Young British Art

Reinventing Derivation: Roles, Stereotypes, and "Young British Art" Author(s): Elizabeth Legge Reviewed work(s): Source: Representations, No. 71 (Summer, 2000), pp. 1-23 Published by: University of California Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2902923 . Accessed: 15/01/2012 08:54 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

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ELIZABETH

LEGGE

Reinventing Derivation: Roles, Stereotypes, and "Young British Art" BRITISH ARTIST) CAME to international attenTHE "YBA" (YOUNG in a tion the early 1990s with combination of elaborate construction, lame jokes, and apathetic shock: from Damien Hirst's shark in a vitrine of formaldehyde to Jake and Dinos Chapman's vast staging of a concentration camp using tiny readymade model kit figures.' To avoid hegemonizing or homogenizing, critics have used alternative acronyms: "nBa" (new) and "rBa" (recent).2 Who exactly is a yBa is also flexibly defined, although a roster was proposed by Sensation,the 1997 Royal Academy exhibition of the collection of the advertising executive Charles Saatchi, who functions as the demiurge of this contested avant-garde. The agitation surrounding Sensation,both in London and again, in 1999, in New York at the Brooklyn Museum, was the yBa's symptomatic apotheosis. The scandal of the London Sensationwas Marcus Harvey's portrait of a notorious murderer of children, Myra Hindley (fig. 1). Based on a thirty-year-old newspaper photograph, Harvey's painting comments on the media iconization of the celebrity criminal (recapitulated by the publicity surrounding it during Sensation). The painting is a bald quote of Chuck Close's blandly uncanny giant portraits, but, with vicious effectiveness, Harvey transforms Close's painterly tesserae (sometimes composed of fingerprints) into a template of a child's handprints. Myra (1995) is an affront not only to media sensationalism but also to U.S. art as international model. Harvey's Myra also comments on contemporary nostalgia for the pop 1960s and for the punk 1970s ("God Save Myra Hindley" T-shirts), on crime scene art (Abigail Lane's "bloody handprints"), and on media obsession with another serial murderer, Rosemary West.3 During the autumn of 1997, however, the painting was necessarily received in the context of media inundation of photographs of the recently deceased Princess of Wales.4 Harvey's portrait functioned as a short-haired blonde demonic double of Diana-the-good-mother (fig. 2). This context confused Harvey's ironic message about celebrity and tragedy, a confusion intensified by the fact that the generic incomprehending "philistine," the staple foil for all avant-

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71 * Summer 2000 (CTHE ISSN

REGENTS

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UNIVERSITY

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0734-6018 pages 1-23. All rights reserved. Send requests for permission to reprint to Rights and Permissions, University of California Press, Journals Division, 2000 Center St., Ste. 303, Berkeley,CA 94704-1223.

FIGURE 1. MarcusHarvey,Myra, 1995. Acrylic on canvas,320 X 396 cm. The Saatchi Gallery,London.

FIGURE

2. The Princessof Wales,BBC "Panorama"interview, November 1995. CourtesyBritishBroadcastingCorporation.

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3. "PrinceNaseem in EquipmentSolutionAdidas," London, 1998. Billboard.

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garde outrage, who picketed the Royal Academy was the grieving mother of one of Hindley's victims. Myra, as quintessential avant-garde shock, was rapidly recycled into advertising. A drug abuse charity, making explicit a moral agenda, had a poster made of children's handprints.5 Adidas simply produced billboards with the monochrome face of a boxer made up of little running shoes (fig. 3). While there is a comic logic to Damien Hirst's formaldehyde work being used to advertise Absolut vodka, or to Tracey Emin's advertising Sapphire Gin (Emin's autobiographic work includes accounts of heavy drinking), the displacement of Myra tesserae into advertising billboards conveys an ambiguous message. Harvey's painting, intended to politicize the autonomous neutrality of Close's art, in effect laundered the newspaper mug shot of Hindley, allowing it to be put to commercial use. The grays of Harvey's image have a metaphoric tinge: they occupy almost any cultural gray area. The highly publicized Sensationexhibition has aggravated the sometimes disingenuous agonizing about the legitimacy and nature of yBa art, the picking of scabs off the various claims for both the degeneration and regeneration that the art might be made to represent.6 A resume of objections include that the art is derivative, that it looks avant-garde but isn't oppositional, that it fails to address individual artists or works, and that it is a shallow, media-driven phenomenon playing into certain stereotypes of Britishness.7 It could be argued that objections,from left and right, are Reinventing Derivation: Roles, Stereotypes, and "YoungBritish Art"

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. IrAP6

4. RichardBillingham, Untitled,1993-95. Photograph on aluminum, 105 X 158 cm. The SaatchiGallery,London.

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exactly what yBas usefully generate by drawing attention to the ethically bad fit between the successfullymarketedworkof art within the Saatchieconomy and the expectationsof some social disruptionraised by the very publicityused to market it. The yBa functionsas a space in which failuresand limitationsof international contemporaryart may be identifiedand temporarilystored,at least until some unspecifiedsell-bydate. One primaryconcernvoiced by theircriticsis the questionof whetherthe yBas merelyopportunisticallysimulatelost avant-gardeengagement,adoptinga mediafriendly"look"of being shockingin the traditionof the angryyoungman, the working classhero,and the punk.8The yBas'enhancingof stereotypesof avant-gardism can be seen as working-classism,a reassertionof punk'sworking-classas classwar.9 PatriciaBickers,the editorof ArtMonthly,ajournal that has led the skepticaldebate about yBas, has deplored the marketingof "class,"and of the vulgarizedyBa as caricatural"chirpycockneytype."'0lExamplesmight includethe "plucky,""feisty" TraceyEmin, who makesart of her eventfullife and whose personais designedin the eccentrictraditionof Stevie Smith:"That'snot her drowning,but waving.Let's wave back!""RichardBillingham'sphotographshave been made to evoke not so much family life as the "spiritedness"of the workingclass (fig.4).12 Rachel White-

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read's plaster cast interior of a demolished house must stand for the East End's "tenacious hanging on" during the Blitz.'3 If a middle-class paradigm of a "lost inheritance of struggle" can be nostalgically projected onto working-class youth, it can be equally wishfully projected onto artists.'4 Working-classness, egalitarian but not anticapitalist, is highly exportable. The New rork Times account of Sensation, "Art That Tweaks British Propriety," quoted the London Times: "The rebels have stormed the bastion of conservatism."'5 This could be a synopsis of Richard Flood's essay from the 1995 Brilliant! catalog, which set the terms for U.S. marketing of yBas as a cartoonish class war. While class may be deployed ironically by some yBas (Damien Hirst's, Sarah Lucas's and Tracey Emin's "yobbishness"; Sam Taylor-Wood's gentrification), it is a unique selling feature, as it has always been for British exports to Masterpiece Theatre.16

