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 TM
London’s Palace of the Perverse
The Saatchi
Gallery
By David Peevers
Cows, neatly chain-sawed and stitched around their
severed sections into vivisected cross-sections floating in enormous vats of
formaldehyde. The head of a slaughtered beast of some sort lying in a
Plexiglass bin surrounded by thousands of corpulent flies who were,
mercifully, more attracted to a bowl of mush provided them. Was this a sort
of nouveau ‘coat of arms’ for the inbred British, I wondered? “Flies rampant
with beasty head” for example?
 Who better to send half way around the world to witness
and write about what’s possibly the world’s most stupefyingly twisted modern
art museum than someone who knows absolutely nothing about it whatsoever? So
I went to London to record reactions, revulsions and various repugnances
that I might experience at the Saatchi Gallery; the Frankenstein of the
south-bank-of-the-Thames’ cultural explosion.
It’s all the brainchild of gazzillionaire and
advertising maven, Charles Saatchi who has said of his lust for outraging
the public, “I think that new British art is the most exciting in the world
and needs a dedicated showcase. I don’t want the artists I believe in to
have to wait until they are pensioners before the public has a chance to see
their works in large-scale shows." The Gallery opened in its current home in
2000 to hub-bub, hoopla and hordes of the merely curious or the simply
deranged.
 The Saatchi is literally at the foot of the Millennium
Wheel (actually known as the ‘London Eye’) which hoists passengers to a
dizzying 350 feet above the city for the best photo (or puking) ops you’re
likely to find in all of the city. It’s a colossal experiment in glacial
transport – as it makes its agonizing 40 minute loop above the city - and a
test of one’s ability to avoid death through sheer boredom. A blonde,
blue-eyed Rastafarian was shilling for the Gallery amidst the hordes of an
ethnic mish-mash queuing for entrance to the Eye. I think I detected a
Swedish/Jamaican accent.
The Saatchi occupies a staid and stately old building,
formerly the London City Council HQ’s, and you reach it via ‘tube’ to arrive
at Waterloo Station. “Fittingly named” I thought. “Napoleon began his
ultimate demise at Waterloo. Why shouldn’t I begin and end my career as an
art critic at the same locale?” Imagine the loathing and disgust that the
Fleet Street and Parliament crowds of Victoria’s era would feel if they made
their way into the sprawling halls of the Saatchi in these down and dirty
days of publicly celebrated perversions. Decorum and a certain British
sensibility had been maintained within these hallowed walls. What awaits
within today is, however, another matter entirely.
 My viewing of the floating cows ensured what I had
always suspected: Cows are very empty animals except for the portions
dedicated to producing methane. Next among my musings were the Hiroshe
Sugimoto gelatin-silver prints of famous dead British royals taken in Madame
Tussaud’s waxworks and printed, I was told, one and a half times life-sized
including a portrait of Henry VIII that made me fear for my life. I shall
not wax further on the subject…
Through this hall I passed piles of manure building
other piles of manure into the gigantic main hall where I discovered a group
of sniggling Spanish school girls astonished by an armchair that
intermittently sported an enormous schlong. Nearby, artist Marc Quinn
created a unique self portrait entitled “Self”. It’s a death mask, really,
fashioned from gobs of his own blood and frozen within a plastic cube by a
really neat refrigerator, which I was far more attracted to. I was actually
tempted to ‘pull the plug’ on old Marc –an act of artistic mercy killing, I
would claim in court – but since the head had been floating there since 1991
I decided to let it awake to the horrors of industrial freezer burn.
 I then encountered a vast aquarium of scum-sucking fish
that looked as though they could make short work of Marc Quinn’s head. They
were swimming through a maze of gee-whiz technology items such as computers
and a gynecological exam table, their drooping jowls making them look like
sedated Fu-manchus. And I wondered if gynecologists look like this to all
women. This was the work of the fabled Damien Hirst whose work is also
honored at the nearby Tate Modern where you can watch a video of him beating
himself to a pulp. If I specialized in pickling cows I might have a pretty
rotten view of my self worth too.
