Looking glass

Notoriety though should be forewarning enough. Given the oohing and theaahing and the cutting and the jabbing that had gone on in the pressfollowing the city mayor’s well-publicised opposition to the show, everyfervent visitor thrusting his $ 9.50 at the ticket window knew full wellwhat to expect. And yet neither I nor, I suspect, observing the expressionsaround me, much of the audience, was really prepared for the actualunveiling. It was not so much a piece here or a piece there (though therewas that too : I had to force myself to look at Damien Hirst’s bisectedanimals by telling myself "if I can eat it I can look at it") but the showas a whole. I found it disturbing. A lifesize representation of a ma-n’sface, with every pore and hair alive; a replica of the naked corpse of theartist’s father real in every detail, yet child size; giant pictures offleshy women with the heads cut off, `two fried eggs and a kebab’, slang fora woman’s body slapped upon a table. Disgusting? It could have been but forthe irony (as self-assured as Brit glam rock: Queen or even Bowie himself).

Teasing, provocative, warm even. Chris Ofili’s Madonna, the painting thatcaused the greatest furore in fact, unlike the traditional Virgin Maryseemed to invite as much as exude love, the dung breast exposing an almostgirl-like vulnerability.

If these reasserted a theme that to me at least pointed at universalmortality and the sameness of flesh, skin, blood, there were pieces thatindicted contemporary excesses. Hadrian Pigott mocked the use of detergentsmore toxic than human grime. Mona Hatoum’s `Deep Throat’ was an eleganttable setting till you looked at the plate and found yourself gazing stomachchurningly into the expanding and contracting larynx of the artist.Effective. Confrontational. Thought provoking. Till you thought about it andwondered : are the issues profound or are they embarrassingly trite. Whyare Britain’s best young artists preoccupied with the idea of equalization?And is this really art? One need not agree with the need for art to bepleasant or elevate. But isn’t this treading dangerously on the preserve ofthe journalist and the filmmaker? Adam Chotzko for instance showed picturesof people who thought they looked like God – an idea tailor-made for glossyjournalism. Richard Billingham’s shots of his vivid lower class family couldhave come straight from PBS or Oliver Stone.

Furthermore, if one expects art at least to last, then what does one say ofthe child killer Myra Hindley portrait? Ten years on or even two who willremember her? Will it make sense?

These questions are not new. They are as perennial probably as the new formsart can take. Yet they dangle like shards of glass sometimes catching thislight, sometimes that. Is the artist a victim of the times or is hemanipulating the viewer to confront his or her own notions of art and indeedof high and low whether it is in terms of class, media, sensibility etc. Allthis is significant in the context of the current debate over the perceiveddumbing down of culture in the west. Hilton Kramer, editor of the NewCriterion is scathing about the present-day amusement park aspect of thearts claiming that "high art’s serious accomplishments are packaged in waysthat can appeal to the ignorant" and that "aesthetic standards have beenabandoned in the interest of social documentary." The New Yorker, meanwhilesees merit in that. Commenting specifically on Sensation it maintained:"It’s a matter not of `high’ and `low’ but of inside and outside: cooking toengage both the gourmets in the kitchen and the rabble in the soup line."

Desirable or undesirable? An argument that I’m still trying to resolve.Meanwhile let me describe one of the more startling exhibits. Marc Quinn’shead made of blood (real blood that he extracted over five months out of hisown body, all 8 pints, the average amount required by a human body) and thenpoured into a cast of his own head. The sculpture is kept alive by arefrigeration unit. It suggests, we are informed, the precariousness of thehuman condition and our reliance on technology. One pull of the plug and -plop!