Artrage!

The Story of the BritArt Revolution

Elizabeth Fullerton

• Publisher: Thames and Hudson Ltd
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9780500777114
• Topic: Kunst
• Subtopic: Kunstgeschichte der zeitgenössischen Kunst

The Young British Artists (YBAs) stormed on to the contemporary art scene in 1988 with their attention-grabbing, ironic art, exploding art-world conventions with brazen disdain. Dismissed as trivial gimmickry and praised for its witty energy, their art made a mark both on the art scene and on public consciousness that continues to reverberate today. Artrage! tells the raucous story of the YBAs, chronicling the groups rise to prominence from the landmark show Freeze curated by Damien Hirst, through their 1990s heyday and the notorious Sensation exhibition, to the Momart fire of 2004 that seemed to symbolize the groups fading from centre stage. The book ends with an update on the artists careers and fortunes. Drawing on interviews with all the key BritArt players and extensive archival research, Elizabeth Fullerton examines the individual characters, their relationships to one another, crucial events and seminal artworks, considering, too, the political, economic and artistic context of those years. Plentiful quotations bring out the distinctive personalities and provide fresh insights into the people and the period. Among the artists discussed are Damien Hirst, Rachel Whiteread, Tracey Emin, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Sarah Lucas and Gary Hume.

It was like carving out an arena
for people to sort of perform in,
and it was very desired.
It was like a cult.

ANGELA BULLOCH

I often said to students…
‘Stop being so creative,
it’s too much.’

MICHAEL CRAIG-MARTIN

God knows who said what,
but then it must have started
a little conversation
that led from
frisée to ‘Freeze’.

ABIGAIL LANE

‘Freeze’ was the most
amazing launching pad for me….
It was as if Damien
gave us a moment of maximum
visibility and opportunity.

FIONA RAE

CHAPTER ONE

THE BIRTH OF THE YBAS: 1988

By the time of the ‘Freeze’ launch on Sunday 7 August 1988, Mat Collishaw was a wreck. His hands lacerated and bleeding, he had been up for three days straight labouring on his installation for the show. Between bar shifts at a Hoxton nightclub, he had been cutting up sheets of galvanized steel and sawing fluorescent tubes to make fifteen light boxes. Mat and his friends were still mounting what would be arguably the most enduring image of the show when visitors arrived. Titled Bullet Hole, the gigantic photo installation featured a glistening, fleshy vagina-like wound radiating from parted hair, so unbearably magnified that it sent shudders down the spine yet simultaneously transfixed the viewer (Pl. 1). Mat remembers his friend Angus Fairhurst, who was also in ‘Freeze’, coming up and saying, ‘“Your piece looks like shit.” He was joking, of course, in a very dry way. But I was feeling a little vulnerable because of the lack of sleep and the fact that it was an opening. I just thought, “My God, it’s shit.”’ No doubt the other fifteen Goldsmiths students and alumni in the show shared Mat’s apprehension after three weeks of hard toil overhauling the derelict Port of London Authority warehouse.¹

The stakes were high: the tiny London art scene was virtually a closed shop, and this was a rare chance to have work seen. ‘Freeze’ has gone down in art world lore, not so much for the art, nor for its setting in a disused warehouse, which was not a new concept; it was more the sheer chutzpah of those fledgling artists staging a gallery-standard exhibition, commissioning a remarkably professional catalogue and inviting the art world’s luminaries to the no-man’s-land of Surrey Docks to see it. ‘As far as I can remember, it was the first time that an artists’ organized show had been taken seriously. Up until then it was always seen as vanity publishing, but this had a different edge to it,’ says former South London Gallery director David Thorp.

No one could have foreseen the impact the show would have. It would shatter the elitist hierarchy of the art world. In the process it would launch a new generation of British artists who thought expansively, reached out to mass audiences and weren’t prepared to wait for approval from some higher authority. ‘I have no words to tell you from my perspective how important that show was,’ says former Serpentine Gallery director Julia Peyton-Jones. ‘It was a revolution…. It really taught me something about vision. Ambition. Desire. And also attitude.’