Nearby was a withered tree with a nice collection of
dismembered and castrated corpse-mannequins impaled on the sharp branches.
It was supposed to have something to do with Goya… Yeah, right.
I was beginning to think that most of this …art …was
something that could be put together by a group of mongoloids at summer camp
when I rounded a corner and was hit in the solar plexus by an image of total
malignity. It was a painting by Marcus Harvey of Myra Hindley, one of the
“Monsters of the Moors” murderers who once tape recorded the murder of a
child for later amusement. Rendered in gobs of grey, white and black pigment
and twelve feet high it was as palpable an expression of pure evil as the
eyes of Charlie Manson. Frightful.
 Nasty, lumpen murals of grotesque women I hope never to
wake up next to then led me on to yet another tank (Mr. Saatchi must just
have a thing for them) containing a 17 foot Australian tiger shark. Its
snarling visage leapt out at me from different angles of its light-warping
tank: I couldn’t get away from it. It reminded me of being in the Boston
Aquarium in the sixties and watching the acid heads who would gather at the
shark tank roaring, “Oh My Gaaaawd!” while screaming school groups clambered
for safety.
Then I discovered one of the ‘poetry sections’ of the
museum. It was a patchwork quilt looking as though assembled from patches of
fabric slashed by a pack of rabid wolverines on Benzedrine. Its message?
“Come unto me. Every time I feel love, I think Christ! I’m going to be
crucified! So I close my eyes and become the cross. SO BEAUTIFUL”. I could
imagine Shakespeare’s ghost in the nearby Globe theatre turning cartwheels
in horror.
Not to be outdone in the literary department were the
coy and insightful comments occasionally pasted up next to the exhibits by
the curators themselves. One of these sages had written of an exhibit, “In
‘Chicken Knickers’ she straps a plump, juicy Butterball to her pants,
reducing herself to a piece of meat; raw, gaping, cold and provoking an
instant desire to fuck it”. “Boy”, I thought. “I’m not having this guy over
to my house for Thanksgiving anytime soon”.
Religion naturally comes in for some heady treatment at
the Saatchi. Look! Here’s a nice Virgin Mary done up in some sort of
Aboriginal style. Almost tasteful, you think, until you notice that those
hundreds of little medallions she sports are actually porno cutouts of
various orifices, all lacquered onto a board in some kind of slime that
looks like the last orgasmic juice of a diseased manatee. Tasty. I thought
of mailing a Christmas card of it to Jerry Falwell. Next up is a soiled
mattress cradling two large melons and an upright cucumber sprouting from
between a pair of swollen oranges symbolizing… Oh! I just can’t put my
finger on it. But it’s right on the tip of my tongue…
A glowering infant looking like the lovechild of
Mussolini and Marlon Brando made me grateful that I don’t have kids. Another
reason not to have kids is to be shown how adults look to them. Ron Mueck’s
frighteningly realistic self portrait – three times the size of God almighty
and suspended in its own alcove - glowers down at you with ultimate parental
rage and disapproval. It’s a perfectly created work, actually, and gets
pride of place in the entire gallery. It’s effect on me was that I just
wanted to crawl under the nearest bed and sulk with my ‘blanky’.
Then, in an antechamber, (is that where you store used
aunts?, I wondered) I discovered Yasumasu Morimura, surely a household name
in gay sushi bars. He had photographed himself as Marilyn Monroe approaching
her ‘70’s and looking like she was out arm-twisting corporate donors for
George Bush. Nearby was a photo installation of a couple of white trash
lizard people as they scratched and clawed and puked and bled their way into
Modern Art immortality.
The world’s largest medicine cabinet had me lusting –
by this time – for Maalox as my stomach was feeling kindred with that shark
in his embalming fluids. I wasn’t alone in feeling this way. I met a woman
and her son just flown in from Boston. She said to me, “I wish I hadn’t had
corned beef for lunch,” as she eyed a nine-foot-tall pile of embalmed mice.
