Art in London: Summer 2007
excerpts Published in C Magazine, Issue 96, Winter 2007 and Canadian Art, winter 2007, Vol 24 no. 4
Emily Vey Duke
Beyond Belief, Damien Hist, White Cube 3, 1 Jun - Jul 2007
Through the Eyes of Children , Life as a Refugee, National Geographic Photo Camp 2006, The gallery at Oxo, 14 June ‚ 1 July 2007
State Britain, Mark Wallinger, Tate Britain, 15 January - 27 August 2007
In New York City, I'm always struck by the extent to which art is about a particular brand of youthful glamour, a singular species of cool. There's an obligation to "hang out" a lot, in a peculiar suit of clothes, with a peculiar combination of passion and dispassion. I was told recently by a certain New Media art luminary that she spends twice as much money on social drinking as she does on rent--and she lives in Manhattan.
In London I was overwhelmed by the way in which money saturated all corners of the art world. The work I saw was all, in one way or another, about wealth, commerce and conspicuous consumption (or the lack of these).
London is an art capital. There's a vast podge of stuff to see, and it plays a real role in the life of the city. It's not only in the galleries and museums, it's in the newspapers-even the tabloids. It's on TV! This is interesting to me, hailing as I do from art-pooh-poohing North America. Being there made me think about my vocation in different terms-though I'm not sure I like them much better.
The Artful Dodger
On our first day, we went to see For the Love of God, the new Damien Hirst exhibition at The White Cube Mason's Yard. It's a two-part show, with the other half of the work presented at the Hoxton Square shop. I've never seen any of the YBA/Sensation work in real life, and I cannot tell a lie--it was really fun and exciting to see much of the stuff in the show.
The formaldehyde works were fascinating. If I credit Hirst with anything (and I guess I do) it's his ability to think of things we'd like to see things but haven't seen before and then show them to us. In For the Love of God, we get to look closely at the inside of a shark, a dove with wings outstretched and a bisected cow and her calf, among other things. My favourite piece in the show was a highly detailed platinum cast representing a life-sized male figure who's just finished flaying himself. He holds a scalpel in one hand and an enormous, gleaming scissors in the other, and his skin is slung across his forearm like a jacket. That was really "neat".
What interested me most was the quantity of irrefutably dreadful work in the show. The walls of the second floor of the gallery were lined with a series of photo-paintings of the birth of Hirst's son by Caesarian Section . One showed Hirst himself, bedecked in scrubs and cap, complete with those little puffy hospital booties. It's titled, embarrassingly, Portrait of the Artist as a Surgeon.
I remember a teacher in art school telling me once that his rule of thumb was "if you can't make it good, make it big. If it still isn't good, make it red." Hirst's series of collages in the basement of the White Cube follow this recipe faithfully. They are vast, candy-apple red and, sadly, still very bad. They depict diseased cells covered with what looks to be glossy acrylic gel medium, into which Hirst has liberally sprinkled scalpel blades and glitter. They would be notable for their shittiness in an undergraduate thesis exhibition.
Of course, we saved the piece-de-resistance for last. Titled with the same waggish coyness as the above-mentioned painting, For the Love of God is a life-sized human skull cast in platinum and meticulously encrusted with some £5-8 million in diamonds. In order to have an audience with the work, we had to get tickets (which were free), queue up, have the security dude search our bags and receive our viewing instructions.
The security for the skull is intense, likened in an interview by the White Cube people to that of an international airport. We were parceled into groups of ten and ushered into the small dark viewing room. Our receding handler told us she would be back to remove us after two minutes. For 120 seconds, we huddled and circled, our faces as close to the vitrine as they could be without leaving smears. Again, I have to confess—disgusted as I was and am by this abomination, it was astonishingly interesting to look at. Identical small jewels hug the curves of the skull, lining not only its outer surface but its inner ones as well. The inside of the mouth and eye sockets glinted, bouncing light off the faces of the other patrons like a disco ball. The skull sports a 50-carat gem on its forehead worth a reported £3-5 million. It's the size of my big toe. I didn't know diamonds came like that.
Hirst and his emissaries have claimed that these diamonds are ‚ "ethically sourced‚". On point of fact, there is no such thing as an ethically sourced diamond. Amnesty International has issued the following statement regarding the Kimberly Process Certification Scheme, which is the only regulatory system in place for monitoring diamonds: "[We] welcome the Kimberley Process as an important step to dealing with the problem of conflict diamonds. But until the diamond trade is subject to mandatory, impartial monitoring, there is still no effective guarantee that all conflict diamonds will be identified and removed from the market." A further criticism of the concept of conflict-free or clean diamonds stems from the fact that in diamond trading centres like Antwerp, there is a near-total lack of transparency, rendering it impossible for consumers (like Hirst) to know with any confidence that the stones they buy aren't dirty.
