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On weekends at the Tate Gallery, long queues of pretty young, pretty cool people would form before two tall glass cases arranged to make a narrow corridor. Each case contained one half of a cow which had been split lengthways from nose to tail, and the queue was for the privilege of walking between them to closely examine the innards. This, and a calf similarly treated, which formed the work Mother and Child, Divided, were Damien Hirst's contribution to the 1995 Turner Prize exhibition-as it had been to the Venice Biennale two years earlier. If a point of the work was to make people behave in this way, then it would have been a good joke; but there are reasons to think that it was rather more earnest than this.1
The Turner Prize is a hype-generating exercise for the Tate and the contemporary art world, an annual award to British artists under the age of fifty for particular exhibitions or other contributions to the art scene; unlike the Booker, it is more the endorsement of a reputation than an individual work, so its temporal aspect is something of a fiction. Hirst was awarded the Prize, not for the works displayed, but for various exhibitions in the us and Germany, and for his curatorship of the Serpentine Gallery exhibition, Some Went Mad, Some Ran Away... Hirst and the Prize were made for each other, for both are devoted above all to publicity. Yet, when he was nominated in 1992, Hirst failed to win; in the interim, something significant. may have shifted on the British art scene.
Bringing corpses into the gallery has made Hirst famous: his most wellknown work is simply the body of a shark displayed in a large tank of formaldehyde, coupled with the title, The Physical Impossihility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living — and various ruminants have received similar treatment. Grandiose claims are made about this work, both by Hirst himself, who never ceases talking about life and death, and by its promoters. For Virginia Button, one of the Tate's curators, 'brutally honest and Confrontational, he draws attention to the paranoiac denial of death that permeates our culture', and the Prize jury, too, praised the 'thoughtfulness of his approach' and noted that his work continued the long tradition of art which 'deals with the issues of life and death'.2 But aside from these expected puffs, and unusually for a contemporary artist, Hirst has received a great deal of attention from the mass media-and not for the usual reason, that public money has been 'wasted' on his work. Hirst is as much or more known for his lifestyle as for his art, and he takes care to ensure that the two are thoroughly entangled. In a feature in the Tate Magazine a full page illustration was devoted, not to any work of art, but to an iconic image of his shaven head sucking on a fag.3
Yet the work is also spectacular and attention-seeking. In one of Hirst's most striking pieces, canvases were hung with chrysalises in a closed room; the butterflies, hatched, fed off sugared water, flew, bred and died-some squashed by art lovers. In a separate room, their bodies were painted into the bright colours of other canvases. The installation was called In and Out of Love (1991) and it was symptomatic of many of the recent developments on the British art scene. Non-art objects, or beings, are brought into contact with traditional fine-art materials and modes of display-the gallery and, more important, the vernissage. Titles are flip, often borrowed from films or songs. Such works face Janus-like in two directions at once, but each face looks out upon a different world. They are both easily affecting and coolly ironic, approaching the viewer with a knowing grin, and commenting simultaneously on the world from which their objects are taken and the art world's deadly, money-spinning appropriation of these objects.
