Marcus Harvey's portrait of Myra Hindley, an enormous image composed from a child's handprints, may prove to be the most controversial piece of work yet produced by the current crop of young British artists. On the eve of its exhibition at the Royal Academy, he talks exclusively to the Guardian about his work and its provenance.
The height of the Morbid Manner
Banging. Sorted. Mental. Wicked. New words for new ways of living in an old country. Large. Skanky. Blimey! (shading out of the child-like wonder of the pop mentality here, into rote MTV irony). Top tip! Brilliant! Phwoar!
Betcha By Golly Wow! This could have been a good title for the show of work by young British artists from the Saatchi collection, which is just about to open at the Royal Academy. The record was a hit in 1972, so they probably danced to it at junior discos. It's corny-clever, "selling", in a sly, self-deprecating way, and suggestive of the we're-all-dumbed-down-now Sun-speak that it pre-dates by a few years.
Instead, the show is to be ho-humly called Sensation (no exclamation mark), a word that will be emblazoned on the belly of Burlington House, the home of the RA in Piccadilly, like a Nike swoosh on the master of the hounds' well-filled twills, or a logotype splashed across the stirrups and snaffles printed on his lady wife's headscarf. Bleeuuuur-rrrgh! Begpardon, guv.
On second thoughts, though, perhaps Sensation isn't such a bad title. It suggests the gulf that exists between all the heat generated in the media kerfuffle surrounding the Damien Hirst generation of artists, and the coolness — that is, the affectless-ness; the loss of sensation; the stary, cold stoniness — in the work itself. Sensational. This was one of the adjectives applied by Diane Arbus to the nightmare reality she cruised New York photographing everyday. Terrific, interesting, fantastic, brilliant. These were others.
Arbus made her name in the Sixties taking pictures of the subliterate and the disliterate, the pain-crazed and the deranged, transsexuals and circus freaks. To photograph people, according to Arbus, is necessarily cruel, mean. The important thing is not to blink. With Andy Warhol, she was an originator of that new kind of ghostly, frozen, remote look at death and suffering and decay. In a now-famous attack on Arbus's work, Susan Sontag accused her of being "devoted to lowering the threshold of what is terrible", and continued: "By getting used to what, formerly, we could not bear to see or hear, because it was too shocking, painful or embarrassing, art changes morals — that body of psychic custom and public sanctions that draws a vague boundary between what is emotionally and spontaneously intolerable and what is not. The gradual suppression of queasiness does bring us close to a rather formal truth — that of the arbitrariness of the taboos constructed by art and morals. But our ability to stomach this rising grotesqueness in images and in print has a stiff price.
In the long run, it works out not as a liberation of but as a subtraction from the self: a pseudo-familiarity with the horrible reinforces alienation, making one less able to react in real life."
Some of Sarah Lucas's early pieces, which started finding their way into die Saatchi collection from about 1990, bear a superficial resemblance to Arbus's work. Sod You Gits, for example, is a huge, seven-foot-by-ten-foot blow-up of a spread from the Sunday Sport in which Sharon Lewis, die topless midget, tells how she became die smallest stripper in the world and learned how to drive men wild by showing diem her breasts. Fat, Forty And Flabulous features the 25-stone wife of Reg Morris who grew so large her husband decided to get rid of her by putting her up for sale. She is photographed naked (front and rear), except for a pair of stockings.
In Arbus's pictures, the point would have been to gaze on the women's reality with curiosity and detachment; to confront the horrible or, at the very least, the potentially embarrassing with equanimity. It is this flat-eyed gaze that Lucas appropriates and parodies in a recent photographic self-portrait, in which she stares sullenly into the camera, a fag-end clamped skittishly in the corner of her mouth, its coil of ash ready to drop, direct eye-balling anybody with the Niagara Falls to eye-ball her. It is a pose, of course, a semi-fiction, as Martin Maloney points out in the Sensation catalogue: "She took [Michael] Landy's idea of the object as a tool of class visibility and directed it towards herself . . . Her appropriation of a young, working-class male's interest in violence, sex and alcohol was unapologetic. By adopting it she exposed it."
