Date: 31-12-2000
Owning Institution: The Saatchi Collection
Publication:       Sunday Telegraph “In The Picture”  
Subject:     Now    

On 31 December, an image to strengthen the resolve of anyone planning to include abstinence from cigarettes among their New Year's resolutions. Damien Hirst's Horror at Home, 1995, is a gigantic fibreglass ashtray into which several binbags filled with cigarette butts - all supposedly smoked at one of the artist's favoured London haunts, the Groucho Club - have been unceremoniously tipped. A thing of beauty and a joy forever it is not; nor was it meant to be.

Hirst explained how he came to think up this unflinchingly direct, somewhat simple-minded and extremely smelly work in an interview given at the time. He had been irritated, he said, by the fastidiousness of a wealthy acquaintance and fellow-smoker:

“I went to some posh person's house and they had a tiny little fucking ashtray, it was about two inches by one inch. And they had a beautiful house. It's like they were trying to reduce the horror to such a point. You could only fit about three cigarette butts in it, then they'd empty it.”

The artist elaborated further, in characteristically rambling fashion:

“I think an ashtray is the most fantastically real thing. But smoking's never talked about. It's probably the most powerful thing of the 20th century. There's no country in the world where smoking is allowed where they don't smoke. Even where it isn't allowed they still find a way to smoke. People are killing themselves. I think suicide is the most perfect thing you can do in life. The whole thing in life is you don't know when you're going to die. It makes everything not make sense, there's this unknown factor. Whereas if you suddenly go, 'OK, I choose to die now', you take the matter into your own hands. So smoking is the perfect way to commit suicide without actually dying. I smoke because it's bad, it's really simple. So people can't come up to me and say 'Oh it's bad for you, don't do it'. I mean, I don't trust people who don't smoke, because I think the way the world works, I can't imagine not smoking. If I don't smoke, I feel like a poof.”

Hirst has always enjoyed playing the various roles of blue-collar artist, naughty boy and latterday Dadaist - someone out to shock the bourgeoisie with the novelty and general all-round disgustingness of his creations. But despite his popular image as an iconoclast he is an essentially conservative artist; and Horror at Home is itself very much at home within an established tradition of twentieth-century sculpture.

The idea of taking an ordinary mass-manufactured item and “designating” it a work of art originated with Marcel Duchamp, the father of what has come to be known as Conceptual Art, who in 1917 famously exhibited a porcelain urinal under the title Fountain - the insinuation being that commercially produced objects were just as potentially fascinating, just as worthy of aesthetic contemplation or intellectual discussion, as anything that an artist might choose to make with his hands. Likewise the idea of massively enlarging everyday objects can be traced back principally to the work of the American Pop Artist Claes Oldenburg, creator of - among other things - the Brobdingnagian two-point plug currently on display on the third floor of Tate Modern and the forty-foot-high clothespin erected in a prominent plaza in Philadelphia in 1976. Oldenburg also, incidentally, created a number of oversize cigarette butts made from stuffed fabric – “soft sculptures” which in their calculatedly pathetic, detumescent way were intended to parody the masculine heroics of conventional public statuary. Hirst no doubt had them somewhere in the back of his mind when he created his own trashy homage to cigarettes and smoking

The larger-than-life ashtray might also be said to represent the fag-end of a much older artistic tradition, which has its origins in the Low Countries. The Dutch were not the first smokers in Europe, but they were the first connoisseurs of tobacco (the world's most impressive cigar shops are still to be found off the Kneuterdijk in the Hague) and the first to make smoking into a distinct subject of art. The so-called “tobacco piece”, in which the painter would lovingly depict the smoker's paraphernalia - pipes, tobacco pouch, tapers and so on, artfully arranged on a dramatically lit tabletop - became a popular subgenre of still life painting in seventeenth-century Holland. The meaning of these pictures, as so often in Dutch art, was ambiguous. Such work might celebrate the sensual pleasure of smoking, but it was also designed to prompt serious reflection. Those with strict Calvinist views saw tobacco as the Devil's food (fire, after all, being Satan's element). Even those of a considerably milder disposition were apt to be put in mind, by the image of a smouldering pipe, of the transience of human life.

Hirst does not seem to have paid a great deal of attention to the arrangement of his smoker's detritus, but there is none the less something very Dutch about Horror at Home. It is a self-evidently cautionary image, this accumulation of what could be a lifetime's smoking by a single individual: a modern vanitas, which plays on the fact that the link between smoking and death is no longer merely metaphorical but literal, given all that we know about the links between cigarettes and cancer.

Hirst had probably been thinking about making the piece long before 1995. Going through some old papers the other day, I came across the transcript of an (unpublished) interview I did with him very early in his career, in 1991, where the subject of smoking also came up:

DH: Every time I finish a cigarette I think about death. Not in an obsessed way…

AGD: Maybe in a slightly obsessed way?

DH: Maybe.

AGD: You seem to be obsessed with bodies.

DH: Yes. I've got one. I'm dying. I do feel quite strongly that I'm dying, sometimes. But not in a negative way. There's just a point in my mind where everything - people, art, objects, ideas - breaks down to the same material, because at the end of the day it's all going to become nothing, me included. There's this perspective where you step back, I mean right back, and everything is just ash. Whenever I think I've got to make art about something, I end up with ash, definitely.

All of which suggests that behind the clownish and presumably deliberate banality of Horror at Home - that brand of knowing, exuberant silliness which characterised so much fin-de-siecle British art - there does lie a genuine obsession with mortality. “My days are consumed like smoke,” as it says in the Psalms.