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'Sensation' lives up to name Brooklyn Museum of Art's wildly controversial exhibit opens to the public tomorrow Friday, October 01, 1999 By Caroline Abels, Post-Gazette Cultural Arts Writer
NEW YORK -- The exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum of Art lives up to its name, and then some.
Titled "Sensation: Young British Artists From the Saatchi Collection," the controversial display of 90 works by 40 artists has ignited a political and legal firestorm -- all before the first patron patrols the museum hallways.
Scheduled to open to the public tomorrow, the show had a media preview yesterday that was nearly as big a sensation as the exhibition. A handful of New York City police officers were stationed outside the museum as television news trucks lined up and a throng of foreign and domestic reporters -- representing networks, newspapers and magazines -- launched into a two-hour tour.
If they came in search of the sensational, they were not disappointed.
To reach the exhibit, reporters had to pass some of the museum's more traditional artwork, such as sculptures by Rodin and a full body portrait of George Washington by Gilbert Stuart.
In stark contrast to the traditional, a sign at the entrance to "Sensation" warns that what patrons are about to see is "difficult, even offensive," but adds that it is "satirical and unflinching" and aims to address society's "most pressing and persistent obsessions," including class, gender, race, eccentricity, disease and death.
Visitors can opt to use an audio guide to the show, which is narrated by singer David Bowie.
Death is the first topic on the agenda. As visitors enter, they see a lifeless tiger shark suspended in a sealed glass tank of formaldehyde. The work, by Damien Hirst, is titled "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living."
Other works by Hirst also feature dead animals in tanks, but in various stages of dissection -- their insides fully in view. "This Little Piggy Went to Market, This Little Piggy Stayed Home" shows a pig cut in half lengthwise and placed in a tank; another shows cross sections of cows encased in 12 tanks. "A Thousand Years" shows flies and maggots feeding on the head of a bloody cow -- in this case, a fake cow.
It's a visceral show. Indeed, the room in which Hirst's works are showcased has a slightly foul stench.
Another exhibit, also dealing with death, features bloodied, naked male mannequins with their genitalia cut off. Arms, apparently cut from one of the mannequins, were seen hanging from an artificial tree nearby. This work, based on an etching by Lucientes Goya that illustrated atrocities committed when Napolean invaded Spain in 1808, is by brothers Jake and Dinos Chapman. Text cards accompanying the display say the artists expect visitors to laugh at the mannequins, which are clad in strange wigs. The work, however, elicited blank stares from members of the media.
By contrast, Chris Ofili's "The Holy Virgin Mary," the piece that most outraged New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, seems almost tame. Nonetheless, it is the only artwork protected by a railing. Ofili, a British-born artist who explores his African heritage in his works, will be featured in Pittsburgh next month during the Carnegie International.
On a background of orange paint and glitter, Ofili has created an image of an African Virgin Mary with a fist-sized ball of elephant dung on her breast. Pictures of buttocks, from pornographic magazines, surround the Virgin Mary and are meant to look like angels' wings.
Text cards indicate Ofili was confused by the virgin birth when he was a child, but that as an adult he found illustrations of the Virgin Mary to be sexually charged.
"Mine is simply a hip-hop version," he is quoted as saying.
At a news conference preceding the media tour, museum Director Arnold Lehman defended his right to stage "Sensation." Speaking specifically of Ofili's Virgin Mary portrait, he noted that elephant dung is considered a symbol of fertility in many African cultures.
Among those appearing with Lehman was dancer/choreographer Bill T. Jones, who applauded the museum's decision to stage the exhibition in the face of intense criticism.
Artists, he said, are not misanthropes but, rather, care deeply about expressing issues.
"The public at large must recalibrate, rethink the boundaries of art," he said.
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