It is role-playing as we have come to understand it through the work of Gilbert and George and Cindy Sherman. Frontal, insolent, the unintimidated direct address to the camera. This is a look we think of as traditionally masculine; certainly as unfeminine. It is a look that many of us instinctively associate with the murderer, Myra Hindley, and, in particular, the picture that Marcus Harvey has used as the basis for the painting that has turned him into a (reluctant) headline-hitter.
Its the belief that it is the terribleness of her "inner being" that can be plainly seen etched on the 30-year-old police mugshot of Hindley — die cavernous, upturned eyes, die heavy bones, die holed hedge of bleached-blonde fringe, the fondant of deep shadow, like a choke-collar, under Hindley's chin — that gives it its power as a symbol of evil. In the 16th century, Protestant iconoclasts believed that evil influences could come into the body through the eyes, and corrupt the viewer. And the events of recent weeks have shown that it is still possible to hold these views, 400 years later. It was inevitable from the start that Myra would mobilise powerful opposition from predictable sources. At the beginning of August, the Sun printed the telephone number of the Royal Academy and urged its readers to bombard the switchboard with protests about the hanging of a picture that — an essential part of the outrage ritual — only a handful of people had seen at that point. Peter Blake happened to be at the Royal Academy that Saturday morning. It was the day of the porters' annual coach trip to the Ascot races, and one man was having to field all the calls. Many were abusive, and a few threatened violence. "Unless you tell me it's withdrawn, I'm coming round to the Academy and I'm going to stab the first person I see," Blake heard one caller say.
The alleged charlatanism of contemporary art has always been good copy. It is even better copy now that London is swinging again ("ablaze with, a giddy energy," in the words of Vanity Fair), and young artists such as Damien Hirst and Jake and Dinos Chapman enjoy something approaching pop star status. In the 1930s, as Andiony Everitt has pointed out, the joke was usually about reclining nudes with holes in their stomachs, and well-hung angels. In the more recent past, there has been the noise around a display of soiled nappies at the Institute Of Contemporary Arts, and the torching of David Mach's submarine made out of tyres on the South Bank, in which the arsonist ended up killing himself.
In the past few years, their engagement with the real world (the lavatory as art, die racehorse as narrative sculpture, the avalanche of cartoons and one-liners about pickled cows and sharks) has seen British artists turning up in the mainstream media, usually to be cackled at, in unprecedented numbers. This reached some kind of crescendo at the end of 1993, when Rachel Whiteread's House went up on Grove Road in the East End and Whiteread was judged to be both the best artist in Britain (by the Turner Prize jury), and the worst (by the rock-biz pranksters calling themselves the K Foundation).
The case with the most obvious relevance to the controversy surrounding Marcus Harvey's billboard-size painting of Myra Hindley is probably Andy Warhol's 36-feet-square painting derived from the "Wanted" posters for the 13 most wanted men in America. It had been commissioned for the New York State pavilion at the 1964 World's Fair, but the sponsors' protests over such a perverse official advertisement meant it was whitewashed over within hours of its installation. (The Royal Academy has given Harvey an assurance that his painting will be withdrawn from the show only if they feel the safety of any RA staff member is threatened.) Andy Warhol, though, was Andy Warhol; he was a creature of, by and for the media; a lifelong media tart and headline junkie. Marcus Harvey, by contrast, is not a controversialist. With him, it really has been a case of backing into the limelight, and he has found even that can be unnerving. "I'm going to stab the first person I see," he repeated ruminatively, pouring a rubber latex solution into a mould. When, it had hardened, the mould would make the head of Adolf Hitler, its mouth opened in an un-Hitler-like guffaw. The head would go on the body that was already made and waiting in the studio, leaning forward, right arm extended, taking a child by the hand. "I'm going to stab the first person I see." I had told him what Blake had overheard at the Royal Academy, and it was a phrase Harvey would keep returning to, saying it under his breath really, rather than speaking it, in the course of the day.