Recognition by the international art world paradoxically increases the pressure to differentiate oneself, and one marketing recourse for artists and critics is to stereotypes of "Britishness."'7 The yBa relationship to U.S. art can be seen as an ambiguous, strategic, postcolonialism: the culturally marginalized Britain remarkets itself as just another postcolonial culture, playing, ironically, to the approval of the stereotypically economically dominant U.S. imperial center."8 While acknowledging the difficulty of situating British art within international art, Bickers has deplored the use of stereotypes to break that impasse.'9 An example of someone caught in this predicament is the astute Michael Corris, who, writing in the U.S. journal Ar~forum,argues for a particular British identity for this art but, in doing so, sets out generalizations: "British, Young, Invisible, w/Attitude."20 Significantly, "attitude," used here to define an essential yBa identity, is in fact U.S. idiom (made famous by Madonna and the rap supergroup "Niggers with Attitude"). Moreover, Bickers deplores the tendency to see or market oneself "as others see us." Jake and Dinos Chapman, having been advised that their child mannequin Fuckfaceswould not be exhibitable in the United States, made their version of a suitable exportan image of Stephen Hawking (fig. 5).21 Their Hawking, Ubermensch(1995), hyperbolizes the stag of Edwin Henry Landseer's Monarchof the Glen(and its mild 1960s British pop treatments by Peter Blake and Bryan Organ), conjuring up stereotypes of British tenacity, eccentricity, and intellectual superiority. These stereotypes are deployed in the diffuse context of "postmodern" theory. British art colleges of the 1980s famously turned out artists inculcated with concepts of the simulacral, excess, constructed identity, and postcolonialism and with critiques of authorship, representation, and art institutions. In this theoretical domain, the ironic deployment of stereotypes by yBa artists and critics (the Chapmans' Hawking) meets crude stereotyping (the presumably reassuring bobbies, guardsmen, darts, and Beatle music at the Brilliant!opening) and tactical stereotyping (the litanies of national attributes by erudite British critics) for marketing pur-

Reinventing Derivation: Roles, Stereotypes, and "Young British Art"

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FIGURE 5.

Jake and Dinos

1995. Chapman, Ubermensch, Fiberglass,resin, paint, 366 X 183 X 183 cm. CourtesyJay Jopling, London.

poses, to producea recognizablevoice both for the art and its criticism.22The title of the 1991 TechniqueAnglaise catalog,a foundationalexaminationof the new British art and its internationalrecognition,was flippant,a Frenchphrasefor Englishpublic schoolhomosexuality,as if recognitioncouldonly takethe formof a class-bound, stereotypical,foreignview.23 Arguably,postmodern theory has itself become institutionalizedand can be read as such offthe surfacesofyBa art.24Is theory,then, a paradoxicallyinstrumental, shallow-making,and formulaiccomponentof the art, ratherthan a trulycorrosive critique?25Does theory provokethe playfullypernicioushybridityenvisioned by Homi Bhabha, or, as Aijaz Ahmad has more skepticallyargued,does it instead become a "marketplaceof ideas"in which to shop?26In any event, the stereotypes of yBa idiom are theoretically deployed, with the understandingthat they may backfire,and they are at the heart of what might constituteyBa meanings. Self-presentationin stereotypesderivesfrom Britishcrisesof identity afterthe "lossof Empire":seeing one's disempoweredself in the way that one has seen the colonized other. In this historicalcontext, the theorizing of the postcolonial is a markerof the theoreticallyinformedyBa.27Echoes of the famouscolonial "mimic men," emulating dominant imperial culture with some mitigating irony,may be detected in Bickers'ssuggestionthat the yBas enjoy a degree of license denied to U.S. artistsin the prevailingculture of political correctness.28(Americanpolitical REPRESENTATIONS

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6. Gavin Turk,Pop, 1993. Glass,brass,MDF, fiberglass,wax, clothing, gun, FIGURE

279 X 115 X 115 cm.

The Saatchi Gallery,London.

correctnessis, of course,also a stereotype.)The BrooklynMuseum'srecentpublicity for Sensationin the form of a "health warning" bears out this idea of special Britishlicense: "The contentsof this exhibitionmay cause shock,vomiting,confusion, panic, euphoria and anxiety."The yBas are lords of misrule,yet they offer a degree of absolute skepticismto this hypothesized earnest U.S. engagement. In Gavin Turk'sPop(1993), Britishworking-classrebellion as staged by punk is enacted as a self-portraitof Turkas the Sex Pistol Sid Vicious as Andy Warhol'sversion of the corny movie Elvis as anodynecowboy as theorizedby Greil Marcus(fig. refer to U.S. popular culture in 6).29 Similarly,Marc Quinn's silveryMorphologies the form ofJeffKoons's chromedkitsch as if absorbedby the shape-shiftingrobot 2 (fig.7).3?It may be that the price of admissionto the U.S. marketis in Terminator a combinationof flatteringmimicry and mockinglylicentiousmarginality. All these stereotypeslead to the larger,more highlymarketablestereotype:that of Britain'slost identity,shored up only by stereotypes.Since the Second World War,Britainhas been perceivedas a weak economic power,attractiveonly for tourism;or,as the filmmakerDerekJarmanand novelistJulianBarneshavecaricatured it, a mere simulationof its own historyand monuments,a theme-park.3'In an Artforumpiece on new Britishart, David Frankelprovidesa list of national symbols (rationing,Wimpy's,Bird's custard, Butlins)as a counterpartto Prime Minister John Major'soften-mocked 1993 list (the county ground, warm beer, old maids ReinventingDerivation:Roles,Stereotypes,and "YoungBritishArt"

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7. Marc Quinn, Budding Morphology, 1998. Glass and silver, 180 X 115 X 27 cm. CourtesyJay Jopling, London.

