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Damien Hirst: Social Symbol Or Real Artist?
Uma Nair |
"Business art is the step that comes after Art," said Warhol the Prophet, and, thirty years later, we know whereof he spoke.
At best a stew of the restless and the sedate-Damien Hirst's works at the Oberoi’s Ballroom was the stuff of gossip and culture vultures. Damien's debut in Delhi was exciting, specifically because it speaks of no barriers in connectivity in the art world. After Christie's preview last week that was kind of humdrum with the usual Sotheby's decided to up their antennae and bluster a whole host of Englishman on Delhi gentry.
What does Damien Hirst do other than pickle sharks in formaldehyde and make skulls with million dollar diamonds? The Internet has images of Damien Hirst's next collaboration with Levi's. They're part of the fall '08 Levi's® X Damien Hirst line. The artist's first collection for Levi's debuted in September 2007, and all those shirtless hunks left us wondering what Hirst had planned for fall. In the meantime, his spring debut featuring Vincent Gallo, Andrew Andrew, and many male models was something to see.
This time part of the auction has 56 works by Hirst and they look like just a series of conceptions: playing the same names and games with the touch of recycling. A series of dead butterflies, diamonds in memory, a host of spots, an oil painting showing a skull and a set of pills, a shelf of pretty pharmaceuticals, an antiseptic looking Angel the list is endless. Often done by his assistants (who swear by Hirst's kindness), they depend upon photographs and resemble the sort of affect-less conceptual painting now produced by Hirst more by the acre rather than the yard.
Though a blend of the gory and the gorgeousness of colour and light it is his dead butterflies that were the best because they blend deep instincts of Catholicism and a diffused brooding quality of light lingers in the mind. With titles like Psalm 23 and Psalm 37 with Eyes of Judas and a host of Biblical connotations Hirst's works with the butterflies move beyond merely interesting to the portentous ruminations about death that dot the avid discussions of Hirst's works.
Here is death as hoary theme and it represents a bold brassy attack on idealist and Platonic traditions. Of course, like many modern artists in the Duchampian line, Hirst wants it both ways. It wouldn't be incorrect to say that he not only subverts the idealist view of death, but actually brings in the crowds by using so many romantic titles! There is indeed an alacrity in his sense of irony too. After seeing his Skull `For the Love Of God’ last year in London I wondered whether he was in some ways hitting back at society for some strange brooding reason. In art history we see that Andy Warhol was the master of the art of deception there were double and triple games in his intentions:` You could never be sure if he was mocking, reflecting, or praising celebrity culture, since he was doing all of the above.. '
"For the Love of God" was presented in the tradition of "memento mori" - those skulls placed in classical paintings to remind us of what lies ahead - and as an homage to the Aztecs (Hirst now spends some of every year in Mexico), who attached precious stones to skulls and even re-created entire skulls with crystal. In other words, Hirst's piece is packaged as a concept.
Art lovers seemed divided about viewpoints. Some felt that the skull was an act of off beat theatricality. But the skull is not new for Damien. In 2003 he created a series with resistors and malachite, and lazuli and tiger's eye. In an art mart that is drunk with money, where people are looking for adrenaline and news not art Damien's diamonds are a testimony to the art of tangible and tensile tantrums.
One magazine in New York stated so pertinently that `Damien Hirst is famous for suspending dead animals, among them cows and sheep, in steel-and-glass vitrines filled with formaldehyde. These cadaverous works (the best known holds a large shark and is called The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living) have made Hirst the glamorous bad boy of art. Great claims are regularly made for him: Not only is he said to criticize Western corruptions of the spirit, such as materialism and indifference toward the natural world, but, it's thought, he is also engaged in a profound meditation upon death. Skeptics regard this as metaphysical—not just literal—rot. They sometimes become enraged when Hirst attracts coverage. Why give him more attention? Why suck oxygen from other art?'
The best answer is that this English artist's celebrity is also an important social phenomenon, one that provides a sharp portrait of both the art world and the larger culture. Not only does he play to the gallery he is the gallery too. So all of his art is Hirst for Hirst.
According to an American critic and analyst: `Hirst's popularity reflects his time. Whereas he might seem like a wild-man original to many people, within the art world he's part of the reigning orthodoxy. In his sculpture, he's a descendant of Duchamp (through the Warhol-Koons line) who works with ready-mades, shock, and irony to make conceptual points. His inclusion of dead animals makes him a titillating taboo-breaker, a familiar cultural stance that appeals to an audience always searching for a new boundary to cross. He also reflects the squeamish English fascination with the flesh. 'And so be it.
Hirst's popularity and his penchant for recycling his works makes us think about the English. It has been said that London in the nineteen-nineties is New York in the eighties—history repeating itself as farce. By all accounts, however, the scene-makers in this millennium are having a far better time of it than many of us in the viciously competitive, money-maddened, terrorist -fried 2000's. Do the Brits have a real handle on a real conundrum—which is, roughly, how to square the special and contrarian nature of artists with the bland and complacent character of a vastly expanded audience...? Maybe.
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