New Neurotic Realism & Charles Saatchi (1999)
Excerpt fr. Supercollector: A critique of Charles Saatchi (4th ed.) by Rita Hatton & John A. Walker.
While the crowds inside the galleries of [the Royal Academy of Arts] were still assimilating Sensation during the autumn of 1997, Charles Saatchi was already preparing his next move in the artopoly game by “scouring small, alternative artist-run warehouse and studio shows to find the next generation of trend setters”, who turned out to be the proponents of The New Neurotic Realism.[1]
New Neurotic Realism: The book
Months before any work by the [artists in] New Neurotic Realism was visible at the Saatchi Gallery, a hardback book was published— by the gallery itself— and preview articles appeared in the press, just as adverts often precede the arrival of new products in the shops. The book, in effect, was a substantial press release signalling the existence of a “new movement” well in advance. Perhaps too far in advance because some people felt the first of a series of shows, held from January to August 1999, was an anti-climax.
Who coined the problematic label New Neurotic Realism? There were three candidates: Martin Maloney, Dick Price and Charles Saatchi. Opinions were divided: the British critic Waldemar Januszczak was convinced Saatchi christened it, while the German critic Nicola Kuhn maintained that Maloney was responsible. Saatchi later admitted he invented it. The adjective “new”— used ad nauseam in advertising— implied that there had been an “old” neurotic realism but since no such movement was known, “new” became an embarrassment and was dropped from the title of the first exhibition. The New Neurotic Realism label reminded art historians of the German new objectivity movement of the 1930s and the European nouveau réalisme of the early 1960s, but what it meant in the British context was a puzzle.
Evidently, some name was needed to differentiate the latest manifestation from the Sensation artists even though three of them— Peter Davies, Martin Maloney and Ron Mueck— were common to both. Thirty-four artists were featured in the book, almost all of whom lived and worked in London. However, they were not exclusively British: 11 were born in countries as far afield as Australia, Japan and the USA. Their work was executed in a variety of forms: assemblage, mixed-media installation, painting, paper cut-outs, photography, and sculpture. Stylistically it also ranged from cartoon fantasy to construction, from photorealism to neo-naive. The disparate nature of the work made the label New Neurotic Realism hard to justify except as a brand name or marketing tool. A hostile writer in Art Review proposed the alternative label “frenetic opportunism”.
Jonathan Jones, then a freelance journalist, penned a more thoughtful critique of the New Neurotic Realism label or “ism”. [2] He thought Charles Saatchi had every right to name a new art movement but could discern no common denominator. Earlier modern movements such as dada, futurism and surrealism had been accompanied by manifestoes, and bodies of theory, they had been “ideologies” and had spoken “the language of revolution”— realism in art had also been associated with political movements such as socialism— whereas “the movement Saatchi has pasted together travesties the history of modern art by stripping it of its politics”. Jones concluded that there was ’something deeply reactionary about neurotic realism’s melancholia’. Other critics dismissed the label as “hype”, “a joke”, but, as one pointed out, if its purpose was to be a talking point then it certainly succeeded.
An introduction to the book was provided by Dick Price (an alias for the painter Dexter Dalwood), a reviewer for the British fashion magazine i-D. Price argued that the [artists in] New Neurotic Realism rejected the cynicism, shock tactics, ironic posing and the role of art star associated with the yBas. They were “a group of artists who use strange psychology as an accepted subject”, who were interested in fiction and collective memory, the subjective relationship to movies; there was a “shabby-ragged realism” but also “elegance and sophistication”, and a return to traditional art forms such as painting and sculpture and more emphasis on craft skills. He traced the origins of New Neurotic Realism in Britain to the influence of American artists such as John Baldessari, Chris Burden and William Wegman.
New Neurotic Realism & Charles Saatchi: 1 | 2 | Die Young Stay Pretty at ICA (1998): 3 | Martin Maloney: 4 | NNR: Tomoko Takahashi, Paul Smith, Brian Cyril Griffiths: 5 | Steven Gontarski, Martin Maloney: 6 | 7 | 8 | 9
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