How the Young British Artists changed the direction of art from an abandoned building in Surrey Docks

They were controversial, shocking and rebellious. In 1988, a group of 16 ambitious Goldsmiths students led by Damien Hirst took over an abandoned building in Surrey Docks and staged an exhibition titled Freeze , writes Emily Buckley Bunn. ..

Against the backdrop of Southwark’s industrial decline, and with little to lose, these young artists took the art world by its horns and created a new space for their work to be showcased.

A major art movement that came to be known as the Young British Artists (YBAs) was born from the Freeze exhibition, including the likes of Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst Mat Collishaw and Sarah Lucas.

Through their shocking pieces, they got everyone talking, frequently made the tabloids and carved out a new role for art in British society.

As an area with several major art schools and multiple galleries, Southwark possesses a rich artistic history and remains home to many creative communities.

Collishaw, who moved to South London from Nottinghamshire to study Fine Art at Goldsmiths in the late 80s and spent much of his adult life living in Southwark, tells us that being an art student in the late 80s was very different to how it is now.

"The public didn't really have any idea of what fine art was and nor did I,” he explains.

This was before large contemporary public art spaces like the Tate Modern existed – the art world at the time largely revolved around traditional elite galleries in the West End.

“When we started there were only a handful of contemporary art galleries in the country. Nobody really talked about contemporary art other than a very small bubble of people,” he says.

At the time, the prospect of being able to make a living as an artist seemed unlikely.

“I think there was a general perception that if you did fine art, you'd work away for 30 years in an attic and then if you were lucky, maybe you might sell one or two paintings,” he adds.

“There was no real map to going from being in art school as a student to being an artist in the real world - it was a mystery.”

Southwark in the 80s was in economic decline, badly affected by the Thatcher years. The north of the borough was characterised by empty buildings and derelict ex-industrial spaces, compounded by the 1971 closure and subsequent filling in of Grand Surrey Canal.

Having previously approached art mainly through drawing trees, Collishaw found the cityscape had a strong impact on his work.

“South London has always felt very real to me,” he continues. “There are these contrasts that are going on and for me that makes it a very vibrant and inspiring area.”

He elaborates: “I think I realised that what I was doing wasn’t really in touch with what was going on in the world.

“Being part of London, it’s like you’re in this huge machine, it’s this very metropolitan hub where people are kind of making the modern world happen.

“I think it presses itself on you that you should be responding in kind and making something that reflects this modern kind of impersonal brutal technological city that we’re living in.”

Collishaw and his contemporaries were encouraged by tutors Michael Craig Martin and Richard Wentworth to adopt a more contemporary and conceptual approach to artmaking.

He began recycling cultural materials for his work and it became more ideas driven, challenging and shocking. He used sampled images, magazines, cameras, and integrated technology in an attempt to “introduce something of the modern world.”

With little money to spare, this do-it-yourself approach applied not only to their art making, but also to their surroundings. Many squatted in empty residential buildings, and they put on their own parties in abandoned warehouses.

There was the sense that they had to create their own opportunities and make a space for themselves using the resources available.

The ex-industrial landscape of Southwark presented a perfect opportunity to use these huge gallery-sized empty spaces to present their artwork to the public.

Collishaw tells us that Freeze was first suggested by Damien Hirst after a minor student exhibition in a lobby at the University of London when he realised “maybe we could do it and we could do it better, more professionally, more like the West End Galleries were doing at the time.”

The group of Goldsmiths students were keen to put their work out and get it seen by the public. The work was meant to provoke a reaction, which meant that it could only really be complete when an audience was able to see it and, more importantly, see it in person.

“It makes no sense making conceptual work and just having it in a room and nobody is seeing it - it’s got to be out there,” he says.

Hirst had realised there was a lot more to being an artist than just making art – it was also about promotion.

Hirst was working as an assistant at the Anthony D’Offay gallery in the West End, one of the best contemporary art galleries at the time, which essential for giving him an insight into how exhibitions were put on as well as a hefty list of contacts.

The young artists wanted to do everything they could to make it seem like Freeze was not a student exhibition. The goal was to imitate the bare white cube-style contemporary galleries owned by Charles Saatchi. Hirst would invite gallery owners and collectors, professionally print the exhibition catalogues, and even specially select the wine.

“We started putting together a list of artists and then went about the business of finding a building,” Collishaw says.

They chose an old Port Authority office building in Surrey Docks which was certainly an unusual location to stage an art exhibition.

“It was a bit of a dump,” Collishaw remembers. “It had been abandoned for quite a while - it had a lot of obstacles that had to be surmounted.”

The group of artists spent a month undertaking the mighty task of getting the building up to a professional standard with the help of a small amount of funding Hirst had secured.

They removed the carpet, cut out lighting, angle grinded the radiators off the wall, repainted everything and hung the artworks.

