Last Summer I sat in the Tate Modern waiting for a friend. The Turbine Hall was in one of its fallow periods, between one Unilever installation and the next. It was early on a weekday morning and more or less deserted. The only other gallery visitors were a mother, with a baby in a pram, and a toddler. The toddler, a blonde and cherubic girl, gleefully rolled a ball up and down the Turbine Hall’s slope. It was the sort of thing to warm the cockles of the heart, a small child enjoying a museum, engaging with the architecture, forming a life-long engagement with art. This touching scene was somewhat spoiled when the mother produced a potty, set it down on the Turbine slope, and stood by with baby-wipes while her daughter relieved herself.
I only rehearse this unsavoury story, because effluent is very much on the cultural agenda – and would you believe it, on the cover of Vogue – this month. Tate Britain is hosting a mid-career retrospective of British artist Chris Ofili. Like his contemporaries Tracey ‘Unmade Bed’ Emin, Damien ‘Shark Tank’ Hirst and Grayson ‘Transvestite Potter’ Perry, Ofili comes with a convenient career-encapsulating sobriquet. Chris ‘Elephant Dung’ Ofili made his name and won his Turner Prize with paintings that recycled the outpourings of the elephant enclosure at Whipsnade Zoo. In his youth he staged ‘Shit Sales’ in Berlin and London, laying out his artistic wares on market stalls.
Before you chorus “modern art – what a load of…” let's speak for the artist’s defence. Ofili is a wonderfully talented and inventive painter with a sensibility to colour unmatched by any living British artist. He is a worthy subject for a retrospective, excrement or no.
The Tate have confronted the dung thing head on. The exhibition opens with a room that showcases Ofili at his most elephantine. His Shithead sculpture of 1993 is the oddest of self-portraits: a spherical dung ball with Rastafarian dreadlocks and a grinning mouth of human teeth. Also on display are the monumental canvases 7 Bitches Tossing their Pussies Before the Divine Dungand The Adoration of Captain Shit. The exhibition, incidentally, does have a parental advisory warning, but there were dozens of children on the Saturday I visited. (Presumably the offspring of the sort of liberal parents who encourage their children go to the loo in museum foyers). Ofili is not at his best in these early works, their titles, and the pornographic imagery which accompany them, are the mark of a puerile, underdeveloped imagination. But they are early examples of Ofili’s breath-taking colour combinations, beautiful, saturated Trinidad and Tobago colours.
The crowning glory of the exhibition, and of Ofili’s career, is the Upper Room, here re-created in its David Adjaye designed chapel. When it was first exhibited at Tate Britain in 2005, what should have been a triumph was undermined by an insider trading scandal. The Tate, with Ofili on its board of trustees, was heavily criticised for buying the works. It was a shame. Ofili-gate overshadowed what was the single most beautiful art work of the last ten years. The thirteen paintings, a Jungle Book recreation of the Last Supper, are iridescent jewels, magnificently rich in both colour and texture.
Ofili goes off the boil a bit after the rapture of the Upper Room. His move to Trinidad has been accompanied by a Blue Period. It’s a bit gloomy. Along with colour, he has abandoned his elephant dung. Trinidad is a long way from Whipsnade.
Maybe Ofili needs the dung. It’s his talisman and its absence from the later galleries, with their drowsy, melancholy, and monochrome canvases, is the elephant in the room.
This article first appeared at www.varsity.co.uk
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