DAMIEN HIRST at the TATE MODERN, APRIL 2012
DAMIEN HIRST at the TATE MODERN, APRIL 2012
In some ways amazing, awe-inspring and sometimes just evoking disgust (but evoking something), Damien Hirst's (1965 - ) retrospective at the Tate Modern is designed to coincide with Olympic year, perhaps also to summarise where Britart is now at. There's a glass case filled with flies feeding off a cow's head which are born inside maggots and go on to die against an insectocutor, there's a room full of live gigantic butterflies (the butterflies, from Africa and Latin America, only live for three weeks, after that they are all replaced. Some feed on fruit and some on pollen depending on whether they are African or Latin American.), there's the shark in formaldehyde (The Physical Impossibility of Death in the mind of someone Living) and much else. If you haven't thrown up by the time you've left you are probably desensitised. There's also an exhibit called The Black Sun made up of one million or so dead flies which refers to a symbol found in Tibetan Buddhism which was also thought to exist and sought by Heinrich Himmler's SS henchmen whose designation was to seek out occult artifacts like the Black Sun or the Spear of Destiny and bring them to Germany.
Hirst is therefore prepared to dabble in the Occult but he doesn't often bring his symbols to fruition. Few of the exhibits are about love though, but most reflect Hirst's anxious preoccupation with Christianity, it's most fundamental, ambivalent concepts, death and resurrection. Hirst employs an aesthetic of disgust, eschewing traditional means and mediums, embracing large-scale concepts that illustrate a very active mind that is also unafraid to use materials, such as dead flies, that defy the conventional. Yet the work eventually coheres and makes sense in a way that jars and shocks and can be integrated back into a conventional understanding of art. Hirst never has to prove his art skills though and if you look for them here you won't find any. Most of the exhibits can be found anyway in some format or formula in Billingsgate Market (or similar markets) on a Monday morning.
The point is that Hirst has defied conventionality, traditional mediums and means, has created something refreshing and clearly not at all academic which has also been brought eventually to the Tate Modern but its not art because that's how his shock, schlock slogan runs. If Hirst is ever publically criticised for his concept artworks he calls the next work 'It's not art...'. Is this a stroke of brilliance or some form of brash self-publicising? Hirst has created something shocking but everything is palpably temporary just as the butterflies die after three weeks, the paint chips and the gilt peels away revealing....nothing. When Picasso created artworks they shocked but they were also made to last. Indeed in two hundred years time it should be possible for people to look at great works by Picasso like Guernica but it will only be possible to re-create Hirst's work in accordance with his blueprints. In other works they won't exist, nor were they meant to. They were designed for the rubbish bin before they were even conceived. The only reason they exist is because of the tantalising (yet vapid basis) they have in Christianity or mysticism which provides an aura of secular mysticism while also confirming their entirely contingent, temporary basis which the organic materials already point to.
Which is also Hirst's point, of course, indeed he's more socially conservative than his critics are. At least they insist on 'good' art. In other words, the only thing that separates Hirst from x number of eccentrics, loony artists, dangerous nutters and cranks is the size of his bank account.
Hirst's work retrospectively engages with a lost world of vast Modernist projects. This explains the seeming revolutionary content yet supremely conservative context of the Tate Modern and the whole gang of culture critics, curators, chattering classes, would be avante garde sculptors who all descended on the venue in order to view the bulk of fragments that Hirst has managed to collect to shore up against his ruins. Instead Hirst's new concept of the artist is like the director of a film bringing together a variety of talents to make large scale effects that are simple and complex simultaneously yet they don't ultimately matter. 'Damien Hirst' is therefore only a cipher for this collective. Its success is a purely financial one. Hirst's E grade in A Level Art already demonstrated his total disinterest in anything remotely academic. But it also underscores the temporary nature of Hirst and his art. Here today, gone tomorrow. This is not the art we deserve, as The Guardian advises: it's not art and we don't need it which could be the title of Hirst's next ephmeral success.
