London 2018: Contemporary Art - Damien Hirst, Charles Saatchi

Ever since my husband Rich and I went to a library talk given by Don Thompson, an economist and professor of Marketing and Branding, who was promoting his book “The $12 Million Stuffed Shark: The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art”, we have become much more familiar with and fascinated by contemporary art and artists.  We learned that successful branding involves creating a well-known and respected personality, distinctiveness and value to your product or service, usually achieved through marketing.  In the Contemporary art world, branding has significant influence on the value of art.  This can be seen by past sale prices of works created by branded artists such as Damien Hirst, Jeff Koons, or Andy Warhol, sold by branded art dealers such as Larry Gasgosian or branded auction houses such as Christie’s and Sotheby’s, purchased by branded collectors such as Charles Saatchi, and displayed at branded Contemporary Art Museums such as the Tate Modern.

I selected the $12 Million Stuffed Shark as my pick for our book club.  To get into the spirit of the topic, I asked each participant to create their own piece of contemporary art, using some famous work as inspiration.  I created 3 items, the first two as homages to Andy Warhol’s soup cans and his silk screen prints.  The third was based on a story from the book about Damien Hirst taking a red marker and drawing a red nose on an obscure painting of Joseph Stalin by an unknown painter.  Once Hirst signed the painting, its price jumped from 200 pounds to a final sale price of 140,000 pounds at auction.  Our book club dinner was also theme related, with an entrée of chicken casserole made with Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom Soup (Warhol) and a carrot cake decorated with Damien Hirst-esque dots (aka smarties) and blue and white gummy sharks.  We were thus quite excited about our plans for a Contemporary Art tour of London, including visits to Damien Hirst’s Newport Street Gallery and Pharmacy 2 Restaurant, as well as the Saatchi Gallery and the Tate Modern.

Located south of the Imperial War Museum on the South Bank of the Thames River and open since 2015, the Newport Street Gallery offers free admission to the public and hosts exhibitions that show works from Damien Hirst’s private collection.  Taking over 3 buildings from 1913 that were originally used as workshops for producing theatre scenery, the Newport Street Gallery spans 37,000 square feet and includes six exhibition spaces spread over 2 floors. Hirst’s Pharmacy 2 Restaurant is also found on the second floor and we planned to eat lunch there after touring the gallery.   The façade of the gallery is noted for the triangular protrusions at the top of one building, that look to me like mountain peaks or the points of a crown.  Each peak or point contains a large skylight or window that allows light into the gallery.

Despite the spacious exhibition rooms, only two artists were featured on the day that we visited and their works were very sparsely hung in the large spaces.  I guess this is the preferred method for displaying contemporary art, unlike the old days of the French Salon where paintings were stacked closely side by side and one on top of the other.   The first exhibit was British artist Rachel Howard’s “Repetition Is Truth – Via Dolorosa” series, which according to the write-up is supposed to be inspired by Christ’s Stations of the Cross.  This bewildered me since what I saw was a bunch of large yellow hued canvases with some faint grey and purple vertical lines.  A couple of the pieces also seemed to include the tip of a paint brush, perhaps in the process of creating the vertical lines?  One of these paintings was hung all by itself in a large room with the three other white walls completely bare.  One work stood out from the rest, both in subject matter and its green and black colour scheme. For this particular piece, after reading the description I was able to see what the artist was depicting, which was a hooded Iraqi detainee in the Abu Ghraib prison with his arms outstretched as he is being tortured by electric wires attached to his fingers and genitals.  I wish I was able to understand how to interpret the rest of these works, but I couldn't and so they did not appeal to me.

I liked the second exhibit much more although my Contemporary Art appreciation knowledge was probably not vast enough to grasp its deeper meanings either.  It was American artist John Copeland’s series of acrylic and oil paintings called “Your Heaven Looks Just Like My Hell”.  Not quite in the same league as Damien Hirst (who named his iconic stuffed shark sculpture “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living”), Copeland also uses curious, enigmatic names for not only his exhibition but his works as well.  His paintings have titles like “My Favorite Terrible Ideas” or “And I Cursed the Sun for Rising” which sound interesting but don’t have any obvious correlation to what you see in the works.  The first room of this exhibit contains what I assume is Copeland’s interpretation of the female nude trope historically prevalent in art works.  His females often have bright green or red hair and often come in pairs or doubles.  My three favourites were titled “A Difficult Set of Instructions” (girl with green hair), “Transmission - Imaginary Rules” (girl blowing bubblegum) and “The Bullet Screams Past” (pair of women rotated 45 degrees counter-clockwise each with her hand covering her mouth). 