"You decide to make a piece, you've got to fund it, and then you don't know if it's going to work," he said. "I was prepared to let the thing just wither and die in my own studio if that had been the case. Or you've sold it, and after two years of thinking [Charles Saatchi] doesn't like it, he's bored with it, he's frightened of it, I'm not going to see it again, suddenly — bang! It just explodes all over you, with 'I'm going to stab the first person I see'. Now, the only time I get to see it and evaluate it for myself is in a hallowed institution. I haven't had time to form my own relationship with it yet."
The studio is behind a breakers' yard in Brixton, south London. In addition to the Hitler paraphernalia — histories, texts, pictures blown up to poster size and taped to the wall — it is filled with pallets on which hundreds of plaster moulds of squeaky nursery toys, bath-time ducks, tea-time cakes and biscuits are stacked. There are also moulds of a baby's hands and feet, the feet plunging, soles upward, into the choppy picture plane, as if it was water, the hands emerging from it, like a diver coming up for air. (Seeing a hand "beckoning" from its shallow grave was how the police, combing Saddleworth Moor in the mid-Sixties for Brady and Hindley's child victims, discovered the remains of John Kilbride.) The plaster moulds are the components of a three-dimensional, even more monumental version of the painting of Myra Hindley.
Any portrait of Hindley was, of course, going to be controversial. A portrait measuring 11 feet-by-nine feet was bound to be interpreted as an affront to common decency. A wall-sized portrait of Hindley in which the basic picture element is a baby's hand, simultaneously clawing and constructing, obliterating and making, and repeated hundreds, perhaps thousands, of times across the surface of the picture was seriously — some might say recklessly — raising the stakes. In his on-the-record remarks, it seemed more important to Harvey to be candid than to bring the temperature down. "It's a terrifying image," he said, "and I realised I had been attracted to it lots of times, just pulled in by it. It's quite exciting, it's uncomfortable. I was very aware that the pull of the image was a sexual thing and that that is part of the taboo that increases its appeal.
"The whole point of the painting is the photograph. That photograph. The iconic power that has come to it as a result of years of obsessive media reproduction. And I don't really want to get beyond that. I'm not going to read a lot of trashy books to find out the nuts and bolts of the case. I know enough to know that she probably didn't do any of the murders, that she was just in a relationship where she was probably too attached to the man who was doing it to extricate herself. That her life was probably too dull and boring to throw the relationship away ... I don't believe that's 30-years-worth of reputation as one of the most vile and notorious murderers in British criminal history.
"This is the crucial issue: she didn't do the murdering, but she was a female who ignored her motherly instincts. That is her great crime. It was compounded by the unmentionable sin of looking like everybody's idea of what somebody who commits that crime should look like. It's more than the embodiment of evil. It's the realisation of a certain kind of Nazi/Marilyn Monroe/Frankenstein fantasy. A kind of dumb insolence. I think there's a lot of sexual appeal to men, and definitely to a lot of women as well. That is what we're not admitting to ourselves. And that is why the first reaction [to the painting] is to condemn. The only way you can talk about the power that image has is by allowing it to operate on people. And that meant making it big. You're in a sea of Myra, lashing over you. It felt very uncomfortable right from the outset. I was troubled by it. But there seemed to be no other way of doing it." Unlike most other young British artists in the Saatchi collection, Marcus Harvey's background is in "pure" painting. For the past three or four years, he has plundered top-shelf magazines for pornographic images of women. Julie From Hull, Golden Showers, Doggy and others are dense smearings of paint applied directly to the canvas with his fingers in a process that he describes as "orgiastic". It takes him half an hour to get the muck off his hands after finishing a picture. "I feel like a murderer," he once said, although he probably now regrets it.