Paul Murphy, The Tate Modern, April 2012
In some ways amazing, awe-inspring and sometimes just evoking disgust (but evoking something), Damien Hirst's (1965 - ) retrospective at the Tate Modern is designed to coincide with Olympic year, perhaps also to summarise where Britart is now at. There's a glass case filled with flies feeding off a cow's head which are born inside maggots and go on to die against an insectocutor, there's a room full of live gigantic butterflies (the butterflies, from Africa and Latin America, only live for three weeks, after that they are all replaced. Some feed on fruit and some on pollen depending on whether they are African or Latin American.), there's the shark in formaldehyde (The Physical Impossibility of Death in the mind of someone Living) and much else. If you haven't thrown up by the time you've left you are probably desensitised. There's also an exhibit called The Black Sun made up of one million or so dead flies which refers to a symbol found in Tibetan Buddhism which was also thought to exist and sought by Heinrich Himmler's SS henchmen whose designation was to seek out occult artifacts like the Black Sun or the Spear of Destiny and bring them to Germany.
Hirst is therefore prepared to dabble in the Occult but he doesn't often bring his symbols to fruition. Few of the exhibits are about love though, but most reflect Hirst's anxious preoccupation with Christianity, it's most fundamental, ambivalent concepts, death and resurrection. Hirst employs an aesthetic of disgust, eschewing traditional means and mediums, embracing large-scale concepts that illustrate a very active mind that is also unafraid to use materials, such as dead flies, that defy the conventional. Yet the work eventually coheres and makes sense in a way that jars and shocks and can be integrated back into a conventional understanding of art. Hirst never has to prove his art skills though and if you look for them here you won't find any. Most of the exhibits can be found anyway in some format or formula in Billingsgate Market (or similar markets) on a Monday morning.
The point is that Hirst has defied conventionality, traditional mediums and means, has created something refreshing and clearly not at all academic which has also been brought eventually to the Tate Modern but its not art because that's how his shock, schlock slogan runs. If Hirst is ever publically criticised for his concept artworks he calls the next work 'It's not art...'. Is this a stroke of brilliance or some form of brash self-publicising? Hirst has created something shocking but everything is palpably temporary just as the butterflies die after three weeks, the paint chips and the gilt peels away revealing....nothing. When Picasso created artworks they shocked but they were also made to last. Indeed in two hundred years time it should be possible for people to look at great works by Picasso like Guernica but it will only be possible to re-create Hirst's work in accordance with his blueprints. In other works they won't exist, nor were they meant to. They were designed for the rubbish bin before they were even conceived. The only reason they exist is because of the tantalising (yet vapid basis) they have in Christianity or mysticism which provides an aura of secular mysticism while also confirming their entirely contingent, temporary basis which the organic materials already point to.
Which is also Hirst's point, of course, indeed he's more socially conservative than his critics are. At least they insist on 'good' art. In other words, the only thing that separates Hirst from x number of eccentrics, loony artists, dangerous nutters and cranks is the size of his bank account.
Hirst's work retrospectively engages with a lost world of vast Modernist projects. This explains the seeming revolutionary content yet supremely conservative context of the Tate Modern and the whole gang of culture critics, curators, chattering classes, would be avante garde sculptors who all descended on the venue in order to view the bulk of fragments that Hirst has managed to collect to shore up against his ruins. Instead Hirst's new concept of the artist is like the director of a film bringing together a variety of talents to make large scale effects that are simple and complex simultaneously yet they don't ultimately matter. 'Damien Hirst' is therefore only a cipher for this collective. Its success is a purely financial one. Hirst's E grade in A Level Art already demonstrated his total disinterest in anything remotely academic. But it also underscores the temporary nature of Hirst and his art. Here today, gone tomorrow. This is not the art we deserve, as The Guardian advises: it's not art and we don't need it which could be the title of Hirst's next ephmeral success.
Paul Murphy, The Tate Modern, April 2012
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