Date: Sun, 27 Aug 1995 17:19:57 -0400
Subject: Hype and Gore 


   Vanity Fair, September, 1995, pp. 134, 138.


   Hype & Glory. By Brian Sewell

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

      [Photos] Damien Hirst, above, with his girlfriend, Maia
      Norman, and the twin artists Jane and Louise. Left: *Away
      from the Flock* (1994), lamb submerged in formaldehyde.


   Of all the young artists now celebrated by British dealers,
   critics, and curators, Damien Hirst is far and 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 short-listed 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 modern 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 students of late
   have grown from 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
   learn 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 modern 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 museum
   rather than an art gallery? But here, of course, we
   encounter the contemporary artist's greatest boon and
   blessing: thc 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.

   It is easy to dismiss Hirst -- now famous as a wild and
   heavy drinker, nocturnal clubman, man-about-town in the
   stews of London and Berlin, bringing his 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.

      [Photo] The severed head of a cow, part of an exhibition
      at London's Serpentine Gallery in 1993; *The Acquired
      Inability to Escape, Inverted* (1993) will be part of
      the " 'Brilliant!' New Art from London" exhibition at
      the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis; Hirst attired [in
      toxic-protective gear] to work on *Mother and Child,
      Divided* (1993).

   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.

   [End]


   NYTimes today: [Photo] Ivan Kozbur, a Croatian refugee
   expelled from the Serbian-held town of Banja Luka in
   northern Bosnia, removing a [head-shattered] cow from
   property in Pobrdani that had been abandoned by Serbs who
   fled when Croatian Government forces overran the Krajina
   region in Croatia.











     --- from list avant-garde-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---

     ------------------