Hirst is only the most celebrated member of a new wave in British art which has succeeded in gaining international attention and widening the audience for contemporary art. They were formed as the once confident and affluent private art market transformed itself following the recession from 1989 onwards. Galleries closed or scaled down their activities, while some began to turn away from the work of highly expensive international stars to young-and much cheaper-home-grown talent. Artists often found themselves with large stocks of unsaleable objects and nowhere to show them: many ceased making permanent fine-art objects-there was a revival of performance work and of transient installations-and others made less conventional ones. Artists also became their own curators, making shows for themselves and their acquaintances in the numerous industrial spaces emptied out by the recession. 4 But, most of all, there was a turning away from the inward-looking concerns of the art world to new subjects, especially to those which might appeal to the mass media. This tendency was no avant garde, for it had no coherent programme, and no mission except success. It was a rapidly changing scene where works and reputations were driven by fashion and publicity from venue to venue, courting the growing museum- and gallery-going audience. If Hirst's shark is a symbol of the phenomenon, it is because the creature can never be still-it must keep the water flowing over its gills-or die: as the artist himself put it, 'not moving forwards...just moving'.5
Bad Art
This courting of controversy and publicity was cloaked with an allknowing irony. The artists generally had good formal education, being put through sophisticated fine-art courses which informed them about 'Theory' and the history of the avant garde. They also learned of the debilitating situation of high art in this country, besieged by philistinism and constantly having to defend its most fundamental tenets-not that any of this had mattered when it was a world unto itself awash with money. A facile postmodernism was the foundation of this art, one which took no principle seriously, which did not separate high from mass culture and which, given this relativism, accepted the system just as it was, and sought only to exploit the chances that change opened up. This new art would be quite as dreadful as the philistines said it was, obscene, trivial, soiled with bodily fluids, and exhibiting a fuck-you attitude, but this time deliberately so-it would use their energy and their power in the mass media against them.
But the new British art was not generally seen like this, certainly not at first-indeed, if it was to be effective, it could not be. So the defenders of traditional art played their role, fulminating against this shocking, publicly supported non-art. The most infamous of these is Brian Sewell, the critic of the Evening Standard who enlivens the homeward journey of London's commuters with tales of those crazy art-world folks. His anthology of reviews, An Alphabet of Villains, bears a mock-up of Sewell's severed bust immersed in a Hirst-style tank. At the other extreme, the defenders of radical contemporary art were earnest in the new wave's support. Their claims were often quite as ridiculous as those of the conservatives. Of their voluminous writing, we may take a few symptomatic examples: Andrew Graham-Dixon asked of the new art, 'What if-a radical suggestion, in its own way-the point of making art is, simply, to address themes and preoccupations that can be addressed in no other way? ... what this new English art speaks of is a faith, of belief in the continuing fruitfulness of certain strands of modern art. That, and a certain tolerance of spirit: a willingness to recognize that artists should be free to choose their own languages, in accordance with their own expressive needs, whatever the fashion of the time.'6 To look at the work like this is to take it at face value-and there is a certain point to doing so. It is to look in from the outside, as someone new to high art, or not much immersed in the minutiae of the art world, and to see a forthright art which speak of death or sex or drugs or junk culture. Such work is certainly liberating for the new audience to contemporary art-finally here is an art which speaks to everyday concerns in recognizable voices. But when such a statement comes from a critic thoroughly immersed in this world, familiar with the in-fighting, the constant paranoia about putting a foot wrong, the parade of fashion victims, it is a perfect exemplar of the mirror of ideology.
Likewise, Stuart Morgan, one of the most influential affirmative critics in the country who also uses an all-embracing irony in his defence, in reviewing the work of various artists who use organic matter-'Isn't every remnant of life potentially talismanic?', he asks, quaintly- promises us nothing less than an art which will become an alternative to religion, where 'the sacred and the profane, pollution and the holy, may coincide from time to time, and the result may be an ability to change our lives.' 7 If some of these defenders are as shrill and defensive as ever, this suggests that what the new scene has wrought is not a permanent change in the structure of the art world but a fragile shift in fashion.
Thinking About Mortality
Nevertheless, the combination of these critical views-both praising and earnest, populist and damning-form a very effective promotional machine: for it to function, the art must at least pretend to make grand statements, and it must actually be entertaining and engage with issues which concern people. Given this, Hirst is a most convenient figure. Just as the best Mills and Boon writers are not cynical money-spinners but true romantics, Hirst in a naive, sincere way does appear to be caught up with the eternal themes of the human condition. In Hirst's installations, says Iwona Blazwick: 'he attempts to encapsulate the dialectical oppositions and tensions of social relations; of mind and body; of reproductive cycles and death throes; of being in and out of love.'8 Another Hirst installation involving insects was called A Thousand Years (1990): within its glass frame, flies breed and feed; as they fly between its two sections they may enjoy the rotting cow's head, or be fried by the fly-zapper. Jerry Saltz, writing last year, noted that the installation was still running and that sixty generations of flies had lived and died within it. This, he says, makes you ponder mortality: Hirst 'gets you to think about the fact that of the five billion or so people now on earth, all will be gone within, say, 100 years. That's a big thought to have in front of a piece of sculpture.' 9 Mortality is a big subject, but to say simply that a work of art gets you to think about it is a small claim. As the American comedian Bill Hicks commented about the conservatives' definition of pornography-material which causes sexual thought-almost anything, riding on public transport was one of his examples, could cause that.
