Nearly 40 years ago, a group of second-year Goldsmiths fine-art students looked at the artistic landscape and saw no place for their renegade sensibilities. So they took fate into their own hands and made a show in an abandoned Port Authority building in Docklands.
This DIY exhibition, Freeze, coordinated by Damien Hirst, catapulted the talents of a group of twentysomethings into the public eye. They would go on to be Turner Prize nominees and winners. Gary Hume, Angela Bulloch, Anya Gallaccio, Ian Davenport and Sarah Lucas, and with others — Tracey Emin, Gillian Wearing, Steve McQueen, Rachel Whiteread, Chris Ofili — the Young British Artists, or YBAs, as they were called by their Goldsmiths tutor, Michael Craig-Martin, helped shape the transformation of London through the 1990s.
“These artists embodied optimism, freedom and rebellion”
These artists embodied optimism, freedom and rebellion. The sense of boundless opportunity that the 1990s brought fused art, design, fashion and music into a potent cultural force: an audacious renewal of British spirit. Hierarchies were undone, with high art and pop culture feeding one another. London found its place at the heart of the global creative map.
Emin arrived in London in 1987 to study at the Royal College of Art. A decade later, she opened I Need Art Like I Need God, a game-changing solo exhibition at the South London Gallery in Camberwell, which was pulling the gaze of the Mayfair art world south of the river. Artist-led spaces like Studio Voltaire and Gasworks were founded — and still thrive today.
Many young artists, fashion designers, musicians and activists found warehouse and studio spaces across south and east London. The music and club scene, queer and black, illegal and legal spaces, prospered in and between the rush toward gentrification. And, of course, as the new millennium arrived, an enormous power station on a once desolate stretch of the Thames opened its doors, starting a journey that would see it become the most visited and influential modern art museum in the world.
Tate Modern changed art
The opening of Tate Modern, with its five million visitors in its first year, proved there was a hunger for contemporary art. This chain of events changed London forever, and it also changed the art world, continuing the work of the YBAs in making art less elite and more engaged with the public who were adventurous consumers of artistic innovation.
Our appetite for looking back to this 1990s moment is huge, and not just in the UK. Just two weeks ago, Tokyo’s National Art Center opened YBA & Beyond: British Art in the 90s from the Tate Collection, curated by Gregor Muir, who came from that Goldsmiths generation. In October, ex-Vogue editor Edward Enninful will guest curate The 90s at Tate Britain — a riot of a show that will bring together photography, fashion, art and design, connecting the creativity of this time to generations of Londoners now.
And Emin’s long-awaited A Second Life opened last week at Tate Modern. She may be one of the best-known YBAs but as the title suggests, her show is not simply about looking back — though we will be showing that bed. It looks too at the paintings and sculpture she is making now, her new relationship with her body following major surgery, and her bold determination to live in the present.
Young guns of the future
Emin’s exhibition is the last I will be curating at Tate. My nine-year tenure as Director concludes in April. I have also found myself looking back and reflecting and I’m keen to see the how the 1990s, the decade I became a grown-up, a parent, is assessed through the eyes of my own kids’ generation.
“I am just as interested in the present, and the exciting talent that is emerging on the London art scene now”
But like Emin, I am just as interested in the present, and the exciting talent that is emerging on the London art scene now. Emin’s exhibition, and our 90s show, have been made with some of the brilliant young curators at Tate, like Jess Baxter, who started in our Tate Collective Producer programme for young creatives and is now assistant curator on Emin’s show and Alvin Li, who has moved to London from Hong Kong to work at Tate; or Dominique Heyes-Moore, who grew up south of the river in the 1990s and is now senior curator for contemporary art at Tate Britain.
Younger artists continue to make their mark — Rene Matić, one of last year’s Turner Prize nominees, the youngest artist in Tate’s collection; or Rachel Jones, with her brilliant Dulwich Picture Gallery show last year; or Michaela Yearwood-Dan in east London, opening her studio to the creative influences around her; or the New Contemporaries exhibition on now at the South London Gallery, showing us the importance of young talent for this city.
As I step away from Tate, saluting the artists that have made this city and my museum so dynamic, let us make sure we continue to value and make space for the contribution artists, musicians and designers make to London’s soul. They are the heart of this bold and brilliant place.
Maria Balshaw has been Director of Tate since 2017
