1988| YOUNG BRITISH ART or BRITART. The desecrating spirit of youth.

curated by Francesca Franco

Young British art first appears at the exhibition Freeze, organised by a group of sixteen students of the Goldsmiths College led by Damien Hirst in an abandoned building in London Docklands in 1988-89. Within a decade the success of this self-promotion action brings into the limelight a heterogeneous group of young artists who prefer to have recourse to self-funding or sponsors and private purchasers rather than to public funding from conservative organisations. These artists, including among others Gary Hume, Anya Gallaccio, Angus Fairhurst, Mat Collishaw, Tracy Emin, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Jenny Saville, are not viewed as a movement with a homogeneous style or common themes, but are considered as the representatives of a certain mental attitude that establishes itself in the late 1980s and is characterised by a strong independent, desecrating spirit which soon gains the support of the entrepreneurial spirit of advertiser and art collector Charles Saatchi. Born out of the encounter between these and the system of English art schools, young British art receives its first official recognition with the Turner Prize awarded to Hirst in 1992 and the 45th Venice Biennial of 1993, and then with the Sensation exhibition at London’s National Gallery in 1997. The success of the movement on the international art scene as well as on the market is confirmed by the exhibition Century City at London’s Tate Modern in 2001, where works by Mona Hatoum, Sarah Lucas, Ron Mueck, Chris Ofili, Fiona Rae and Rachel Whiteread are displayed as exemplary achievements of contemporary research in London, which is celebrated as the new arts capital after Rome, Paris and New York.
Less and less concerned with the impossibility of being ‘original’ and more focused on the presentation of the work, young British artists consider the practice of art as an activity that is deeply linked to all the components of the media universe – from the cinema to TV commercials – that Jean Boudrillard celebrates in Simulacra and simulation [1983]. Hence the interest in the dynamics of projection and in the physical act of looking. A hybrid universe, constantly contaminated by the surrounding culture, for which only an equally ‘impure’ art can be produced, no longer aiming at representing something that exists in reality, but rather at a simulation which has the power of moulding reality. In this sense the search for grandeur or the bold theatricalism that characterise some of these works respond to the need to force art images to produce an even stronger impact, despite or perhaps because of their apparently banal content. Apart from the captivating, provoking or sensational gesture, the works of young British artists boast conceptual resonance and, above all, a great formal refinement, as shown by Douglas Gordon’s movie appropriations and Steve McQueen’s films – veritable meditations on the history of the cinema, revisiting not only old movies but also some techniques of structuralist film-making of the 1960s and 1980s.