But ‘Freeze’ was not born from a vacuum. It resulted from a perfect storm of teaching, chemistry between students and specific social, cultural and political circumstances. To understand how it came about and what made it so defining, we need to go back to Goldsmiths College in the mid-1980s.

THE UTOPIAN BUBBLE OF GOLDSMITHS

On the green in front of the Millard Building, a Victorian former hospital that housed the Goldsmiths fine art and textile faculties in far south London, Damien Hirst and his friends would hang out and argue with the group intellectual, Liam Gillick, about art. ‘Damien was caught up in a very complex caricatured idea about what it is to be an artist. He’d make strange gestures, raise his fist and say “Art!”’ says Carl Freedman, a friend from Damien’s hometown, Leeds, who was studying anthropology at University College London. The two shared a house for several years, and Carl grew to know Damien’s first-year mates Mat Collishaw, Angus Fairhurst and Abigail Lane, his friends in the year above, Angela Bulloch, Ian Davenport, Anya Gallaccio, Gary Hume and Michael Landy, as well as third-year students Sarah Lucas and Fiona Rae, all of whom would take part in ‘Freeze’. Separated from the rest of Goldsmiths, the Millard Building was, according to Carl, ‘a self-contained bubble of idealism and experimental culture’ where students from all social strata could unleash their creative impulses. ‘You could write poetry, you could wander round for twelve hours with pigs’ trotters hanging off you with a balaclava helmet on,’ says Michael Landy, referring to a fabled performance by fellow student Shaun Caton. Michael earned the nickname ‘Stacks’ because he would stack objects obsessively, from bread trays to biscuits. ‘I used to stack toilet rolls,’ he recalls. ‘Like pull off the individual leaves and stack them up into piles until they fell over. As art.’

This sense of freedom emanated from the unique teaching structure and ethos at Goldsmiths, set in place by its visionary principal and later dean of the school of art, Jon Thompson. When he arrived there in the late 1960s, disillusioned by the conservative teaching he had himself received at art school, the college was a cradle of radicalism, and on his first day he was pelted by Maoist students with little red books. However, he was interested in a real revolution in art education, not empty idealism. On becoming head of department, his first step was to abolish all hierarchies, announcing: ‘We don’t have students here, we only have artists.’ Second, he dissolved the divisions between disciplines, convinced that would-be artists fresh out of school had no idea yet where their strengths lay.

In contrast, art schools like Chelsea, the Slade and the Royal College of Art confined students to one discipline, such as sculpture, for their whole course and had a more traditional approach to art education. The artist Gavin Turk, who failed his degree at the Royal College for presenting a room that was empty but for a blue UK heritage plaque bearing his name, profession and dates, says: ‘They wanted to supply objects for aristocrats’ gardens. It’s called the Royal College of Art, and…obviously the royals have quite old-fashioned taste.’ Jake Chapman, who also attended the Royal College, describes it as a ‘finishing school’. Saint Martins in the 1980s enjoyed a similar vitality to Goldsmiths, sparked by the students drawing inspiration from each other, according to the critic Adrian Searle, who taught at both.

At Goldsmiths all the tutors were practising artists, exhibiting work, actively engaged with the art world. ‘There was a sense that students might be within touching distance of making it as artists, whereas at Chelsea there was a course “Is there life after art school?” and the short answer seemed to be no,’ says Mark Wallinger, who did a BA at Chelsea and taught at Goldsmiths after completing his MA there. Goldsmiths had the fortunate accident of being a ‘historical freak’, caught between two sources of funding: the University of London and the local authority. Jon Thompson exploited this fortuitous independence to the full. A Europe-leaning intellectual himself, he hired a broad spectrum of teachers. He mixed Conceptualists such as Michael Craig-Martin, Carl Plackman and Richard Wentworth with traditional painters like Basil Beattie, performance artists such as Lindsay Kemp and feminist artists like Helen Chadwick, Veronica Ryan and Jean Cowan.

The YBAs have sometimes been labelled as ‘Thatcher’s children’, which equates their success with Margaret Thatcher’s emphasis on self-reliance at the expense of the collective. In fact, they were both a product of and a reaction to Thatcher’s government, their entrepreneurial ‘fuck-it’ attitude owing as much to the legacy of the punk era as to the 1980s opportunist ethos.

