Young British Artists: The Legendary Group

Given the current hype surrounding new British art, it is hard to imagine that the
audience for contemporary art was relatively small until only two decades ago.
Predominantly conservative tastes across the country had led to instances of open
hostility towards contemporary art. For example, the public and the media were
outraged in 1976 when they learned that the Tate Gallery had acquired Carl Andres
Equivalent VIII (the bricks). Lagging behind the international contemporary art scene,
Britain was described as a cultural backwater by art critic Sarah Kent.1 A number of
significant British artists, such as Tony Cragg, and Gilbert and George, had to build
their reputation abroad before being taken seriously at home. Tomake matters worse,
the 1980s saw severe cutbacks in public funding for the arts and for individual artists.
Furthermore, the art market was hit by the economic recession in 1989. For the
thousands of art school students completing their degrees around that time, career
prospects did not look promising. Yet ironically, it was the worrying economic
situation, and the relative indifference to contemporary art practice in Britain, that
were to prove ideal conditions for the emergence of Young British Art.
Emergence of YBAs
In 1988, in the lead-up to the recession, a number of fine art students from Goldsmiths
College, London, decided it was time to be proactive instead of waiting for the dealers
to call. Seizing the initiative, these aspiring young artists started to curate their own
shows, in vacant offices and industrial buildings. The most famous of these was
Freeze; and those who took part would, in retrospect, be recognised as the first group
of Young British Artists, or YBAs.
Diverse in style and practice, there was no formal group, and certainly no manifesto
for the YBAs. One of the major ties between them was that most of the core YBA
members had attended the fine art course at Goldsmiths during the mid-1980s to early
1990s.2 Goldsmiths differed from other London art colleges in that it no longer kept
the traditional boundaries between individual fine art disciplines. The freedom, and
the breadth of choice and exposure that this afforded, enriched the students in their
exploration as artists. Under the directionof the principal, Jon Thompson, students
1 Sarah Kent, senior art critic for London Time Out, wrote in a review in the October issue of 1974.
Quoted in her own essay Nine Years, in, Richard Cork and Sarah Kent ed., Young British Art: The
Saatchi Decade, HarryN. Abrams, Inc., p.9.
2 Notable exceptions include Rachel Whiteread and Tracey Emin, who trained at the Slade School of
Fine Art and the Royal College of Art, respectively.

were taught to reflect on their social position as artists, to adopt a critical approach to
art history, and to engage with the art market. Mostimportantly, Thompson, and other
artist-lecturers such as Michael Craig-Martin, Yehuda Safran and Richard Wentworth,
were inspirational as mentors and visible as practising artists. The liberal and spirited
atmosphere at the college produced a close group of confident young artists, sixteen
of whom participated in Freeze, including leading figure, Damien Hirst, and other
such as, Mat Collishaw, Angus Fairhurst, Gary Hume, Michael Landy and Sarah
Lucas.
Freeze, has now attained near-mythical status as the defining moment of the YBAs
emergence. It was not the line-up at Freeze, or the exhibited works, but simply the act
of self-promotion on the part of the participants that gave the show its significance in
the history of British art of the 90s. Unembarrassed about promoting themselves and
their work, the organisers went to great lengths to put on a professional-looking show,
and to get the right kind of people key dealers and promoters to attend. These
included Nicholas Serota, Norman Rosenthal and, famously, Charles Saatchi. Such
artist-curated shows at abandoned factories became a plausible and successful means
of countering the harsh economic conditions of the early 1990s. Freeze came to
epitomise this astute survival tactic. Following its success, other warehouse shows
were staged; for example, Modern Medicine (organised by Carl Freedman, Billie
Sellman and Damien Hirst), East Country Yard Show (by Henry Bond and Sarah
Lucas) and Market (a large-scale installation by Michael Landy).
The Artists Persona
In organising Freeze choosing the artworks, finding the sponsors, publishing the
smart catalogue, fixing the opening party, etc. Hirst presented not only the
exhibition, but alsohimself: Damien Hirst, a constructed yet evolving public persona.
In fact, Hirst is perhaps as well known for his lifestyle as for his art, making sure that
the two are often entangled. He always manage to make headlines with his
astonishing and intriguing actions; to name a few, Hirsts purchase of Toddington
Manor, a rundown 300-room gothic mansion with 3million in 2005, intended as his
country retreat and a venue to house his own works and art collection; in 2007, Hirsts
interest in buying a Victorian collection of stuffed animals for 1million caused the
owners to sue the auction house, Bonhams, for not having accepted the offer; and
Hirsts successful auction at Sothebys, Beautiful Inside My Head Forever, right
before the economy crashed in 2008 etc. Topping these with his outrageous and wild
behaviour (attaining the title of the bad boy of the modern Brit art), Hirst obtains
great presence over the media (and often not limiting to the arts section), formulating

