their work, the continent was still digesting the tragedy that had unfolded there. Many of Europe’s practising artistic communities, fleeing the threat of war and persecution by the Nazis, had emigrated as refugees to America.
Abstract Expressionism and Pop art both demonstrated new and innovative ways of producing art. Though the two movements were in conflict with each other – with Abstract Expressionists searching the inner depths of the human soul in their art, while Pop art celebrated the ephemeral – artists from both groups were predominantly based in New York. Abstract Expressionist Mark Rothko was often seen wandering the streets of New York, and would shake his head in disapproval at Andy Warhol’s Pop art ‘Factory’. Bursting with galleries, museums, happenings, openings, gatherings and parties, New York was forging ahead as the new centre of the art world.
In 1987 Andy Warhol died unexpectedly. He was recovering from minor surgery, but the 58-year-old’s body had been weakened by previous illnesses and a gunshot wound in 1968. A year later, the young art student Damien Hirst co-ordinated an exhibition titled Freeze in the Docklands in East London. He was in his second year at Goldsmiths College and, together with his fellow students, staged the exhibition of their work in a large disused warehouse in three parts. The show proved to be a pivotal point in British art, helping to launch a new generation of artists who came to be known as the Young British Artists, or YBAs.
Hirst worked hard at generating interest in the exhibition. He secured sponsorship for the show and produced a catalogue to help create a buzz. He famously drove the Exhibitions Secretary of the Royal Academy of Arts, Sir Norman Rosenthal, to the exhibition to ensure he saw the show. It would secure his reputation as an artist adept at self-promotion, a characteristic that is often used by his critics to dismiss his art. However, Michael Craig-Martin, who was his teacher at Goldsmiths, commented about Hirst and the Freeze show: ‘It amuses me that so many people think what happened was calculated and cleverly manipulated whereas in fact it was a combination of youthful bravado, innocence, fortunate timing, good luck, and, of course, good work. It caught people’s imagination.’[2]
Whatever one’s view of Hirst, it is undeniable that he changed the course of British art. The work exhibited at Freeze was so different from anything the art world had seen that almost instantly the gravitational centre of the art world shifted away from New York and towards London. Many of the artists who exhibited in Freeze are still practising artists and are highly successful in their field.
Several artists who were part of the YBA movement did not exhibit at Freeze but were considered part of the ‘gang’, such as Tracey Emin and Rachel Whiteread. The YBAs utilised different mediums to create their art, though each reflected the zeitgeist in their own way. There was a restlessness to the art, an attitude that was distinctly ‘London’. And the public loved it. Quick to snap up great works of art, collector Charles Saatchi was a major patron of the YBAs, amassing a collection that would go on display at the Saatchi Gallery on Boundary Road in north-west London from 1992. This space became a point of pilgrimage for all art lovers and for art students looking to emulate the success of the YBAs. The following year, in 1993, Jay Joplin opened the White Cube Gallery in Duke Street, St James’s, where he created his own art empire, displaying and selling work by many of the YBA artists.
Though Freeze and the heyday of the YBAs – who are not so young any more – was in the 1990s, the impact of this loose group of artists is still felt today. They are responsible not just for strengthening London’s position in the art world, but also for updating the London brand into ‘cool Britannia’, placing it ahead of the art-fashion curve. In recognition of their enduring contribution, work by several of the YBAs is featured in this exhibition, including Mat Collishaw, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Yinka Shonibare and, of course, Hirst.
It is easy to get caught up with the story of Hirst the entrepreneur, although, as Craig-Martin suggests, it is his art and the quality of the work produced that is the true success story. Hirst creates work that is bold and exciting with a clinical sexiness to it. It is both sentimental and cruel, and manages to arouse strong reactions in his viewers. Perhaps the most famous of his works is his series of dead animals suspended in formaldehyde in glass display tanks, at times cut in two, as is the case with Mother and Child (Divided) of 1993. From this series, the most iconic is The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991), featuring a shark, jaws ajar, originally commissioned by Saatchi. What Hirst does so brilliantly with these works is to make us, the viewers, confront our own mortality. There is no suggestion of redemption; the work is surgical as much as it is inevitable, the ultimate memento mori.
