Date: 10-06-2007
Owning Institution: White Cube Gallery in Hoxton
Publication:   Sunday Telegraph Reviews 2004-2012      
Subject: Now        

Damien Hirst is at it again (and again). The artist’s new exhibition, which occupies not just the generous spaces of the White Cube Gallery in Hoxton, but also three floors of the same, thriving concern’s premises in Mason’s Yard, Piccadilly, is a dizzyingly repetitious display of tried-and-trusted devices – with a single sparkling novelty, like a dazzling decoy, to draw away attention from so much relentless sameness. There are numerous photo-realist canvases, painted in the mutely anonymous manner that marked the paintings in Hirst’s last exhibition at Gagosian in New York. There are rows of dead fish, embalmed in rectangular glass boxes arranged on shelves – neat little mock-taxonomies that go back, in the artist’s oeuvre, at least as far as 1992. There are vitrines, flayed figures and blood-red paintings blown up from medical slides. There are sheep and cows and a bisected tiger shark, all suspended in flotation tanks of formaldehyde. And then there is the piece de resistance, in the shape of a diamond-encrusted platinum skull with a price tag of a cool £50 million.

To avoid too great a sense of anticlimax, this exhibition in two parts is most sensibly negotiated from East to West. The downstairs galleries at White Cube, Hoxton Square, which represent a low point, have been hung with paintings that resemble swatches of fabric but soon disclose the artist’s familiar morbid preoccupations. Collectively entitled the Biopsy Paintings, each is based on a blow-up of a biopsy image of a particular disease – different forms of cancer, for the most part – drawn from the resources of the Science Photo Library. These magnified snapshots of cellular degeneration, bright documents of ways in which people die, are colourful but inert. This is a common side-effect of Hirst’s increasing tendency to make do with simply displaying the objects or images that interest him, rather than imaginatively transforming them. In an attempt to mitigate the clinical dullness of the picture’s surfaces, they have been glitter-dusted with a screed of scalpel blades and shards of broken glass – a gesture in the direction of surface effect so perfunctory that it merely enhances the numbly systematic means by which they have evidently been produced.

The spirit of arid serialism which these pictures exemplify is common to much of Hirst’s recent work. It helps to account for the immense productivity of his workshop, now so prolific as to be achieving positively Stakhanovite output norms. The artist’s well known “spot paintings” – no examples of which are on display in the current show – already run into the hundreds; and there is no reason, least of all aesthetic fastidiousness, for why the Biopsy Paintings should not similarly proliferate, multiplying like the diseased cells which they aptly figure. Hirst’s dealer, Jay Jopling, has shown a special kind of genius in managing to surround such a spew of mass-manufactured objects with an aura of precious rarity. The father of Conceptual Art, Marcel Duchamp, was once asked why he insisted on making more and more versions of his “readymades”. Because, he answered michievously, each time he made a new one it meant that all the others were worth a little bit less. Had Duchamp witnessed the phenomenon of Hirst managed by Jopling, he might have been forced to reconsider that statement. It has been a model demonstration of the irrationality of markets. 

The Biopsy Paintings are merely backdrops to the principal exhibits at Hoxton Square, which are three sculptures parodying the devotional art of the distant past. The Adoration is an absurdist version of the Nativity distilled to a vitrine in which the silver skeleton of a foetus, in a hospital ventilator, is worshipped by two skinned sheep preserved in tanks of formaldehyde, upon which gold party hats are perched. Saint Sebastian, Exquisite Pain consists of the carcass of a black bullock, attached by cable-ties to a steel post, shot through with crossbow bolts, preserved in a glass case filled with formaldehyde. God Alone Knows is a triptych of sorts, an arrangement of three more glass tanks, with mirrored backs, within which three flayed sheep have been arranged, stretched and upright, to evoke Christ, flanked by the two thieves, crucified on Golgotha. This has been given pride of place at the far end of the gallery – where, in a church, the altar would be.

