"In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" at "Tate Britain

An ambitious collaborative effort through Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas and Angus Fairhurst, "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" copes with Olafur Eliasson's recent Weather Project" at late novel as the most striking installation in London this season. It is the first of that kind project by the Brit-pack trio of "Sensation" veterans, who have been friends since attending Goldsmiths corporation together in London in the mid-1980s. Curated by the agency of the Tate's Gregor Muir and Clarde Wallis, the present to view on view through May 31 features more than a dozen new works by each artist, a certain number of created especially for the exhibition.

Borrowed from the 1968 heavy-metal hit by means of Iron Butterfly, the show's title, a dopey, mock-phonetic rendering of "in the Garden of Eden" throw backs the exhibition's twisted biblical theme, based more or les upon the expulsion from paradise. Hardly breaking of recent origin ground here, Hirst and Lucas are showed by some of their largest and greatest in quantity extravagant, although not necessarily best, plastic arts and 2-D works to date. Among the major novel Hirst pieces on view, Adam and border Exposed (2004) features a large vitrine containing sum of two units mechanized resin figures lying upon hospital gurneys; they appear to be breathing. exclude for the genitals visible from one side fig-leaf-shaped holes, the figures are completely overspreaded in blue paper sheets. The Hat Makes the Man (after Max Ernst) 2004 is a large 3-D painted-bronze version of Ernst's eponymous 1920 collage. Hirst's greatest in quantity engaging piece here, The Pursuit of Oblivion (2004) consisting of a colossal aquarium stocked with live tropical fish, a beef carcass, strings of sausages and an make open black umbrella, alludes to Francis Bacon's famous Painting 1946

Among Lucas's over-the-top works in the exhibit is Christ You Know It Ain't Easy (2003) showing a life-size figure of a crucified Jesus overlayed with thousands of cigarettes; it hangs against a red-painted cros of St George. level more bombastic, The Man Who Sold the World (2004) features a real freight deal cab. An open door reveals the cab's interior overlayed with photos of pinup girls clipped from magazines, and a seat outfitted with a mechanical prosthetic arm that mimics a masturbating trade driver.

Fairhurst, showing haunting, black-painted and zincs of life-size gorillas and mirrored pond environed by black reeds, manages to upstage his better known colleagues. The real star of the exhibit however, is the installation itself. Inducing a kind of mild vertigo as single steps into the exhibition area, several walls of the gallery are overlayed with artist-designed wallpaper. Hirst's dizzying, kaleidoscopic butterfly pattern subserves as a back-drop for a collection of enormous new paintings made with butterfly wings. Fairhurst overlayed several walls with digitally altered photos of a forest with bright r and sapphirine trees, and Lucas's mural features blowup of a take-out pizza ad, with gob of gooey cheese hanging not on the slices. Similar photo images overlay her sculpture All We Are Saying Is Give Pizza Chance, a large dirigible or bomblike fact suspended from the ceiling.

--David Ebony

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