Snobs dismiss him, but Hirst was a rock star of the art world
Damien Hirst: Natural History Gagosian, London WC1 ★★★★★
‘Art’s popular,” Damien Hirst once said. “That’s my generation. It wasn’t before… Isn’t that an awesome thing?” Like a brilliant singer-songwriter, Hirst, always the most prominent YBA, knows – or, at least, once did – how to produce a hit.
His new exhibition, Natural History, the fourth instalment of his “takeover” of the Gagosian Gallery near King’s Cross, contains a bunch of his sensations, all taking the form of his sliced-and-diced pickled beasties, preserved for posterity in hefty, formaldehyde-filled stainless-steel tanks. During the Nineties, this sort of thing brought contemporary art to the masses.
A long, grey tiger shark, for instance, seems to glide through the main space, serenely exposing its teeth like a compliant patient opening wide. Nearby, another dorsal-finned man-eater, this time carved into three chunks, each presented in a separate container, appears – hey presto! – like a sawed-apart magician’s assistant.
Neither specimen, in case you’re wondering, is the shark – The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, commissioned by Charles Saatchi and created by Hirst in 1991. Reportedly, Saatchi sold that one, for at least $8million, to US hedge-fund manager Steve Cohen back in 2004.
Would he have got so much for it today? For all his rapid, prodigious success, Hirst is, within the art world, now considered something of an embarrassment, an old-timer to whom younger artists pay scant attention.
Struck by the astonishing, visceral force of his early work, Lucian Freud once told him: “I think you started with the final act, my dear” – and, it’s true, for more than a decade now, he’s been floundering about, drifting into irrelevance.
Still, Natural History isn’t an exhibition of new work, but a presentation of 26 pieces spanning three decades, including a cluster from Hirst’s heyday, when he electrified British art. Paradoxically, then, this grisly visit to the abattoir is also a trip down memory lane.
So, how well do his historical artworks hold up? My head says: terribly. Yet, I can’t deny my heart, which, flooded with a strange nostalgia for all these embalmed cows, pigs, and sheep, reminds me that there was a time when Hirst really meant something as an artist.
Collectively, his formaldehyde
Hirst’s early work blew my young mind and many others, I suspect, felt the same way
sculptures are supposed to evoke the fragility of existence, fusing the dark emotion found in the work of his artistic hero, Francis Bacon, with Minimalism’s industrial look. Those decapitated animal heads and chopped-up carcasses? They’re us: nothing but meat.
Yet, as meditations on mortality go, we’re hardly dealing with the subtlety of, say, Rembrandt; rather, Hirst’s riffs on the traditional “memento mori” theme now seem glossy, grabby, skin-deep. Most of these tanks titillate by summoning the spectre of death in such a winking fashion that they’re not properly scary.
Hirst wanted his original shark to intimidate people, but the later examples on display here, like most of the pitiable creatures in the show, have a pathetic, wrinkled quality, like skin turned raisiny in the bath.
Did the tongues of the two calves, never replaced, in Cain and Abel (1994), always look so stiff, plasticky, and grey? Either way, whereas once all these works had an aura, now, sadly, their magic has decayed. Instead, we notice distracting mechanical details, such as the fishing lines that make the sharks appear to float, or cable ties which keep the innards of Hirst’s butchered animals from spilling out.
Then there are the clumsy allusions to Bacon, and the trite grandiosity of all the religious symbolism (Hirst was brought up a Catholic). Sometimes, the effect is comical – and, in our age of veganism and respect for animals, obscene: one poor sheep’s corpse has been manipulated to resemble a devout churchgoer kneeling before an altar. Hirst’s titles are often naff, too – and occasionally, by his own admission, “lazy”.
Yet, like someone fondly recalling their first love, I can’t bring myself to renounce Hirst’s early work entirely. I remember wandering by chance into one of his Gagosian shows as a student: it blew my young mind, and thousands of others, I suspect, have had similar experiences. Yes, many observers these days dismiss Hirst out of hand. But, within the backlash against him, I detect an unpleasant strain of snobbery.