Copeland often uses found photographic images from magazine pullouts as the starting point of his works.  The next rooms contain ambiguous or incongruent social scenes of people interacting.  They are often in the act of looking or viewing, as depicted in “Before the Beginning” where you see the backs of three people who seem to be viewing a large mural of biker gangs rumbling (possibly the Hell’s Angels?) , or “A Loud Silence” where a crowd seem to be inexplicably milling around in front of a reclining nude.  At first glance, his painting of two couples frolicking in the water seems playful and joyous.  But the ominous title “You Should Have Known How Things Would End” makes you take a second look, where you then notice the disfigured faces of the participants and grasp of the woman wearing the orange swimsuit, which now suddenly can seem menacing.  The strange point of view of the trope of a “table scene” in the painting “Wrong is Always Right” also gives one pause.  The viewer is looking down upon the table where the heads of half the participants have been cut off.  Focus is drawn to the woman turned away from the table and you wonder why?  Copeland says that his works are “a starting point for conversation or digression, like a riddle .. that raises questions that aren’t really answerable”.

The problem with having only one or two exhibits within your art gallery is that if the works of those few artists don’t resonate with your visitors, then there is not much recourse.  Luckily for us, while we did not connect either emotionally or intellectually with the works of Rachel Howard, we were intrigued by the paintings of John Copeland.  But the gallery visit was actually just a bonus since our real goal was to have lunch at Damien Hirst’s Pharmacy 2 restaurant, inspired by his works featuring medicine cabinets and the 1992 installation called “Pharmacy” which was first displayed in the Cohen Gallery in New York City before being installed at the Tate Modern.  His first medicine cabinet was called “Sinner” (1988) and represented the medicines that his grandmother used before dying of lung cancer.  The installation was a room-sized, site-specific representation of a pharmacy that included glass-fronted cabinets with pharmaceutical drugs on the shelves, desks and chairs behind a counter that holds four coloured apothecary bottles filled with coloured liquids representing earth, air, fire and water.  When this work was at the Cohen Gallery, visitors mistook it for a real pharmacy and frequently asked where the Damien Hirst exhibition could be found.

The Pharmacy 2 Restaurant expands on the concepts of Hirst’s Pharmacy art pieces with images and references to pills and drugs everywhere.  There is a glass case full of candy-coloured pills and capsules at the entrance to the restaurant, images of pills on the metal cupboards, the back of chairs and seating booths and inlaid in the marble floors.  Embroidered logos of pharmaceutical companies cover the walls.  An explosion of colour emanates from the stained glass windows depicting DNA strands in vibrant reds, whites and blues that can be seen from the street level at night. The side panels of a stainless steel and glass-topped bar are covered with multi-coloured pills that look like jelly beans from afar.  The backsplashes of the bar feature the similar DNA motif as the front windows and the seats of the bar stools resemble tablets of various types of medicines.

It was so much fun to sit in this restaurant that we would not have minded if the food was just mediocre, but it turned out that the food was actually really good.  Celebrity British chef Mark Hix collaborates with Hirst at Pharmacy 2 (the second Hirst restaurant after his original one in Notting Hill closed in 1998) and serves classic British and European cuisine made from fresh ingredients.  We were lucky to be in London during soft shell crab season and made the most of it by ordering it every chance we got.  We shared battered broccoli and buttered asparagus served with a hollandaise sauce, then each had the soft shell crab burger served with lettuce, kimchi and an aioli mayonnaise, with shoe-string potato fries on the side.  I'm not sure the Newport Gallery alone would be worth the trek since there is so little art on display, but if you want to experience this restaurant for the first time, then it is definitely a fun experience.

Charles Saatchi is the branded art collector and philanthropist whose endorsement and patronage of young, unknown British artists in the 1990s helped launch their careers.  He coined the terms “BritArt” and “YBAs” (Young British Artists), with the most famous member of that group being Damien Hirst, whose tiger shark preserved in formaldehyde in a large display case was funded and purchased by Saatchi.  Open since 1985, the Saatchi Gallery provides a space for Saatchi to share his large collection with the public, which he does free of charge, supported by a partnership with the auction house Phillips de Pury & Co.  The location of the gallery has changed several times since its original opening and now resides in the Chelsea district, housed in the Duke of York’s Headquarters, once the home of the Royal Military School.  The new Saatchi Gallery spans 70,000-square-foot (almost double the size of Newport Gallery) with 15 exhibition spaces.  Accordingly, Saatchi is able to display works from many more different artists than what is shown at Damien Hirst’s gallery.  Charles Saatchi’s goal is to make contemporary art accessible to the mainstream population and highlight relatively unknown artists in hopes of propelling them to become the next rising stars.