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cycling to communion).32The yBas have also been implicatedin the trafficin outmoded stereotypesof Britishnessfrom earlier "Swinging London," the pop '60s, and the punk '70s.33 The stereotypicalBritishidentitycrisisderivesfrom "lossof Empire"and Britain's relegationto the status of regional power,along with postwar economic decline. Economic decline is furthershaded as physicaldecline and demoralization: the "Britishdisease,"the "sickman of Europe,"a "postwarfunk"to be rectifiedby Thatcherite "enterpriseculture."34Britishpostwarart may also be seen in terms of the politicalpositioningof Britainwithin the Cold Warand the delusionalBritish belief that it would be a brokerbetween the United Statesand Iron Curtain countries (a recurrenttheme in John Le Carre'sspy novels).35 The rhetoricof decline goes hand in hand with the rhetoricof postimperial guilt:a "histrionicself-pityin comparing[Britain's]deindustrializationand decline as a worldpower to the Third World."36 This demoralizationhas even been implicated in the theorizationof postmodernism,whose "fataland fatalistic"rhetoricis fulfilled in the condition of Britain.37If yBa art plays into stereotypesof an exhausted Britainof uncertainidentity,it does so with the knowledgethat being exhausted is a theoreticallyversatileoption; perhaps,given the skepticismof all national rhetorics,the only option. It is explained to Arforumreadersthat the new "crudeenergy"of Britishart emergesfrom a "mood of helplessnessand apathyin a culturestrugglingto come to termswith its colonialistand neocolonialistpast."38 This scenariohas its seductions:the rottencore maybe sweet,as MichaelBracewell and Julian Evans suggest in the parodic artists'tabloid, The Mule:"LikeBrighton Rock,the novel or the British seaside confectionery,rottennessruns through the nation, a rottenness,accordingto the pundits,with any numberof causes."39 Stereotypes,as useful,agreed-uponmisunderstandingsthat set up the communicative economy,function as shorthandversionsof identity and power and have been fostered by governmentprogramsaimed at promoting culture, both in its REPRESENTATIONS

"heritage" and contemporary forms.40New Labour has recently retooled some of the more marketable stereotypes; for example, in 1997 M. and C. Saatchi redesigned the British Tourist Authority logo: now the component crosses of its Union Jack are separatedribbons floating above areas of green, gold, and black (the colors of the Jamaican flag). This is curiously akin to Mark Wallinger's reworking of the Union Jack in the colors of the Irish flag, Oxymoron(1996), which he made for an exhibition that dealt precisely with national identity in multicultural Britain.4"British Airways, another Saatchi client, has controversially jettisoned the Union Jack, presumably regarded as the tatters of Empire, in favor of more international, folkartish emblemata.42 The marketing of Britain in a time of policy timidity ("new" Labour) through images generated by designers and advertisers draws attention to the affiliation of advertising and cultural identity. That this identity tries to take into account, however cautiously, the presence of the former Empire within the multiracial and multicultural new Britain again directs us to the presence ofpostcolonial theory. A cliched aspect of the British identity crisis involves self-definition in opposition to the United States, characterized as trashy, consumerist, and complicit in the breakdown between art and advertising.43Recently, Tony Blair's staging of the Princess of Wales's funeral was disparaged as an Americanized"politics of the emotions," "inauthentic display," and "devalued currency of feeling."44 In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher's declarations of the "special relationship" between the United States and Britain, combined with the sale of British industries to U.S. conglomerates, aggravated British debate.45 Parliamentary exchanges after the U.S. air raid on Libya in 1986 raised themes of both British impotence and the relative crudity of U.S. power.46Informing this perception is a fantasy in which "Britain is Greece to America's Rome, providing finesse and intelligence to tame and direct America's force."47This notion that the British can provide intellectual refinement is, in turn, furthered by American cultural representations: Obi Wan Kenobi to Luke Skywalker.48

These relative formulations of identity play out, paradoxically, in the very crudities of yBa quotation, or parody, of U.S. art, particularly of minimalism. The peculiar potential of minimalism for declaring its own austere classiness has long been teasingly reduced to packaging for consumer goods, by U.S. artists from Warhol to Koons. In a British context, however, minimalism was established through exhibitions at private dealers (Lisson Gallery, White Cube, Saatchi), and public institutions (the Tate Gallery) and could be made to stand for the colonial status of a Britain that imported its standards of modernity from the United States.49If the minimalist effect of glass and metal in yBa art seems shallowly "notational," then it is because it is meant to be.50 The yBa variation is made to seem inadequate to its task, in a kind of underengineered sublime in such works as John Frankland's wall of faked elevator doors, Hirst's seedy shark suspended by visible wires that undermine the illusion of floating, Quinn's cryogenic refrigeration units, WhiteReinventing Derivation: Roles, Stereotypes, and "YoungBritish Art"

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8. Robert Morris, Untitled, 1965. Fiberglassand light, 240 cm diameter.FromGregory Battcock, MinimalArt(New York,1968). ? Robert Morris/ARS (New York)/SODRAC (Montreal)2000.

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Damien Hirst, PartyTime, 1995. Plastic,foam, contentsof ashtray,240 cm diameter. Courtesyof the Denver Art Museum.

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read'slinty cast of the insideof a wardrobethat solidlyblocksits own storagecapacity.5"This "notational"quotationmay be understoodas a yBa ploy for dealingwith the exhaustion of international art: "It's like a language which has been worn out.... we've out-minimalizedeach other and out-conceptualizedeach other."52 All that is left, then, are devalued gestures.For his big New Yorkshow in 1996, Hirst turned a Robert Morrisminimalist piece, well-knownfrom reproductionin GregoryBattcock'sMinimalArt,into a giant ashtray(figs.8 and 9). If Hirstreinvents Koons's 1980s basketballsin vitrines(whichhad in turn reinventeda 1966floatingball piece by Hans Haacke),Hirst'sis more literallylightweight-a ping pong or beach ball.53The questionis whetherthis workconstitutesa blow againstthe domination of U.S. art, or whetherit is, conversely,merelyan opportunisticadoptionof American sheen. It may have to be the latterin orderto achieve the former. It has been arguedthat yBa quotationsof U.S. minimalismresultin a "scream10

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ing for attention from within structures that [warrant] none,"54but, ironically, this argument just reposes certain of Clement Greenberg's and Michael Fried's original objections to minimalism's theatricality, anthropomorphism, and literalness. Originality and derivation in art and criticism are difficult to call.55 Recognizing this inescapable bind, the artist Matthew Arnatt has bathetically restated the U.S. minimalist Donald Judd's famous comment that "a work needs only to be interesting" as: "I don't think it's necessary to think of art, art works, or shows, working in any interesting way."56