Hirst was still at Goldsmiths when he started to make his medicine cabinets. They were to become a series that continue to evolve to this day in his practice. As Ann Gallagher writes of these works: ‘The incorporation of scientific imagery into Hirst’s work first occurred in the simple, white glass fronted cabinets – filled with drug packaging, bottles and other objects related to the medical environment … in which the ailing or distressed body is implied using a vocabulary that combines the graphic imagery of Pop, the discipline and formal order of abstraction, and the influence of Jeff Koons’s consumerist works. The ready-made colour in the design of the drug packaging supplied Hirst with a way to address his aim to integrate colour into minimalist aesthetic, and the Medicine Cabinets helped him resolve the progression of his paintings of rows of pill-like spots.’[3] Encompassed in one work, Hirst manages to address issues of mortality, addiction to prescription drugs, the fragility of the human body, and implicitly the progress of the history of art.
Memento mori is a theme explored repeatedly in art history. Artists return to the subject over and again so that it has become a time-honoured tradition. It is the dominant theme in the works of fellow YBA and Freeze exhibitor Mat Collishaw, who has brought the debate into the twenty-first century, combining cutting-edge technology with Victorian low-tech innovation. A master of ‘smoke and mirrors’, Collishaw rigorously researches his subject matter before creating the final piece. He will often make works on a commission or site-specific basis, finding the best tools to express the final message. A master of illusion, his work is often startling for the optical illusions he creates. With Collishaw, no two works are the same.
As Rachel Campbell-Johnston explains, the subject choices in his art are “a legacy of his childhood, he presumes. He was born in 1966, the second of four boys brought up on a Nottingham council estate. His parents were committed Christadelphians. Every Wednesday and twice on Sunday the young Collishaw attended the Bible study sessions of a sect that appeared to disapprove of pretty much everything, from female education (his mother had to study in secret) to television sets … he emerged as an artist who, thanks to his upbringing, was looking for images that could carry spectators beyond the mundane. This desire, over the course of more than three decades, has led to dozens of imaginatively complex, often technically complicated and usually critically acclaimed pieces that tend to work, first, by delivering a visual gut punch before shoving the viewer into another way of looking.’[4]
In Seria Ludo (2014), an inverted giant zoetrope made using 3D printing technology, Collishaw depicts a scene inspired by the phrase ‘Eat drink and be merry, for tomorrow you die’, which is a conflation of two biblical sayings from Ecclesiastes and Isaiah. The Latin title of the work translates as ‘looking at serious matters in a lighthearted way’, and was a toast used by the Society of Dilettanti, an eighteenth-century drinking club formed by a group of British gentlemen who had made the Grand Tour to Italy and were inspired by classical antiquity. The work comprises a glowing, strobe-lit chandelier covered with 186 carousing Lilliputian figures. As it spins, the zoetrope animates the tableaux and brings to life the characters – including a swinging monkey – in scenes of drunken revelry. The orgy of debauchery echoes the moral works of William Hogarth such as A Rake’s Progress (1734), and the endlessly repetitive scene Collishaw presents to us resembles something more hellish than pleasurable.
The success of both Collishaw and Hirst lies in their ability to update classical themes for a contemporary audience. They repackage and re-present these themes in a way that makes them relevant for our times, using a language of Pop and technology. They created and displayed their art in London, and the art-going public flocked to the city to see it first hand. Hirst enjoys the success he has achieved and can still be seen having breakfast at the Connaught Hotel in Mayfair clad in colourful jogging trousers and baseball cap, while Collishaw has made frequent appearances in the list of GQ Magazine’s Top 50 Best Dressed Men of Britain.[5] Though this might seem irrelevant, in an age which is fixated on the media and image the artists’ ability to market themselves successfully as a brand has no doubt had an impact on the perception of the city as a whole.
