I fondly remember my one visit back in 1996 to the original Saatchi gallery on Boundary Road in London, mostly because at the time it was filled with Stephan Balkenhol's wonderful wood sculptures. I didn't make it to the South Bank venue in the short two years the gallery situated itself in County Hall there, but now Charles Saatchi has opened a show of contemporary Chinese art from his collection called The Revolution Continues in what is reportedly a beautiful new space in an old military barracks in Chelsea. Mark Brown shed some light on the collector's technique for putting this inaugural show together:
Saatchi has supervised all the hanging. In a Q&A for the Sunday
Times, earlier this week, he revealed how he does it. "I just go by
what shapes and colours work together in a room," he said. "The poncey
way some curators try to demonstrate their 'vision' by highlighting
connections gives me the collywobbles."
Bay Area denizens who visited the excellent Half-Life of a Dream exhibition recently at SFMOMA will recognize some of the names featured in the London show like Yue Minjun (pictured above), Zhang Huan and Fang Lijun. These are the artists from contemporary China who are making a big splash in the art world right now. Adrian Searle, however, is singularly unimpressed with what he sees in Saatchi's gallery:
Too much here looks secondary, or like a tiresome kind of
entertainment. There are few signs of language being stretched and one
has the feeling that many works have been manufactured with a market in
mind.
Perhaps some genuine curation would not have been such a bad idea after all. Charlotte Higgins shares Searle's disappointment about the works on display, though she did get a kick out of Sun Yuan and Peng Yu's Old Persons Home, hyper-realistic sculptures of elderly world leaders rolling about one room of the gallery in motorized wheelchairs:
Well, that was the highlight. Too much of the work here was on one
note, or had one shouty visual trick up its sleeve. As often in the
company of the work of Charles Saatchi, or at least the stuff that he
has collected recently, I found myself being reminded that he is an
ad-man. Visual puns are his bread-and-butter. That's why he likes this
kind of thing: the miniature city (badly) constructed out of dog chews;
the 'history-painting' containing Mao sitting in the back row at a
McCarthy hearing; lord help us, the giant turd containing miniature toy
soldiers. Hectoring art with little to say.
Again, the work by many of these same artists that I saw in the SFMOMA exhibit was many things, but hectoring or one note? No. So I'm liable to turn my eye to the collector in this case, and it's certainly true that much of the work glimpsed in the Guardian online gallery does seem to have been selected for its shock value. But back to the gallery itself, the one thing no one seems to have any complaints about. Stephen Bayley lays out a little bit of the background:
Architects AHMM spent three years looking for an appropriate site and,
coincidence or not, eventually found one very close to Saatchi's Eaton
Square home. It is a fine historic building in a beautiful wooded and
grassy setting. AHMM stripped back the innards to reveal the underlying
geometry and created 15 spacious new galleries on three floors. They
are boldly white, sparely finished and top-lit, designed to create a
recessive background for London's reclusive modern Medici. If they are
recessive it is not because of a limited budget: none has been
declared, but we may be certain Charles Saatchi does not stint himself.
Anyway, this sort of recession is surely the right thing because so
many art gallery designs - the Guggenheims in New York and Bilbao and
the National Gallery extensions in London and Washington - fail because
the showy architecture overwhelms the subtleties of painting.
Of course it sounds like there was no danger of this first batch of art being overwhelmed by the space in which it was being shown. As for me, I will remain wistful for the old Boundary Road gallery, but I also can't wait to investigate this new incarnation in all its converted Georgian glory. Just as long as Saatchi doesn't start charging admission.