"In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" at "Tate Britain

Art in America, May, 2004 by David Ebony

An ambitious collaborative effort by Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas and Angus Fairhurst, "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" competes with Olafur Eliasson's recent Weather Project" at late Modern as the most striking installation in London this season. It is the first such project by the Brit-pack trio of "Sensation" veterans, who have been friends since attending Goldsmiths College together in London in the mid-1980s. Curated by the Tate's Gregor Muir and Clarde Wallis, the show, on view through May 31, features more than a dozen recent works by each artist, some created especially for the exhibition.

Borrowed from the 1968 heavy-metal hit by Iron Butterfly, the show's title, a dopey, mock-phonetic rendering of "in the Garden of Eden," reflects the exhibition's twisted biblical theme, based more or less on the expulsion from paradise. Hardly breaking new ground here, Hirst and Lucas are represented by some of their largest and most extravagant, although not necessarily best, sculptures and 2-D works to date. Among the major new Hirst pieces on view, Adam and Eve Exposed (2004) features a large vitrine containing two mechanized resin figures lying on hospital gurneys; they appear to be breathing. Except for the genitals visible through fig-leaf-shaped holes, the figures are completely covered in blue paper sheets. The Hat Makes the Man (after Max Ernst), 2004, is a large 3-D painted-bronze version of Ernst's eponymous 1920 collage. Hirst's most engaging piece here, The Pursuit of Oblivion (2004), consisting of a huge aquarium stocked with live tropical fish, a beef carcass, strings of sausages and an open black umbrella, alludes to Francis Bacon's famous Painting 1946.

Among Lucas's over-the-top works in the show is Christ You Know It Ain't Easy (2003), showing a life-size figure of a crucified Jesus covered with thousands of cigarettes; it hangs against a red-painted cross of St. George. Even more bombastic, The Man Who Sold the World (2004) features a real freight truck cab. An open door reveals the cab's interior covered with photos of pinup girls clipped from magazines, and a seat outfitted with a mechanical prosthetic arm that mimics a masturbating truck driver.

Fairhurst, showing haunting, black-painted bronzes of life-size gorillas and mirrored ponds surrounded by black reeds, manages to upstage his better known colleagues. The real star of the show, however, is the installation itself. Inducing a kind of mild vertigo as one steps into the exhibition area, several walls of the gallery are covered with artist-designed wallpaper. Hirst's dizzying, kaleidoscopic butterfly pattern serves as a back-drop for a group of enormous new paintings made with butterfly wings. Fairhurst covered several walls with digitally altered photos of a forest with bright red and blue trees, and Lucas's mural features blowups of a take-out pizza ad, with gobs of gooey cheese hanging off the slices. Similar photo images cover her sculpture All We Are Saying Is Give Pizza Chance, a large dirigible or bomblike object suspended from the ceiling.

--David Ebony