reviews damien hirst
Damien Hirst: BeyonD Belief
White Cube, hoxton square and m ason’s Yard, London
3 June – 7 JuLY
In Beyond Belief, the publicity reads, ‘Hirst continues to explore
the fundamental themes of human existence – life, death,
truth, love, immortality and art itself’. So where’s he got to with
it all? Not that much further, unless you reckon that repeating
your greatest hits counts as artistic development. Rather than
going ‘beyond belief’ Hirst has discovered religion-chic, all
sacred hearts, the holy spirit, saints and martyrs.
Hirst’s familiar anti-metaphysical shtick is still plentifully
rehearsed; in What Goes Around Comes Around (2004), an
array of fish specimens are arranged in a big mirrored vitrine.
One side all formaldehyde specimens; the other side all
mounted skeletons. The mirrored division means that neither
side can see the space they virtually reflect into. Just as neither
life nor death can be perceived from the vantage point of
the other. Get it? Then there’s Death Explained (2007), a
cut-down-the-middle shark in two tanks that you can walk
between, stare into and still look for an explanation. Or the
sad-looking front halves of two cows facing away from each
other, with a gap between for inspection, titled Love’s Paradox
(Surrender or Autonomy, Separateness as a Precondition for
Connection) (2007). Death’s a paradox, and so is love, see?
But the death-and-meat bravado has lost its verve. ‘I
suppose since I’ve become a father, I think even more about
the end,’ Hirst muses. Cue many photorealist paintings of the
hospital birth of Hirst’s newborn, and lots of indifferent canvas
blowups of diseased cell types. These are for the poorer
collectors. With mortality drawing ever closer, Hirst is goofing
around with Catholic iconography, perhaps to give ‘the end’ a
visual dressing-up that might give it the meaning he can’t find
– those Catholics always put on a good show. Among the
formaldehyde tableaux there’s a sort of odd nativity vitrine,
with flayed sheep adoring a baby’s skeleton in an incubator,
a three-tank flayed-sheep crucifixion and a sorry cow as St
Sebastian, shot through with arrows – a case, perhaps, of
‘forgive them father, for they know not what they moo’.
Immobilising and dissecting living existence is Hirst’s interminable fascination; but like his life-size silver Saint Sebastian,
figure of the martyred Bartholomew, Saint Bartholomew, Exquisite Pain (2007) – his flayed skin draped over one
Exquisite Pain, 2007,
glass, steel, bullock,
arm, looking puzzled and pointing into the void – Hirst is searching for the mystery of human consciousness and
arrows, crossbow bolts
and formaldehyde
existence in the wrong place, poking about in entrails which reveal just entrails. It’s what Slavoj Zižek mocks as ‘the solution, 322 x 156 x
realization that, when one looks behind the face into the skull, one discovers nothing, there is “nobody home” – just
156 cm. Photo: Prudence
Cuming associates Ltd.
stacks of brain meat’. And religion is just another way of missing the point, projecting what’s exceptional about
© the artist.
Courtesy science Ltd
humans into ‘the soul’ or the ‘hereafter’.
and Jay Jopling /
White Cube, London
Postmodern agnostics aren’t really serious about religion, but they like the thrill of existential certainty in an
otherwise meaningless world: Madonna studies Kabbalah while Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens rail
against fundamentalism, and Hirst – belatedly noticing that religion is a hot topic – is up for pseudo-fundamentalist
glam. So For the Love of God (2007), the diamond-encrusted, multimillion-pound platinum skull, is the bling
remedy to Hirst’s sagging nihilism: adorning death with earthly riches? That was primitive civilisation’s way of
facing death. Secular culture doesn’t much believe in anything anymore, but it’s fascinated by those who do.
Beyond belief? If only. J.J. Charlesworth
Artreview 118
Sept_REVIEWS Outstanding.indd 2 7/8/07 16:37:37
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