Nevertheless, this British literalizing and inhabiting of minimalism has been construed as lack of originality rather than as fine or useful ironies. If the left deplores the ineffectual pose of this work as not being up to the task of critique, conservative critics may also deplore it as a defeatist exercise in shoddily made goods that "implicate[s] decay as an English pastime."57 In a TimesLiterarySupplement(TLS) "End of Britain Issue," a former Thatcher minister, George Walden, laments yBa art as "provincial, derivative, and residual: pallid or garish echoes of genuinely exciting and innovative movements" elsewhere (fig. 10).58On that TLS cover, Scots celebrating devolution are juxtaposed with Damien Hirst's name, which functions, here and elsewhere, as a comic metonym of political disintegration (fig. 11). (In the Independent,in 1995, John Major was caricatured as a Hirstian animal in formaldehyde, with the caption, "Oh God! It's disintegrating!")59 That sense of a literal, half-hearted, and second-rate synthesis of international art embodying decline may be this art's point and strategy for success. In fact, one new British Council poster for international distribution features a painting of a horse by George Stubbs fading into Hirst's pickled sheep, Awa)from the Flock, here used as a symbol of British innovation.60

A further problem in the notion of British lack of originality is that devaluation through reference to minimal art was already present in U.S. art of the Boston Institute of Contemporary Art's 1986 Endgamecatalog.6 In TechniqueAnglaise it was argued that "a lot of American work from the '80s suddenly feels a little like Donald Trump stuff" and that British art had taken a perverse conceptual turn precisely to situate itself in opposition to the "big plate paintings" prevailing in the United States.62(These claims suggest the stereotype of British intellectual austerity against vulgar foreign gestures.) The yBa phenomenon actually emerged not only as an antidote to Julian Schnabel's "big plate paintings," but also as a variation on the well-theorized, equally American, "endgame" art. Endgame'sconcerns with the simulacrum and with the artwork's collapse into fetish or commodity in the deadpan work of Haim Steinbach, Koons, and Peter Halley was reinforced in Britain by the Saatchi Gallery's N'ew r1ork exhibition, which included these artists.63 In the Endgamecatalog, Thomas Crow observed that art, stripped of its larger tasks of representation in the social world, survives by "being weak." This playing at being weak has been taken up strategically by a generation of British artists who adapt it to international relations. Two endgames make an active match, as the Reinventing Derivation: Roles, Stereotypes, and "YoungBritish Art"

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STLS THE TIMES

LITERARY

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VernonBogdanor Democracy and Damien Hirst George Walden Crips and Chrstianity Peter Clarke New Labour's new men JohnLloyd The coming communities

AmitaiEtziomi Max Weber and America JohnGray

FIGURE 10.

Cover, TimesLiterarySupplement, 26 September 1997. Macleod. Courtesy TimesLiterarySupplement!Murdo

success of yBas in the United States might indicate.64 To adopt the terms of Hal Foster'sessay "The Futureof an Illusion,"the Britisharguablyfunction as "cargo cultists."The originalMelanesiancargo cultistsconcludedthat it was necessaryto behave like the U.S. troops-to build simulatedrunwaysand radio towers-in order to obtain the same airliftedcommodities.The yBas,analogously,refashionU.S. art: Michael Landy'sMarketas landing-stripSol LeWitt (figs. 12 and 13). Hirst's most famousriposte,dead animals in vitrinesof formaldehyde,imply not only that commodity art but also issuesof critiqueand plagiarismare dead in the water. If criticaltheory,supportedby referencesto U.S. minimal and "endgame"art, is a kind of exoskeletonto yBa art, it has also functionedas viscera,throughabjec12

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FIGURE 11.

Chris Priestley,"JohnBull Shows His CulturalPedigree," 28 July 1997, Gazette. cartoon, Independent, CourtesyIndependent/Chris Priestley.

Abjection,assotion-taken as an Americanpracticeinformedby Frenchtheory.65 ciatedwith odious and boundary-defilingthings, playsout in Britishart in a range of tones, from grave to comic: fromWhiteread'sstained castingsof the undersides and insides of things (howevercostivethe effect of her workis otherwise),through Hirst'ssliced cadavers,to SarahLucas'splumbed-intoilet in the middle of the gallery,to Gavin Turk'sparodic plan to "excrete"T S. Eliot'sHollowMen from fake buttocks(a nice incorporationof Anglo-Americanheritageculture).66The relation of this Britishart to its U.S. counterpartsis deliberatelythat of a pantomime horse to a method actor.67(The horse,a stockcharacterin traditionalBritishpantomime, is playedby two actors, one in the front and one in the back of a woolly costume.) ReinventingDerivation:Roles,Stereotypes,and "YoungBritishArt"

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FIGURE

12. Michael Landy,Market,1988-90. Installationat Building One, Bermondsey,London. Courtesyof the artist.

The embrace of abjectionis a strategyintertwinedwith the self-presentation of Britishart within the international.In the United States,the notion of abjection has lent itself to a political rhetoricof marginalizedgroupsand also servesrepresentations of the postcolonial, a marking of one's group as liminal, transitional, and Third World against both U.S. economic power and European political unity.68Boundariesand identitieswithin Britainare also unstableat a time when Scotlandand Walesare devolving-or, alternatively,when Englandis "abjecting" its Celtic parts.69 If Britishart'sstrategicweaknessand abjectionmay be seen as an identification with a diminishedpostcolonialstatus,it mustbe observedthatpostcolonialismitself The postcolonialdiscourse has become an "objectof desirefor criticalpractice."70 that appearsto inform certainyBa strategiesand criticismis allied to Homi Bhabha'sformulation,in which new alteritiesand minoritieswithin the formerimperial center are addressed.7'While not political in the sense of "mutuallyreinforcing oppositions,"this "multiplicityof voices"raisesissuesof marginalizationand, more important,of stereotypesof national and gender identity.The questionof why the yBas are consideredas a group and not as individualartistsalso may be in some 14

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FIGURE

13. Sol LeWitt,SeriesA, 1967. FromBattcock,MinimalArt. ? Sol LeWitt/ARS (New York)/SODRAC (Montreal)2000.

way reposed as postcolonialtheorizing.Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattarihave argued that a minor literatureis characterizedby its collectivity,with "no individual masters."This scarcityof talentparadoxicallyworksto the advantageof individuals as each author'sstatementnecessarilybecomes part of a larger,more recognizable collective enunciation.72 workBerniceMurphy,curatorof the SydneyyBa exhibition,PicturaBritannica, ing throughthe complexitiesof a nation-basedexhibitionthat triesto avoidregressivenotions of nationalidentity,cited Homi Bhabhaand the culturalanalystStuart Hall under the subheading,"PluralIdentities,Decentred Subjectivities":"Artists are also mouldedin sitesother than cities-sites that includepotent mental spaces, that are acculturatedand historicizedthroughdiverseprocessesof... memoryand socially mutating experience."73It must be noted that these artists'mental spaces not only involvethe collisionsof diverseculturalbackgrounds,Britishstereotypes, and American and internationalart but also include the very theorizingof culture exemplifiedby Hall and Bhabha.74 Artists'knowing use of retheorizedpostcolonialdiscourseis in some respects allied to governmentrethinking of Britain'sidentity and role. This multiplyposiReinventingDerivation:Roles,Stereotypes,and "YoungBritishArt"

