In short, I loved it.
Damien Hirst at the Tate Modern. It’s a look back over at his artistic career since the late eighties when he first came to public attention.
This exhibition has been on for a while – I finally got round to going with my sister and my 1 year old nephew. He had a great time too!
I like the directness of his works – in one art critic’s words, “there’s no art bollocks about Damien Hirst.”
There’s his fascination with life cycles, for example, and the fact death will come to us all – sounds gloomy but it’s really not. There’s a whole room in this exhibition with live butterflies flying around - the room has a series of white canvasses on the wall with hundreds of pupae attached to them. It’s as if the butterflies have hatched right out of the paintings on the walls. The butterflies live in this specially humidified and heated room for around a week – and when they die, a Tate Modern staff member told me, they are put in the fridge. The dead butterflies will be recycled by Damien Hirst into another artwork, such as this one….
And there’s Damien Hirst’s “A Thousand Years” – a dead cow’s head, its blood has spilled across the floor. Inside the tank, maggots have hatched into flies. Tens of thousands of flies. They feast and lay their eggs inside the cow’s head. There’s also an Insect-o-cutor inside this tank – will the flies survive in the tank or get sizzled by the zapper? Sounds disgusting and yes it is (there is a trace of the rotting smell as you approach this cabinet) – but it is also fascinating to look at. Life, death, decay. And it’s an uncontrollable artwork, changing before your eyes, every millisecond.
There’s this floating ping pong ball on a hair dryer from his early works whilst at Goldsmiths College in London – daft and funny.
There’s a floating beach ball in the middle of a room with enormous ‘spin paintings’, which were created by Damien Hirst tipping pots of paint from a height on to huge spinning discs. The playfulness of childhood. One of these spin paintings is titled: “Beautiful, childish, expressive, tasteless, not art, over simplistic, throw away, kids’ stuff, lacking in integrity, rotating, nothing but visual candy, celebrating, sensational, inarguably beautiful painting (for over the sofa), 1996”.
There are Hirst’s creatures in formaldehyde vitrines. The sheep. The cow and her calf, sliced in two, “Mother and Child Divided” – you can walk through the middle and study the dissection of this most unusual madonna and child.
There’s the famous shark in formaldehyde – “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living 1991”.
A white dove in flight – with my sister and nephew the other side!
All of Hirst’s creatures are suspended in their vitrines, the surface of which reflects you back as you study their contents. Sometimes the surface of the vitrines curve as you get close up, almost sucking you in. And the world the other side is turned formaldehyde-bluey-green – a reminder of our own life cycle!
Medicine, pathology, pharmacology – all of these themes are explored with humour and directness by Damien Hirst in relation to life and death, in works that are at once very real but also surreal – what’s a life size pharmacy doing in an art gallery, for example? It made me laugh anyway. Hirst says “The Pharmacy” plays with the idea that people put so much faith in medicine but often lack faith in art.
Damien Hirst is on until September 9th at the Tate Modern – definitely worth a visit. (Maybe not if you’re vegetarian!).
