Shock For Shock's Sake?

By STEVEN HENRY MADOFF

In its own way, "Sensation," the Brooklyn Museum of Art's sprawling show of young British artists that has opened up the latest front in the culture wars, is a sheep in wolf's clothing. That was bound to be. Not even an ad man's dream of a drop-dead one-liner can hold its shock past the listener's double take. And "Sensation" is precisely that: a vanity showcase from the collection of British ad mogul Charles Saatchi--loud and "naughty" works juxtaposed with the occasional better one--that has generated more noise than it deserves.

Outraged by one work in the exhibition, Chris Ofili's black madonna festooned with elephant dung, Rudolph Giuliani, New York City mayor and all-but-declared U.S. Senate candidate, refused to pay the October installment of the city's $7 million subsidy to the museum. The city further claimed that the institution, in league with Christie's auction house, a sponsor of the show and the seller of $2.6 million of Saatchi's art last year, was knowingly trying to raise the value of Saatchi's collection. It then filed suit to throw the museum--one of the finest in the country--out of the gracious city-owned building that has been its home for more than 100 years. Supporters rallied to each side, and both the New York Civil Liberties Union and the Catholic League organized pickets.

The furor made its way to Washington as well, where the Senate passed a nonbinding resolution sponsored by New Hampshire Senator Robert Smith that called for an end to federal funding for the museum. Trying not to alienate either camp, Hillary Clinton, Giuliani's likely opponent for New York's Senate seat, chided the mayor for threatening to shut down the museum but added, "There are parts of this exhibit that would be deeply offensive. I would not go to see this exhibit."

One of the more remarkable aspects of this whole affair is that "Sensation" has gained more attention than any marketing campaign for it could possibly have achieved. The furious outcry came before practically anyone had actually viewed the art. If Giuliani and Mrs. Clinton had bothered to go, they would have seen an exhibition that trades shock for shallowness with all the easy insouciance of youth. It has long been a vogue of contemporary art to focus on social issues at the expense of classical ideals of beauty, and the art here follows that vogue with a vengeance. That's not to say that the work doesn't have jolts of visual energy, corrosive or not. It is an energy that was new to the somnolent British art scene and brought these artists local and then international attention throughout the '90s.

But the plain and sometimes ugly truth is that when this sort of work sticks its jaw out into the wider world, its jaw turns to glass. That is surely the case with the lightning rod of the show, Ofili's The Holy Virgin Mary (1996). The work, which has now been placed behind Plexiglas, with a velvet rope in front and a guard standing by to protect it from any angry viewers, is a perfectly competent rendering of a Christian icon--a central figure on a ground of gold. The drawing of an African Mary (Ofili is of Nigerian descent) is plausible, but there is no real depth, no great feeling in the line. You might pass right by were it not for Ofili's strategy to shove the voltage up by adorning it with a pattern of cutouts from porn mags of women's crotches and then adding to the rhythm of the work with clumps of elephant dung. Interpretations reach too glibly for the symbolism of this Virgin in a cloud of sex parts as an emblem of the sacred's overcoming the profane, of the elephant manure as an African symbol of regeneration that adds luster to the Madonna's beneficence. And so it may be, but the painting is surely a calculated come-on.

In work after work in "Sensation," and there are some 92 pieces by 42 artists spread out over nearly 22,000 sq. ft. of gallery space, you see the same calculation peeking its tongue-wagging little head out of the art. Much of what's on show here really ought to be viewed the way another work about another Mary was--last year's bathroom-humor blockbuster, Something About Mary. It's lewd and long on visual pratfalls, and there is not a great deal else to do but roll your eyes as you pass Sarah Lucas' Au Naturel (1994), a dingy mattress leaning against a wall with an erect cucumber shooting up with two oranges at its base, two ripe melons across the way...you get the idea.

Throughout the show, there's an obsession with the body, leering humor about sex and yammering about death. Tracey Emin's canvas tent called Everyone I Have Ever Slept With (1995) is done inside with crudely laid-out names and notes about old paramours. It camps out a short distance from Mona Hatoum's more elegant but hardly deep creation (despite its title, Deep Throat): a dining table with proper tablecloth and silver, and a plate whose bottom is a video screen showing the travels of an invasive camera down a human gullet.