He was at London's Goldsmiths' College in the early Eighties, when neo-expressionism was the prevailing style and the lack of spirituality in our materialistic world the dominant message. "I had these very kind of... religious ideas about how you proceed in art. You sweated and suffered and, if you were lucky, when you were old and wispy, you might sell a picture. And to do anything other than that was just a frivolous load of bollocks that would come to nothing."
The two Hindley pieces and the Hitler-and-child tableau are a move in a more conceptual, ideas-based direction. Using the hands to depict Hindley's face, though, instead of the more conventional brushes and paint, was a tactic he said he was driven to by the desire to side-step the inevitable allegations that, just by painting it at all, he was lending a gloss of glamorous allure.
"I just thought that the hand-print was one of the most dignified images that I could find. The most simple image of innocence absorbed in all that pain. And that kicks the thing into reality. "I just thought that the hand-print was one of the most dignified images that I could find. The most simple image of innocence absorbed in all that pain. And that kicks the thing into reality. There's an absolute realism. It's a real event. I realised you had to break the surface of this image, so it's not just a glamorous posturing. That wouldn't have been enough. It wouldn't have struck the nerve you needed to strike if you were going to get people to recognise that what they loved to hate — what gave it the heat — was the idea that a woman and innocent children were in there, and the children were dying."
The result is a remarkable, refrigerated piece of work with a chill that seems to stain the air around it. It's a chill to which even the person who made it is not immune. "I became very aware that I had completed the person, and that they were looking back out at me. I was very aware of having created the thing. Then I did become kind of concerned about the potency of it, of what I'd done."
Norman Rosenthal, the Secretary of the Royal Academy, believes it is the single most important painting in the show and the one that informs everything else. "I mean, I would rather live with something a little more decorative, like a Gary Hume. But I believe the Myra Hindley painting is a very, very cathartic picture. It is an incredibly serious and sober work of art that needs to be seen. It means nothing in reproduction. Its facture, its aura, its immanence. These are things which have to be experienced. To take it out would reduce the temperature of the show radically."
Rosenthal believes that there is "a place in the world for lightness and a place in the world for darkness". But the evidence of his eyes must have told him that it is in the dark places — "the mind's swampy sewer," to quote one American critic — that most of the best artists of the current generation have been grubbing for inspiration.
"There's something very macabre about what I do ... twisted and macabre," Cindy Sherman said recently. And macabre is a word that has been used in connection with their work by everybody from Rachel Whiteread to Alexander McQueen, who paraded dead animal parts on the catwalk in his last Paris show.
As a preoccupation, of course, this is not new. There can't be many people left who don't know about Francis Bacon's habit of haunting medical bookshops or his fascination with the "glitter" and "incongruous beauty" of the inside of the human mouth. (Perhaps less well-known is his fondness for remembering that Sigmund Freud had in his possession a set of particularly horrendous photographs from the Viennese police archives, and Bacon's own irregular visits to the Black Museum in Scotland Yard.) Consciously emulating Bacon, Damien Hirst had built up a grueseome library of pathology books when he was still a teenager in Leeds. "Books of burns and this kind of horrible thing," as he described them to me once. "I was painting all these people with mutilations and bums. I always had a morbid fascination with it. Eventually I couldn't bear them any longer and gave them away. But I went out and bought about six a couple of weeks ago, new copies of the books I'd had when I was young. I think the interest comes from the fact that they're completely delicious, desirable objects of completely undesirable and unacceptable things. They're like cookery books."