The YBA brand went on an international tour to Berlin and New York with the Sensation exhibition. This was an important show, which was critically acclaimed and was first staged at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 1997. The full title of the exhibition was Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection. The Royal Academy is an independent institution which does not receive government funding. Based in central London, it is governed by a body of artists who are elected by their peers. It was founded in 1768 and though it isn’t always in step with the times, in the 1990s it hit a nerve with this popular exhibition that attracted over 300,000 visitors during its run at the RA. The media attention helped, with the BBC hailing it ‘a giant success’ and describing it as ‘a show of gory images of dismembered limbs and explicit pornography’.[6]
Sensation reminded the nation about how relevant art could be. ‘For better or for worse, Sensation put British art on the map,’ wrote Gregor Muir, author of Lucky Kunst: The Rise and Fall of Young British Art (2009). ‘Nowhere has embraced contemporary art in quite the same way Britain has. Everyone from cab drivers to politicians was talking about a group of young artists. It felt like an opening up of art. Suddenly it wasn’t elitist.’[7] With the attention it generated and the vast visitor numbers, the exhibition proved that the public was interested in contemporary art and wanted to see more of it. Sensation helped to whet the public’s appetite for the opening of Tate Modern three years later, in 2000. It also made the YBAs international stars.
Although not all the artists whose work was featured in Sensation were looking to provoke, Jake and Dinos Chapman are among those YBAs who use controversy as their modus operandi. These art-world ‘bad boys’ were born and bred in London and are purposefully offensive in their art, making work that explores the nature of violence and taboos, such as pornography. Employing a noxious infantile humour, they reduce the depravity that they create in their work into a bad joke. They have been fascinated with the work of Francisco Goya from early on in their career, using the Old Master’s work as a source of inspiration for composition and subject matter. For The Disasters of Everyday Life (2017), the Chapmans turn to Goya’s revered series of prints, Disasters of War (1810–20). These chronicled the violence that swept through Spain in the early nineteenth century and depict rape, mutilation and famine, among other horrors. In many cases, Goya himself had witnessed the disasters.
In this work, the Chapmans have collaged directly on to Goya’s original prints with mundane aspects of everyday existence, pointing to the existential horror of daily life.
Utilising the damning truthfulness of Goya’s prints, the Chapmans explore our learned indifference to violence and the hypocrisy of being shocked by a work of art but, to a large extent, accepting the news of wars and destruction as an inevitable part of life. The repetitiveness in the acts of violence depicted also breeds apathy. One might scrutinise the first of the defaced prints, and perhaps the second, but will rarely give equal time to all of them, having understood and internalised the violence as a given and affording but a passing glance to subsequent works.
In 2017, the brothers presented a new series of bronze sculptures, Life and Death Vests, which are based on images found online of both real and fake suicide vests worn by terrorists. One such suicide vest, presented in the exhibition, is modelled on a Hollywood prop from the 1998 film Rush Hour starring Jackie Chan. Much attention has been given to the detail of the sculpture, which is life-size and realistic in appearance. However, the formal structure of the Life and Death Vest works resemble the many torso sculptures of the classical period, such as the Hellenistic Gaddi Torso. ‘There are not many artists who could triangulate Jackie Chan, terrorism, and classical sculpture, and leave the viewer feeling as if all three are uncomfortably close to their everyday experience,’ [8] wrote Tim Smith-Laing when the series was first exhibited in London.
Exhibiting works that grapple with issues which, although unpleasant, are of consequence and importance, has been a contributing factor in the increasing popularity of contemporary art. Moving on from mounting exhibitions of Minimalist and Conceptual art that many visitors found austere and impenetrable, institutions were now attracting new audiences by showing work that felt relevant again. These were works that continued the conversation of current affairs and echoed what was being reported in the news. The exhibiting institutions, whether galleries or museums, have gained in popularity, with art being the new activity of choice for weekend outings and for visiting tourists. Furthermore, the variety of art institutions in London cater to a wide audience, with all tastes and interests accounted for. Each of the London institutions has a role to play in the ecosystem, satisfying all aspects of artistic production. For example, the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) on the Mall shows experimental art, while the Serpentine Gallery’s mission is to champion new ideas in contemporary art. The National Portrait Gallery specialises in the depiction of the human form, and the National Gallery, the temple for the British national collection, focuses on Old Masters. Since 2000 and the opening of Tate Modern, contemporary art has been regarded as equal in importance to the art of the Old Masters and has become an integral part of London cultural life.
