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Home , 24 Hour Psycho, Abigail Lane, Angela Bulloch, Angus Fairhurst, Anya Gallaccio, Billy Childish

Press release Centre for Contemporary Ujazdowski Castle

BRITISH BRITISH POLISH POLISH: Art from Europe’s edges in the long ’90 and today

7th September – 15th November 2013 Curators: Marek Goź dziewski and Tom Morton

Olvier Basciano

1985 Advertising executive opens his first exhibition space, on Boundary Road in North , to works from his personal collection. Until 1992, the gallery exhibited mainly American artists – including Dan Flavin, Sol LeWitt and Bruce Nauman – until the recession catalysed the collector to turn his interest to emerging, cheaper, British artists, with a series of shows staged under the title .

1986 , and start their BA in at Goldsmiths College. , Grenville Davey, , and were in the year above. and Richard Patterson graduated that year, the year prior. All the artists would have worked alongside each other as the Head of Department, , had ended the division of students into separate media-related study groups a decade earlier. By the time Michael Craig-Martin joined the staff in 1973 – bringing with him his experience of having been a student at Yale and his interest in , commodity sculpture and in art – painters, sculptors and performers, installation, film and video artists were taught together and had studios in the same building. Classes were heavy on art theory, with little energy expedited on developing the students’ practical skills. Compulsory drawing classes were abandoned. Occasionally, students from Goldsmiths would have crits with their peers at Falmouth College of Art and Design. One of these sessions saw a Falmouth student present a wooden sculpture with which he had used dowling to peg the various joins together. Collishaw recalls Bulloch as asking, “Why don’t you just use a fucking screw?” Collishaw has described his university peers as “the losers who didn’t fit anywhere else”.

Karsten Schubert opens his eponymous gallery. The German-born, London-based gallerist is an earlier supporter of the artists who became known as the YBAs, and ended up representing several of them, including Angus Fairhurst, Anya Gallaccio, Gary Hume, Michael Landy and . Schubert closed his gallery space in 1996 to focus on private dealing.

1988 Damien Hirst organizes , an exhibition of his peers, at the empty Port of London Authority Building in Surrey Docks, South East London. The artists featured in Freeze were Steven Adamson, Angela Bulloch, Mat Collishaw, , Angus Fairhurst, Anya Gallaccio, Damien Hirst, Gary Hume, Michael Landy, , Sarah Lucas, Lala Meredith-Vula, , Richard Patterson, Simon Patterson and . All continue to make work, with the exception of Adamson, who has disappeared from public view. In the accompanying self-published catalogue art historian hit upon the intrinsic post- of the exhibited work. “Once upon a time there were completely new starts, with yesterday a long way off, but under the new terms of reference the present comes less as itself, than as the recent past redone, re-recorded, or maybe never even away”.

Nicholas Serota appointed director of The . Previously he was director of the , London, and The Museum of , Oxford.

City Racing opens. An artist-run space set up by Matt Hale, Paul Noble, John Burgess, and Peter Owen, it operates from a former betting shop near the Oval cricket ground in South London. Sarah Lucas had her first solo exhibition at in 1991, as did in 1994. and were among the other exhibitors. It closed in 1998.

1990 , Damien Hirst and Billee Sellman organise Modern Medicine at a former factory in Bermondsey, South East London. Charles Saatchi sponsors the show with a £1,000 donation. Freedman and Sellman go on to curate Gambler in the same space, a show that saw Hirst’s A Thousand Years exhibited for the first time. It consists of a large glass

1 vitrine housing a decapitated cow’s head with a host of maggots and flies feeding off it, and is an early indicator of the artist’s enduring fascination with the spectacle of death and decay.

1991 Damien Hirst exhibits The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living for the first time. A tiger shark floating in a formaldehyde solution, the work was paid for by Charles Saatchi and exhibited in the collector’s Boundary Road space. Hirst had commissioned an Australian fisherman to catch the shark. A new shark had to be caught to replace the deteriorating original when Saatchi sold the work to American collector Steven A. Cohen in 2004.

For his MA show exhibits a single work, a sign in the style of the English Heritage plaques that commemorate buildings around the UK in which notable people lived or worked. Turk’s sign, titled Cave, read ‘Gavin Turk, Sculptor, worked here 1989 – 1991’. The artist was given a fail and not granted a degree.

Channel 4 broadcast a series titled Art is Dead – Long Live TV in which journalist Muriel Gray attempts to prove a “con” by hoaxing viewers, and a number of interviewed art critics, with a series of interviews with ‘contemporary artists’, who are later revealed as fake. The following day The Sun newspaper claimed Spark “spent a fortune stating the bleeding obvious – that Modern Art is a culture-wrecking con.”