The majority of their teachers were anything but Thatcherite, espousing the 1960s ideals of the Welfare State. Ironically, given Thatcher’s lack of interest in the arts and discouragement of welfare reliance, the grant system that continued under her government supported many artists from modest backgrounds through art school and beyond. People like Sarah Lucas, who grew up on a north London council estate, and Damien Hirst, who was brought up in Leeds by his working-class mother, had access to free higher education, which they wouldn’t have under today’s student loan system.²

Within this mini social utopia, students had their own studio spaces in an open-plan room and could request tutorials with any of the artists. ‘I actually made it my business to have a tutorial with every single tutor that went there. I think I maybe missed out on one,’ recalls Fiona Rae, who was perhaps more self-possessed than some of the others, having been brought up in Hong Kong and attended boarding school. Sarah Lucas, on the other hand, preferred to catch a tutor over a beer in the canteen. ‘There wasn’t any syllabus and it was a very self-conscious place because it was up to you what you did,’ says Sarah. ‘It could be quite a glare to be in. I don’t think it suited everybody, actually, but it was a brilliant time.’

Students bonded on many levels. Tuesday was disco night where everyone danced like mad and drank Newcastle Brown Ale or watched Ian Davenport’s country band, the Good Ol’ Hometown Boys, perform.

Twice a week students could display their work in designated exhibition spaces and have it critiqued in an open seminar. Competition for these opportunities was stiff; fifty students might turn up to watch tutors debate the merit of the exhibits, at times clashing fiercely. ‘That was really fascinating.…The teachers would feed off each other and argue and the students would play off each other. There was a lot of exchange,’ says Liam Gillick, who was not in ‘Freeze’ but took part in subsequent shows with the group. ‘It was very contestatory,’ admits Thompson, ‘but there was an immense amount of trust.’

This atmosphere of fervent enthusiasm sprang from the passionate engagement of the teachers. Irish-born Michael Craig-Martin, who trained in America, had one of the most sought-after tutorial groups. ‘He created this sense of urgency and importance about what that group was doing. And everybody was so competitive, and wanted to do well,’ says Angela Bulloch. ‘It was like carving out an arena for people to sort of perform in, and it was very desired. It was like a cult.’ People would bring their latest creations to the tutorials and ‘everybody would look and examine whatever thing you’d done in this very intense way, it was almost medical,’ she recalls.

Craig-Martin had no time for politically motivated art. ‘If somebody had a political agenda, then Michael was the wrong tutor for them,’ said Jon Thompson. The students were schooled in the tenets of Postmodernism: appropriation, bricolage, fragmentation, pluralism, a rejection of the modernist belief in progress and universal truths; above all, the view that originality was impossible since all art was derivative of something else.

Of the sixteen-strong ‘Freeze’ group, those who studied under Craig-Martin at different times include: Angela Bulloch, Mat Collishaw, Ian Davenport, Gary Hume, Michael Landy, Abigail Lane, Sarah Lucas, Richard Patterson, Simon Patterson and Fiona Rae. Damien Hirst did not, but Craig-Martin would later become something of a mentor to him. ‘I think everybody who got something special out of the course went on a bit of a journey,’ says Ian. Angela was interested in systems, patterns and rules, and found her own language using digital technology and silicon chips to dim or turn lights on and off within sculptures. Early on she made installations using Belisha beacons, originally devised to help people cross roads safely, and supplanted that system of flashing lights with her own. Craig-Martin ‘was very good at helping you understand what it was you’d actually done. Taking it apart and starting from scratch really,’ Fiona remembers. ‘One student, for example, took a car bonnet and put it on the wall, and so Michael talked about that and whether it was now a painting.’ In another instance, Liam remembers the feminist tutor Judith Cowan challenging a large painting of his: ‘Why don’t you use pastry? Why are you using these male materials?’ Much discussion revolved around cultural permission and whose voice gets to speak.