The prominence of public art in London is one of the city’s great assets. In addition to the vast number of historic monuments, there is a steady increase in examples of contemporary sculpture being commissioned and erected each year. In 2015, The Line, a dedicated sculpture trail, was opened, with a route that runs between Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park and the O2 stadium, following East London’s waterways and the line of the Greenwich Meridian, with around 20 sculptures to see en route. The unveiling of a sculpture by Gillian Wearing of politician and female-rights campaigner Millicent Fawcett in Parliament Square – the first woman in a space full of sculptures of men - caused much debate in the press, and residents and politicians alike expressed strong opinions on who should be added to the square and what the work might look like. Conrad Shawcross won a commission for the Francis Crick Institute near St Pancras station, where he installed Paradigm, one of London’s tallest sculptures, in 2016. The same year, Julian Opie’s video art Shaida Walking graced Carnaby Street with her eternal march. Contemporary art is visible on the streets, not just hidden away in museums and galleries, and Londoners have a sense of ownership over the work on view.
This is particularly true with the Fourth Plinth project in Trafalgar Square. One of four plinths in the square, the Fourth Plinth is in the northwest corner. Built in 1841, it was originally intended to hold an equestrian statue of William IV but remained empty due to insufficient funds. For over 150 years the fate of the plinth was debated. It stands in front of the National Gallery and in one of the most visited parts of London by locals and tourists alike. The Fourth Plinth project is run by the Mayor of London’s office and involves commissioning an artist to create a temporary sculpture for the plinth. Whenever a new sculpture is revealed, there is a sense of anticipation and it is the subject of lively debate in the press and on social media.
One of the most loved of the Fourth Plinth projects was that by Yinka Shonibare. For his commission, the British-Nigerian artist created a giant ship-in-a-bottle with sails made of his signature African-style fabrics, titled Nelson’s Ship in a Bottle (2010). Born in London, Shonibare moved to Nigeria when he was three years old, then returned to study at the Byam Shaw School of Art and Goldsmiths College. Growing up in Lagos had a profound influence on his practice. Shonibare’s works are almost always instantly recognisable through his use of brightly coloured batik textiles – ‘African fabrics’ – which he bought at London’s Brixton Market for many years. Though the fabrics are not intended to articulate a particular political message, Shonibare uses them to challenge assumptions of Western philosophical and artistic traditions. He cites the influence of philosophers Edward Said and Jacques Derrida on the exploration of themes of identity, colonialism and myth in his work.
Shonibare often creates figures dressed in eighteenth- or nineteenth-century costume made from these dazzling colourful textiles. He does so to highlight the history behind the origin of the fabrics. They were introduced to West Africa by Dutch merchants as recently as the 1880s. The Dutch mechanised Indonesian batik printmaking with the intention of selling it back to the Indonesians. However, the Indonesians were not keen on these mass-produced imports, preferring their own handmade original fabrics. Unsure about what to do with the textiles and wanting to save on the investment, the Dutch tried selling the textiles in West Africa. The fabrics grew in popularity, and over time Africans took ownership of the fabrics, integrating them into their cultures, with different patterns expressing specific identities. By using these fabrics, Shonibare is reviving this chapter of global history, and underlining the role of the West in shaping popular myths of cultural identity internationally. What are now commonly known as ‘African fabrics’ are, in fact, European.
In Planets in my Head, Young Geologist (2019), Shonibare is addressing the current global anxiety about the health of the planet. This is one in a series of sculptures that incorporate a globe-like form in the position of a head on a child’s body. All the children hold Western tools invented in the Age of Enlightenment, which were made to further a European-inspired understanding of the world. With Young Geologist, for example, the figure is looking through a theodolite, a surveying instrument used to measure horizontal and vertical angles. The sculptures are re-imagining the bodies of knowledge to create a new globalised perspective. Using child-like forms, Shonibare indicates an innocence in the action which is both forgiving and scathing. No longer children, we should know better. As Shonibare explains: ‘The Enlightenment period is a time of being liberated from the Dark Ages, from the shackles of tradition into the empirical methods of science and rationality. Our traditional notions of democracy were refined in this period and emerged in the Age of Enlightenment alongside the ideals of liberalism. However, it is precisely the arrogance of liberal democracy that has been used as a justification for a number of wars ... The arguments are familiar from a colonial period: they, the other, are “uncivilized” people and we, enlightened Europeans that we apparently are, will endeavour to enlighten them.’[9]
Shonibare’s work, although distinctive and striking, does not employ the shock value used by some of his fellow YBAs in their practice. He shows that contemporary art can be thought-provoking without being provocative. Like Hirst and Collishaw, Shonibare too studied at Goldsmiths and was one of the artists exhibited at Sensation. It might seem that there was a preoccupation among the YBAs to create sensational work removed from traditional methods in their art making, but there were still artists working as painters, namely Gary Hume or Jason Martin whose work featured in Sensation.