But finally I rounded yet another corner and came face to face with the
reason that fate had sent me here.
It was a bed like most I’ve slept in. With soiled
sheets and books and cans and bottles and cigarettes spewing everywhere.
Reams of sheet music and torn newspaper scattered like the survivors of a
small bomb. Unclean dishes were stacked in complete defiance of gravity.
Stabs at creativity jostled for space with cheese rinds. And it was here
that the Saatchi provided me with my epiphany. I felt so grateful that I
nearly wept, for the truth was revealed! I was indeed not a slovenly,
drunken, smoker who is basically incapable of taking care of himself. No, by
God! As it was revealed by Saatchi himself, I can now stand up proudly in
front of the world and shout, “I… am… an… Artiste!
Getting There
Knowing that I was gong to be soon engaged in the front
lines of the ‘Art Wars’ at the Saatchi, I had only two things in mind.
Complete comfort in getting to London and – after enduring an onslaught of
sensory overload – complete comfort in the place I chose to stay. Getting
there, as it turns out, was half the fun. I flew on Virgin Atlantic in
Business class and it was a very real joy as countless times I’ve flown the
‘sardine skys’ where you’re packed in like lab rats and the couple behind
you – apparently – is boiling their two year old. Not so with Virgin. The
stewardesses all looked as they’d just stepped off the dance floor at a
Viennese ball; radiant, intelligent, glowing. I was having a total blast
trying out my reclining seat that had more positions than the Kama Sutra
when one of these angels of mercy asked if I would like to schedule a
massage for later. No, I wasn’t dreaming. I demurred, however, as the first
glass of Pouilly fuisse arrived, knowing that sleep was an imperative. After
a dinner that I can only recall as splendidly prepared, I sprawled my lanky
frame nearly flat out and – for the first time ever in crossing the Atlantic
– slept a blissful and uninterrupted eight hours. This is the way to fly.
A Note on Jet Lag
Save your sanity and health when making long flights. I
have flown drunk and stone cold sober. I’ve fasted for days before a flight
or gorged myself with heavy meals. I’ve stayed awake for days before flying
in the hopes that slumber would catch up with me. But nothing I ever did
prevented me from arriving at the airport looking like someone who should go
to the top of all Interpol computers. This ‘Werewolves of London’ factor
would actually cripple and stunt me for weeks. Until I found this stuff
called ‘No Jet Lag’. It’s homeopathic, tastes like sugar pills and you just
pop ‘em like M&M’s. And when you arrive – wherever you arrive – there you
are! Do NOT fly without these little guys.
The Radisson Edwardian at Heathrow
Don’t be deluded about the skill sets that travel
journalists are supposed to have been born with. I’m about as oriented in a
new city as a lone Cub Scout in Vegas. I depend on the kindness of strangers
to keep me from getting run over by trolleys and other lumbering hulks.
German train schedules instill a horror in me akin to facing an exam in
Chinese algebra. When I step off a plane, I’m in shock: My God! Now what?!?
I want to get to the absolute best place to hide and then I want all my
connections to be brainless and painless.
So it is at the Radisson Heathrow where a shuttle picks
you up and you’re swept into your room with all the kind attentions you
could ask for. The place is a palace, truly, and deserving of each of its
five stars. Suites are largish, filled with creature comforts and
absolutely, blissfully silent. The staff people here all seem to have PhD’s
in people skills and are vast repositories of local knowledge. When finally
I felt ready to brave the world again, I felt like a six year old whose name
and home phone number had been safety-pinned to his parka. I was ready for
the Saatchi and –for the first time in recent memory – actually felt
fondness for a hotel. A highly recommended experience.
The Saatchi Gallery:
www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk
Radisson Edwardian Hotels:
www.radissonedwardian.com
Virgin Atlantic Airways:
www.virgin-atlantic.com
Story and photos copyright 2003 by David Peevers
Phone: 310-636-0015
Email:
peeversla@aol.com
Website: www.peevers-la.com
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