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September 1997, the venerable Royal Academy is full of rotting cow heads, pickled sharks, and portraits of mass murderers. Not everyone is happy about this. Some people are very upset. The Evening Standard arts correspondent Brian Sewell is very upset. But if he'd been paying more attention he should have seen this coming from a long way off.
In Sensationalists:The Bad Girls and Boys of British Art (BBC2/iPlayer, originally aired during September and October of 2022) we hear the story of how young British artists (YBAs) went from the squats and the dole queues at the height of the Thatcher era (when the Tory government were trying to run down the NHS and replace it with private health care for the rich - sound familiar?) to the heart of the very establishment - and beyond.
There's a lot of talking heads on standby to narrate that story:- Rachel Whiteread, Antony Gormley, Jeremy Deller, Gavin Turk, Michael Craig-Martin, Damien Hirst, Michael Landy, Gary Hume, Norman Rosenthal, Sue Tilley, and Glenn Brown from the world of art and, from the world of music, Alex James of Blur, Goldie, and Rick Smith and Karl Hyde from Underworld. Even Janet Street-Porter and celebrity restaurateur Oliver Peyton get in on the action.
As for the soundtrack, it's a fairly comprehensive run through the sort of music you may have been listening to from the mid-eighties to about ten years ago. Take a deep breath:- Air, Battles, Big Audio Dynamite, Bjork, Blancmange, Blueboy (Remember Me, as if you recall any of their other songs), Blur, The Chemical Brothers, Cornershop, The Cure, Daft Punk, The Dandy Warhols, Deee-Lite, Depeche Mode, EMF, The Farm, Fatboy Slim, Frankie Goes To Hollywood, Franz Ferdinand, Garbage, Goldie, Happy Mondays, The Human League, Inner City, Inspiral Carpets, Jesus Jones Justice, KLF, Annie Lennox, M People, M/A/R/R/S, Malcolm McLaren (Double Dutch is a tune), Massive Attack, My Bloody Valentine, Orbital, PiL, Primal Scream, Public Enemy, Pulp, Roxy Music, Run DMC, Saint Etienne, Scritti Politti, Simple Minds, Sleeper, Stereo MCs, The Stone Roses, The Stranglers, Suede, Sugababes, Supergrass,Tears For Fears, The The, Tubeway Army, The White Stripes, White Town, and Yello.
There's so much of it that, at times, it feels like Sensationalists is more about music than it is about art. Perhaps that's because so many of the YBAs behaved like, and were treated like, rock stars. But Sensationalists starts somewhere far removed from the cocaine snorting and champagne swigging rock star style parties that would come to be ubiquitous for some of those in the scene.
They begin with the miners' strike of 1984-85. At a time when British cities were dying as Thatcher and her friends sold everything off. The art world of London at the time was ridiculously elite. You couldn't, as I recall, just walk into a gallery like you can now. Even if you felt bold enough to do so you would be made to feel unwelcome.
Music was far more available. That's why musicians, rather than artists, had far more to say about the miners' strike. The doors of the music world weren't closed like those of the art world. Especially in the case of punk, post-punk, and ska bands like The Specials. When Michael Clark danced with, and to, the music of The Fall the worlds of leftfield music and highbrow culture came closer together. If punk ethos could be applied to ballet then why not to art?
It was at Goldsmiths' in New Cross where many of what would become the YBAs met. Under the tutelage of Michael Craig-Martin were the likes of Michael Landy and Fiona Rae as well as the star pupil, Damien Hirst. A very boozy Damien Hirst.
Alongside Craig-Martin and Michael Clark, another big influence was performance artist Leigh Bowery. My friend Richard used to tell a story of Bowery doing a show where he appeared to climb out of someone's stomach dressed as Orville the duck and then sang I Wish I Could Fly to an audience one would imagine to be as amused as they were shocked.
With the rise of the popularity of hip-hop and the rise of acid house, parties started taking place in abandoned warehouses and often they would continue until 6am. But still very few people in the UK saw modern art as having a place in this new, and exciting, cultural environment.