The rise of the YBAs appeared all-consuming during their dominance of the art scene, although there was, and still is, much opposition to the trajectory on which they set art in the UK. Many considered the shock tactics that some of the artists were using to be base and lacking in depth and nuance. Criticism came in many forms but none as engaging as from the artist Grayson Perry. For many years an outsider to the art world, Perry works with craft techniques such as ceramics and tapestries to create his work. He surprised the art world in 2003 when he won the Turner Prize while still a relatively unknown artist. He has now become a television celebrity, having hosted documentaries that explore gender and national identity. He has crafted his own identity very carefully and is himself instantly recognisable when seen cycling through the streets of London, largely because he dresses in very eccentric female clothes. When dressed as his alter ego, Claire, he wears Bo-Peep style frocks in bright blues and with splendid ruffles, or sparkling mini-dresses and platform knee-high boots, his make-up applied to surreal perfection. Perry has taken the exploration of gender and identity to a personal level.
Perry claims to make art for people who like art, and is not looking to push the boundaries of what art is. He is comfortable with the classic crafts to convey his artistic expression. Of the avant-garde favoured by the art establishment, he said in 2013: ‘It’s rather tired and insular. It’s talking to itself a lot of the time. I embrace the middle ground, because curiously it has more edge to it than the cutting edge. It has been a weirdly neglected path for the audience of contemporary art. I’m making art not for people who don’t like art, but for people who are interested but maybe alienated by the more esoteric pieces. I’m addressing them, and I think that’s more interesting than being yet another avant-garde try-hard.’[10]
Regarding himself as an artist for the people, Perry investigates subjects of identity and gender in his work and how these themes might play out in society. His pieces don’t offer a definitive answer but signal an investigation or exploration, an attempt to represent the complex scope of our collective intertwined fabric. Though he did not set out to be a potter, Perry creates many of his pieces from clay, updating the traditional technique of ceramics to modern-day tastes. On the surface of his pots, Perry draws and applies a range of techniques such as photographic transfers that, though themed, are like a stream of consciousness. The choice of images may be influenced by what he has experienced on the day of creation or, for example, what is happening in the news. He will often flush out hypocrisies and with fearless candour both celebrates and criticises events as he sees them. An excellent example of this is
Sex and Drugs and Earthenware (1995), where the artist has drawn portraits of Michael Jackson and Kurt Cobain and placed a transfer with an image of himself with a sex advert underneath it on the reverse. Here, an elegant, traditional Chinese vase has been decorated in the Punk spirit. Both celebrities had been recently featured in the news, Jackson regarding his alleged sex abuse of children and Cobain who had recently killed himself. Both were idealised by the masses, some of whom tolerated Jackson’s crimes and viewed Cobain’s mental-health problems as entertainment’. Cynically, Perry positions a can of Pepsi cola beside them, for which the advertising strapline at the time the vase was made was ‘A choice of a new generation’.
On the reverse, in true Perry style, the photo of himself dressed as a respectable-looking woman in a white blouse and long skirt has a ‘lonely-hearts’ sex advert underneath which reads: ‘TV gorgeous sissy seeks position as maid to strict lady. Loved b. and d. rubber, humiliation, cock, torture, will change my body for you.’ Perry combines sexual fantasy with gritty realism, and it is unclear if the purpose of the advert is to ridicule or criticise the social structures that permitted these two celebrities to continue operating despite their problematic behaviour.
In 2014, the National Portrait Gallery held an exhibition of Perry’s work titled Who Are You?, in which the artist populated the permanent-collection galleries with his pots and tapestries. The permanent collection charts the history of Britain through portraiture, including images of the monarchy and significant people who have contributed to the culture and history of Britain in the past and present. It was an apt location for Perry to have exhibited his work, which challenges the history of the nation as well as how we have chosen to depict it. In an interesting development in his recent work, Perry teamed up with British luxury leather company Osprey London and designed a limited-edition handbag that features Alan Measles, his teddy bear mascot, as the clasp. In this series, Perry is ridiculing the culture of spending large sums of money on frivolities such as handbags. By selling the bags himself, he is acknowledging his own success and wealth, and his own role as part of consumer culture or the ‘Establishment’, as he refers to it.
