Not exactly a message of hope

4:40pm Thursday 4th March 2004

Tate Britain: London is a shining and revolting town, isn't it? One minute you're watching Mamma Mia and swigging gin and tonics, the next you're dodging drunks in the rain on St Martins Lane.

You are not the only one who has noticed. Rest assured, art royals Damian Hirst, Sarah Lucas and Angus Fairhurst have not only clocked the faded glamour of the world, they've made an exhibition out of it.

Over the next couple of weeks you'll most likely see an awful lot of guff spread about the pointlessness of the works in their new exhibition, at Tate Britain, "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida"*.

It seems a challenge, though, not to be struck by the scale and maturity of work here by these three artists, who first exhibited together in Docklands in 1988.

The decay implied in the name (see note) pervades the show. As you come in you are confronted by the next step in Hirst's series of animals in tanks: a cow, skinned and torn open, floating above a butcher's toolkit, surrounded by tropical fish. (The Pursuit of Oblivion, 2004)

Planned to shock, surely, and the tabloids will doubtless respond, but it is also elegant, and intricate. A solitary umbrella hanging open in the tank suggests someone got caught in the deluge.

Sarah Lucas brought a dead juggernaut into the building, in bits (The Man Who Sold the World, 2004). Of all the motors in the room it is the only one not running, but is nonetheless an immense presence. Should you go and gaze at the exhibit card alongside it, and wonder where the "bunnies" are, my guess is they're the Page 3 girls pasted inside the cab.

Another Hirst, an enormous pizza is composed entirely of millions and millions of actual dead flies (Black Sun, 2004). Don't go too near - it smells very bad. Still, the overtones of a disgusting, decomposing food industry are clear.

Humour runs throughout the pieces, though the suggestion is that much is wrong with the (once green?) world the artists perceive.

Adam and Eve's dressing tables covered in mud (Adam and Eve Towards the End, Hirst 2004), Christ composed of cigarettes (Christ You Know it Ain't Easy, Sarah Lucas 2003), thousands of pills on slim shelves (Standing Alone on the Precipice and Overlooking the Arctic Wastelands of Pure Terror, Hirst 1999-2000), a freak cow with six legs (In His Infinite Wisdom, Hirst 2003).

These few examples should serve as a taster for the show: it is a smart, uncomfortable take on the decayed Eden, but it isn't a message of hope.

The familiar is used with a terrible power to disturb. Pizza adverts, magazines, cigarettes, tacky vases, bath oil, trinkets and medicines speak about the sour side of everyday life from behind the glass tanks.

How many of us ever expected to see the Marlborough Lights we smoke turned into a sculpture of a huge phallus?

The YBAs may be a bit older now, and more thoughtful, but they remain brash in the face of a world less perfect than they hoped - and they're not backwards in coming forwards about it.

"In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" is an extravagant and sensory assault on much we may take far too far for granted - and jolly good fun. But it is not for the faint-hearted.

* "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" was the title of a song by Iron Butterfly, which gained its name when the singer got too drunk to pronounce "In the Garden of Eden".