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Oil Based Art: London’s Saatchi Gallery
London, England

I latched onto contemporary art at a young age. In the second grade my school had decided to put on an “Art Show” to show off all the student’s artistic achievements for the community. Though most of my contemporaries rested on the clumsily colored self-portraits that they had made in class with the assistance of an artist-in-residence, my father and I dared to dream a little bigger. At home we were constructing a six foot tall tyrannosaurus that somehow we considered to be “higher” art than the incoherent scribblings of my fellow students. We worked for hours bending hangers to make a rib cage and cutting a wood frame backbone for what was to be my paper-maché masterpiece. But with a couple of days to go until the showcase we realize we didn’t have enough time to finish my second grade artistic oeuvre. With only half of the dinosaur done and not enough time left to finish it, we rushed to the grocery store to buy some cardboard so I could construct something for the show. I ended up piecing together colored pieces of cardboard into an abstract shape. I painted the sides I felt like painting, left others blank, and generally exuded artistic pretension much beyond my seven years of being. In the end I was disappointed, my cardboard sculpture was no six foot dinosaur, but I put it in the show for all to see anyway.

The artist-in-residence loved it so much that he accidentally knocked it over while singing its praises to my parents. He said that I had the ever elusive “good eye” of a budding artist.

With such a strong background in the avant-garde one would think that upon entering the Saatchi Gallery in London that I would not have just walked by the first exhibit without it even fazing me that it is was, in fact, an exhibit. But as my companion, Jonathan, tugged on my sleeve to show me that I’d just missed the opening piece, I realized that maybe my second grade “good eye” for art wasn’t quite over the jet lag I was fighting with all the strength and caffeinated drinks I could muster. The first piece in the Saatchi Gallery is pair of wax sculptures of tourists – American tourists from the look of it. They are jolly and plump and looked to be about fifty. The man is sporting a Hawaiian shirt and the wife seems content in her horribly unflattering blue and white stripped shirt. They, like most tourists asking to be mugged, have expensive cameras hanging around their necks and large bags loosely hanging by their sides. They were looking up at something in the distance and being a jaded American traveler I just thought that they were tourists from stateside admiring something in the gallery that I wanted no part of. So I initially walked right by them, not wanting to associate myself with their tackiness and never thinking that they were in fact a wax sculpture entitled “Tourists II” by Duane Hanson.

Contemporary art, for many, is confusing. Many present-day artists have abandoned questions of aesthetics in order to raise larger questions about politics, society or even art itself. This is precisely why I love contemporary art and also why many are appalled and outraged by some of the things that are on display in galleries such as the Saatchi. However, for those who have traveled extensively through Europe there are only so many Renaissance and Impressionistic paintings that you can look at before they all start to mesh together in a confusing swirl of Baroque, Romantic, and Gothic pieces much akin to Vincent Van Gogh’s “A Starry Night”. Therefore, for those who have done The (fabulously free) National Gallery in London, the Saatchi Gallery, which is right across the Thames from Big Ben, is a great alternative for the London bound art lover. It is not free, but student admission is just six pounds and seventy-five pence.

Right past the statues of wax statues of the American tourists is the opening rotunda of the Saatchi which boasts very different pieces from very different artists. Two of the pieces are by the same artist, Damien Hirst, and both involve dead animals placed in formaldehyde tanks: a sheep and a shark. The shark is suspended from hooks in a large tank and appears to be swimming in the green/blue liquid preservative. While nature itself is art to me on an everyday basis – beautiful sunsets, tree branches blowing in the wind while you lie on the grass below – I am not completely sure why embalmed animals are. The shark piece is titled “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Something Living” and after a recent viewing of Open Water I didn’t need anything reminding me of the dangers of sharks. Though a little morbid, the piece offers the viewer a chance to see sharks close up – something that you might otherwise not get the chance to see or, for that matter, really want to see in the wild. It is pieces like this that are, for me, the joy of contemporary art. While Modernism was concerned with aesthetic rules and definitions, contemporary art is concerned with breaking those rules, pushing the boundaries of social acceptance, and acknowledging the various subject positions of artists and patrons alike.

In another corner of the first room is the “The Holy Virgin Mary”, a piece that I had read much about but never seen in person. The painting is of a large black Virgin Mary. Aesthetically it appears to be a cross between a Pablo Picasso drawing and a Gustav Kilmt painting. Its background is a golden metallic color while the lines that formed the Virgin flowed freely and without much adherence to the natural shape of a human figure making her appear almost like an apparition. This painting caused a ruckus in 1999 when it was included in a traveling display that stopped for a show at The Brooklyn Museum of Art. The Brooklyn Museum of Art is a publicly funded museum, unlike most museums in New York City. Then-mayor Rudolph Giuliani called the work “sick stuff” and revoked funding for the museum for a month. The mayor was not only outraged about the depiction of a black Virgin Mary, but also about the elephant dung that was used in the painting. The artist, Chris Ofili, used feces because of its positive symbolic connotations in Africa, but some conservative religious groups found it blasphemous and demanded for the museum’s closure and/or the exhibit’s swift shipment back to England. One 72 year-old Christian patron even went so far as to deface the painting by smearing white paint over it. I couldn’t understand the dogmatic hype myself. I found the (original) colors in “The Holy Virgin Mary” to be wonderful and the overall piece to be a celebration of a different interpretation of the image of the Virgin. Maybe I am just not pious enough.

However, despite my belief that art shouldn’t be censored no matter how dogmatic, blasphemous, or smelly it is, at times, I do find myself wondering about the motivations of the creation of certain pieces. My enthusiasm for artistic creation was questioned later on in Saatchi when I entered a room full of oil. Using a metal pool of sorts the artist, Richard Wilson, had constructed a holding tank for oil that encapsulated the floor of an entire room. The oil tank extended several feet off of the ground and, I believe, made it so that half of the room was filled with oil. The piece is called “20:50″. While I stood there in awe trying my best not to touch the sticky surface of the exposed oil I couldn’t help but wonder what was the place of this in the realm of art? And if it was, who authorized it to be called art? It was, in essence, just a room half filled with motor oil. It was magnificent to see, but what did it, if anything, mean?

I plopped down on the bench outside the room of oil and waited for Jonathan to finish basking in the questionable slick glory of “20:50″. Next to me was an elderly man sitting silently waiting for something. It took me a moment to realize that he was also a brilliant and horribly realistic wax sculpture by Duane Hanson. If I hadn’t been alerted to the presence of the wax tourists I would’ve eventually called for help thinking that this elderly man had had a seizure of some sort that had left him paralyzed.

In the seventh grade I took another art class. We were drawing self-portraits and I was moving my pencil back and forth creating a jagged, feathery, line as I sketched my form. My teacher peeked over my shoulder and stated, “No, Ruth. You can’t do it like that. You need to draw a solid line.” Even as a twelve year old I knew what she was saying was wrong. Art is whatever you wish it to be, but, as I would figure out later in my never-ending studies, my seventh grade art teacher was a Modernist who believed more in Naturalism than the exploration of pubescent relationships with artistic mediums. There is no “good” art or “bad” art, there is just art. And so that is why when I saw the sculpture of artist Marc Quinn’s head near the end of my time at the Saatchi and discovered that is was made largely out of his own blood I didn’t question its categorization or placement in the gallery; I just wondered in grotesque admiration how he had done it.