With Dead Head (1991) is a picture of Hirst as a 16-year-old, posing with the severed head of an old man in a mortuary. When Logics Die (1991) features two photographs: one is the gaping, mouth-like wound of a man who has slit his own throat; the other is the bloodied hand of the victim of a road accident. Shortly after these were shown at the ICA, Abigail Lane moved in and decorated the walls of the same gallery with her blood-splattered wallpaper: the pattern came from a scene-of-the-crime photograph showing the trace of hands, printed in their own blood. Her show also included a dismembered body, cast in red wax, and a looped tape of terrified whimpering sounds coming from behind a locked door.
Lane and Hirst were students at Goldsmiths' at the same time, and she remembers his atrocity books doing the rounds. Mat Collishaw took, a forensic pathologist's picture of a bullet hole in the top of a man's head, blew it up from five-inches-by-four-inches to 12-feet-by-eight feet, called it Bullet Hole, and hung it in Freeze, the hit show put on in a deserted warehouse in docklands that almost nobody saw and that everybody remembers seeing now. Others — Marc Quinn, The Wilson sisters, Jane and Louise, Richard Billingham and (especially) the Chapman brothers, Jake and Dinos — have since taken thie aesthetics of revulsion to places even David Cronenberg probably didn't know it could go. "Vomit," Jake, the younger Chapman brother, once said, was the response he wanted from the viewer. "No, laughter. And then vomit. Money. No — I don't know." Six Feet Under, the Chapman brothers' show opening at the Gagosian gallery in New York later this month, will apparently feature a mass grave. "There'll be grass and trees and lots of mutated figures looking down into a pit." In 1993, the American critic, Adam Gopnik gave what was happening, not only in Britain but internationally, a name: the Morbid Manner. Picking up where Sontag had left off a generation earlier, he described works in which "bodies rot, faces are filled with maggots, surgical instruments and examination tables are on display" as representing, "if not the spirit of the age, then at least the mood of the moment". He continued: "A detached, distanced, oddly smiling presentation of violence — a pageantry of violence — is, as every evening's television and every summer's big movie demonstrates, as much the popular fashion as the avant-garde one... The shock of the new, which for most of the century could reside as much in a black square as in a slit eyeball, isn't available any longer. It's not possible to shock any more by being new. The only way to shock is by being shocking."
"I want to give succour," Gary Hume once told an Express reporter, who he had already floored by saying that, outside of art, nursing was the only other field that interested him. What was shocking about this was that it was said without any obvious irony. Hume is the orchid in the dung heap; the poppy amidst the current carnage; a painter with a deliberately cloying confectioners' palette and a hallucinatory menagerie of owls and puppy dogs, teddy bears and bunny rabbits, prayerful model girls and low-wattage celebrities that can induce a sort of sugar shock in the viewer. Hume is unblushingly (although not doctrinairely) pro-life. When he does produce a creepy or crapulous image, such as Baby, it is to throw the surrounding ordinary goodness into sharp relief, as the Italian critic, Francesco Bonami, has intelligently pointed out: "It looks like all the energy of this artist has been concentrated in the effort to reveal a world of nasty images that veil the tine beauty of a world inhabited by beautiful people and beautiful things."
But there was a time, and it wasn't very long ago, when Hume could conceivably have qualified for membership of the Morbid tendency. When he was still at Goldsmiths', he started showing life-size paintings of doors, but not just any doors. These were hospital doors, complete with finger and kick plates and port-hole windows. Which naturally led (although he says it was never his intention) to speculations about "cheerless hours of fearful loneliness", and lines of thought whose only direction was towards dwindlings and exits and death. It was possible to link this work with work being done at the same time by, say, Rachel Whiteread, who made her first bed piece two months after her father died in 1989. They are both suffused with what Saul Bellow calls "street sadness"; the same easily identifiable ache of urban melancholy.
But, where Whiteread went on to cast mortuary slabs and discarded mattresses, Hume turned his face towards a brighter day. Like Mat Collinshaw, whose subject matter has shifted from suicide, rape and pornography to pictures of himself in Arcadia catching fairies, Hume has, very successfully in the past few years, produced a body of work embodying his belief in "colour, form, laughter, innocence, attraction, beauty". That's what he's for. He is against "pain, loss, grimness, paranoia".