We finish the exhibition with two artists who are currently attracting much critical attention in London. They are removed from the YBA conversation as they are part of the next generation of producers whose practice doesn’t self-consciously address the work of its predecessors. Annie Morris studied at Central Saint Martins before completing her studies at the École de Beaux-Arts, Paris, and then the Slade School of Fine Art in London. Perhaps her most recognisable work is her Stack series (from 2014), sculptures assembled of spheres threaded one on top of the other, each in a different colour.
The series was inspired, as is all her work, by her personal experience, her devoted love of pigment and colour, and in response to a stillbirth, with her grief driving her to create. Morris is, in essence, a colourist, finding joy in pure pigment. As she explains: ‘I have always been obsessed with pigments since I was a student at the Beaux-Arts in Paris, where I used to throw pigment at my canvases and scratch into the canvases, trying to create a way of keeping the pigment raw, to make it look like it never dried, that kind of fragility.’[11] In her sculpture, she has managed to achieve the powdery effect she describes, with each sphere appearing to be coated with a delicate layer of pigment. To touch it would agitate the pigment and destroy the work, or so it seems.
In her tapestry works, Morris stitches her frantic drawings into the wall hangings, creating an image which is at once freehand and also deliberate. Though the work might seem spontaneous, it involves a laborious process of sewing the lines into the fabric. She makes abstract forms, cyphers and symbols, creating her own iconography. The motifs reappear from tapestry to tapestry. The line is broken and fragile. Looking at the tapestry, one’s eyes dart from one object to the next. There is nowhere to rest, nowhere that calms the viewer. The restlessness is all-consuming.
If Morris is on an internal exploration of her experiences of womanhood, drawing from within, Idris Khan, Morris’s husband, funnels the external into his art. Khan was born in Birmingham and grew up in Walsall, a market town in the West Midlands. He initially studied photography at the University of Derby, and although his practice has branched out to different media, his interest in time persists, the camera being the means of capturing a moment. Khan studied for a Master’s degree at the Royal College of Art, and he considers this time as formative. London, the RCA, and all that was suddenly readily available to him as an artist overwhelmed him. ‘For the first year of the Royal College I kind of stopped making photographs, having gone there always wanting to make pictures. Suddenly I was surrounded by all these incredibly intelligent people who were exposing me to new influences … it was almost like this overload of culture, of information, and I didn’t quite know how to process it into my art.’[12]
To look into Khan’s practice is to open oneself up to a plethora of source material. He draws on his interest in philosophy, music, art, poetry, religion, culture, architecture and literature, and uses them as materials in his work. One of the first pieces of Khan’s that drew critical attention was every ... page of the Holy Qur’an (2004). Here, instead of drawing on the Qur’an as a source of inspiration, he uses it as a material in his work. Khan photographed each page of the holy book and layered one image on top of another as transparencies. The work took two months to complete. The resulting effect is that of an illegible pattern, a soft fraying of lines that is geometric and abstract. Conceptually, one is looking at multiple points in time at once. Like Schrödinger’s cat, Khan’s work is both dead and alive at the same time. The book is there for us to see, but we cannot see it. It speaks of an ambivalence to his birth religion, an anxiety about his past but still a need to connect with it. He is finding his own way of celebrating his cultural tradition.
Using the process of layering information to create an abstract is an ongoing theme investigated by Khan. In the installation of large-scale work Burnt Wood (2021), we see him repeat the process of layering but with sheet music. Should one try to read the music to play it, it would be impossible. The music has been transformed into visual noise. Because of the portrait-format shape of sheet music and the blocks that the process has created, together with the blue ground Khan has chosen, there is a clear nod to the work of Mark Rothko and the Abstract Expressionists. The notes float on the surface and, although the music has been destroyed and rendered illegible, Khan has created something else, a third space.
In 2010, Khan suffered two great losses with the death of his mother and, shortly after, his wife’s miscarriage. Trying to process his heartache, Khan turned to his art. He started writing down his feelings and then made a rubber stamp from that text which he stamped repetitively in a circle. The repetitive, cyclic pattern was cathartic and therapeutic for Khan, much like a chant. It was the start of his series of radiating stamped glass works, in which he layers sheets of glass to give another dimension of depth to the pattern. As one can see in Bright Impossibility (2019), like a burst of colour, the occasional phrase is visible, resembling a mandala radiating from a point of origin.