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tioned postcolonial attitude can also be situated within "post-Fordist" economics, the shift to part-time, decentralized patterns of designer-originated production and consumption what Robin Murray has called (with attention both to consumerism and the opportunistic multiculturalism of advertisers) "Benetton Britain."75This alliance of cultural identity and post-Fordism is evident in the influential Demos report, BritainTM: Renewing OurIdentity,produced in September 1997 at the time of the Sensationexhibition. Here, Britishness means being a "hub" where goods, messages, and ideas are exchanged and a "bridge" between Europe and America a reworking of the postwar vision of Britain-as-broker. This redefined, ethnically diverse Britain markets creativity in science, pop music, fashion design, and yBas.76 If Empire can no longer empower Britain's cultural constructs, then the market can. The operations of theory within the work of artists and critics allows for a theorized self-marginalization, including identifications with the situations of various minorities, whether or not the artist is actually a woman, gay, black, worker, immigrant, and so on.77 Sarah Lucas plays a tough boy, while Sam Taylor-Wood vamps in a T-shirt with the slogan of a politicized gay group devoted to outing eminent closet gays: "Fuck, Suck, Spank, Wank."78Jake Chapman argues that "fractured, unreliable, irresponsible" work reflects the status of British artistic culture: "It's always already marginalised. It already has the essence of being a subculture. It already conceives of itself as having no power.' 79 This rhetoric of marginality echoes Phil Cohen's description of youth cultures as a play of representations and identities that have no truly oppositional ground. "Youth"is "simultaneously constituted as a place and time of marginality and powerlessness, and as a whole series of special symbolic powers."80 In this construct, the animalistic adolescent is characterized in the same way as "primitive" colonial populations or the domestic working-class.8' Thus invented, youth is both marketable and market. This construction of youth is analogous to the construction of the yBa: "a whole group of deliciouslyyoung and savage artists who all know each other, live near each other, and even dot-dot-dot-dot each other."82As does "youth" as a postcolonial construct, yBas let the old imperial center retain its intellectual prestige but simultaneously let it shop among identity formations of various minoritiesafter all, its Empire is now within and let it play through the markets as a range of fragmentary stereotypes of what constitutes avant-garde affront, including British working-classism.83 The editors of OccupationalHazard assert a "notoriously parochial and enclosed" British art world.84 In doing so, they echo a postcolonial voice's insisting that no one else may speak for it. This is allied to Bickers's refusal of any artistic or critical endeavor complicit with the dominant culture's stereotypes. While local patterns of influence and mutual conductivity are important and subtle, the insistence on a closed art world not only protects against crude outside misperceptions but also enhances the hyped mystique. Simon Ford's devastating, axiomatic, demythologizing critique of the yBas-as-phenomenon has in turn become a foundational 16

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part of yBa mythology. The key players named by Ford (Tate Patrons of New Art, Charles Saatchi, the dealers JayJopling and Larry Gagosian, Goldsmiths' College teacher Michael Craig-Martin) are in turn grist for publicity. Ford'spiece is contaminated by fashion magazine articles offering "insider" views of the "scene."85 It could be that the confrontation of the Marxist oppositional model with postmodern multiplicity, and the further rhetoric of decline that surrounds that impasse, themselves constitute the only possible critical positions.86 The Bank collective, which functions as a kind of superego to the London art scene, summarizes the situation by lamenting the "bankruptcy of the binary" and the concomitant "general flattening of all art practice into a limited non-variety of recognizable house styles, each equally facile."87 Certainly some kind of in-between position is inevitable. Britain, reconfigured as postcolonial, must situate itself complexly within and against both U.S. cultural and market supremacy and the new euro Europe. While the turn toward Europe offers a way of countering U.S. domination, it also threatens old orders of class and national place of origin within Britain. If a colonialist master discourse requires a degenerate native population to justify its rule, here it is taken on by the mythic yBa as "yob." The yBa allows Britain safely to frame, for domestic consumption and for export, what mightbe critique. This framing is enacted by taking up the well-theorized position of British decline as countered by new multicultural identifications and then by entering into the Americanized French critical discourse by parodic emulation of U.S. art. Within and without Britain, it involves entering the world of postcolonial mimicry and imitation. Just as Thatcherism was parodic (and, it was argued, ineffectively transplanted) Reaganomics, so the yBas can take up the endgame for their own powerful postimperial ends.88As Julian Barnes's Thatcherite entrepreneur observes: There are some people out there ... who think it'sourjob, our particulargeopoliticalfunction, to act as an emblem of decline, a moral and economic scarecrow.Like, we taughtthe world how to play cricketand now it's our duty, an expressionof our lingering imperial guilt, to sit back and let everyonebeat us at it.89 In a useful strategy, this mortified postimperial condition has been allied by British artists and critics to identification with the postcolonial condition (and does take the form of appearing to let others beat you at games). To this end, Bank ironically articulates the necessity of redefining the terms of competition: " America is indisputably not very high up in the league table of all-time world powers,' said an expert today. 'Italy comes out top, with the Roman Empire and the Renaissance; then you've got France and Great Britain in fourth and seventh position. America are 11th behind Portugal.' "90 The hyped outrage surrounding Sensation in New York, centered on Chris Ofili's Holy Virginmade with elephant dung, might be taken as a coda. On one level, Mayor Giuliani's objections to the exhibit on religious grounds might be seen as a red herring (akin to the role of the protesting mother of one of Hindley's victims Reinventing Derivation: Roles, Stereotypes, and "Young British Art"

17

at the London Sensation)that distracts from critical responses. In fact, art-critical responses have been inflected by Giuliani's assault: Peter Schjeldahl, who had been witty about Damien Hirst's "wild-assed" efforts at ingratiating himself in New York in 1996, more gravely defends the Hirst of Sensationas "some sort of great artist."'" In another way, the shock of Sensationin New York is a culture shock, an incarnation of the confusion attendant upon the crossing of cultural barriers, however ironically or consciously undertaken. The gray ornamental boss of dried elephant dung, which, until now, had been remarkable for its innocuousness, an ironic symbol of Ofili's African heritage (as if he had been staging himself as a kind of postcolonial hip-hop "Jongleur de Notre Dame") becomes, in New York, a "smear" on the painting and against Catholicism. In these gray areas, Giuliani has been able to situate his own war on the New York City "elite": the "guys who have the pulpits at the big mainstream Protestant churches ... folks who work at the Ford Foundation . . . people who take it for granted that Giuliani is being a total philistine," along with the Brooklyn Museum Board, and the yBas themselves.92 This politically motivated and media intensified response is the most gratifying measure of there being an effectiveness of yBa strategies: in the postcolonial game, playing by British rules, it is only possible to score an "own goal."

