in memory of Karsten Schubert and Angus Fairhurst A Pot of History MYBA At the beginning of this small chapter, I was still in college, Thatcher was in full stride and the art scene in London in the mid-1980s felt dull and not about radical ideas any more. Instead it felt centered on an awkward club of artists and institutions, who went about their ‘business as usual’. No one talked publicly about art, because it was embarrassing. To aspire to be an artist, or even to be interested in art was considered a waste of time. To have a job as an artist was a virtual impossibility. A fine art voca- tion in the UK was not an option. You got the impression from your tutors’ view of the world that if, after years of art school (which in those days you even got a grant for), you managed to survive for five years making art (perhaps on the dole), you might just get a chance to exhibit it, in a real gallery. Malcolm McLaren summed it up: “At art schools, they trained everybody for failure!” London had been for a decade, creatively, much more about music and advertising, which was where the more ambitious art students had been ending up after art school. However, in such stagnant ponds, interesting stuff happens. Some of my fellow art students, encouraged by more radical teachers and each other, were getting stuck into various Marxist writings: the Frankfurt School, with its critique of cultural mass production; Semiotext(e) were publishing books that highlighted the simulacrum and the way that the ‘Society of the Spectacle’ (Guy Debord, 1967) had engulfed the world so completely that now only the meagre shadow of reality was visible. The Postmodernism of Jean-François Lyotard and Jacques Derrida and the social anthropology of Michel Foucault was starting to bleed into the way art was being discussed and developed. All this cutting-edge, critical theory that in today’s world — of fake news, social media, manipulating populists, reality TV stars and journalists (as leaders of the free world), as well as a terrifying background of ecological breakdown — seems fright- eningly prescient. But at the time we all felt we were discovering the pattern of DNA. In the wider arena, Fine Art courses were beginning to be restruc- tured and the restrictive divisions of painting, sculpture, printmaking and ‘New Media’ were being broken down. This in turn helped to free up thinking and flattened the restrictive hierarchies of class, race and gender and gave confidence to a growing band of outsiders and iconoclasts. Set against a backdrop of increased cooperation in Europe — with discussions around the Euro currency and the Maastricht treaty — European countries were starting to look inwards in a different way and search for their own specific cultural identities. The Turner Prize was instigated in 1984, but it wasn’t until the early 90s that Channel 4 and younger artists on the list made it commercially viable and it gained public attention. These activities paved the way for later developments, including Tate Modern’s conception in 1994 which, when it opened at the turn of the millennium, ushered in London as the epicenter of global art. Meanwhile the financial instability, recessions and high unem- ployment of the mid-80s had put many businesses into bankruptcy. So we were also getting on with the practical stuff of creating exhibitions for ourselves. There were lots of empty buildings where property developers, encouraged by a wave of active young artists, began to see an opportu- nity, with little investment, to bring the spaces alive with art exhibitions. Warehouses in dilapidated, shell and semi-furnished states were buzzing again. The developers gave keys to groups of artists who just wanted to see their work in a public context with the raw concrete of a warehouse or polished floorboards of an empty shop. Beer sponsors were found and brought on board; private view cards and mailing lists connected everything up and created a new way of thriving as young artists. Later, in Docklands and Bermondsey, the seminal warehouse shows Freeze, Modern Medicine and Gambler would prove to be career-launching vehicles for not just Damien Hirst and other of our contemporaries, but also for advertising mogul Charles Saatchi and his transformative entry into collecting contemporary British art. The complexity of adver- tising making art and art making advertising has been an issue for our generation. Modern Art had fractured and given birth to a new movement of Contemporary Art, which was swimming in a global conversation, finding new markets to sell, show and celebrate equality and difference. London attracted young gallerists from abroad who knew about contemporary art. Karsten Schubert — a German dealer, who arrived from the burgeoning art scene of Cologne, learnt his trade at the Lisson Gallery and opened a new gallery in Fitzrovia — knew being an artist was a profession and being young was an asset rather than a problem. Artists who I knew were already working and exhibiting there while I was still at college. Another gallery (ironically first known as Interim Art) was conceived in Beck Road, East London by its owner the American-born art school graduate Maureen Paley, before being moved to the West End. She employed more artists I knew to paint the walls white in her terraced house which was the gallery venue. She knew the value of art made by young people and was full of the energy of New York, which had a buoyant market and was overflowing with art and artists at this time. Then there was also a tiny but influential white-box space in Foley Street, set up by Laure Genillard (who came from Switzerland). The London art world was learning how to be international. This started to attract the attention of a new wave of establish- ment characters such as Jay Jopling, who at that time was funding and producing exhibitions from his house in Brixton, including my first solo exhibition in Denmark Street, which opened about the same time as the first of his many galleries — White Cube in Duke Street, St James. The fresh art school leavers, even some still studying, were on a roll. There were also new collectors, people to write about the art, critics and philosophers and new art magazines, including the influential interna- tional publication Frieze, whose owners went on to set up Frieze Art Fair in a tent in Regent’s Park. In practice the whole scene quickly became self-perpetuating. In some ways it felt like there was space for all and yet I am sure in hindsight it all must have seemed hermetically sealed to many of our peers. Angus Fairhurst made a memorable work in 1991 which captured this moment in history — when we could question culture and society as a playful punkish gesture, before the stakes got so high that we now find ourselves fighting for life on the planet. The work, Gallery Connections, was literally just that. The transcript of this performance artwork was published in the first issue of Frieze magazine and much later a desk (with what appears as the recording device), was bought and shown at the Tate. The work is a series of simultaneous phone calls made to galleries, who are then hooked together, so the person answering the call is accused by the other of calling them. As the work progresses, more and more galleries are picking up the phone to each other — the activity seems to suggest that some special phenomena has spread like a virus throughout the gallery network; indeed, maybe they are being investigated by the Inland Revenue(!). Gavin Turk 2019 I was studying in the RCA sculpture department, where Jake Chapman was taking his MA. He was frustrated with the course and so started taking the Goldsmiths MA at the same time. His elder brother Dinos was at the time working under his Christian name Constantinos in the painting department at the RCA. They started to work together after college in a crusade against individualism. One of the early works that I saw of theirs was a wall work in a space in Hoxton Square (later the Lux cinema) — Richard Long meets Art & Language via psychedelia and a dirty protest. 1. Jake and Dinos Chapman We Are Artists 1991 Mud wall painting dimensions variable © Jake and Dinos Chapman Courtesy the artists All too often when I work into the night I think I’m making great steps forward. However when I wake up in the morning, there’s a reality check as I realise that things aren’t quite what they seemed, only hours ago. This work is from a portfolio called London made in 1992 and exhibited at Karsten Schubert Gallery that year. Angus was always moved to repeat, change and repeat stuff so that the sense of things pulsated and got modified. (The guy in the picture is not actually Angus but a man, I think called Shaun, who I remember turning up several years later at a Critical Décor opening in Golden Square and having a contretemps with Jake outside the pub.) 2. Angus Fairhurst When I woke up the feeling was still there 1992 Screen print 875 × 660 mm © Angus Fairhurst Estate Courtesy Private Collection Photo: James Pfaff I went to the New Contemporaries exhibition in 1989 and saw two medicine cabinets there. They seemed refresh- ingly different to most of the work in the show. There was a simplicity to these glass-fronted cabinets which confounded me in that they were neither medical nor museum cases, but oscillated between.