The idea of comparing a side of meat to a crucified figure is nothing new, and lurks in the pictures of artists as diverse as Rembrandt, Chaim Soutine and Francis Bacon. But Hirst has rendered it with such anaesthetised literalism that it seems entirely emptied of pathos and meaning. His work might, at a stretch, be taken as an unusually naked, wisecracking assertion of his own atheistic doubts. But he has engaged in such acts of parody before, has created so many works of art using essentially the same conceit, that each new manifestation now has the air of an exercise about it: a case of once more, without feeling. In the nineteenth century, painters such as Bouguereau in France and Lord Leighton in England created fricassees of nudes and mythologies so anodyne that they seemed, to the generation following, to have devalued the very traditions of Western painting. The question of what might reinvigorate those traditions was one to which Picasso and Matisse, among many others, addressed themselves. Hirst increasingly resembles a twenty-first century barrow-boy version of Lord Leighton, except that in his case he has taken the visceral directness of certain forms of high modern art – not quite that of Picasso but certainly that of Bacon, and of Joseph Beuys – and found ways to create from it vessels of perfectly weightless banality. He has become, by degrees, the epitome of an academic artist.

Upstairs at White Cube, Hoxton, hang a number of photo-realist pictures. These slight and sentimental images were painted from photographs of the birth of Hirst’s third son, Cyrus, which in some of the publicity material for the exhibition is alleged to have deepened the artist’s preoccupation with mortality. The second part of the exhibition, at White Cube, Mason’s Yard, opens with more pictures of the hospital in which the child was born. Painted on a larger scale, many of these tend to emphasis the apparatus of birth, such as forceps and ventilators, surgical gloves and masks. They are not among the most memorable things in the exhibition. In the middle of the gallery, like a parody of the holy ghost, a taxidermised dove floats, wings outspread, in a another tank of formaldehyde.

Downstairs, the visitor enters what some members of the gallery staff have christened “the valley of death” – a large gallery hung with further examples of the Biopsy Pictures and containing several more examples of the artist’s recent sculpture. Variations are played, once more, on familiar themes. There is a black sheep in a glass tank, alluding perhaps to the vandal who once poured black ink into a similar tank by Hirst containing a fluffy white lamb. Death Explained is the title the artist has given to his new work with tiger shark. The shark’s body, this time, is not whole but longitudinally divided and placed in two adjacent tanks, so the viewer can, so to speak, walk along the length of the slice contemplating the animal’s inner workings. Other sculptures resemble exquisite cabinets of curiosities, in which – for example – whole preserved specimens of fish may be compared with the filigree forms of their skeletons. The feeling here is academic bordering on outright mannerist, with old compositions reconfigured into multiple new arrangements. Hirst has devoted increasing energies to his activities as a collector, both of art and curios, in recent years and that seems reflected in his practice as an artist too. His work itself has largely become a matter of arranging and rearranging things that he has made before, thoughts that he has thought before, in slightly different forms.

A ride in a lift whisks the visitor up and into the inner sanctum of the exhibition, a single dark room where the fabled diamante skull is to be found, spotlit on a plinth, displayed as if it were the crown jewels. Its effect is so pronouncedly mannerist it might almost be some decadent objet de luxe dreamed up for one of the crowned heads of sixteth-century Europe by Benvenuto Cellini. For the Love of God, as it is called, also calls to mind the settings of gold and jewellery once devised for the most precious relics in the treasuries of the churches of medieval Christendom. In this case the skull in question, purchased by Hirst from a collector of such things, apparently belonged to an unexceptional eighteenth-century individual. The bones of the skull were cast in platinum, so that all to survive of the original are its teeth, which have been carefully reset in place.

Fashioned by the Bond Street jewellers, Bentley & Skinner, For the Love of God is both a paradox and a practical joke that can only be truly fulfilled at the point of sale. Set with 1,106.18 carats of the finest “ethically-sourced” diamonds, including a huge flawless pink pear-shaped diamond of 52.4 carats, set in the centre of the skull’s forehead, it is a rebarbative vanitas object seemingly intended to symbolise the monumental, doomed vanity of whoever decides to pay the asking price of £50 million for the privilege of owning it. What the bejewelled skull smilingly but unequivocally declares is that no matter how much anyone tries to hide from the facts of their own mortality, by taking refuge in wealth and symbols of status, all is futile because all must die. It exemplifies precisely that which it declares to be pointless. This multifaceted gargoyle, glittering on its plinth like an anthropomorphised disco ball, is also a grinning emblem of the improbable enterprise that has been Hirst’s entire career: a work of art, made from a body dismembered, costing an arm and a leg.