Date: 10-03-1992
Owning Institution: Saatchi Gallery
Publication: The Independent 1987 - 1999        
Subject:   Now      

THERE'S no getting round the shark: a ton or so of pure killer instinct suspended, in perpetuity, inside a gigantic glass tank filled with formaldehyde solution. It was always going to steal the show devoted to ''Young British Artists'' which opened last week at the Saatchi Gallery, and now it has done so. Its title is The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. But it is known, simply, as The Shark.

Rarely can a contemporary British sculpture (if that's the right designation) have been so much dis-cussed before it even existed. For some months now it has been widely known that Damien Hirst, the Great White Hope of British art, was working with a Great White Shark. (In fact, three days before he placed his order with an Australian fisherman, the Great White was declared an endangered species, so Hirst has had to settle for a Tiger Shark.) The Shark is rumoured to have cost Charles Saatchi more than pounds 50,000, but the news from Boundary Road is that it was worth it. It will be remembered as one of the most remark-able British works of this, er, fin de siecle.

There will no doubt be those who wonder whether a real, dead shark, simply pickled in formaldehyde and placed on display, can justly be described as a work of art. Had it been commissioned by, say, the Tate, The Sun's headline-writers would already have gone to work on it: pounds 50,000 FOR FISH, WITHOUT CHIPS. But although The Shark might be hard to defend, that's no reason not to try.

Hirst has adopted a classic strategy of Surreal, Dadaist and later modern art, which consists in the re-moval of something from its usual context (Marcel Duchamp did it with the urinal, Carl Andre with the brick) and its relocation within an art gallery. The tactic of displacement has been responsible for not just some of the major art of the century but, too, for a large quantity of lazy and uninteresting work. In an era that has seen an exponential increase in the number of such tired exercises in ''recontextualisation'' - the Hayward's ''Doubletake'' exhibition contains several examples - Hirst's work represents a terrific reinvigoration of a near-moribund tradition.

The Shark is both scary and disconcerting, its range of effects genuinely surprising. The opacity of the glass used causes peculiar dislocations of vision as you circle the gape- mouthed carcass. Walking from its tail towards its head and rounding the corner of the tank to stare into its mouth, you find that the result of simultaneous refraction through two walls of glass makes The Shark's head appear to lunge at you. This is not entirely pleasant.

Neither is it gratuitous, a mere special effect. The fact that The Shark appears to move contributes to its considerable power as an object of contemplation. It is a paradox made solid, this creature, at once frighteningly dynamic and completely still. It is, of course, a vanitas, albeit of an unusual kind: a work of art that prompts reflections on death, its inevitability, and our habit of avoiding that most unsavoury and basic fact of our existence.

It is an image of man's power over nature, and its evocation of the exhibits in zoos or natural history museums is doubtless calculated. It demonstrates that even the most unreflectingly hostile animal can be transformed into, merely, matter for aesthetic consideration. The Shark will never break through that glass; we will never feel the impact of that awful row of teeth on our flesh.

But visitors to the exhibition tend to respond to its open maw with an answering grimace of their own, a grin that is not altogether complacent. This is appropriate, since The Shark is one of those rare works (and in this Hirst fulfils one of Francis Bacon's desiderata for serious art) which operates primarily on the nervous system and only secondarily on the intellect. The uneasiness that The Shark provokes is related to its pecu-liar status as an image of human power - because it actually suggests how uneasy, how insecure that power really is. Hirst's work comes to operate as a displaced image of our relationship to our own bodies, our ability to preserve the flesh but not the spirit, the form but not the life. The Shark, like the grinning skeletons earlier artists employed as their emblem of Death, might be said to have the last laugh.

Hirst's other works in this show underline the singleminded morbidity of their maker. One Thousand Years, first shown a few years ago, is a curious ecosystem-cum-sculpture: another of Hirst's enormous glass and steel cases stocked, this time, with the decomposing head of a cow, a large supply of maggots and a butcher's insectocutor. The maggots hatch into flies, some of which are killed by this electrical device, but enough survive to carry on breeding. It is as gruesome as it sounds. It is a work that actually incorporates the life-and-death cycle, makes it a material element of art. What looks, at first, like a controlled experiment, a demonstration of man's power over his world, turns into an image of our entrapment by its laws. We too breed and die, go about our daily business more or less oblivious of the biological patterns that determine our existence.

''Young British Artists'' suggests that Charles Saatchi is capable of unwarranted over-enthusiasm for mi-nor art as well as enlightened recognition of the best. John Greenwood's neo-Surreal paintings, filled with echoes of the past, crawling with vigorous little biomorphs that seem crossbred by Dali out of Disney, are competent but dull.

After The Shark, of course, everything is apt to look anticlimactic, although there are some other good works here and one outstanding one. Alex Landrum paints monochrome abstracts in household eggshell, each work carrying, just discernibly at its centre, the manufacturer's trade name for the colour - ''Raven's Blood'', ''Gold Coast'' - in which it is executed. They are more arresting than they sound, provoking reflection on the odd human need to give colour, that most irreducible, non- verbal element of the painter's language, a series of associations.

The relationship between art and architecture, art and design, also exercises Ben Langlands and Nikki Bell. Their variously presented scale models of buildings and building types (radial prisons, Lubetkin apart-ments, a Denis Lasdun tower block) seem informed by a species of nostalgia for the days when art and architecture were seen as partners in the betterment of society: nostalgia, though, tempered by enquiry into just what kinds of social improvement might be embodied by a building. Langlands and Bell's art, which is itself reminiscent, in its pared-down forms, of Purist or Constructivist prototypes, is rescued from school-masterliness by its melancholy.

''Young British Artists'' also marks the fourth occasion on which Rachel Whiteread's large sculpture Ghost has been shown since she made it in 1989, although that does not feel like overexposure. It is the other major work in this exhibition, a sculpture created out of the unlikely raw materials provided by a bedsit-ting room in Islington. A set of exact plaster casts of the space inside that room, it is in effect a block of petrified air. Its inside-outness is arresting and strange: all the shapes of the original room have been reversed. The plaster of which it is made picks up hints of former residency, traces of lives we can only guess at. It is like a monument, or a tomb - a mausoleum to unknown memories.

Whatever reservations anyone may have about him and his collection, it is almost certain that without Charles Saatchi neither The Shark nor Whiteread's Ghost - she is said to have considered scrapping it after it was first shown, as an unsaleable work beyond her means to store - would exist. Even should Saatchi sell these works in the future, he has played a significant role in the development of British art of the last three or four years.