www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk
Visited on Friday 4 January 2013
Today’s journey began in Dalston as I was
there for an appointment, and so I was able to get straight on the Overground
to Whitechapel and change for the District Line to Sloane Square. It was a
pleasant journey, taking me unexpectedly round the back of the previously visited Geffrye Museum, and thus affording a very quick look at the gardens
there (nice but bare, it being winter). There was virtually nobody on the train
and I got to the destination in about 30 minutes. If you don’t live in London
be warned – this is in no way typical of a journey on either of those lines!
The Saatchi Gallery began life in 1985 in
St John’s Wood. Opened by renowned recluse, ad man and art aficionado Charles
Saatchi in order to show his private collection to the public, it has received
and indeed courted quite a bit of controversy over the years. Saatchi
effectively launched the career of Damien Hirst, when he put on his famous show
of Young British Artists in the early 1990s (featuring Hirst’s shark in
formaldehyde piece), and provided a springboard for many others such as Rachel
Whiteread, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Sarah Lucas and Tracey Emin. Her piece
‘Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-95’ (‘the tent’) was lost in a fire at a
storage warehouse in Leyton containing several other pieces owned by Saatchi,
as well as many other artworks. The total loss was valued by one insurance
specialist at over £50m. Indeed.
Anyway, the gallery now has its premises
within the very splendid Duke of York’s HQ. Done up for the purpose and opened
in 2008 it is undoubtedly one of the best gallery spaces I have been to. The
fifteen white-walled and high-ceilinged rooms are light and airy and provide a
serious but quite neutral context for the artworks displayed in them. Unlike
other modern art galleries (such as the Tate Modern), where you have to pay to
see the special exhibitions, everything here is free – except for the little
exhibition guidebook, which maddeningly I seem to have mislaid somewhere
between lunch and home (that’s what daytime wine does for you kids – just say
no). Anyway it was only £1. There was a stack of free copies of the gallery’s
own magazine ‘Art and Music’ in the foyer so I had a flip through one of those
while awaiting today’s companion, the Lady Anonymous…
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| Dramatic entrance |
There were two exhibitions for us to see - ‘Gaiety
is the most outstanding feature of the Soviet Union’, and ‘Breaking the Ice:
Moscow art 1960-80s’. Together the two bring together works by about 40 Russian
artists and we saw many pieces, so I will just give some of the highlights
here.
The first gallery contained large black and
white photographs of Soviet prisoners. They were all men, stripped to the waist
(and beyond in some cases) to reveal their tattoos. The photographer, Sergei
Vasiliev, had worked for a local newspaper, then got a job as a prison warden.
His colleague had begun cataloguing the prisoners’ tattoos as the imagery
contained subversive messages about the Soviet regime, and about the prisoners’
own crimes. When the KGB got wind of this, they realized that these DIY tattoos
– made using improvised sharp edges and ‘ink’ in the form of blood or urine –
could provide useful information, and so they sent in Vasiliev to make a visual
document. The photos are immediately striking because the men have been quite deliberately
posed – sometimes on their own with props, sometimes seated in pairs or groups
with their arms over each other’s shoulders in comradely fashion, and sometimes
looking directly at the camera with a very intimidating stare –
these are portraits rather than merely technical pictures. The tattoos themselves are
surprisingly intricate and well-executed, given the tools available. They are
mostly images, though there are some words too – we couldn’t make out much of
this as they use the Cyrillic alphabet, but there was a bit of Latin I did
recognise on one of the men: Dum Spiro Spero, which means ‘While I breathe, I
hope’. (In one episode of the BBC drama series Spooks, the character Lucas
North returns from seven years in a Russian prison, where he had also been
tattooed with this motto).
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| Don't mess |
Moving on, we came to a room containing a
line of what looked like cubicles or stables made from cardboard. Inside each
one was a dummy of a man wearing suit trousers and business shoes, but his head
was a colourful abstract shape, and his shirt was filthy and ripped. Each man
had a different injury but all were brutal – arms missing, or a hand ripped off
and pinned to the wall. The figures were cartoony enough not to be disturbingly
gruesome, but also real enough to be quite unsettling. The artist, Gosha
Ostretsov, is apparently a big fan of comics, which, we learned, ‘have not been
assimilated into Russian art in the same way as they were by Pop artists in the
West. In fact, they are still considered somewhat alien and certainly not the
medium with which to convey anything serious. Ostretsov has knowingly subverted
this received idea by co-opting the resistance to comics and pop culture, using
them as a colourful, mass culture form “[to polemicize] with the profound,
rather heavy-handed conceptualist approach”'. Sure. Quite good though.