Notes

1. 2. 3.

4. 5. 6.

18

I am grateful for their various assistance to Suzanne Akbari, Anne Hamlyn, Linda Hutcheon, Matt Kavaler, Naomi Marrus, and Anne Thackray. Damien Hirst, The PhysicalImpossibilityofDeath in theMind of SomeoneLiving, 199 1;Jake and Dinos Chapman, Disasters of War,1993, and work in progress, 1999. See Duncan McCorquodale, Naomi Siderfin, and Julian Stallabrass, eds., Occupational Hazard (London, 1997). Neville Wakefield on punk, "Pretty Vacancy," in Brilliant!NfewArtfromLondon(Minneapolis, 1995), 11. News media covered Frederick West's suicide and Rosemary West's trial throughout 1995. Diana as patron was "the photogenic face of contemporary art"; Sarah Greenberg, "Hard to Love, Impossible to Forget," ARTnews, September 1995, 130-32. "Pictures: Art and Advertising," Frieze, September-October 1998, 47. Art Monthly, Variant,and Third Text have led the skeptical debate. See, among other things, Julian Stallabrass (assistant editor on the New Left Review), "On the Margins," ArtMonthly(December 1994-January 1995): 3-6; Mark Harris, "Putting on the Style," Art Monthly (February 1996): 3-6; Simon Ford, "Myth Making," Art Monthly (March 1996): 3-9; Robert Garnett, "Beyond the Hype," ArtMonthly(April 1996): 43-44; Valerie Reardon, "Ten Years," Art Monthly (February 1999): 45; John Roberts, "Mad for it! Philistinism, the Everyday, and New British Art," Third Text35 (1996): 29-42. See

REPRESENTATIONS

Editorial, "Space for Art," Times (London), 23 September 1998, on yBa "inventiveness" as "reflection and symbol of a broader revival of national intellectual confidence." 7. Robert Garnett, "Britpopism and the Populist Gesture," and Peter Suchin, 'After a Fashion: Regress as Progress in Contemporary British Art," in McCorquodale, Siderfin, and Stallabrass, OccupationalHazard, 12-23 and 94-1 11; Patricia Bickers, "As Others See Us: Towards a History of Recent Art from Britain," in Bernice Murphy, Pictura Britannica(Sydney, 1997). 8. Harris, "Putting on the Style." 9. Bickers, 'As Others See Us," 74, cites Neville Wakefield's review of Sarah Lucas, Artforum 33, no. 9 (1995): 96-7. See also Gordon Burn, "The Height of the Morbid Manner," GuardianWeekend(Manchester), 6 September 1997, 18; and Eric Troncy, "London Calling: Intimacy and Chaos in Contemporary British Art," Flash Art 25, no. 165 (Summer 1992): 86-89. 10. Bickers, 'As Others See Us," 70. See also James Hall, "Teapot Tempest," Arforum 34, no. 5 (1995): 30-34; Andrew Wilson, "Brilliant! New Art from London," Art and Text no. 53 (1996): 86-87. 11. Michael Corris, "Tracey Emin," Ar~forum33, no. 6 (1995): 85. See also Mark Sladen, "Cinq champions du vice," Art Press,June 1996, 36-40. 12. David Bussel, "Richard Billingham," in Sensation(London, 1997), 193. 13. Rachel Whiteread, House, 1993-94; Richard Shone, review, BurlingtonMagazine 125 (1993): 837-38. 14. Phil Cohen, Rethinkingthe routh Question(London, 1997). 15. Sarah Lyall quoting Richard Cork, New rork Times, 20 September 1997, sec. B. See Alan Riding, "No Sexism Please: They're British," New Yiork Times,29 December 1997, sec. E; Calvin Tomkins, "London Calling: A British Invasion of Young Artists at the Walker Art Center," New Yorker,11 December 1995, 115-17. 16. See Anna Murphy, "Circle of Friends," Observer,25 October 1998, Life; Will Self, 'A Steady, Iron-hard Jet," ModernPainters7, no. 2 (1991): 50-52, here 51; "Tracey Emin, the Art World's Bit of Rough," Independent(London), 27 July 1998, Monday Review. A "yob" (boy spelled backward) is a "lout." 17. Harris, "Putting on the Style," 5-6. 18. On the United States as cultural imperial center, see "On Love, Betrayal, Honesty: A Dialogue Between Playwrights," New York Times, 26 April 1998, Arts; Judith H. Dobrzynski, "France Playing Catch-Up in the Arts," New rork Times, 4 March 1999, Arts; "No Generalisations," Art Monthly, (December-January 1993-94): 22. 19. Bickers, 'As Others See Us." 20. Michael Corris, "British, Young, Invisible, W/Attitude," Arforum 30, no. 9 (1992): 10611. Corris (identified by Bickers, 'As Others See Us," 66, as "a British-based American critic,") teaches at Oxford Brookes University. 21. On Stephen Hawking's marketability, see John Harlow, "Cook [British Foreign Secretary] Sells Britain's New Look Overseas," Sunday Times (London), 6 September 1998, News. 22. On the Brilliant! opening, see Adrian Dannatt, "Brilliant!" Flash Art 29, no. 186 (1996). For recent stereotypes, see Carol Kine, "Cutting Edge but Comfy," Atlantic Monthly, November 1998, available online at wwwtheatlantic.com/issues/98nov/artuk.htm. 23. TechniqueAnglaise: CurrentTrendsin British Art, ed. Andrew Renton and Liam Gillick (London, 1991).

