Photo: The Holy Virgin Mary by Chris Ofili (1996).
The paintings were shown at the Whitechapel Gallery and you
could walk from there to see Rachel Whiteread's House, a concrete cast of a
house standing alone and desolate in an East End "park". What all these
artists had in common, in the years from about 1987 to 1993, was an anger, a
sense of the capital as place of bitter chill and violence. After the
Thatcher revolution and the abolition of the Greater London Council, Roy
Porter concluded in his 1994 book London: A Social History that London was a
city "yielding to disintegration. There is a new pessimism, a new anxiety
about the future." Perhaps Saatchi is aware of the irony of opening his new
gallery in what was once the seat of London's local government, until
Margaret Thatcher's government did away with the GLC. Or perhaps he has no
sense of irony at all. As we climb the steps he taps on a rough sleeper in a
tatty sleeping bag. It rings metallic and hollow - a simulacrum by artist
Gavin Turk, a brand new item in the collection. All the classic art made in
London at that time - Freud's portraits of a man heroically facing death,
Whiteread's monument to the demolished East End house, Hirst's shark
swimming as efficiently as Saatchi himself through the waters of the free
market - emerge from this London. And it was Saatchi, the man who advertised
Thatcher's Conservative party, who grabbed many of the artworks that so
icily described the new Britain.
Saatchi's
claim to be the most daring and generous collector of this art is
indisputable. He provided the perfect cool white stage in his north London
gallery.He visited all the new shows and bought a huge swathe of young
artists' work, some of it now forgotten. Saatchi is clearly frustrated with
the Tate curators, whom he views as whingeing bureaucrats in their timid
attitude to acquiring new art. He modestly believes anyone would have
championed Hirst after seeing his first work - but only he did. And that's
why it is Saatchi who is opening his own art museum. The old Saatchi
Gallery, the one that is now gone and forgotten, opened in 1985. It was like
a space station orbiting the earth. To enter that white, curving, extensive
space was to step out of the surrounding streets and be at the magic centre
of the absolute present - whether Manhattan, or Mars. The absent lord of the
place was therefore, by extension, imagined as a silent, remote controlling
mind. It was here that Saatchi staged a series of exhibitions entitled Young
British Artists, starting in 1992. It was for this space that he helped
Hirst to hire an Australian fisherman to catch a 12ft tiger shark for the
work The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of