The Saatchi Gallery featured a slew of artists from around the world who we were introduced to for the first time.  The main exhibit running during our visit was titled “Known Unknown”, aptly reflecting Saatchi’s main goal for his gallery.  It showcased 17 diverse and eclectic international artists who are mostly unknown in the mainstream art world, but are admired and considered up and coming by their contemporaries.  We enjoyed and admired many of these works, but wish that they had been curated with explanation of what we were looking at.  Instead there was only the name of the artist and work as well as the materials used.  Even the descriptions found on the gallery's website were delivered in "artspeak", the practice of describing art pieces with high-brow, important sounding art jargon that is usually unintelligible to the casual viewer.  If Saatchi's goal is really to bring art to the masses, then the descriptions of the pieces should have been presented next to the works and in a manner that would be understandable by the layman.

My favourite artist from the Known Unknown exhibit was Hungarian painter Mona Osman, whose vibrant and fantastical works, made from oil, paper collage and resin on canvas, contained colour patterns and designs that reminded me of Gustav Klimt and featured warped humanoid forms that could have come from a Sci Fi movie, like the ones in Star Wars: A New Hope’s Cantina Bar scene.  Born in the Philippines, raised in Japan, studied art and now based in the U.K., the influences of Maria Farrar’s West vs East cultural background can be found in her oil on linen paintings.  While subject matters like the one depicted in “Baguette” exude a European flare, the flat perspective and calligraphy-like brush strokes of works like “Birthday” can directly be attributed to her time spent in Japan.  Farrar’s work is said to be personal and autobiographical, which makes you wonder at the title and the images found in “Saving My Parents From Drowning in the Shimonoseki Straits.”  Is the depiction of the turbulent waves, the orange life preserver and the upturned foot wearing a white high-heeled shoe supposed to be whimsical or is this a real and possibly traumatic event?

I was also intrigued by the abstract acrylic and oil on canvas paintings by German artist Stefanie Heinze which each seemed to feature parts of an elephant.  I have not found any reference to the significance of the elephant motifs in her work, but I started to think that I was seeing elephants everywhere when I inspected the ceramic sculpture “Sevres vase à Bobèches” by American artist Francesca Dimattio that was displayed in the same room as Stefanie Heinze’s paintings.  Made of overglaze and underglaze with gold lustre on porcelain, from a certain angle, I distinctly saw the head and trunk of an elephant!  I even thought initially that the ceramics were by the same artist as the paintings.  However after examining Dimattio’s other works including the one called “Confection”, I’ve decided that there was not a connection here and that I just had elephants on the brain.

Danish artist Kirstine Roepstorff creates large-scaled mixed media collages mounted on aluminum that are made from materials including paper, paint, wallpaper, glitter, pearls, sequins, cloth, vinyl, tinsel, silver leaf, wood, vellum, iron-on decals, magazine cut-outs and more.  The images in her work comment on politics and power. The piece ominously titled “You Are Being Lied To” presents a pretty green-space that could be part of a golf course with a water feature and sand traps, but the treetops are augmented with sparkly streamers, stars and flowers that give the setting a fantastical feel.  On top of this background, she layers a disparate mixture of images including a Mafioso dressed in a white suit and dark sun glasses, soccer player, boxer, folk singer with guitar, British “Bobby”, motorcycle rider, a policeman making an arrest, turbaned Indians, portaging canoeists, marching Asian militants, loggers, nudists, walking skeletons and a winged angel-like figure.  Interspersed with this are images of military force including fighter jets, armed soldiers, uniformed generals, as well as various religious symbols or rituals from various cultures.  This collage feels like a modern day version of works by Hieronymus Bosch, who also incorporated many different characters and small vignettes into his paintings.  Roepstorff’s piece is said to deal with the difference between the “reality portrayed in the media vs the reality or truth of a situation”, which seems to tie in with the title of the work.  By cutting out and repurposing or repositioning the realities portrayed by newspaper or magazine stories, Roepstorff is able to present her own message.  I also liked the collage called “Exercise Within the Frame” where the pasted fragments of leaves made from cloth or vinyl span beyond the frame of the work, giving it a 3-dimensional life beyond the usual boundaries of a non-sculptural art piece.