"It's much easier to be disgusting, I find. It can have weight. Take any of the subjects that are illegal or disgusting, or question the given morality, and you've got weight. And weight is one thing artists are desperate to have," he says. "But I didn't want to rely too much on that type of weight. I was more interested in how you can get weight somewhere else." He says it would be a distortion to see Goldmiths', at least during his time there, when his contemporaries included Michael Landy, Angus Fairhurst and Fiona Rae, as a forcing ground for artists gravitating towards the Morbid Manner.
"I think it would be a mistake to call Goldsmiths', instead of the 'cool school', the 'macabre school'," says Hume. "The driving force was wit and formalism. Punning. I think the horror came later, when everybody had left college. When you move from the college environment to the non-college environment, a kind of grimness sets in straight away. And then Damien had created his own supreme place. It's like you wake up one morning and realise all your friends have been eight times to the Groucho Club and you haven't been once."
In fact, Hume was an early flyer; one of the big successes of Freeze. Charles Saatchi bought one of the door paintings and then, when he had a solo show with Karsten Schubert, bought a lot more. "I want it, I want it all, and I want it now" is the motto that Doris, the first Mrs Saatchi, once said should be engraved on all great collectors' hearts. But "Buy cheap. Buy early. Pile it high" has been her husband's purchasing policy since Charles and Doris went their separate ways.
Being taken up by Charles Saatchi has become one of the conditions of success for an artist in recent years. The benefit to Saatchi of having a virtual monopoly is early access to some of the best new work at prices he essentially controls. He is dedicated, serious and assiduous, and he gets everywhere, as Richard Wentworth confirms. "You're being an assessor at the Slade, in what is essentially examination conditions, and he'll just appear. This little figure appears in the background. He's gone shopping, and he's the first in the line. It's like Hitchcock... People perceive a proper collecting culture in this country, and it's not there. There's Charles Saatchi and there's no one else."
But if the patronage of Saatchi can place a young artist firmly on the up escalator, being dropped by him can have equally devastating repercussions. It has happened in the past to, among others, Julian Schnabel, Sean Scully and Brice Marden. A close weather-eye is kept on the auction catalogues to monitor which Saatchi artists are being "let go", and whose prices, as a consequence, are about to nose-dive. "I would loathe it loathe it loathe it," Hume says, not surprisingly. "But at the end of the day, it's up to the power of the work to come through. My advice to Brice Marden would be to tighten his belt, buy a few back and believe in art. Charles Saatchi has saved my bacon a couple of times in the past when I've been totally broke. I've phoned him up, told him there was a good painting in the studio and he's bought it."
Richard Wentworth taught at Goldsmiths' from 1971 until 1987, the period during which he was establishing his own considerable reputation as a sculptor. He was drawn to the college by the innovatory teaching methods of its principal, Jon Thompson, who had abolished the traditional divisions between departments — painting, sculpture, photography etc — and allowed students to move between them according to choice. Students were treated as working artists from the moment they arrived, and the course prepared them for being professional artists after they had graduated. Wentworth believes that there was something about the dynamic of the original Goldsmiths' building in Camberwell — teeming, intimate, cramped — that created the climate in which good work could be done. "It was like a little public school," he says. "Very knowable, and with a nice sense of being independent. Everybody had the chance to talk to everybody, and there was a sense that ideas belonged to people. One of the things that is never articulated was that there was an exhibition space right in the centre of the building which was fought over. The desire to expose your work, which was done every week, was truly incredible. And then there would be a sort of Peking-style crit, with people hanging on the walls, which everybody wanted to go to. I'm talking 60, 70 people. And a real energy."