By the time the exhibition opened, Collishaw had been up for several days straight, working on it: “The whole of the opening was just a blur because I’d been up for a couple of days, and I got wiped out.”

Reaching an agreement on the title of the exhibition was “very, very tricky” Collishaw says, “titles are a nightmare”

They ultimately settled on 'Freeze', after being inspired by – bizarrely - a lettuce.

“We were sitting around having lunch one day together and there was a lettuce on the table which said ‘freeze’ on the lettuce which is a label, and someone suggested that, and nobody really had any complaints about that one.

“It kind of said something quite dynamic but didn't really say anything at all, you know what I mean? It was still open to interpretation.”

The list of artists exhibiting included Sarah Lucas, Gary Hume, Angus Fairhurst, Ian Davenport, Angela Bulloch, Richard Patterson, Fiona Rae and Abigail Lane, many of whom Collishaw remains close with today.

The theme that ran through the selected work was “something to do with a kind of studied blankness,” Collishaw adds. “The work almost looked kind of dumb, but it was knowingly done.”

Collishaw’s Bullet hole is often used as the poster image for the Freeze exhibition. Gory, horrific, and weirdly abstract, it depicts up-close the immediate aftermath of a head wounded by an ice pick taken from a book from the Foyles medical department.

Other works included Hirst’s famous dot paintings which were painted directly onto the walls of the building and Gary Hume painted life-size hospital doors taken from Bartholomew’s Hospital using household gloss paint.

It was heavily ideas-driven and involved a reinterpretation of the conceptual and minimal art from the previous two decades.

Although the footfall for the exhibition was not very high, it did catch the attention of high-profile figures in the art world.

Hirst, through contacts at the Anthony D’Offay gallery, had invited art dealers and collectors to see the show. The story goes that Hirst even personally chauffeured Norman Rosenthal, who was the head of the Royal Academy, to the show.

Intrigued by its unusual nature, Charles Saatchi, also went to see the exhibition, looking for new works to add to his collection, he purchased Gary Hume’s hospital doors straight away, and was to later play an instrumental role in catapulting the YBAs to fame.

Although the show was commended by the Guardian as a success, the reviews weren’t all good. Collishaw tells us that there were a lot of people studying at Goldsmiths who didn’t like it at all.

“They were quite vocal about that, and they organised little kind of seminars to talk about how bad it was, and they made some kind of little fanzine type magazine saying how bad it was,” he says.

“Criticism seemed to be that the exhibition to them appeared to be like a commercial venture because it was artworks that you could hang on the wall and then people could potentially buy them.”

Michael Craig-Martin, who was a tutor at the time dispelled rumours of commercialism. He told the Guardian in 2008: “People have said that Freeze was about making money but it wasn't. It was about being young, about being excited about what they were doing, and getting people to see their work."

The Freeze exhibition catalogue (creative commons)

Freeze inspired a wave of other exhibitions in abandoned and unused spaces, including 1990 Modern Medicine at the Peak Frean Biscuit Factory, and the 1990 East Country Yard Show’, held an abandoned warehouse in Surrey Docks. Sarah Lucas and Tracey Emin also began The Shop in an empty shop at the top of Brick Lane.

“The whole kind of London scene started to evolve as like this organic entity where there'd be little openings going on every day or so and you go down there and meet all these other people and then you start to meet people like Gavin Turk and Keith Coventry, and Tracey Emin,” Collishaw says.

“And the scene started to become a lot bigger, but there was lot of DIY people just making their own little exhibitions and setting up their own little galleries.”

Looking back on Freeze , Collishaw said that it showed the power to create something significant out of nothing: “Nobody asked for it, nobody really wanted it, and I think that's an important lesson that just because nobody's giving you some kind of invitation to do something doesn't mean you shouldn't just get on with it and make it happen.”

By the end of the 20 th Century, the YBAs had made a significant contribution to the role of art in British society. In 1997, Charles Saatchi put on the Sensation exhibition at the Royal Academy which catapulted the group to fame.

Although they attracted a lot of controversy over the years, through their shocking works such as Tracey Emin’s bed and Hirst’s cow, which many people doubted were art, the YBAs certainly bought art into public consciousness.

“There was an attempt to make artworks that were accessible. You're kind of connecting on some level with a broader audience so that kind of broadening out of what art can be like kind of making work that embraces popular culture,” Collishaw concludes.

“You didn't need to read books to understand what they had like a kind of an immediate impact to them. And I think that's something that's probably less important now but at the time I think it was quite significant and helped a lot in terms of making a noise.”

If you would like to see what the young art students of today are making, you can visit the Goldsmiths undergraduate exhibition between 19 – 23 June, and the Camberwell undergraduate art show 14 - 20 June.