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

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

THE YBA (YOUNG BRITISH ARTIST) CAME to international attention in the early 1990s with a 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 Sensation was Marcus Harvey's portrait of a notorious murderer of children, Myra (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-