It feels so long ago and far away now, doesn’t it? The 1990s. Optimism. A failing Tory Government, a young(ish) Labour leader as the heir apparent, Britpop in the charts. Britart in the galleries. Pop stars and popular artists getting drunk together in the Groucho club. Damien and Tracey and Sarah and Jake and Dinos tearing up the artworld’s stuffy rulebook, going all out to shock, making art, making headlines.
The YBAs, Young British Artists, are now middle-aged, members of the establishment (or the Royal Academy of Arts; it amounts to much the same thing). The shock of the new that they announced themselves with is neither new nor particularly shocking these days (well apart perhaps from Marcus Harvey’s misunderstood portrait of Moors Murderer Myra Hindley).
Indeed, when Damien Hirst had his retrospective at the Tate Modern in 2012 what was most noticeable was the sad state of his most famous work, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (better known as the shark in a tank). Originally created in 1991, the shark in question was looking raddled and frankly pitiful. As a symbol of the past tenseness of Britart it’s hard to resist. We have moved on.
Which probably means it’s a good time for someone to look back and sum it all up from a distance. That’s what art historian and journalist Elizabeth Fullerton attempts to do in Artrage!, an account that takes us from the Freeze exhibition in 1988 with which the YBAs announced their arrival to the blaze at the Momart storage company in 2004 that saw the destruction of many iconic BritArt works including Tracey Emin’s tent and the Chapman Brothers’ model Hell (the one with Nazi toy soldiers and toy death camps).
The book fills a need. There has been surprisingly little written on the YBAs; there was Matthew Collings’ contemporaneous Blimey!, Gregor Muir’s insider account Lucky Kunst and the late Gordon Burn’s art journalism collected in Sex & Violence, Death & Silence.
But those are all, for various reasons, partial accounts. Fullerton has the chance to stand back and look at it all with fresh eyes. And she does, up to a point. For anyone seeking a straightforward, brisk, and often entertaining account of the YBA movement you could do worse than start here. It’s well researched, compendious, willing to cover artists who weren’t in the YBA front line (and so the likes of Anya Gallaccio and Jane and Louise Wilson are given their place in the story); willing, too, to look beyond London and the YBAs and what was happening elsewhere in the British art scene in the 1990s. Which mostly means Glasgow. That said, she could have integrated that into the book more compellingly. She reports the Glasgow scene but doesn’t use it as a chance to compare and contrast.
And that’s symptomatic of why Artrage! is a little frustrating. Not for the things it does, which it does very well, but for the things it doesn’t. Fullerton retains her journalistic objectivity even when the subject positively demands her to dive in, get dirty, give her opinion. Instead, she leaves that to others. As a result, the best lines are not hers. By the age of 26, she tells us, Damien Hirst had produced most of the works that he is known for. It’s left to the art critic Adrian Searle to stick the knife in: “He’s one of those artists who’s lived life backwards really; you do your mature work first and your juvenilia later.”
All that said, this remains an excellent primer on the rise and fall, successes and failures of a moment in British art. It catches the brio of the people involved, charts the connections that they forged; the friendships, the fall-outs, the partner swapping (a bit more gossip wouldn’t have hurt) and celebrates the art they created. Along the way she also reminds us that the YBA generation was mostly working-class, the creation of a grant system as much as their own post-Thatcherite pushiness.
But then that’s a thing of the past too in parts of Britain, isn’t it? The idea that the state should pay for education. It’s not just politics that can feel post-British these days.
Elizabeth Fullerton will be at the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh on Monday night at 6.30pm to discuss the Scottish dimension of Britart. Visit fruitmarket.co.uk for details.
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