Insomnia, 2008
October 2009 saw full-time conceptual artist and part-time god Damien Hirst tumbling down the art power list. From No.1 in 2008 to No.16, to be precise! Is Hirst’s magic wearing off, or those stinky rich supporters of his have gone bankrupt? SUPERSWEET’s Poonperm Paitayawat is tracing the Damien Hirst trail to find out.
Starting Point: The Wallace Collection
On Wednesday 14th October 2009, Hirst’s new, twenty-or-so paintings were unveiled at the Wallace Collection to the public. Spreading across two subdued galleries on the first floor, Hirst’s then-latest exhibition titled No Love Lost with its focus on death was immediately panned by critics. The Independent says “They are not worth looking at;” The Telegraph cherishes Hirst “as a brain not as a painter,” whilst The Guardian insists, “The Wallace Collection is playing host to a jumped-up pretender.” So, one simple question, what’s in them that seems to put all the critics off?
Lemons (you’ve heard it right) ashtrays, cigarettes, and lighters (no, you’re not hallucinating) lots of skulls and half skulls, shark jaws, iguanas and an obscure female form Hirst calls “Medusa” - now you realise why the critics are being so harsh? Everything comes in somber shades of black and blue, apart from the lemon and the colourful stripe on the iguana’s tail. Hirst includes some cobweb-like slashing lines and incorporates dot painting in many of the pieces. They’re not the brightly coloured dots but some dark ones that injects gloom into the paintings. This doesn’t sound too bad, does it?
Well, when Hirst revealed that he took up the brush and handcrafted all the paintings himself, it started to sound worrying. In the past, Hirst was famous, or rather infamous, for having his assistant do all the paintings for him. How can this work? Say, Hirst is a conceptual artist, meaning he comes up with concepts and sometimes those concepts from catching a shark to painting dots can hardly achieved by himself alone. It’s not like an artist having a “ghost” doing work for him—not at all. Think Galliano or Anna Wintour! Hirst is just like them, always about ideas and finger pointing to get the best out of the best. Therefore, when it comes to him doing the painting himself, Hirst will never be like Poussin, Reynolds, or Rembrandt, whose works are housed in the adjacent galleries.
The Crow, 2009
Detour: White Cube, Hoxton Square
About a month’s later, under the exhibition label Nothing Matters, more of Hirst’s damned paintings appear to dominate London’s art scene, not through sheer, positive reception from the public, but from the volume of works that have been produced. At White Cube, Hoxton Square, Hirst gives you blue sky, crows, and some dots.
Unlike those “Blue Paintings” at the Wallace, these triptychs are powerful and enigmatic. They portray the crows entangled and mutilated by webs of subtly drawn slashing lines reminiscent of, say, the thread of life spun by the Three Fates in Greek mythology. The visual paradox draws us in: the clear, pale blue, limited sky versus the lines that work as an inescapable vice entrapping the crows. Here, the omen of death is defeated by death itself. With the trail of red blood on the tableau of the pale blue sky, minimalist violence is aggrandized by this thoughtful juxtaposition of colours. Hirst deliberately leaves some paint gunk on the crows to add the third dimension to this exquisite gore.
Finish Line: White Cube, Mason’s Yard
Everything - crows, skulls, lines, dots, even the aloof Medusa, but not lemons - seems to come together at White Cube, Mason’s Yard. First of all, looking at the “Portrait of a Man” series, we learn the skulls do not represent the generic, but synecdochise Hirst’s close friend and artist Angus Fairhurst who hanged himself. The memory of Fairhurst, as well as his horrific death, is imbued in Hirst’s paintings. If this be the case, Hirst refrains from sentimentalizing his friend’s demise by giving us, instead, a very haunting vision of Fairhurst.
Walking on the White Cube’s lower ground floor is no less spooky than being in a crypt. From two triptychs “Nothing Matters/Empty Chair” and “Walk Away in Silence” with empty chairs, knives and taxidermic crows, to another triptych “How Did We Lose Our Way?” depicting a half-erased human face glancing away, an opened up human form showing blood, bones and sinews, and the Medusa looming in the background, to the last and saddest conclusion “Insomnia” with a blood red cubic room, skinless bodies and shark’s jaws made grotesque as if they had just consumed Hirst’s loved one. These are the moments between life and death frozen in time by those slashing lines that are now cobweb-like and works to hold everything as they used to be, the chair, the working desk, etc. There, too, is the sadism of death, of memory of the loved and lost one. Bodies after bodies, gore after gore, Fairhurst does not die, in memory at least, becomes un-killable and therefore endures the violence of his own doing in others’ memories forever.
Hirst does not attempt to unearth the mystery of death, the cause, but his paintings embody the frustration of life and living, of witnessing and coming to term with the loss. What is interesting here isn’t the paintings themselves but the accumulated dynamism of these paintings once viewed as a coherent story. Yes, I won’t argue that Hirst shouldn’t take up the brush to make statements and money. He really isn’t skillful enough. But, when it comes to expressing ideas and thoughts, this series of paintings is Hirst’s most personal to date.