Amanda Sharp and , alongside artist Tom Gidley, found frieze magazine. The inaugural issue covers the debacles over both the Gavin Turk degree show and the Art is Dead broadcast.

Angus Fairhurst starts works on Gallery Connections. Fairhurst rewired two telephones so that they would ring two different commercial galleries simultaneously. With each person on the line believing that the other had rang them; the various victims of this prank became increasingly bemused and annoyed. The work first emerged only in transcript form, published in frieze, though the artist would later exhibit a live recording, the speakers installed in a side table.

Marc Quinn exhibits the first Self (blood head) sculpture. A frozen cast of the artist’s head, made with 4.5 litres of the artist’s own blood; Quinn has remade the work every five years, the bust reflecting the artist’s aging on each occasion.

1992 The term ‘Young British Artists’ is first used to denote the emerging scene. describes Young British Artists in Artforum as “a cultural phenomenon formed out of specific need, needs expressed primarily in terms of presumed national culture”. He notes that this has occurred while “a mood of helplessness and apathy [is] felt by the Left in the face of Thatcherism and collapse of so-called ‘workers’ states”.

1993 Rachel Whiteread completes , a concrete cast of the inside of an entire Victorian terraced house situated on the original site of the building in East London. A public commission from Artangel, Andrew Graham-Dixon describes it in as “one of the most extraordinary public sculptures to have been created by any English artist working this century” and drew huge crowds. Despite this, the local council weren’t so enamoured – one Liberal Democrat councillor, Eric Flounders, called the installation “crap”, liked only by the “Hampstead arty crowd” – and it was demolished three months later. The same year Whiteread became the first woman to win the .

Damien Hirst exhibits Mother and Child Divided at the Venice Biennale. The work is formed of two vitrines, each with a bisected cow and calf preserved in a formaldehyde solution.

Jay Jopling opens the first gallery in Mayfair, central London. The gallery would be instrumental in shaping the careers of many of the young British artists, most notably and Damien Hirst. Jopling himself became a high-profile public figure by association. In 2000 the gallery moves to Square in the , an area where many of the YBA artists lived and worked. In 2006 a second purpose-built space opens in Mason’s Yard, just metres away from the original premises. In 2011 a 5,388 sq m gallery is built in South London, replacing the Hoxton Square gallery that closes a year later. In 2013 White Cube opens in São Paulo.

Douglas Gordon shows 24 Hour for the first time. The work consists of a film projection of ’s Psycho (1960) slowed to last the duration of an entire day. Gordon is one of several prominent artists, including Richard Wright, David Shrigley, Jim Lambie and Cathy Wilkes to have graduated from the Glasgow School of Art in the late 1980s and early 1990s. They are generally regarded as working at a remove from the YBA phenomenon.

Tracey Emin and Sarah Lucas open The Shop. The artists rented a former doctor’s surgery in east London, using it as a studio and exhibition space for six months. Among the many products on sale are ashtrays featuring images of Damien

2 Hirst’s face on the bottom. The shop closed on Emin’s thirtieth birthday with a party titled Fuckin’ Fantastic at 30 and Just About Old Enough to do Whatever She Wants

Steve McQueen first exhibits Bear. The ten-minute 16mm silent black and white film shows two naked men wrestling. It is a sublimely charged study of eroticism and violence. The work’s expressive qualities – which are typical of McQueen’s wider practice – mark the artist out from his contemporaries, whom Jon Thompson writes “remained wedded to the object”, and whose work willingly, if ironically, sought to be at home in the “commodity-scape”.

1994 Mark Bridger pours black ink into Damien Hirst’s work Away From The Flock, a formaldehyde solution-filled tank containing a preserved white lamb, while it was on show at the Serpentine Gallery, London. Bridger claimed, “I was providing an interesting addendum to his work. In terms of , the sheep had already made its statement. Art is there for creation of awareness and I added to whatever it was meant to say.” Hirst and the legal system did not agree, and Bridger was found guilty of criminal damage. In 1996 Hirst released an art book in which an image of the work had a tab which the reader could pull to make the liquid turn black. Bridger tried to sue for copyright infringement.

1995 Brilliant! opens at the , Minneapolis, travelling to the Contemporary Museum, Houston. The exhibition sought to introduce various artists associated with the YBA label to an American audience. The catalogue cover shows a photograph of the aftermath of the 1993 Bishopsgate bombing by the IRA.

Damien Hirst wins the Turner Prize.

1996 includes work by Angela Bulloch, Gillian Wearing, and in at CAPC musée d’art contemporain de Bordeaux, alongside the likes of Carsten Höller, and . The exhibition is thought of as a demonstration of Bourriaud’s thesis on Relational Aesthetics.