And then there are the enormously silly, explicitly sexual sculptural romps by Jake and Dinos Chapman, whose fascination with genetic mutation leads them down the very foolish path of constructing girlish mannequins with phalluses for noses and sexual orifices in all the wrong places. Hardly Rodin. But then Rodin's Balzac, created just before the turn of the century, wrapped the great French novelist in a cape beneath which, it was said, he was holding his own member in the potent coupling of climax and creative genius. The work outraged its patrons and wasn't cast in bronze until after Rodin's death. Now it is considered a masterpiece that foretells the abstract sculpture that became a hallmark of this century's art.

That's not to say that the Chapmans' puerile offerings will rise to a place of lasting esteem. No, the point is that work once seen as scandalous takes on new meaning as culture is rocked by alien, disquieting expressions and then slowly evolves. And there are works in this show that warrant respect and have had it from critics and gallerygoers for some time.

Rachel Whiteread, for example, is a leading figure among contemporary sculptors. Her plaster and resin casts of the space around domestic objects, whether it be the airy volume of a room or the underside of a humble chair, are eerie, elegant and refined. The exhibition includes a gorgeous gallery of these chair pieces: variously colored blocks shining softly under a skylight like a plot of grave markers. It's a tranquil hymn to loss and absence, evoking the sense of departed souls who once sat among us. Its thoughtfulness is a respite from so much brazen shouting, and like a good deal of her art, it can be enjoyed as much for the minimalist pleasure of its simple, rhythmic shapes as for the stories it conjures.

There is also ample work to look at by Damien Hirst, the most prominent and furiously productive artist of his generation on the London scene. Hirst has been vilified by animal-rights groups for his sculptures incorporating dead animals, sliced down their middle or sideways and displayed in all their forensic grimness inside formaldehyde-filled cases. The alarming piece that first brought him fame is here as well: A Thousand Years (1990), with its vitrine full of maggots and flies that swarm over the bloody head of a cow. It's a little pocket of hell: nauseating, unerringly brutal, but its shock looks death terribly in the face. Not silly, not shallow, not shock for shock's sake. Nor is Marc Quinn's Self (1991), in which a cast replica of the artist's head is filled with eight pints of his own blood, kept cool in a refrigerated case. We'd all like to freeze our mortality, stop it cold, and you can take Quinn's literal rendering of the idea or you can leave it. Yet the bust itself has all the solid weight of bronze, and this classical death mask in its futuristic case is odd and chilling indeed.

In another gallery sits Marcus Harvey's huge grisaille portrait of an English child abuser and murderer, Myra Hindley, whose image is composed of child-size handprints. Proving that local politics tends to make all art local, it is this work, rather than Ofili's Holy Virgin, that prompted an outcry in London, where "Sensation" first appeared two years ago at the Royal Academy of Arts. And yet, like Ofili's work, Myra is hardly an astonishment, looking like a wobbly send-up of a picture by the American painter Chuck Close. People in New York, ignorant of her crimes, will surely pass it by.

Amid the outrage and grandstanding in the exhibition, some crucial issues swiftly show themselves: Should the largesse of public funding be allowed to circumscribe free speech? Can unhindered expression, in its turn, become sheer offense? And how ironclad are the constitutional protections for edgy art that may amount to hate speech? In the end, art can be political, but it cannot affect the world the way politicians can. Says Bill Ivey, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts: "The damage can outlast the politics of the moment."

In the Brooklyn Museum, right outside the entrance to "Sensation," is a small oil by Thomas Cole, the great 19th century painter who went to America from England as a young man and laid down on canvas the raw grandeur of the landscape as illustration of the new nation's moral power. The picture is easy to miss, a little study of a Christian pilgrim on the verdant knoll of a mountaintop. His arms are outspread, brilliant under a sky ablaze with light and hope.

Close down the museum for a single painting? This is another one to look at. Visitors to "Sensation" might want to start their viewing by stopping first in front of Cole's bright image. And coming back to it at the end.

--With reporting by Ann Blackman/Washington and William Dowell/New York

With reporting by Ann Blackman/Washington and William Dowell/New York