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24. Garnett, "Britpopism and the Populist Gesture," 18-19. See also David Lee, "Damien Hirst," Art Review,June 1995, 10. 25. John Roberts, "Pop Art, The Popular, and British Art of the 1990's," in McCorquodale, Siderfin, and Stallabrass, OccupationalHazard, 52-79; Reardon, "Ten Years," 45. 26. Homi K. Bhabha, "Minority Maneuvers and Unsettled Negotiations," CriticalInquiry 23, no. 3 (1997): 431-51. See also Stuart Hall and David Held, "Citizens and Citizenship," in New Times:The ChangingFaceofPoliticsin the1 99O's,ed. Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques (London, 1990), 176. Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory:Classes,Nations,Literatures(London, 1992), 70. 27. For a postcolonial critical approach, see Nikos Papastergiadis, "Back to Basics: British Art and the Problems of a Global Frame," in Murphy, PicturaBritannica, 128. 28. Bickers, "As Others See Us," 71. 29. Greil Marcus describes Elvis Presley's "shoddy movies" as "cinema discrepant," linking Elvis's impact with that of the Sex Pistols, in Lipstick Traces:A SecretHistory of the TwentiethCentury(Cambridge, Mass., 1989), 148, 245. 30. Mark Gisbourne, "Dis-incarnate (and Whose Body Is It Anyway?)," in Marc Quinn: Incarnate(New York, 1998), unpaginated. 31. Derek Jarman, Jubilee, and B Movie: Little England/A Time of Hope, in Up in the Air: CollectedFilm Scripts(London, 1996); Julian Barnes, England, England (London, 1998). On the Ronald Reagan/Margaret Thatcher years proving that there is no "authentic" culture beyond the commodity system, see Alan Sinfield, Literature,Politics,and Culture in PostwarBritain (Oxford, 1989), 133-34. 32. David Frankel, "Now You See It Now You Don't," Arforum 35, no. 3 (1996): 71. 33. See Ford, "Myth-Making;" and Spellbound:Art and Film (London, 1996), 86. 34. Norman Tebbitt quoted in Robert Hewison, Cultureand Consensus:England, Art, and Politics Since 1940 (London, 1995), 21 1. See Duncan Webster, Looka Yonder:The ImaginaryAmericaof Populist Culture(London, 1988), 176; Nigel Thrift, "Light out of Darkness: Critical and Social Theory in 1980's Britain," in Paul Cloke, ed., Policyand Change in Thatcher'sBritain (Oxford, 1992), 8. 35. Serge Guilbaut, "On Studying British Modernism," Collapse1, no. 1 (1995). (Arguably, this delusion of being a broker might be applied to a Canadian like myself imagining the relations of contemporary British to contemporary U.S. art.) 36. Webster, Looka Yonder,215. See Linda Hutcheon, "Orientalism as Post-Imperial Witnessing," in Culturaland Post-ColonialStudies:Essays in Honourof Edward Said, ed. Hussein Kadhim (forthcoming). 37. Hewison, Cultureand Consensus,222-25. 38. Corris, "British, Young, Invisible, W/Attitude," 106 n. 1. 39. Michael Bracewell and Julian Evans, "The Rising Son of the Classless Society: Et in Arcadia Joe ****," Mule, 31 October 1997, 4. See also Michael Bracewell, England Is Mine (London, 1998). The Mule parodies fashionable hybridity in its masthead: "The hybrid that can't reproduce." (There is only one issue.) 40. Hewison, Cultureand Consensus,304. 41. PledgeAllegianceto a Flag? curated by Stewart Russell, London Printworks Trust. Mark Wallinger's work is collected by Charles Saatchi. Jonathan Parsons made a black, white and gray Union Jack, Achrome,1994, also exhibited in Sensation. 42. James Heartfield, "Identity Crisis: Brand New Britain," LM, November 1997, 25; "A New Brand for Britain," Economist,23 August 1997, 43.

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REPRESENTATIONS

43. Sinfield, Literature,Politics, and Culturein PostwarBritain, 133-34. 44. Michael Fitzpatrick, "Psychopolitics," LM, November 1997, 28; "Ridell on Monday": "Hard Heads, Not Soft Hearts," Times, 31 August 1998; Jacqueline Rose, "The Cult of Celebrity," LondonReview ofBooks, 20 August 1998. See Alan O'Shea, "English Subjects of Modernity," in Mica Nava and Alan O'Shea, eds., Modern Times:Reflectionson a Centuryof EnglishModernity(New York, 1996), 7-37. 45. Webster, Looka ronder,209-12. See William Feaver, "New York Art Now: Saatchi Collection," AR Tnews, March 1988, 222, on Saatchi's buying and Thatcherism. 46. Webster, Looka Yonder,236-39. 47. Ibid., 240. 48. See "Fat Profits," Guardian(Manchester), 29 August 1998, The Guide (South), 18. 49. John A. Walker, CulturalOffensive:America'sImpact on British Art Since 1945 (London, 1998), 228-31. 50. Harris, "Putting on the Style," 6. 51. John Frankland, You Can't Touch This, 1992-93; Hirst, Physical Impossibilityof Death; Marc Quinn, Self 1991; Rachel Whiteread, Closet, 1988. 52. Andrew Renton quoted in Renton and Gillick, TechniqueAnglaise,40. 53. Hans Haacke, FloatingSphere,1966, in Gregory Battcock, MinimalArt (New York, 1968). 54. Harris, "Putting on the Style," 6. Mark Harris is an artist and critic living in London and New York. 55. See Clement Greenberg, "Recentness of Sculpture" (1967), and Michael Fried, "Art and Objecthood" (1967), in Minimal Art, ed. Gregory Battcock (Berkeley, 1968). 56. Donald Judd, "Specific Objects," in Arts Yearbook8 (New York, 1965), 78. Matthew Arnatt, "Another Lovely Day," in McCorquodale, Siderfin, and Stallabrass, OccupationalHazard, 48. Arnatt recently participated in a "faux" exhibition intended to expose the myth of critical distance: see Matthew Arnatt, Klega Mollin, and David Mollin, OneHundredReviews (London, 1999). 57. Gregor Muir, review of Gavin Turk, Flash Art 27, no. 176 (1994): 120. See also Julian Stallabrass, "High Art Lite at the Royal Academy," Third Textno. 42 (1998): 78-84; and Julian Stallabrass, "Phoney War," Art Monthly no. 206 (1997): 15-16; and James Roberts, "Last of England," Frieze, November-December 1993, 28. For conservative objections, see Brian Sewell, An Alphabetof Villains(London, 1995). 58. "Leave Your Weapons at the Door: Democracy, State Modernism, and the Official Embrace of the Arts," TimesLiterarySupplement,26 September 1997, 10. On derivation see Harris, "Putting on the Style," 6; and Robert Garnett, "Britpopism and the Populist Gesture," 15-16. 59. James Hall, "The Revolution Continues: British Art Now," AR Tnews, September 1993, 144; also 'Are We in a Pickle?" Guardian(Manchester), 7 April 1997, Media (cover). Norbert Lynton, "Damien's Fairground," TimesLiterarySupplement,7 November 1997, 5-6; Jerry Saltz, "More Life: The Work of Damien Hirst," Art in America,June 1995; David A. Greene, Art and Textno. 55 (1996): 80; Jeffrey Kastner, ARTnews, Summer 1996, 55. Art Spiegelman recently adapted this to show Mayor Giuliani confronting a 11 October 1999, cover. Hirst pig: N'ew Worker, 60. Harlow, "Cook Sells Britain's New Look Overseas." 61. Endgame:Referenceand Simulationin RecentAmericanPainting and Sculpture(Cambridge, Mass., 1986); Garnett notes endgame influence, "Britpopism and the Populist Gesture," 15.