Hirst is presented, and presents himself, as 'one of life's innocents', capable of reintroducing into art 'emotions long banished as being in some way embarrassing; curiosity and awe' so that 'the gallery is restored to one of its least remembered functions-a focus for 'amazement.' 10 Hirst's work does have a highly literal side: the works named after arms (Heckler and Cosh); the series of bull's heads, each bearing the name of one of Christ's disciples and all placed in glass cases with white frames except for that of Judas, who is framed in black; or the dot paintings named after drugs-rectangular ones after medications while all those named after controlled substances have irregularly shaped frames-like wild, man. But of course, these are all ironic statements.
Sarah Kent, the critic of Time Out and another of the proselytizers, works hard to fit a mythology into place: the sources of Hirst's art are to be found in his childhood memories, and the artist still looks with a childlike, wondering gaze upon the absurd adult world. 11 Hirst, then, despite his Goldsmiths training, serves as the movement's Douanier Rousseau. In line with this, he is marketed not only as a mental innocent, but as a class primitive, someone who only got an e in a-level art, and who 'lives on a council estate in Brixton, built in the shape of a vast wall punctuated by windows-a shit-coloured cell block where lifts are broken, landings are strewn with rubble and plants are dead.' 12 So in admiring Hirst's work in the gallery, art lovers can slum it a little, getting a direct and authentic experience of what 'life' is really like-without having to risk setting foot in some rubble-strewn block.
Frankenstein Meets Bacon
To get away from such nonsense about life and death, and from Hirst's constructed image, to the authentic sources of the art is no simple matter. Nevertheless, the critics sometimes hit on clues. Sewell recounted a comment made by Hirst about Jeffrey Dahmer, whose biography was apparently long a bedside companion for the artist: 'he has a kind of terrible curiosity to find how living things work, by taking them to pieces'; 13 and. Richard Shone, writing about the exhibition Hirst curated at the Serpentine Gallery, says that 'each time he showed a new work it was as if some art-world Jack the Ripper had perpetrated one more outrageous crime. The public's reaction was the same admixture of horror and frank admiration that it reserves for the acts of the most elusive criminal.' 14 But, it seems to me, the subject is never actual serial-killing-or actual anything-but its representation in mass culture. Hirst's material and themes-drugs, vitrines, surgical instruments, containers for confinement or torture, dismemberment, experiments with insects-is the stuff not of true crime but of horror movies. Here high art meets a deranged and fictional science. If his minimalist frames refer to Francis Bacon, the flies in A Thousand Years are from Frankenstein, the butchered animals and pickled internal organs from a hundred Hammer movies. The attraction was also there in Hirst's choice of Hiroshi Sugimoto's photographs of waxwork horror ensembles for the Serpentine exhibition. Imagine the artist's studio with its chemical apparatus, its specimens and dissection equipment, and Hirst, one of the 'rummagers in the tossed away envelope of the soul, up to their elbows in it' 15 -it's all so Peter Cushing. And what else could a boy do, growing up in the sixties and seventies, who happened to be called Damien?