The Tearjerker
After we left the White Cube, we walked across the Thames toward the Tate Modern. Along the way we came upon a little storefront being used for a show of photographs. It was one of those underprivileged-kids-get-cameras things, but on a grander scale than most--a collaboration among National Geographic, International Medical Corps (IMC), a global humanitarian non-profit organization and UNHCR, the UN refugee agency. National Geographic has exceptionally deep pockets. The kids, as well, were grandly underprivileged: internally displaced Ugandan refugees in their teens, living in makeshift dwellings in a camp, often separated from their families.
The images shown were selected from thousands shot over the course of a two-day workshop in which the participants were given themes on which to shoot. The whole process was directive and typically paternalistic, but the resulting photographs, and the texts with which the makers had captioned them, were totally devastating in their beauty and candour.
One kid had photographed this weird thing cobbled together--without nails--out of hand-hewn pieces of wood. His caption explained that this was his bicycle, and that having a bicycle was very helpful in making money to support his family. He had learnt how to build it by watching his friends, but the wheels had broken and he hadn't had time to repair them. He pointed out that if he had a camera, he would be able to make a lot more money, which I found to be a pretty pithy statement on projects such as this.
A girl had photographed of fish carcasses that'd had the meat cut from their bones. She said that when her family could afford it, they would buy these, but because the camp was a long way from the market, the fish were rotten and full of worms before they could be cooked. She said this was disgusting and not very good for you.
A third girl took a picture of a little plastic tub full of maize and explained that, as the only vessel her family possessed, it had to rotate through functions like food storage, water collection and bathing.
I don't think I need to belabour the point I'm making here. We skipped the Tate Modern.
The Tonic
On our last day in London we went to the Tate Britain, where we saw two exhibitions that provided a really interesting counterpoint to the painful contrasts of the preceding day.
The first I'm not going to discuss in much detail, but I would be remiss if I didn't mention it because it's excellent, and was a tonic for my bruised identity as an artist with activist pretensions. It's called 1807: Blake, Slavery and the Radical Mind, and it was mounted to commemorate the 200th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in the British empire. In the USA, where I live currently, we'll be waiting another 58 years for that jubilee.
The other exhibition, occupying the whole of the Duveen Galleries (the central hall of the museum), is State Britain by Mark Wallinger. It's a painstaking recreation of anti-Gulf War protester Brian Haw's makeshift camp on Parliament Square in London. Haw began protesting the economic sanctions against Iraq in June 2001 (June, like three months before September). He was on the square until May 23, 2006, when the cops raided the site and confiscated virtually everything, including a giant banner by the infamous (or perhaps at this point just famous) Banksy. The piece of legislation invoked to justify this undertaking was, perversely, the Organised Crime and Police Act. Under the new rules, Haw was banished. His and all other "unauthorised" protests were deemed to be illegal within a mile of Parliament Square. Critical to State Britain is the fact that the museum falls partly within that radius. A black line on the floor marks the boundary.
The notes, placards and objects (all faithfully replicated and distressed) that make up the exhibition-cum-protest comprise a sort of chronology of Haw's time on the square. The first banners we encounter oppose the pre-war sanctions against Iraq, and the last ones describe the battle around Haw's right to remain on the site. Throughout we find notes and gifts given to Haw in support of his actions. One of the things I found of particular interest was the focus on the effects of depleted uranium on Iraqi children. I vaguely recalled, as I walked through the images of children born without faces, with their internal organs outside their bodies, with no eyes (and so on), having heard something about the effects of DU on American soldiers--Gulf War Syndrome stuff--but I didn't remember hearing anything about the effects on Iraquis. Haw reads almost equally as hero and crackpot in this exhibit, so I decided to do some research of my own on the subject.
The statistics bear out Haw's allegations. In Southern Iraq (where depleted uranium was deployed by the US and British militaries) in 1989 there were 11 children born with defects per 100,000 births; in 2001 there were 116 per 100,000 births. In 1988, 34 people died of cancer; in 1998, 450 died of cancer; in 2001 there were 603 cancer deaths. There is also compelling evidence of the effects of DU on British and American soldiers who served in Southern Iraq, including increased rates of immune system disorders and birth defects reported by military personnel who worked with or near the material. The link to DU is strengthened by reported similarities between the symptoms reported by those personnel and uranium metalworkers exposed to frequent occupational uranium inhalation risks.
This exhibition was successful because it speaks in the language of contemporary art, following the trajectory set out by Dada and pursued by conceptualism and Relational Aesthetics, but it does so without sacrificing any of it's political efficacy. It's undeniably a tribute to Haw and his supporters, and it's undeniably a protest against war and censorship. At the same time it is an extension of the discourse of the readymade, a new move in conceptualism and a critique of the cult of originality.
Most importantly, it's incredibly moving and edifying. Clearly, Wallinger considers seriously his social responsibility as an artist.
We expect that consideration from nurses, soldiers and corporate executives (even if we are often disappointed). It‚ was refreshing to see work reflecting such self-scrutiny in the art world.