Simon Ford makes the first use of the acronym ‘YBA’ in an article titled Myth Making in the March issue of Art Monthly. The magazine’s editor, Patricia Bickers, has noted that the article is “critical of the jingoism of the YBA phenomenon, and of its inherent ideological conservatism”. Carl Freedman also explored the politics of the YBAs; positing the artists eschewing of a left-wing stance in a more positive light. “In Britain the Left has traditionally claimed art as its own, meaning art should be in the service of the people, and artist unequivocably anti-establishment” the curator and writer (and now commercial gallerist) wrote in 1998. “However, faced with such a tired and programmatic attitude, it was actually more radical to accept the establishment and work alongside it.”

1997 Sensation opens at the Royal Academy of Art. Consisting of works from Charles Saatchi’s collection, it would later tour to Berlin and New York. While in the UK Marcus Harvey’s portrait of child murderer Hindley caused uproar – and was vandalised twice– the ire of the then mayor of New York, Republican Rudolph Guiliani, was raised by another exhibit. Guiliani warned he would cut the $7m City Hall grant to the of Art if it went ahead and hosted the show, believing Chris Offili’s to be “sick stuff”. The museum refused to back down and the mayor carried out his threat. The touring show was deemed controversial asides its curatorial content: it was supposed to have a final stop at the of Australia in 1999 but, this was cancelled after its director, Brian Kennedy, stated he believed that as all the works were owned by one private collector, it was “too close to the market”.

Patricia Bickers pens a negative article in Art Monthly titled Sense & Sensation on the affect that Charles Saatchi’s buying and selling of art has had on the market, which she claimed was “manipulative” and “damaging”.

The Turner Prize has an all-female shortlist: , Angela Bulloch, and eventual winner Gillian Wearing. The actual event is overshadowed by Tracey Emin’s drunken, rambling, appearance on an accompanying live television discussion show. The artist has said she doesn’t remember appearing on the show and was oblivious to the media uproar she caused until the next day.

1998 Tracey Emin’s is first exhibited. A self-deprecating sculptural self-portrait, the work – the artist’s own unmade bed complete with soiled sheets and littered with everyday debris such as condoms and dirty underwear – is simultaneously poetic and lurid, with a sense of emotional alienation and depression mixing with the more obvious references to sex. The work attracted an avalanche of media attention, mostly negative and sneering, and has become an enduring reference point for reactionary critics of contemporary art. In 1999 the right-wing newspaper The

3 ran the headline “For 1,000 years art has been one of our great civilising forces. Today, pickled sheep and soiled beds threaten to make barbarians of us all”. The attractiveness of the YBAs to the tabloid press was a factor that dogged – or helped – the careers of many of the main protagonists. admitted that it was “a deliberate strategy” to get the more outwardly controversial works by artists represented by White Cube seen and commented on by the populist media as means of creating hype around their practice.

Damien Hirst opens Pharmacy, a restaurant in north London with leading PR agent Matthew Freud. The artist designs the interior to mimic a druggist with such accuracy that the Royal Pharmaceutical Society lodges a complaint, worried that the eatery might confuse the public. When the Pharmacy closed in 2004, the fixtures, furniture and tableware were put up for auction with an estimate of £3m. They would bring in £11.1m including six ashtrays selling for £1,600 and two Martini glasses being hammered down at £4,800.

The BANK art collective initiate their project Fax Bak, in which gallery press releases were returned to their senders having been ‘corrected’ for grammar and syntax mistakes, general pretensions and an overuse of so-called ‘art speak’. The action highlighted the tension between the use of art theory in the texts and the commercial, capitalist, aims of the galleries who would be sending them out. They were also very funny.

1999 Mark Wallinger’s Ecce Homo, a white marble resin sculpture of a human-scale Christ, is installed as the first of an ongoing series of commissions for a historically empty plinth in London’s . Works by Rachel Whiteread and are among the subsequent commissions for the ongoing programme.

Channel 4 airs This Is Modern Art, presented by . The curator Kate Bush claims in Artforum that the art critic and author of Blimey! - a chronicle of the YBA years published two years previous - had “invented the perfect voice to complement YBA: He makes an impact without (crucially) ever appearing to try too hard. The absence of any critical agenda is, according to Collings, a wilful response to “an age in which the avant-garde is an official one and therefore a pseudo one.”

Gary Hume represents Britain at the Venice Biennale

The stages a series of shows under the title New Neurotic . In Art Monthly the critic J.J. Charlesworth dismisses this rather too obvious an attempt to identify a new movement thus: “There comes a point in the life of any innovative, ground-breaking product, when what was initially the brand’s Unique Selling Point is adopted by the innovator’s slow-to-catch-up competitors. Whether it’s bagless vacuum cleaners […] or young British art, loss of market share soon follows and, as any advertising guru will tell you, no amount of slick marketing can halt the decline […] Neurotic Realism, now in its second instalment, is at its most basic level an attempt to recapture the momentum of the Saatchi gallery’s seminal ‘Young British Artists’ series”.