Especially when Hirst's work is seen as a whole-from severed heads to dot paintings, from fly-zappers to the strict administration of the medicine cabinet-the combination of Hammer-style shlock and minimalist rigour is revealed as systematic and calculated. The innovation was to bring the two together, to see that the vitrine is used to display corpses as well as high-art valuables, to take the minimalist comments on bureaucracy and administered life literally, producing a rigor mortis which reflected, albeit faintly, on life and the action of art on its objects.
Beyond the shlock, however, there is a vacuousness which is the work's defining characteristic; Hirst recognizes it himself by stressing the viewer's readings, in seeking only to present, never to comment. 16 Hirst, though he worries about adding to the number of objects in the world, says of his work: 'You make a sculpture [note the use of that old word] and it's exciting, and it's in a show, and you look at it, and you go "wow".' 17 And this is just the effect that so much contemporary art relies upon: 'wow' is just what you say when you see a giant shark suspended in a tank, or six tons of iron hanging from the ceiling or a bust made from an artist's frozen blood. Beyond this amazement, though, the works often seem empty. Hirst plays on this, of course, telling interviewers that he wants to call some piece, 'I sometimes feel I have nothing to say, I often want to communicate this.'18 The emptiness is to do with the work's collage basis in which ready-made elements are simply assembled. The (often borrowed) titles frustrate rather than encourage particular readings, and again Hirst owns up: 'I really like these long, clumsy titles which try to explain something but end up making matters worse, leaving huge holes for interpretation.' 19 Now if Hirst always seems to have got there first in making a criticism of his work, this is not only an ironic defence, but a claim to originality. Yet since these works are merely assemblages of objects and titles, it is easy, once you get the basic idea, to conceptually generate your own:
Four plucked vultures in formaldehyde, placed separately in small glass tanks. They are suspended so that they appear to be in flight. The tanks are arranged on the gallery wall in a diagonal formation. The title: Fair Game.
A series of works in which very thinly cut slices of calf's brain are wedged between pieces of glass, like specimens for a microscope. The title: Legless, or, Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy.
A large cabinet with shelves on which stand jars of brightly coloured sweets- gob-stoppers, smarties and the like. The title: Knows Candy.
Hirst's materials are only incidentally objects in the world, for they live the greater part of their lives in the media. Does the shark really get us to think about mortality-who's really afraid of sharks rather than cancer or being run over?-or does it simply remind us of Jaws? Hirst's impossible desires-to live forever-are caused, he thinks by media images: 'magazines, tv, advertising, shop windows, beautiful people, clothes. Images that can live forever and we are constantly being convinced that they are real.' 20 And they are entirely average.
Dead Head
The track from the factory buildings of Freeze and Modern Medicine, through the ica and the Saatchi Galleries to the final accolade of the Tate has been made. It is hard to see where Hirst goes from here-though he has been recently making films-since work which once seemed radical is now at one with the shark's belly of the market. It may be that the Turner Prize is less the apotheosis than the headstone of Hirst's art. His grand statements already look old-fashioned alongside the self-consciously crude constructions of, say, Sarah Lucas, Gillian Wearing or Tracey Emin, or the cool ephemera of the collective Bank. This is the ground for the endorsement of the Tate: as the fashion wheel of the art world turns faster and faster, catching up with tabloid time, Hirst takes on the guise of an old master.
In all this, the art market has not gone away. Indeed the patronage of Maurice Saatchi did a great deal to make Hirst's name in the first place. Hirst made a 'sculpture' called Away from the Flock, a lamb held in leaping position within the usual vitrine, which I saw at the Serpentine Gallery a day or so before a disgruntled artist, in a witty act of vandalism, poured black ink into the container. Hirst was far from amused at this addition to his handiwork. Significantly, the owners felt that, rather than simply obtain another dead lamb, they had to spend a large sum of money to restore that particular one-the original art object. This strongly suggests that the relation of the art market to its unique objects has not been undermined by such work-as indeed it had not been by many more radical movements before it.
