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From: Rudi Scholl
Category: Exhibitions
Date: 04 June 2001
New Labour at the Saatchi Gallery London UK until August 19
The first thing you look at after you have made your way through the corridor of eyestorm.com junky decoration for rich pseudo-tasteful bourgeois is the claymation of the hand masturbating vagina. It’s very realistic and that makes it nice to watch, next to it are a chair made of sponges and a painting with an outline of a woman composed of chips (french-fries). These two pieces look like they have escaped from an art school skip. They are tragic and remind you that the rest of the art you will see might be bad but it could be worse.
DJ Simpson’s big wooden paintings fill the gallery nicely, but more is less with these works. One at the ICA’s Becks Futures was exciting and aesthetic, lots in the Saatchi make you wish that he would get another idea. All art now is empty even when it is quite good and I only hope for a little visual pleasure and some novelty. Simpson rates highly on these criteria.
Turn right for Rebecca Warren’s pretend mannered dissolving sex sculptures. I don’t know. Are they good because they parallel painting’s unfinishedness and hark back to Fragonard or Boucher in their swirling clay? Or bad because they have no soul and make you think a little but repel you with their lack of subtext?
Turn left, for Grayson Perry’s pots. Hilarious: he makes vases with rude things and personal history on them.
Enrico David sews his pictures making them more contemporary than if they were painted.
Martin Maloney has managed to make some collages worse than children’s book illustrations. I presume he became bored with the lack of labour involved in his ok paintings, so decided to make it more difficult for himself by using bits of coloured sticky back plastic. Labour doesn’t work. Bring back Saatchi’s 80s.
Translated from the German text of Rudi Scholl
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