Hype & Glory

BRIAN SEWELL

A Hirst for blood: Is Damien Hirst a modernday Michelangelo or a formaldehyde fraud?

Of all the young artists now celebrated by British dealers, critics, and curators, Damien Hirst is far and away the most notorious, the most mocked by the tabloid press, and the most mystifying to the broadsheets. He

is both famous and infamous well beyond the purlieus of the London art market and is well known to all who enjoy the gossip engendered by professional personalities. Though perhaps not quite the equal of Madonna or Princess Di, he is not far behind in generating public curiosity.

This fall—following much fuss over his musing about creating a Minotaur from the body of a dead man and the head of a bull and being shortlisted for the second time for the prestigious Turner Prize—Hirst hits the U.S. with a major exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery in New York City and as part of an eagerly anticipated group show at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

Among his peers, Hirst is, at 30, the Michelangelo of his day: sculptor, painter, draftsman, cod-philosopher, polymath, a man of so many ingenious ideas that he must run a Renaissance workshop to realize them, with assistants to construct steel cages, cut sheets of armored glass, and, in breathing apparatus and protective rubber clothing, wade in tanks of formaldehyde in which they submerge animal corpses, for these are the constituents of his most famous works of art. No action painter of the 50s ever provided so much activity and entertainment. It was young Hirst who sold Charles Saatchi, Britain's Maecenas of modem arts, a tiger shark, a shoal of

lesser fish, sheep's heads, the internal organs of eight cows, and a whole lamb, all suspended in formaldehyde.

An insatiable demand in the marketplace for the young, the new, the innovative, means that many art stu5 dents of late have grown from 1 puberty to adulthood with the public gaze upon them, and with dealers and critics vying to be first in their discovery. As a consequence, successful students leam that traditional skills are of far less use to them than a sophisticated use of fashionable art idioms—no matter how hackneyed—and the knowing insincerity that seduces the witless art critic and curator. When, under the influence of American Abject Art, British students concerned themselves with the fluids, emissions, and waste products of the human body, Hirst did a little lateral thinking and declared himself obsessed with death—and art his means of coming to terms with it. Serial murder fascinated him, and he observed of Jeffrey Dahmer without the slightest frisson of distaste, "He has a kind of terrible curiosity to find how living things work, by taking them to pieces." That is precisely what Hirst did in caging thousands of bluebottles and butterflies and allowing them to go about the business of living, feeding, breeding, and dying. He claims to give spectators access to their nightmare fears, and indeed, whether it be with shark or blowfly maggot, he succeeds in touching on aversions and revulsions, if not terrors, that affect us all. But is this art or a sort of old-fashioned freak show, a Madame Tussaud's Chamber of Horrors brought into the modem day? Is it enough to present, dead or alive, with not the smallest aesthetic intervention, a creature that induces fear? Is this not the purpose of a natural-history (Continued on page 138)

(Continued on page 138) (Continued from page 134) rather than an art gallery? But here, of course, we encounter the contemporary artist's greatest boon and blessing: the critics' claim that anything and everything is art, provided an artist has declared it so. And now mere presence within art-gallery walls is enough to turn things that are quite preposterous into icons thaumaturgic.

■ t is easy to dismiss Hirst—now famous I as a wild and heavy drinker, nocturnal I clubman, man-about-town in the stews I of London and Berlin, bringing his I baby son to bars—as no more than a self-publicist, an outrageous prankster deliberately challenging and demanding, as did Hockney with his homosexual boys, a liberal response, but this is true only in part. There is no doubt that Hirst's way of

life and art is intended to affront, and as with Duchamp's inverted urinal in 1917, those who accept it as art are damned as dupes, and those who object are damned as reactionary fogies. Those of us who, Buddhist in spirit, feel that the use and abuse of living creatures or corpses are unjustifiable, and in no sense art, are treated with amused contempt.

Evidence that Hirst was once more than a mere prankster, however, lies in the works exhibited at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London in the winter of 1991-92, when he was only 26, for in these he seemed to abandon all wish to shock, and chose instead to make a pessimistic comment on some of the world's ills. Those works were large black steel-and-glass cases that suggested bleak laboratories, life-

support machines, and prison cells, with the instruments of both torture and medical survival sharing a cold, hygienic kinship, the absence of the prisoner/patient a metaphor for death particularly telling 45 years after our discovering Auschwitz, Dachau, Belsen, and a dozen other monuments to the extremes of inhumanity. The inherited references are clear—to Andy Warhol's electric chair, to the rooms devised by Edward Kienholz, and to Francis Bacon's cages—but in these three-dimensional constructions all is order, proportion, placement, each line and space informing the next as though to move anything by one half-inch would slacken the tension and ease the clinical hostility. Horrifying compulsions are implied with elegant precision and economy.

Hirst has not sustained this level of achievement. In his formaldehyde conceits he found an answer to every problem and repeated it, instead of searching for a different answer each time, and one of his most supportive commentators sees in them the "defeat of metaphor . . . they take you to the thing. The thing is the thing is the thing." In this he risks not only repetition but also self-plagiarism and descent into the quirks of style as old ideas grow stale—just as third-rate Renaissance artists hacked out their many variations of one successful image of the Virgin and her Child. It may be that Hirst has devised and done all that he can, and that he would be wise to turn his lively but undisciplined intelligence to television advertising and settings for the stage. We may well have seen the last of Damien Hirst as a serious conceptual artist; we may soon see the last of him as a fairground barker exhorting us to wonder at his freaks. For the new Hirst it will perhaps be enough to be Hirst, the flamboyant personality with the damp, limp handshake, the ebullient nocturnal talker with a felicitous command of parody and puckish mischief, ripe for television game shows and the chatty host. This will be Hirst in formaldehyde— Hirst the thing and nothing more.

Hirst sold Charles Saatchi a tiger shark, sheep's heads, and the internal organs of eight cows.