It was the Grey Organisation who tried to change this. For the shame, I'd never heard of them before this programme. They'd throw cans of grey paint over the windows and doors of stuffy Cork Street galleries. Eventually they were arrested for this and banned from entering central London. The slack was picked up by quite an unlikely person.
Tory ad campaign guru Charles Saatchi turned out to be the game changer. He'd already bought work by big American names like Andy Warhol, Jeff Koons, and Carl Andre and he'd started to collect modern British art too. When he ran out of space for it all in hi St John's Wood home, he opened a gallery on nearby Boundary Road. I visited it. I'm in the story now!
The initial Saatchi Gallery, according to Jeremy Deller, looked "like a spaceship had landed in London". Other galleries took notice. Or at least Anthony D'Offray in the West End did, starting to exhibit the same artists as Saatchi. Hirst, not yet a big name, was tasked with serving champagne to guests at openings.
It was the Freeze exhibition of 1988, held in an abandoned fire station in Surrey Docks, that was the first big collective show of the YBAs. Hirst, Rae, Hume, Landy, Sarah Lucas, and Matt Collishaw all exhibited there. Margaret Thatcher had set up an Enterprise Allowance scheme to tackle youth unemployment (or, more truthfully, to manipulate the unemployment figures) and many up and coming artists, like Rachel Whiteread, exploited this. They could live on £40 a week and still have plenty of free time to make art without having to go to work.
The Chisenhale Gallery, near Victoria Park in Tower Hamlets, showed Rachel Whiteread's Ghost in 1990 and Hirst decided to try a different tack and started making work out of dead flies and cow's heads. Work like A Thousand Years.
Rachel Whiteread - Ghost (1990)
Damien Hirst - A Thousand Years (1990)
Things started to change. Both in politics (by the end of the year Thatcher had left Downing Street and been replaced by John Major) and in the world of British art. Charles Saatchi funded a fisherman in Queensland to hunt and kill a shark so that Damien Hirst could pickle it and display it. The show it featured in was a group show called Young British Artists which, of course, gave the YBAs their name.
Sarah Lucas used vegetables and other food stuffs to make crude sexual artworks that spoke about the way women's bodies are often described by men. Two fried egg tits and a kebab vagina may not be subtle but it's effective in getting its point across.
Sarah Lucas - Two Fried Eggs and a Kebab (1992)
Michael Landy - Closing Down Sale (1992)
Michael Landy's Closing Down Sale does for consumerism what Lucas' eggs and kebab do for sexual politics. Make a pretty simple point effectively if, to the minds of many, not particularly gracefully. Many of the artists involved in the scene were now living in run down and relatively desolate parts of East London. The rents were cheap and many of the properties were converted from big old warehouses.
Perfect for artists and perfect for hosting parties too. Specifically all night long post-pub parties. With all the partying going on, it's amazing any art ever got made but Sarah Lucas and Tracey Emin even got round to opening up a shop. A shop of sorts. A shop that sold humorous low cost parodies of art alongside actual art and complete tat. It wasn't always easy to see what artefacts belonged in what category.
The YBAs had become big news now. More established galleries had started to show them and Hirst was even representing the UK at the Venice Biennale (with Mother and Child) and directing the video for Blur's number one single Country House. Charles Saatchi was starting to look for the next generation of YBAs and Rachel Whiteread, in 1993, unveiled a piece of public art in Mile End, House, that won her both the Turner Prize for best young British art and a K Foundation prize for being the worst British artist.
Damien Hirst - Mother and Child (1993)
Rachel Whiteread - House (1993)
There are some weird jumps in the timeline of Sensationalists and though the show rattles along there are times when it feels like some important link has been edited out. So we go from Whiteread's sculpture to a section about unlicensed raves attracting huge crowds and how John Major's government didn't like that at all.
