After ignoring and denouncing avant-garde art for years, in 1997 the Royal Academy mounted a major exhibition devoted to the controversial work of young British artists. Selected from the collection amassed by Charles Saatchi, it opened under an inflammatory title: Sensation. Ranging from Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst to Yinka Shonibare and Rachel Whiteread, it embraced video, photography and ready-made objects as well as painting and sculpture. When it closed, the RA announced with delight that it was “the highest attended exhibition of contemporary art held in Britain in the last 50 years.” Looking back from the vantage of today, we can see how much Sensation must have contributed to our subsequent ever-growing appetite across the UK for new, experimental art. As chief art critic of the Times in 1997, I applauded the RA’s decision to organise Sensation, and concluded my review by emphasising that although some gallery-goers “shy away from the most alarming aspects of contemporary life,” the artists in this show “are prepared to confront them. Their right to do so must be defended as vigorously as possible, just as the attempt to suppress them should be resisted and deplored.”
Months before Sensation opened, some enraged Academicians tried to ban Marcus Harvey’s portrait of Myra Hindley. She was responsible, along with Ian Brady, for the gruesome rape and murder of children. Harvey’s portrait conveyed the enormity of the crime committed by Hindley, whose menacing face was formed from children’s handprints. Even so, this powerful painting became the focus for angry Academicians’ hatred of Sensation as a whole, and they even threatened to resign in protest. Norman Rosenthal, the RA’s exhibitions secretary, held firm. “Artists have always confronted all aspects of life,” he said, and “the painting Myra is a terrible reminder of the horrors of which human beings are capable.”
From the outset, Sensation attracted a colossal amount of attention. It became the most talked-about exhibition of the year, and I remember my delight when realising that the show had resisted the apoplectic intolerance expressed by the crusty old guard. They also deplored the fact that the exhibition’s first room was dominated by Damien Hirst’s 14-foot tiger shark, floating like a spectre in a glass tank of misty green formaldehyde. (Pictured.) I had first seen this iconic work, entitled The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, five years earlier at the Saatchi Gallery in northwest London. But now that it was on display just a few steps away from Piccadilly Circus, it attracted a far larger audience. Eerily suspended in its tripartite tank, the creature seemed to open its mouth and bare its vicious teeth as visitors walked around.
Another young artist preoccupied with mortality was Rachel Whiteread. By transforming an empty home into a public sepulchre in her work House, Whiteread had eloquently conveyed her interests with probing the irrecoverable past. But a philistine local council had insisted on its destruction in 1994, so the prominent presence in Sensation of Whiteread’s other work was heartening indeed. Cast from household objects filled with family memories, her plaster sculptures also stirred memories of antiquity. None more so than the doomed spirituality of Ghost, cast from an ordinary living room.
Women artists played a prominent role throughout Sensation, and Jenny Saville’s exhibits demonstrated that figurative painting could still possess as much vitality as abstract canvases. Monumental in scale, her work focused on naked women. Their corpulence was far removed from the idealised fashion-model image of women’s bodies.
As well as outstanding women, Sensation gave abundant space to exhibits by black artists like Yinka Shonibare and Chris Ofili
Saville, nourished by Renaissance painters as much as live models, also interrogated the growth of cosmetic surgery. Her mountainous nudes seemed to be governed by ideas far darker than their luminous flesh.
Abstract painting still manifested itself with vivacity in the canvases displayed by Fiona Rae, a virtuoso whose exclamatory vision and freewheeling imagination reached its climax in the enormous Untitled (Blue and Purple Triptych). Yet even the most ostensibly cheerful works in Sensation often turned out to explore a darker side as well. Although Gary Hume’s paintings appeared sensuous enough, his aptly named Vicious confronted us with a beefy, threatening nude whose buckled fist expressed an intent far removed from the joyful Matisse-like flowers exploding around him.
Moving through the Sensation rooms, I realised just how many of its artists were prepared to confront the most alarming aspects of modern experience. Sarah Lucas deployed outrageous humour in Au Naturel, where a mattress slumped on the floor and bent against a wall was littered with breast-like melons, testicular oranges, an empty water bucket and a very phallic cucumber. But she also presented us with a sculpture called PaulineBunny, where the partially naked female body slumped in a plywood chair was twisted into a grotesque figure. She seemed to have been battered to death in very painful and disgusting ways.
Jake and Dinos Chapman went even further, taking as their inspiration Goya’s harrowing image of atrocities committed in war. His small etching was transformed by the Chapmans into an enormous sculpture, Great Deeds Against the Dead, where butchered fragments of naked, handsome young men were tied to a tree and left dangling so that their savage mutilations became inescapable. Visitors to Sensation may at first have felt relief when they moved on from the Chapmans towards Mona Hatoum’s seemingly placid, welcoming installation called Deep Throat. From a distance, it presented us with a chair and pristine dining table displaying a knife and fork set beside a plate. Yet closer scrutiny revealed that the plate was made of glass, and Hatoum projected onto its surface an uncomfortable endoscopic video of her own larynx, expanding and contracting as she ate a meal.
Wherever we wandered in Sensation, provocative images of human body parts assailed our eyes. Perhaps the most painfully disturbing exhibit in the show was Marc Quinn’s Self, which he made by pouring 10 pints of his own blood into a cast of his head. It looked as if the artist had been decapitated, and the blood-saturated head was displayed inside a refrigerated Perspex cube. Nothing could have appeared more alarmingly at odds with the dignified RA roundels above, filled with noble heads of renowned Renaissance masters.
References to tradition could also be found in Mark Wallinger’s polished paintings of thoroughbred racehorses, which stirred memories of George Stubbs. But Wallinger’s title, Race Class Sex, made us realise the extent to which these immaculate horses were bound up with the values of patriarchal authority and rampant capitalism.
By no means all the Sensation exhibits were gruesome. Michael Landy’s colourful Costermonger’s Stall was placed in the vestibule as a full-size unit, enlivened by glittering electric lights and rows of real-cut flowers displayed in plastic pails. Langlands & Bell went to the other extreme, creating austere and forbidding architectural models showing how people can be controlled by the powerful structures placed around them.
Elsewhere, Emin adopted an autobiographical approach in an extraordinary work. Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995 supplied us with the identity of all Emin’s bedmates—sexual and otherwise. She made a portable tent appliquéd with their names, including two foetuses subsequently aborted. Emin’s willingness to reveal so much about her turbulent personal life aroused enormous interest—and she even invited visitors to crawl onto a mattress inside the tent.
As well as outstanding women, Sensation gave abundant space to exhibits by black artists. Yinka Shonibare showed a trio of headless women called How Does a Girl Like You, Get to Be a Girl Like You? Each of them was arrayed in a clangorous wax-print cotton textile dress, Victorian in style but made with African-inspired fabrics. And Chris Ofili’s paintings like Afrodizzia were equally eager to challenge racist taboos, with their orgiastic colours, glitter, map pins and elephant dung. Sensation ensured that British culture gave Ofili’s daring achievements—he won the Turner Prize a year later in 1998—the immense prominence they deserved.
Since then, the British art scene has changed in many positive ways. Our national appetite for audacious new work grows all the time. The RA itself has become ever-more open to experimental initiatives, and the enlightened Academicians selected Shonibare as co-ordinator for their 2021 Summer Exhibition. Black artists are now being given the space they deserve, in a nation increasingly eager to experience the most mind-expanding images created all over the world.