a remarkable prevalence of Hirsts own image which has probably not been
practised or achieved by any other living artists at the time. This must have originated
from a combination of Hirsts strong desire to be noticed by others and his eccentric,
charismatic and sociable character. A feature in Tate Magazine, 3 for instance,
devoted a full page to a portrait of Hirst, shaven-headed and sucking on a cigarette,
rather than to a gallery shot of his artworks; but he and his works are part of the same
package. Grim and extravagant, his installation works tackle head-on the big issues of
love and death, which includes the iconic series such as the spin, dot, and butterfly
paintings, medicine cabinets, and pickled and stuffed animals. The Hirst brand is as
deftly and clinically packaged as his The Last Supper series (1999). Through his
prominent media presence, Hirst became, for many, the embodiment and spokesman
of the YBAs.
The exploration, and manipulation, of the artists persona is a recurring theme within
the work of many YBAs. Since his years at art school, Gavin Turk has been interested
in stereotypes, the cult of personality, and the construction of the artistic myth. Cave
(1995) is a reworking of his degree show work (1991): a blue imitation English
Heritage plaque bearing the words Gavin Turk, Sculptor, worked here 19891991.
Merging his own image with celebrities and historical figures, Turks works address
issues of identity and authenticity. Taking a different tack, Sarah Lucas explores
sexuality, and challenges gender stereotypes, often through crude jokes and visual
puns, and often involving furniture and food, or found objects and material
appropriated from the mass media. Realising that she could exploit her tomboyish
look, too, as an element in her art, she adopts masculine poses to create a series
of confrontational photographic self-portraits (19921998) full of sexual innuendo
(eating a banana, for example, or loitering outside a public lavatory armed with a
large salmon).
The Saatchi-Branded YBAs
Co-founder of the Saatchi & Saatchi advertising agency, Charles Saatchi, played a
crucial role in the success of the YBAs. As a famous adman, he is believed by some
to favour works with immediate visual impact. He visited Freeze, and although he did
not buy any of the artworks, he was very much impressed, and subsequently modified
his collecting priorities, to target a younger generation of British artists.

3 Sarah Greenberg and Andrew Wilson, Art Gets in Your Face, in Tate Magazine, no. 2, Spring 1994.
Mentioned in Julian Stallabrass, High Art Lite: The Rise and Fall of Young British Art, expanded
edition, London (Verso), 2006, p. 20.

Saatchi started to acquire Hirsts works in the 1990s, including The Physical
Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991), a tiger shark suspended
in a glass tank of formaldehyde; and A Thousand Years (1990), a microcosm of the
life cycle of a fly, featuring maggots, flies, a rotting cows head, and an insectocutor.
In fact, Saatchi became an aggressive collector of British contemporary art. Visiting
student art shows, art schools and studios, he would bulk-buy works by young artists
at low prices, sometimes even purchasing the whole show. He became the modern
branded collector and patron of British art, to the extent that once an artists work was
tagged Saatchi Collection, speculation of a rise in value would usually follow.
To house his collection, Saatchi set up his own gallery in London. It has been open to
the public since 1985 (moving premises twice), and serves as an important venue for
the art world. In 1992, the Saatchi Gallery mounted the first exhibition of the series
Young British Artists the title that now designates the group as an art historical term.
It was here that the press first encountered Hirsts shark, foreseeing instantly if not
quite unanimously its future status as the iconic work of YBA art. Other works in
the Saatchi Collection have achieved similar prominence; for example, Tracey Emins
My Bed (1998) and Marc Quinns Self (1991).
Notoriety! Showcasing a new face of British Contemporary Art
In 1997, the controversial exhibition Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi
Collection was shown at the Royal Academy of Arts (RA), London. The exhibition
included Marcus Harveys Myra (1995), a depiction of the child murderer Myra
Hindley, made from childrens handprints; Jake and Dinos Chapmans disturbing
group of mutated child mannequins, Zygotic Acceleration, Biogenetic, De-sublimated
Libidinal Model (enlarged x 1000) (1995); and Chris Ofilis The Holy Virgin Mary
(1996), a painting that incorporates cut-out pornographic images and elephant dung.
Such provocative works Myra in particular led an angry crowd to demonstrate
outside the Academy and prompted the resignation of four RA Members in protest.
Meanwhile, ticket sales just kept on rising. The controversial exhibits drew in a
younger audience, who perhaps had never entered the Academy before. Of nearly
300,000 people who attended the show, 80 per cent were under the age of thirty.
Part of the fascination may relate to the appeal of tabloid newspapers. Certainly, the
works of YBAs frequently reference topics that the tabloids tend to treat in a
sensationalist way: child abuse, violent death, sex, etc. Earning notoriety from the
Sensation show, some YBAs were considered to have revealed, through their works,
an amoral and irresponsible attitudetowards sensitive topics.

Douglas Gordon quotes, Morals are conditioned they are relative like everything
else is today, in the context of his own work.4 In 10 ms1 (1994), looped film
footage shows a First World War shell-shock victims repeated attempts to get up
from the floor. The work causes us to reflect on our changing attitude as observers of
the mans evident plight: evolving from puzzlement perhaps, through pity and
discomfort, to a chillingly detached impatience despite which, still we are
compelled to look. No resolution is offered: the viewer is placed at the centre of the
dilemma, with no way out only a direct confrontation of the dreadful side of society
and our own natures.
The YBAs relationship with the media could be said to work both ways. Painter Gary
Hume traces images from magazine spreads to produce his spare and seductive
paintings and prints. Sarah Lucas enlarges tabloid double-page spreads, to highlight
the exploitation of the female body. In reverse, advertising companies have appeared
to borrow from YBA works. For example, the subjects of Gillian Wearings series
of photographs, Signs that say what you want them to say and not Signs that say what
someone else wants you to say (19923), hold up cardboard signs on which they have
written whatever was on their mind (Im desperate, etc.) precisely the technique
that crops up in a Volkswagen advertisement. Famously, if less specifically, Hirst-like
spots were adopted by British Airways to advertise their low-cost airline, Go. On
whatever level, lofty or base, the intertwining of the YBAs with the wider culture
seems to draw their art closer to the general public.
Amidst the media frenzies and the controversies, the YBA generation has changed the
face of British contemporary art practice. Their diversity of style may partly account
for their enduring prominence, even while their well-publicised social
interconnections reinforce their perceived coherence as a group. Although shock and
awe are sometimes the only appropriate response, these artists command our
admiration for their sheer honesty. Disdaining the comforting but hollow parable, they
opt for reality, in a raw and literal form.

4 Originally from an American TV detective series. Quoted in Julian Stallabrass, High Art Lite: The
Rise and Fall of Young British Art, p.142.