2000 opens in the old Bankside Power Station. , the Tate’s director, is widely seen as the driving force behind the new venue. encapsulates this view, telling the New Yorker in 2012 that, “Nick really caught the wave. He saw the possibilities, the wealth coming in, and he kind of harnessed that. A lot of other people were involved, but to me it really looks like the house that Nick built.” Matthew Colllings noted that in the opening party’s “mix of right-on artists and trendies, with society power people and fashion and pop people, there was the new idea of art’s social status in Britain, and its relationship to money and success”. Tate Modern received 5.2 million visitors in the first year and remains one of the UK’s most popular tourist attractions.

Charles Thompson, co-founder alongside of the movement, paints Sir Nicholas Serota Makes an Acquisitions Decision. The oil and acrylic on canvas work shows the Tate director inspecting a pair of women’s knickers – a reference to Tracey Emin’s My Bed – with a speech bubble asking “Is it a genuine Emin (£10,000)”, and a thought bubble adding “or a worthless fake?” The first Stuckism manifesto was written a year previous and promoted figurative over conceptual art. From 2000 onwards members of the group would protest outside the Turner Prize announcement and other events (such as the unveiling of Rachel Whiteread’s Fourth Plinth commission). The name comes from an apparent insult directed at Childish by his then girlfriend, Tracey Emin, who believed that Childish’s work was “stuck, stuck, stuck”.

2001 Madonna presents the Turner Prize, swearing on live television. Martin Creed wins with his work Work No. 227: The Lights Going On And Off.

4 Michael Landy performs Break Down, in which he publicly destroyed all his possessions. Prior to their destruction each of his 7,227 possessions were catalogued in detail.

2002 The liberal-leaning Guardian newspaper asks porn star Ben Dover to comment on Fiona Banner’s work for the Turner Prize exhibition, Arsewoman in Wonderland. The star of the Anal Academy described Banner’s work as both “clever” and “cynical”. The prize elicited high-ranking criticism, with British Culture Minister Kim Howells, a Labour politician, labelling it “conceptual bullshit” and Prince Charles believing that the prize has “contaminated the art establishment”.

Charles Saatchi placed at number one in ArtReview magazine’s inaugural Power 100. Damien Hirst took the top spot in 2005 and 2008.

2003 124 galleries take part in the first . 27,700 people attend.

Charles Saatchi moves his collection to County Hall on the south of the River Thames, giving him 3,700 sq m of exhibition space. A heart-shaped neon sculpture by Tim Noble and Sue Webster welcomes visitors through its front door. The opening show includes a Hirst retrospective alongside works by the Chapman Brothers, Tracey Emin, and Sarah Lucas.

Jake and Dinos Chapman exhibit Insult To Injury for the first time. The artists took eighty etchings from Goya’s Disasters of War series and systematically painted clowns heads over any human subjects depicted in the original works. Jonathan Jones writes in that the act breaks “art’s ultimate taboo”.

2004 On 24 May a warehouse in East London belonging to , a major art logistics company, catches fire. Charles Saatchi had a number of works from his collection stored at the facility: among those destroyed were ’s Hell (2000) and Tracey Emin’s Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995 (1995).

Damien Hirst’s spot painting motif is used to decorate the façade of the Tate’s new river boat service that runs between Tate Modern and .

Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas and Angus Fairhurst stage In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida at Tate Britain. In frieze Mark Beasley describes the show as consisting of “numerous expensive looking vitrines, brightly coloured wallpaper and an outsized Spam sandwich and could conceivably exist as a spoof exhibition scene from an Austin Powers movie.” Other reviewers were equally scathing. writes in The Guardian. “Everything here shouts. Everything that doesn’t dies or disappears. The subtle and the thoughtful is lost, or plundered, or turned into a spectacle. All laughter must be hollow.”

2006 Simon Starling’s winning of the Turner Prize is described by one of the jurors, the director of White Columns, , as being a sign of a “post-YBA sensibility” that pervaded contemporary practice. Higgs went on to praise the rejection of spectacle in Starling’s work, describing it as “modest materially and formally”.

2007 Damien Hirst sells – a diamond-encrusted human skull for £50 million to a consortium of buyers, who included the artist himself. A year later Hirst would grab headlines again by selling a vast number of works directly through the Sotheby’s auction house with a two-day sale titled Beautiful Inside My Head Forever, which saw bids total £111m. The first day of the sale coincidently occurred on the same day that the bankruptcy of Lehmann Brothers was announced.

2008 Angus Fairhurst dies by suicide at Bridge of Orchy, Argyll, at the age of 41.

The catalogue BRITISH BRITISH POLISH POLISH: Art from Europe’s edges in the long ’90 and today, published by the Centre for Contemporary, Warsaw 2013

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