There were a few artists still on display from a previous exhibit called “Iconoclasts: Art Out of the Mainstream” that had ended before our visit.  The show featured 13 artists who strayed from artistic norms by creating their works using “ground-breaking experimental techniques”.   The artist whose technique I thought was most interesting was Italian-born Maurizio Anzeri, who takes vintage photographs and augments them by embroidering contemporary designs to create 3-D “photo sculptures”.   The multi-coloured embroidery and playful patterns pop against the sepia or black and white photos, turning old photos into new creative artworks.

French multi-media artist Thomas Mailaender’s creation of “sunburn photos” using the human skin as his canvas is in part performance art.  He places original negatives from old photographs onto the skin of his models and applies a UV lamp over them, resulting in the image appearing on the skin’s surface for a fleeting amount of time.  He quickly photographs his models with their “sunburns” before exposure to daylight cause them to disappear.  This unique and slightly creepy process definitely qualified Mailaender to be chosen for the Iconoclast exhibit.

Another interesting exhibit was award-winning Lizzie Sadin’s photography exposé  called “The Trap – Trafficking of Women in Nepal” which documents the prevalent issues of human trafficking and forced prostitution in Nepal and explores the causes which include economic poverty, lack of education and opportunities, as well as social and cultural beliefs and values which deem women as inferior to men.  Lured by promises of work, money, beautiful clothes and jewelry, young girls are lured by traffickers to cross the border from Nepal to India (sometimes via Sri Lanka) where they are enslaved, beaten, starved into submission and then forced into servitude in brothels or assigned as “maids” working over 20 hours a day where they are often sexually molested or raped.  It is estimated that in a year, over 15000 girls are taken into sexual or domestic servitude but less than 200 are reported missing.  Sadin’s photos show Nepal police and the anti-trafficking advocacy group KI Nepal boarding buses about to cross the border, looking for suspicious pairings of potential traffickers and victims.  She profiles several victims, telling their horrific but sadly similar stories.  Some of the most impactful photos of the series are the ones that Sadin took secretly, as noted by the caption “This photo was taken covertly”.  These seedy images include the owner of a dance bar simulating intercourse or rape of a dancer in order to excite his customers, a bouncer positioned in front of a dance bar to prevent the girls from escaping, and young girls summoned to private “cabins” within a brothel/bar where men are waiting to touch or initiate intercourse with them.

We saw many interesting exhibits at the Saatchi Gallery and found it much more enjoyable than the Damien Hirst Newport Gallery.  But surprisingly, our favourite part of this visit was the gift shop.  As usual, you are forced through the gift shop as part of the path through the building, but this time, we actually spent quite a while in there looking at all the cool items.  Rich was particularly amused by the oxymoron of the Karl Marx “Das Kapital” Money Bank.  There were some fun childrens’ books including LLAMAPhones (Homophones as depicted by Llama images) and Baby Duck/Baby Koala finger puppet books.  I liked the extremely “punny” Chairman Meow poster and the cards with visual puns including “mood swings”, “support bras” and “recreational drugs”.  I was really excited to see the giant gorilla sculpture, which I believe was referenced in the movie “The Square”, a hilarious satire mocking contemporary art and the practise of artists, curators and art critics to participate in pretentiously unintelligible “artspeak”.  In a scene in that movie, with no explanation, a gorilla enters an apartment, plops down on the couch and starts reading a magazine.  I was befuddled at the significance of the gorilla in the movie, but perhaps it was inspired by this one in the Saatchi shop?

My favourite item from the Saatchi Shop was the “Lenticular Bookmark” (also available as a ruler) which features a row of figures each in midst of performing an activity such as jumping rope, bouncing a ball, riding a unicycle or spinning a hula hoop.  As you rotate the bookmark forwards or backwards, the figures begin to move.  I bought one of these bookmarks as a souvenir, but wished I had bought a couple more to give as gifts. Our Contemporary Art Tour continues with a visit to the Tate Modern Gallery, which is even larger and more comprehensive than the Saatchi Gallery.  Since this blog has run on long enough and there is so much to describe about the Tate Modern, I will leave that for the next blog.