There are many more artists we could have included in this exhibition. The list is, in fact, endless. There are groups and subgroups within London, each occupying a plot in the landscape that comprises the London art scene. In 2021 the Turner Prize announced that the award that year would go to an art collective rather than an individual artist, in order to support the rise of group artistic production. Some may argue that the prize is no longer relevant and will look instead to solo exhibitions at the major spaces for current trends; others tire of the big names and turn their attention to the more experimental spaces in London. Credit is also due to the commercial galleries and the tireless work they do in promoting their artists, hosting memorable events and putting on great shows, all of which feed into the ecosystem.
Whether London is still the centre of the art world might be disputed. Many claim that the idea of a physical centre has been rendered obsolete with the advent of the internet. If there is one thing that we have learned from the Covid-19 online experiences since 2020, however, it is that technology has done little to replace the joy of visiting a museum and contemplating a work of art, and that we crave seeing art in the flesh. The internet has helped to disseminate the educational aspects of the museum, but it has not replaced it. And though other regions might develop to create their own art environment, they will inevitably be aware of what is happening in the spaces in London. London has withstood the test of time and learned to regenerate. It celebrates its heritage without relying too heavily on it, investing in future generations but giving space and funding for the creative industries to grow and thrive. It involves its citizens, and though not all will be members of the art-going public or read the articles on art in the culture sections of the local papers, they will defend their existence because they know that the arts are what makes London, London.
[1] ‘The Economic Contribution of the Arts’, The Creative Industries, 2 March 2021, https://www.thecreativeindustries.co.uk/facts-figures/industries-arts-culture-arts-culture-facts-and-figures-the-economic-contribution-of-the-arts (May 2021).
[2] Michael Craig-Martin, interview by Brian Sherwin, ‘Art Space Talk: Michael Craig-Martin’, My Artspace, 16 August 2007 http://myartspace-blog.blogspot.com/2007/08/art-space-talk-michael-craig-martin.html (May 2021).
[3] Ann Gallagher, Damien Hirst, exh. cat., Tate Modern, London, 2012, p.13.
[4] Rachel Campbell-Johnston, ‘Mat Collishaw, the man who turned a church in Surrey into a work of art’, The Times, 8 April 2021, https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/mat-collishaw-interview-0jg59vlqd (May 2021).
[5] Robert Johnston, ‘50 Best Dressed Men in Britain’, GQ Magazine, 5 January 2015, gq-magazine.com, https://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/gallery/best-dressed-men-2015 (May 2021).
[6] ‘Entertainment: Sensational hit for Royal Academy’, BBC News, 30 December 1997, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/43401.stm (May 2021).
[7] Gregor Muir, ‘The Controversy of the Sensation Art Exhibition’, Widewalls, 7 January 2020, https://www.widewalls.ch/magazine/sensation-art-exhibition (May 2021).
[8] Tim Smith-Laing, ‘The new Chapman brothers show is delightful and disturbing – and you need to see it’, Apollo Magazine, 2 October 2017, https://www.apollo-magazine.com/chapman-brothers-london-show-delightful-and-disturbing/ (May 2021).
[9] Yinka Shonibare, interview by Anthony Downey, in Rachel Kent (ed.), Yinka Shonibare MBE, Prestel Verlag, Munich, London, New York 2014, p.49.
[10] Quotation from Perry’s 2013 Reith Lectures in 2013, in Simon Hattenstone, ‘Grayson Perry: “Just because you don’t have a dress on doesn’t stop you being a tranny”’, Guardian, 8 October 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/oct/04/grayson-perry-dress-tranny-art-who-are-you-tv (May 2021).
[11] Annie Morris, quoted in Gilly Hopper, ‘From the Desk of … Annie Morris’, Citizen Femme, 30 October 2020, https://citizen-femme.com/2020/10/30/from-the-desk-of-annie-morris/.
[12]Idris Khan, quoted in Thomas Marks and Deborah Robinson, Idris Khan: A World Within, Hatje Cantz Verlag GmbH, Berlin 2017, p.126.