There's even an aside to remind us that The Blue Note in Hoxton Square was the best place in London to go to hear drum and bass. Which was the next new and exciting development in music. Many of the newly wealthy YBAs however, preferred to hang around in Soho. At the Groucho Club or even in Quo Vadis, Hirst's own restaurant.
People now wanted to be seen hanging out with these artists. People like David Bowie, Laurence Fishburne, and The Spice Girls! When Labour won, by a landslide, the general election of 1997 it felt like things could only get better and, for the YBAs, things certainly did. New Labour co-opted the YBAs as surely as they did Britpop and the now laughable concept of Cool Britannia.
Back at the RA, Normal Rosenthal suggested an exhibition based on Charles Saatchi's collection. An exhibition called Sensation. The Daily Mail, not completely unreasonably in this instance, got particularly vexxed about Marcus Harvey's portrait of Moors murderer Myra Hindley. A portrait made up of hand prints of small children.
Marcus Harvey - Myra (1995)
The piece was defaced and daubed with paint and four Royal Academians resigned in protest. At the opening Gavin Turk, rather patronisingly, dressed as a tramp and pissed himself. Interestingly, Marcus Harvey (whose work caused the biggest outrage at the time) hasn't been remembered as well as other artists that were part of the show.
Jake & Dinos Chapman, Emin, Hirst, Lucas, Turk, Whiteread, Gillian Wearing and, perhaps from a slightly different world, the likes of Ron Mueck, Chris Ofili, Mona Hatoum, and Yinka Shonibare. Emin's Everyone I Have Ever Slept With got a few talking. It was a tent with the appliqued names of everyone she had ever slept with. Though, and I've only just found out, she does mean literally 'slept with'. Not had sex with.
Tracey Emin - Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995 (1995)
Emin made herself even more infamous by appearing, absolutely pissed out of her head, on a Channel 4 panel debate, Is Painting Dead?, in 1997. The next morning she woke up to a slew of messages about her drunken television appearance but she had no memory of it whatsoever. Her unmade bed, complete with empty bottles of vodka, used condoms, and menstrual blood stains caused further fuss.
Emin, though, was interesting and had something to say. Hirst, by this point, was mostly hanging out at the Groucho with Alex James and Keith Allen. As Fat Les they put out the football song Vindaloo and Alex James remembers it being more successful than anything Blur ever did.
Perhaps more positive news came when Gateshead Council commissioned an initially reluctant Antony Gormley, he didn't do "motorway art", to make the Angel of the North. Easily viewable from either the A1 of the East Coast Main Line, the Angel of the North was a hit from the start and remains one of the most popular, perhaps the most popular, piece of public art in the whole country.
It's rather lovely that it seems to have been adopted as art for the people. A detail that was underlined when Newcastle Utd fans draped the Angel in 30ft Alan Shearer no.9 football shirt. The YBAs, and it's not often that you think of Gormley as one of them - he was 48 when he made the Angel of the North, were becoming globally famous.
At the 1999 Venice Biennale, Gary Hume represented the UK, Pulp played live, and everyone gorged on wine and canapes. But in London, where it all began, modern art didn't actually have a permanent home. Nicholas Serota changed that when he identified an 'invisible' building on the South Bank of the Thames, the former Bankside Power Station, and set about turning it into Tate Modern.
I lived in London before Tate Modern opened and must have walked by Bankside Power Station many times and I barely registered it. If I registered it at all. It seems crazy now but when it's described as 'invisible' I know what they're getting at. You can't miss it now. When it opened, in the year 2000, the Queen did the honours.
As one British institution began its life, another soon reached its end. C&A are actually Dutch but were once a mainstay in any British town centre. In 2001 they ceased trading in the country. I'm not sure how much this influenced Michael Landy in his next art project but it was certainly an impressive, maybe even foolish, piece of work.
Mark Wallinger - State Britain (2017)
Lucian Freud - Benefit Supervisor Sleeping (2008)
Damien Hirst - Olympic Spin Painting (2012)
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