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| Kind of grim, really |
Vikenti Nilin’s ‘From the Neighbours’
series of photos was one of my favourites in the exhibition. The shots feature
ordinary people seating on windowsills in desolate-looking high rise apartment
blocks, but with their legs on the outside, as if they might jump at any
moment. The buildings and clothes are drab, but, despite
their precarious positions, the people are passive in this potential suicide
situation, which I think is the point the artist is trying to make. You might
joke that living in one of these utterly commonplace, totally uninspiring
Soviet block of flats might make you want to top yourself, but these people
seem to have no drive to do anything, not even that – they are bored,
uninterested, slightly unimpressed. It’s a simple concept I suppose, but the I
found the message affectingly direct, and the camera angles and composition
gave me that same feeling you get when you're close to the edge of high cliff.
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| Suicidal, or just bored? |
In the next room we came across some lovely
paintings. They were mainly large cavasses, with very small, ghostly figures
gently positioned in the middle. They had an ethereal quality to them and were
plain creepy too in a way – they compelled you to look, but the figures
depicted were reminiscent of something that might be in a dream at that point
when you know it’s going to accelerate into a nightmare. It made me shudder a
bit, but I couldn’t help looking.
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| Spooky but lovely |
By far the most disturbing set of pieces –
but in a way my favourite part of the whole exhibition - was a series of
photographs by Boris Mikhailov, showing homeless people in the Ukraine. It was
stark and direct. The people are known as ‘bomzhes’ – those who have no home or
support. The artist states that he wanted to capture them while they still were
‘normal’ and still looked human. The implication that they were changing into
something less-than-human owing to their appalling living conditions and
alienation from society was deeply depressing. Many of the people were posed
naked or half-naked and there were a lot of unpleasant genitals on show. Most
of the subjects were looking directly at the camera, and the expressions on
their faces were in some ways unfathomable, but in another way quite simple –
accusatory and pleading. As viewers we felt almost guilty, as if we were the
ones who’d put these people in this destitute position. The sexual poses were
quite hard to deal with, perhaps because it was a difficult reminder that these
people are indeed still human, and still have the same basic drives that we all
do.
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| Totally massive sure right here |
The next gallery was a bit of a surprise as
it seemed to be art from Hong Kong, therefore not part of the exhibition we
were working our way around. We had a look anyway, and I particularly enjoyed
the enormous wooden tank. Sure was also a fan of this item but there were too
many people around to get a decent shot of him with it.
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| Bonus tank |
On the top floor we found the Breaking the
Ice: Moscow art 1960-80s, which contained some really interesting pieces,
although we were pretty hungry by this point, so we skipped over quite a bit of
it. Nonetheless, we did spend quite a bit of time looking at the series of
paintings and lovely little illustrations by Viktor Pivoravov and the impressively
large works of [did not write down and thus don’t know artist’s name!].
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| Good space |
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| Nice letter-y thing |
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| Pivovarov's 'Black apple' |
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| Stalin meets Giacometti |
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| Ironic |
After all that it was time for lunch, so we
decided to try out the rather posh-looking ‘Gallery Mess’ restaurant, which is
situated just next to the exhibition space. This was something of an
extravagance as it was not cheap, but we felt we ought to treat ourselves,
since we had quite bit of catching up to do, and it was a Friday. So, any
excuse really.
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| Very pleasant restaurant space |
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| Look at that VERY BIG SHOE Mummy. (only one person reading this will get that joke) |
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| Somewhat extravagant lunch |
Salmon fishcake on wilted spinach (Lady
Anonymous)
‘It’s good. Pretty tasty. I guess fishcakes
are quite a boring thing to choose, but it suits my needs at this time. The
crumb-to-filling and fish-to-potato ratios are perfect, and the spinach is
excellent. Frankly this is one of the best fishcakes I’ve ever had and I’m
going to give it a 10.’
Duck breast with lentils and pesto
(thepateface)
‘This is super-delicious and the pesto is a
stroke of genius. I’m loving this thin and elegant cutlery. Probably didn’t
need quite so many lentils but there are some bits of something very tasty
mixed in, which I am enjoying immensely. Portion size is exactly right. 9.5 out
of 10.’
The high marks do reflect the price we
paid, but we enjoyed very nice service and overall the atmosphere in there was
very pleasant – light and airy like the gallery, with some added super posh
people having a conversation worth eavesdropping upon at the next table (“Well
I said to him, if you insist on slumming it then go ahead and move to N16, but
know that I don’t approve of this’). Charming. A slight air of condescension
was detectable in the waiter later on, but that might have been because we were
still there at 4.30pm, taking our dessert in the form of red wine.
On the whole it was a lovely day out. I’d
very much recommend the Saatchi Gallery in general, and particularly the two
exhibitions we saw. Though there is a lot in there that’s just nice or
intriguing to look at, there is some tough stuff as well, so I’d say go along
if you want a little bit of a challenge. And that restaurant is certainly worth
dipping into your savings for!
