Saluting "Sensation" - exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum of Art

Art in America, Dec, 1999 by Linda Nochlin

Despite the continuing controversy over the "Sensation" exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum of Art [see "Front Page," p. 23], most of the arguments have centered, quite properly, on the issue of First Amendment fights rather than on the quality of the show itself. First things first--the arrogance of a mayor who feels he can single-handedly dictate what art is to be shown in our museums needs to be addressed. But aside from Metropolitan Museum of Art director Philippe de Montebello, who disdainfully dismissed the whole show in a New York Times op-ed piece, comparing the artistic elevation of Lorenzo Lotto's peeing putto to the debasement of the human body in a nude by Kiki Smith (an artist of great achievement who is neither in "Sensation" nor British, hence irrelevant to de Montebello's argument), no one but Peter Schjeldahl in the New Yorker and Jerry Saltz in the Village Voice seem to have taken on the actual work on view in Brooklyn.

Yes, some of the work in "Sensation" is shocking--sensational, in fact, both in form and in content. But it is hardly more shocking--and, in my opinion, considerably more original--than many of the titillating nudes by Balthus or Lucian Freud, both of whom have been certified as Important by major retrospectives at de Montebello's own museum. And, after all, is it really so terrible to shock on the taxpayer's money when the shock resides solely in the realm of representation? No one is being beaten up at the Brooklyn Museum, no one is forced at gunpoint to deny his or her religious beliefs. In fact, no one is being forced to see the show at all.

Despite the charges of elitism leveled at "Sensation" by William Satire, it seems to me that the work in question is readily available in most cases, even in-your-face in others. And them are some wonderful pieces to contemplate, and a rich variety of styles and moods and viewpoints on display. Take, for example, Richard Billingham's group of color photos of his family. Large-scale images mounted on aluminum, they give a new meaning to family values. In one, the photographer's parents eat a sloppy meal before the television (Mom is wearing ear muffs, weighs more than she should and is prominently tattooed); the family pets are much in evidence. In another, a cat flies through the air as Dad lists to the right against a background of intriguing complexity; in still another, the portly but sexy Mom reclines on the couch in a flowery shift, her hands behind her head, an odalisque of the housing estate. Beautiful and ugly at once, richly decorative in their documentary accuracy, Billingham's images call into question the very notion of beauty and certainly that of the ideal family. The work of Walker Evans, Diane Arbus and, more recently, Nan Goldin may have provided inspiration, but the vision of intimate life is entirely his own. And speaking of the family, what could be more shocking--and more accurate--than Ron Mueck's supernaturalistic child-sized effigy of his father, Dead Dad? Stark naked, unbearably accurate, this silicone-and-acrylic sculpture cruelly objectifies the change in psychic scale brought about by the loss of a parent, when the child indeed becomes father to the man.

The body is on view in a wide variety of startling forms throughout "Sensation." Most prominent are the huge, virtuoso surfaces of Jenny Saville's female nudes, which occupy almost the whole of the oversize canvases she works on. From one point of view, you might see them as homages to Lucian Freud, but from another you might think them hostile parodies. With exquisite delicacy, Saville mockingly probes the texture of female flesh, leaving not one acre unplowed by her shameless brush. In one case, the vastly foreshortened nude is overlaid by a kind of contour map, as though the image of landscape and that of a woman's body had converged in the mind of the painter. This is an old trope, incidentally. The Surrealist Andre Masson created a landscape version of Courbet's Origin of the World to use as an innocent cover-up for that erotic painting when it came into the possession of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan in the 1940s. It might be worth recalling that Courbet's shocking Origin had its first public showing at the Brooklyn Museum in the "Courbet Reconsidered" exhibition of 1986--without any protest from City Hall, or anywhere else, as I remember. The painting now hangs in the Musee d'Orsay.

Saville's virtuoso canvases remind us just how prominent painting is in the "Sensation" show. Saville, Fiona Rae, Richard Patterson, Gary Hume, Marcus Harvey and the notorious Chris Ofili are all painters, deploying a wide range of styles and techniques. At a time when installation and video occupy pride of place in the contemporary field, it is interesting to see how new oil or acrylic on canvas can be. At the same time, it would be a real mistake to equate the use of oil on canvas with a return to tradition. On the contrary, it is as though these young painters resort to oil paint precisely to dis the lofty pretensions of painting in the past. Many of the canvases are, at once, references to and wildly excessive parodies of even the most "extreme" and "sensational" work of the past. Take Marcus Harvey's Julie from Hull, for instance, which overlays bold de Kooning-style, Ab-Ex facture on a female nude outlined in graphic black. Probably derived from a porno magazine, this figure has contours identical to those of Courbet's lower belly study. Martin Maloney's deliberately primitivizing Rave specifies that it is after Poussin's Triumph of Pan, just as his Hey Good Looking is after the latter's Choice of Hercules. Both are really cartoons writ large in streaky bright color, bad taste "redeemed" by classical reference.