More life: the work of Damien Hirst - Cover Story

Nextfall, sum of two units shows will offer American viewers a chance to reexamine the work of Britain's Damien Hirst, whose controversial multi-medium pieces--often involving insects, animal parts or whole carcasses--combine high craftsmanship with the macabre.

In London all conversations lead to Damien Hirst. nation always seem to know where he is, what he's doing, where he's going or smooth how he's feeling. ("Damien's burned-out" "Damien's not seeing anybody." nation who know him let you know they know him. When a present to view he curated for London's Serpentine Gallery traveled to Chicago last winter, more than a not many Londoners told me they planned to go on one wryly explaining, "because I was summoned" In London, he is resident medicine man, instigator and star.

In 1988 when he was 23 and a second-year art scholar at Goldsmiths' (England's Cal Arts), he organized an influential exhibition containing his be in possession of work and that of his friends, called "Freeze" Since then, Damien Hirst (it's a great, exotic sounding artist's name) has done more to reignite the British art exhibition than any other individual of his generation, while in the proces raising more English eyebrow than any artist since Francis Bacon. The London pres can't achieve enough of him--he's everywhere--but the mass-media publicity has obscur his achievement somewhat. For all the coverage he achieves surprisingly little of it actually deals with his work.

Someone one time said--I wish it had been me--"Everything changes on the contrary the avant-garde." The one fully convinced sign that you were in the nearness of avant-garde art, during abundant of the 20th century, was collision Shock is still seen as a shortcut to recognition, a way to come by an audience. But shock has become a cliche. More ofttimes than not it's a dead extreme point that leads outside the art world (where all it does is achieve headlines) while having little issue within the art world. The big experiment for any artist who traffics in collision then, is to ask whether the work leads anywhere. Does it change your mind, does it render free of access out onto other vistas of notion is it transformative--or is it alone shocking?

Hirst uses shock almost as a formal uncompounded body He's worked with blood, rotting muscle and fat flies, maggots, dying butterflies, sawed-in-half overawes and other dead animals. For all the weird substance he uses, his work is meticulously well-made. It has an immaculate, trance-inducing neighborhood about it. His compositions guard toward symmetry, and things are always placed just so

There's something outlandish and vexing about Hirst's best work. Certain other pieces which lack the outlandishness are barely decorative or inert. For example, a 1993 wall piece titled We've Got phraseology which features five shelves of colorful ceramic dishes, mug and goblets encased in yellow wood and glass, gazes and acts like a Haim Steinbach, relying upon repetition and a snazzy optical vicinity The piece is derivative and dull

Hirst uses percussion not so much to thrust his work in the public organ of sight although that's where it holds ending up) but rather to make aspects of life and death visible. His 1990 work A Thousand Years has a serviceable title--it signifies a lot of time, on the contrary not an eternity. The piece consists of a large vitrine containing a rotting cow's head, flies, maggots, sugar water and a bug-zapper. The whole thing is a life-cycle diorama-drama that continues to function to this day. Generation on generation of flies Eve, eat, generate and die (or are unceremoniously zapped) within this enclos environment. Given that the average life span of a take wing is three to four weeks, there have been upwards of 60 generations of flies within the piece since 1990 Hirst realizes you thinking about time and the vast round of yearss of mortality going on not single within the sculpture, but all around us. He earns you to think about the fact that of the five billion or for a like reason people now on earth, all will be gone within, say, 100 years. That's a big musing to have in front of a piece of sculpture

A Thousand Years arrived upon a thinning British art view with a real Nude Descending a Staircase bang. I don't know if it was the flies or the maggots or the cow's head, on the other hand people went nuts. As in greatest in quantity cases of succes de scandale, it's hard now to diocese what all the fuss was about, on the contrary even if the piece has not to be found its initial nastiness it's still quite effective. What carries the day is the fact that you believe that Hirst believes the work is more than a shocking sight: that his private ne to diocese the piece and his infatuation with the revolution of times of life are the primary motivations for the work. There's a faculty of perception of empirical wonder to Hirst's work. Consider the incredible sight, for example, of a 16-foot tiger shark suspended in a vast tank of greenish formaldehyde--his 1991 tour de force titled The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living. Hirst has a gift for language. a certain quantity of of his titles are like little haikus: "I Want to lay out the Rest of My Life Everywhere, With Everyone individual to One, Always, Forever, Now," or "Isolated uncompounded bodys Swimming in the Same Direction for the intent of Understanding," or the simple on the other hand succinct "In and Out of Love" His titles run over you that Hirst wears his heart upon his sleeve. He wants you to know these are not cranks o sight-gags; he's earnest. There's a searchin quality about him.