Olvier Basciano
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Press release Centre for Contemporary Art 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 Charles Saatchi opens his first exhibition space, on Boundary Road in North London, 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 Young British Artists. 1986 Damien Hirst, Angus Fairhurst and Mat Collishaw start their BA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths College. Angela Bulloch, Grenville Davey, Anya Gallaccio, Gary Hume and Michael Landy were in the year above. Marcus Harvey and Richard Patterson graduated that year, Sarah Lucas the year prior. All the artists would have worked alongside each other as the Head of Department, Jon Thompson, 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 Minimalism, commodity sculpture and appropriation 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 Rachel Whiteread. Schubert closed his gallery space in 1996 to focus on private dealing. 1988 Damien Hirst organizes Freeze, 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, Ian Davenport, Angus Fairhurst, Anya Gallaccio, Damien Hirst, Gary Hume, Michael Landy, Abigail Lane, Sarah Lucas, Lala Meredith-Vula, Stephen Park, Richard Patterson, Simon Patterson and Fiona Rae. All continue to make work, with the exception of Adamson, who has disappeared from public view. In the accompanying self-published catalogue art historian Ian Jeffrey hit upon the intrinsic post-modernism 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 Tate. Previously he was director of the Whitechapel Gallery, London, and The Museum of Modern Art, Oxford. City Racing opens. An artist-run space set up by Matt Hale, Paul Noble, John Burgess, Keith Coventry 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 City Racing in 1991, as did Fiona Banner in 1994. Gillian Wearing and Mark Wallinger were among the other exhibitors. It closed in 1998. 1990 Carl Freedman, 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 Royal College of Art MA show Gavin Turk 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 contemporary art 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 Matthew Slotover, 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. Michael Corris 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 House, 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 The Independent 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 Turner Prize. 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 White Cube gallery in Mayfair, central London. The gallery would be instrumental in shaping the careers of many of the young British artists, most notably Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst. Jopling himself became a high-profile public figure by association. In 2000 the gallery moves to Hoxton Square in the east end of London, 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 a gallery in São Paulo. Douglas Gordon shows 24 Hour Psycho for the first time. The work consists of a film projection of Alfred Hitchcock’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”.