There is much that is positive about the new art, particularly its abandonment of intellectual elitism' and its attempt to speak in many diverse voices directly to people's experience. Those that have followed Hirst into galleries, onto tv screens and the pages of newspapers have often had far more to say. Yet there is still a sharply drawn barrier between the knowing insiders and the mass of art enthusiasts who are left to the mercies of the newspaper critics; there is little evidence that the views of this larger group are ever taken very seriously by the art world which relies upon them. Furthermore, the current scene is fragile, it could so easily be ruined by something as trivial as a slight influx of cash, bringing with it those structures of distinction-of snobbery and elitism-that have sustained it in the past. Since it only has access to its wider public through the often trivializing forms of the mass media, there is the complementary risk that the scene will be' subsumed by them, so that it can no longer say anything not heard everywhere else. To defend against either of these fates, art needs more than universal irony and a yuppie bohemian attitude -it has to decide that there are certain things it must take seriously. In 1991 Hirst posed for a photograph in a morgue with the severed head of a dead man.
In the picture, Hirst is grinning broadly, leaning forwards to put his head next to the head propped up on the slab, its eyes screwed shut, its face creased in an expression some find comic. When the photograph was shown on television, though, the relatives of the dead man recognized him. 'Sometimes you're negative, sometimes you're positive', Hirst has said, 'If you see people as flies, you can see them as butterflies, small and disgusting or fragile and beautiful. Something that intrigues me in all the work is the action of the world on things.' 21 And something he always disavows is the action of his work on the world.
1 I have benefited from conversations with many people about Hirst and the British art scene. In particular, I would like to thank David Crawforth, Robert Garnett, Tony Halliday and Naomi Siderfin.
2 Virginia Button, text in the Tate Gallery booklet, The Turner Prize 1995, n.p.; Tate Gallery press release, ' Damien Hirst Wins the Turner Prize', 28 November 1995.
3 Sarah Greenberg, "Art Gets in Your Face", Tate Magazine, no. 2, Spring 1994.
4 Hirst was prominent in organizing some of the first of these exhibitions, including Freeze in 1988 and Modern Medicine in 1990.
5 Cited in Iwona Blazwick, foreword to Institute of Contemporary Arts/ Jay Jopling, Damien Hirst, London 1991 , n.p.
6 Andrew Graham-Dixon, introduction to Serpentine Gallery, Broken English, London 1991 , n.p.
7 Stuart Morgan, "Semen's Mission", Art Monthly, no. 153, February 1992 , p. 7.
8 Iwona Blazwick, foreword to Damien Hirst.
9 Jerry Saltz, "More Life:"The Work of Damien Hirst, Art in America, vol. 83, no. 6 (1995), p. 84.
10 Charles Hall, "A Sign of Life", in Institute of Contemporary Arts, Damien Hirst.
11 Sarah Kent, entry on Hirst in Shark Infested Waters.The Saatchi Collection of British Art in the 90s, London 1994 , pp. 35-6.
12 Ibid., p. 36.
13 Brian Sewell, An Alphabet of Villains, London 1995 , p. 104.
14 Richard Shone, essay in Serpentine Gallery, Some Went Mad, Some Ran Away..., London 1994 , p. 10.
15 Gordon Burn, essay in Jablonka Galerie, Damien Hirst, Cologne 1994 , n.p.
16 Hirst: 'I try to say and deny many things to imply meaning, so that when you work out a reading you implicate yourself ... I like all the readings.' Text by Hirst presented in the form of an interview with Sophie Calle, in Institute of Contemporary Arts, Damien Hirst.
17 Andrew Wilson, interview with Hirst in "Art Gets in Your Face", Tate Magazine, p. 54.
18 Institute of Contemporary Arts, Damien Hirst, n.p.
19 Serpentine Gallery, Broken English, London 1991 , n.p.
20 Text by Hirst, in Institute of Contemporary Arts, Damien Hirst, London 1991 , n.p.
21 Interview with Stuart Morgan, cited in Adrian Searle, 'Love in a Cold Climate', Artscribe, no. 88, September 1991 , p. 84.
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