Ian Davenport, Gary Hume and Fiona Rae managed to develop their own signature styles in paint, despite continual assertions from conceptual purists that painting was dead. Ian moved from painting into the sculpture department, where the approach to materials was more investigative. Faced with the perennial quandary of what to paint, he chose the dripping paint pots cluttering his studio. ‘And then over a period of weeks the paint pots started to dissolve into ellipse shapes, almost as if the pots had disappeared. It became a repeated mark with all these drips made with wax and God knows what else,’ he says. As he threw the paint around with a controlled randomness influenced by Jackson Pollock, the paint itself and the process became the subject of his painting. ‘From that being a very small idea, I realized it could be a huge idea with massive implications,’ he says.

Fiona Rae was also experimenting with paint, exploring different styles: ‘I never just went with one way of putting on paint…I thought why limit myself – quite a polyglot I suppose.’ Prior to ‘Freeze’ she began laying out marks in rows, like colourful hieroglyphs or calligraphy, possibly influenced by her childhood in Hong Kong. ‘I was thinking about cartoon cells as well, and the way things change from one cell to another. But then because they were laid out in rhythmical ways, the whole canvas would have a presence. So you’d have one big painting made up out of nine small paintings.’

Gary Hume turned to hospital swing doors as a subject, inspired by a health insurance advert, which featured a sleek Modernist door and proclaimed the end of the ideal that the state could meet everyone’s needs. ‘It had this nice sense of the end of a loose socialism and a dreaming…of a better world being encapsulated with the end of Modernism,’ says Gary. Painted in ordinary household gloss, the doors functioned formally as abstract Minimalist paintings, yet contained a human narrative as literal entrances to a public institution where birth and death occur. Like many BritArt works, the doors deliberately blurred the distinctions between the real object and the artwork. ‘If I painted it in oil paint, then I would have a painting of it,’ Gary explains. ‘But if I painted it in gloss paint, I would have something which is very similar to it, so the bit between…the representation and the actual thing is very close: is it a door, or is it not a door?’

This sort of conceptual Postmodern thinking was prevalent at Goldsmiths, as was a tendency toward Minimalist form. Craig-Martin had made his name with his 1973 work An Oak Tree, comprising a glass of water on a shelf accompanied by a philosophical discourse on how he had changed the object into an oak tree. The belief in the artist’s power to transform an ordinary object into art derives ultimately from Marcel Duchamp’s insistence that anything – even a urinal – can be art if so designated by the artist; concept trumped the visual. Duchamp’s idea of the ‘readymade’ had a profound influence on the students, as did the Arte Povera practice of creating art from found objects. Andy Warhol’s open embrace of consumer culture, use of macabre subject matter and innovative approach to authorship and reproduction were also significant.

Craig-Martin had a particular knack for identifying what made each student’s work unique. Time and again he would notice someone struggling to create work they thought they should make. ‘Then he would find out they would go home and make a galleon out of matchsticks or some bizarre hobby and he’d say, “Well that sounds weird, bring that in and make that the thing you do”,’ recalls Richard Patterson. ‘It’s a secret because they think it’s not worthy of attention,’ Craig-Martin explains. ‘It’s too personal. It’s…not avant-garde enough.…There’s a thousand reasons why people dismiss things.’ Often students would be paralysed by the need to come up with some interesting new idea. Craig-Martin released them from this anxiety. ‘Everything is actually already more interesting than you can cope with,’ he says. ‘I often said to students…“Stop being so creative, it’s too much.”…You have to learn, how do you limit yourself, how do you focus?’

Every tutor had their own idiosyncratic approach. Richard Wentworth infuriated Anya Gallaccio by telling her to throw out of the window an overcomplicated sculpture she had been toiling over for months. ‘It was devastating. I think I cried for a week,’ she says. But she learnt a useful lesson: to focus on the essential idea in her work.

As crucia...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• About the author
• Other titles of interest
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chapter One: The Birth of the YBAs: 1988
• Chapter Two: Formative Milestones and Alliances: 1990–1992
• Chapter Three: Rapid Ascent, A Strong Female Voice: 1993–1994
• Chapter Four: From ‘Brilliant!’ to ‘Sensation’: 1995–1997
• Plates
• Chapter Five: Bedding In: 1998–1999
• Chapter Six: Spectacle versus Sobriety: 2000–2004
• Postscript: The Legacy – Where Are They Now?
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Picture Credits
• Acknowledgments
• Index
• Copyright