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Anglaise, 17. 62. Liam Gillick and Karsten Schubert, in Renton and Gillick, Technique 63. See Renton on Koons in ibid., 9. 64. Barbara Pollack, "Green Cards: YBas in the US," Art Monthly (March 1998): 44-45; Richard C. Morais, "Pickled Sheep and Bullet Holes," Forbes,13 February 1995, 200201; 'Anthony d'Offay: Trendsetter," Economist, 12 March 1994, 98. 65. Julia Kristeva, The Powersof Horror:An Essay onAbjection,trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York, 1982). 66. Turk parodies Mike Kelley's defecation drawings (TrickleDown and Swaddling Clothes, 1986) and Kiki Smith's Train, 1994, which in turn refer back to Carolee Schneeman's InteriorScroll, 1972. On Turk, see Matthew Collings, Blimey! FromBohemia to Britpop (Cambridge, 1997), 158. 67. The Decima Gallery has consciously played with the stock cultural prop of the pantomime horse, parodically organizing "Diana the Pantomime Cow" commemorative walks through London; see the Decima Web site at wwwdecima.co.uk. 68. AbjectArt: Repulsionand Desire in AmericanArt (New York, 1993). 69. Mark Henderson, "Confident Celts Put England in the Shade," Times (London), 1 February 1999; "Real Britannia: What Does It Mean to be British?" Independent (London), 20, 21, 22 and 23 July, 1998, Review. Warren Hoge, "London Journal: Has England Lost Its Identity? Or Just Its Cliches?" N'ew rork Times, 14 October 1998, Foreign. 70. Stephen Slemon, "The Scramble for Post-colonialism," in De-scribing Empire: Postcolonialismand Textuality,ed. Chris Tiffin and Alan Lawson (London, 1994). 71. Homi Bhabha, "Minority Maneuvers"; also Etienne Balabar, 'Ambiguous Universality," Differences7 (1995): 435. 72. Gilles Deleuze and F6lix Guattari, "What Is a Minor Literature?" in Out There:Marginalization and ContemporaryCultures,ed. Russell Ferguson (Cambridge, Mass., 1990), 59-69. 73. Bernice Murphy, "'Pictura Britannica': Scenes, Fictions, and Constructions in Contemporary British Art," in PicturaBritannica,40-41. 74. See Homi K. Bhabha, "Re-inventing Britain: A Manifesto," and Stuart Hall, "The Nub of the Argument," (papers presented at the British Council Conference, Open University, 21 March 1997), available online at old.britcoun.org/studies/. 75. Robin Murray, "Benetton Britain," in Hall and Jacques, N'ew Times, 54. 76. Mark Leonard, BritainTM:Renewing OurIdentity(London, 1997). 77. See Stallabrass, "On the Margins." 78. On models and message T-shirts, see Helen Chappell, "Causes to Die for, Darlings," N'ewStatesmanand Society,3 May 1996, 32. 79. Hall, "Teapot Tempest," 30. 80. Cohen, Rethinkingthe routh Question,225. 81. Ibid., 185. 82. Adrian Dannatt, Flash Art 29, no. 186 (1996), italics are mine. Michael Kimmelman notes that Mayor Giuliani, in the Brooklyn Museum Sensationscandal, "seems to regard [the yBas] as naughty teenagers"; "Critic's Notebook: Cutting Through Cynicism in Art Furor," N'ew YorkTimes, 24 September 1999, Arts. 83. On politics of marginality, see Hal Foster, "The Artist as Ethnographer," Global Visions: Towardsa N'ewInternationalismin the VisualArts, ed. Jean N. Fisher (London, 1994), 1219. On representing ethnic identities, see Eleanor Heartney, "Identity Politics at the

22

REPRESENTATIONS

84. 85.

86.

87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92.

Whitney," in PostModernPerspectives,ed. Howard Risatti (Saddle River, NJ., 1998), 2829; and Niru Ratnam, "Invisible InIVA," Art Monthly (November 1997): 13. McCorquodale, Siderfin, and Stallabrass, introduction to OccupationalHazard, 8; also Naomi Siderfin, "Occupational Hazard," in ibid., 31. Such magazine articles include "Art and Soul of the Party,"Elle, November 1997, 10712; David Kamp, "London Swings Again," VanityFair, March 1997, 201-28; Mark Simpson, "Wild Kingdom," Details, July 1997, 58-68. Ford is a historian of avantgardism: see Simon Ford, The Realization and Suppressionof the SituationistInternational: An AnnotatedBibliography,1972-1992 (Edinburgh, 1995). Andreas Huyssen, After the GreatDivide: Modernism,Mass Culture,Postmodernism(New York, 1986); and Donald Kuspit, "The Avant-Garde Complex and the Post-Modern Perplex," in IdiosyncraticIdentities(Cambridge, 1996), 334. Bank, press release, June 1998. Stuart Hall, The Hard Road to Renewal: Thatcherismand the Crisis of the Left (London, 1988), 165. Barnes, England,England, 39. Bank, 'All Americans Are Cunts: Official," The Bank, 25 December 1997, 3. See Peter Schjeldahl, "He Loves You," Village Voice,21 May 1996, 65; and Peter Schjeldahl, "Those Nasty Brits," New rorker,11 October 1999, 104-5. Elisabeth Bumiller, "For Giuliani, Making Most of Artful War with Elite," New York Times, 16 October 1999.

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