Young British art: Kate Bush on the YBA sensation

ArtForum, Oct, 2004 by Kate Bush

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Back in 1997, after the explosion of British shows abroad, and just when it seemed that YBA surely must have exhausted its appeal, Charles Saatchi's "Sensation" at the Royal Academy whipped up yet another media storm to lodge the phenomenon seemingly ever more firmly into national public consciousness. Tracey Emin's coming-of-age as the public's favorite artist--her place in the nation's affections secured by Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995, 1995, the tent (destroyed in the Momart fire) appliqued with dedications to her lovers, her brother, a grandmother, a teddy bear, and her aborted fetus--and new Saatchi finds like Ron Mueck and his uncanny Dead Dad, 1996-97, created added media value. The debacle over Harvey's vandalized painting was matched in volume only by mayor Rudolph Giuliani's loudly offended sensibilities on another side of the Atlantic, as the show arrived in Brooklyn in October 1999. But by 1998 even the Saatchi machine recognized that the media's fascination could not be held forever, and there was a short-lived attempt to manufacture a new "movement" centered on the group of artists that Martin Maloney had gathered in South London at his apartment-cum-gallery Lost in Space. So-called New Neurotic Realists like Peter Davies, Dexter Dalwood, and Luke Gottelier substituted YBA's highly produced spectacle for a homespun aesthetic, offbeat subjects, and a more modest demeanor, but without, unsurprisingly, garnering much attention from the mainstream press. The opening of the new Saatchi Gallery at County Hall in 2003 generated flurries of coverage, particularly when a whiff of competition was scented between Charles Saatchi and Nicholas Serota, the Tate director. But now that the space--hovering above the riverside's hot-dog stands and amusement arcades--has evolved into a visitor attraction more akin to its neighbors the London Aquarium and Dali Universe than to the cool and cultural Tate Modern, the media is relatively subdued.

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Post-Momart, it is clear that the pact YBA forged with the press has been a Faustian one, but in its heyday, from 1992 onward, it was thrilling to behold the impact of Hirst's media-management skills: British contemporary art appeared in a mass-cultural landscape for the first time since the '60s, and Hirst was hailed as the new David Hockney. In order to make that transition into both press and popular consciousness, Hirst and his contemporaries cleverly nurtured their artistic image as avant-garde while jettisoning anything that smacked of theory or intentionality or critique--in particular the forbidding vocabulary and deconstructive impulses of '80s art. Once their work was purged of inaccessible concept, they filled it with accessible imagery and approachable narratives. The popular commercial media, for instance, provided inspiration for Gillian Wearing's early work influenced by '70s reality television and Sarah Lucas's appropriated tabloid spreads, but generally most YBAs (in common, it must be said, with most artists everywhere half a century after "This Is Tomorrow") continued to reference both high and low, as though oblivious to any distinction between them. For the Chapmans, it's Goya and, not or, the zombie flick; for Gary Hume, Fra Filippo Lippi and Kate Moss. Unlike Pop art proper, YBA's interest has been in the debris of quotidian life, not the high end of modern consumerism. Where Richard Hamilton immortalized Mick Jagger's transgressive cool, Hume gave us the eternally cheesy Radio One DJ Tony Blackburn. Where Warhol fixated on Campbell's perfectly condensed brand, Lucas opted for shapeless Spam and messy doner kebabs. Emin's sticky bed, Noble and Webster's artfully piled rubbish, Landy's shredded possessions, Billingham's disheveled family life: YBA tends to be filled with the imagery of either an entropic everyday or--evidenced by the preponderance of serial killers, divided beings, mannequins, and limp flesh--an iconography drawn from popular gothic fiction and film. With an existential scheme split into simple antitheses of life and death, good and evil, pleasure and pain, YBA managed to titillate and fascinate a public unschooled in the finer points of cultural theory, without--and this was its "Brilliance!"--losing the interest of the art cognoscenti.