A great deal has been said about the "Thatcherite" ethos that produced Damien Hirst and his contemporaries. But Wentworth believes their formative experience happened a decade earlier, with punk. "I think punk and Thatcher are very similar in a way. They're both: 'Go for it.' 'That house is empty. We ain't got fuck all. So we'll be pirates, take it, squat it. . . ' I always think Thatcher-equals-ramraiding: 'You wannit, you take it.' They all graduated into that moment."
Julian Opie left Goldsmiths' in 1982, and immediately established an international reputation. Wentworth thinks that Opie was the "permission-giver" for the generation that followed him: "There's nobody come out of Goldsmiths, with his incredible vivacity." But Marcus Harvey takes issue with him on this point. "Damien's been the model, because he was the first. There was no model for it. No ceiling. No one actually believed that the Sixties' Pop thing could come so full circle." Harvey started at Goldsmiths' in 1982. Hirst, a friend from his schooldays in Leeds, visited him in London.
"He had an entrepreneurial spirit," says Harvey. "He just got on with life, you know; making life comfortable. He's the most guilt-free man I ever, ever experienced. That's what the contrast between the two of us is. He just went for it. And he didn't have a plan before, or a model; he just was into life, the guy we know and love. He just came down, saw the deal . . . He didn't pay any attention to the course at all. He just used it like a palette.
"He didn't accept the tutors as tutors. He just got mates with them and joked with them and took the piss out of them straight away; made friends with the artists. Fearless. You couldn't intimidate him. He just knew: 'I can't go wrong. There are so many fucking tossers. Whingeing neurots. I'm like a rock in a stormy sea.' He just got on with it. Recruited a few people for Freeze. And then, suddenly, he blazed away. He ripped the air out of everyone's lungs."
"I realised a couple of things," says Hirst. "I was doing Freeze while I was working for this company called MAS Research. And what I realised is you can get anything over the phone. I always used to be intimidated by the telephone. I was horrified by phones. I couldn't do it. By doing this and having a laugh with all your mates, it just gave me a ridiculous phone confidence. You suddenly realised that the person on the other end of the phone never gets any fucking visuals, so you have massive amount of power. It's like a screen to hide behind.
"When you're on the phone, there's just so much missing. I mean, we got £10,000 out of Olympia and Yorke, £4,000 out of D'Offay [to finance Freeze]. I never thought of it as projecting a lie; I think it's projecting an image. I mean, I'm not afraid of meeting somebody and them being shocked and going: 'Oh fuck, he's just a little twat from Leeds really.' It doesn't really matter, does it? I am who I am. The shark was like the end of that, and Freeze was the beginning."
Hirst is the biggest British art star since David Hockney. He is pleased with his success; he wanted it, he worked for it honestly, and he's achieved it. Inevitably (this is an old country), he is now being criticised for being "just" a celebrity. "You've got to become a celebrity," says Hirst, "before you can undermine it, take it apart, show people that there's no difference between celebrities and real life. Celebrity is a fucking lie. It's like: I'll do a magic trick, and I want it to be amazing. But if anybody asks me how to do it, I'll show them exactly how to do it. I want you to be amazed twice. Once you're amazed because it seems impossible, and then you're amazed because it's fucking easy. That's what I like." The Shark. The Sheep. The House. Ghost. Blood Head. The Actress Asleep In The Case. The Doors. The pieces capitalise themselves on the strength of the place they have claimed in the popular imagination. They are already priceless receptacles of the pleasures and the pathologies of the times in which they were made.
There will be a temptation to see Sensation as some kind of ending or wrapping up; a celebration of an extraordinary period that is now drawing to a close. But that would probably be premature. Most of the artists are in their early thirties, some are not even as old as that. "I feel I haven't even started yet," Hirst says. "I don't think anybody feels like they've started yet. I just feel like everybody's getting a glimpse of... like it's getting equal now. Everybody realises they know more than a lot of the people who are out there. And we're very fucking young to know that.”
The Guardian Weekend September 6 1997 pp.14-21
Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited 1997.
