Sensation: the art exhibition that nearly started a riot
The hook of Sensation, if you asked promoter and art curator Charles Saatchi, was that it was nothing more than a collection of some of the most famous works by the Young British Artists of the 1990s. However, that man knew exactly what he was doing.
I mean, he called the show Sensation, for Christ’s sake. This wasn’t about getting a bunch of amazing artworks together in one place; this was causing a scene, a stir, a…sensation, if you will. This wasn’t simply about exhibiting the best works of the YBAs. This was about offending a lot of people and getting a lot of that lovely, lovely press when it was first exhibited at the Royal Academy of Arts in September 1997, and it did so very, very successfully.
All the names you’d expect to be there turned up. Damien Hirst was hawking his shark in formaldehyde, Tracey Emin was represented with her Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995 installation, Marc Quinn took along his self-portrait made with his own frozen blood, the gang, it cannot be stressed enough, was all here. However, everyone, from Hirst and Emin to even serial line-steppers like Jake and Dino’s Chapman, had their lunch eaten in the controversy stakes by one piece that still feels pretty grim today.
You see, this was the first public appearance of Marcus Harvey’s painting Myra. A portrait depicting the infamous murderer’s 1965 mugshot would have been on thin ice at the best of times, but Harvey went further than that. The black and white portrait was actually a mosaic, made up of thousands of black, white and grey photographs of a cast of an infant’s hand. People weren’t just shocked at this world’s appearance; people were incredibly angry.
So much so that they attacked the Academy en masse.
How did ‘Sensation’ nearly start a riot?
As soon as word got around about the nature of Myra, people didn’t just make their feelings known via strongly worded letters or statements to the press. The windows of Burlington House, home of The Royal Academy, were smashed multiple times, and the piece itself was vandalised twice on the very first day of the exhibition. Hilariously enough, not by scandalised punters but by artists themselves. The first was Peter Fisher, who smuggled red and blue Indian ink into the exhibition inside two camera film containers.
He chucked the ink at the painting before smearing it into the canvas. While he was being tackled by security, fellow artist Jacques Rolé thought this looked like fun and left the gallery for a quick run to the shops. He returned with a box of eggs that he pelted at the piece before an off-site police officer stopped him. Needless to say, the piece was replaced by a backup copy and was exhibited behind perspex glass for the rest of the exhibition.
The controversy continued when the exhibition was moved from the Royal Academy to the Brooklyn Museum of Art in 1999. This time, it wasn’t for Myra, but for a separate piece of art altogether, namely Chris Folk’s The Holy Virgin Mary, a portrait of the Mother of God made mostly of oil paint, elephant dung and porn cut-outs. The then-mayor of New York, Rudy Giuliani, threatened to cut the museum’s funding and evict them from their building, but like any good Trump ally, he couldn’t follow through with his threats.
Didn’t stop another activist from throwing white paint at it, though, forcing it behind plexiglass for the rest of its run, just like what happened to Myra a few years before.