Ladies in Exile: Best of YouTube: Death and Cows in Halves

In anticipation of the exhibition (April 4th to September 9th of this year) by Damien Hirst at Tate Modern in London, the Tate put together a video, shown on its YouTube channel, in which curator Ann Gallagher and the artist walk through the rooms and discuss the artworks together.

The art is a retrospective of the artist's past three decades: 8 Pans — a row of eight coloured saucepans (whose gloopy paint makes them look like cakes of the acrylic paint which normally comes in squeezable plastic bottles) from the 80s which Hirst confesses he doesn't think so much of now; tanks with animals preserved in liquid, vaguely psychedelic turning wheels of paint colours which run and expand like fragmented rays of sunshine to the rims, a roomful of live butterflies with a double curtain of clear plastic streamers at the doorways so that the lepidoptera aren't lost, a regimented and overlarge replica of the shelves and superminimalist counter in a pharmacy, a huge disc encrusted with flies; and so on.

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In the Turbine Hall there is (not shown in the Gallagher-Hirst film but in a second film of its own) the diamond-encrusted skull which, since the artist originally demanded the famously immense price of 50 million British pounds for it, has been cited as a leading exemplar of the subjective pricing of any art and particularly of modern art — where it is arguably difficult to tell how much thought and feeling and work have gone into something, in the absence of the innumerable brushstrokes and details and generally noble (undemocratic?) aesthetic of any classic canvas from a medieval altar triptych to the impressionists.

("I made the skull," he told Anita Singh of the Daily Telegraph,

because in a situation where there was all this money being made, I wanted to make something about the money. When you're in a position where you have made loads and loads of money, it should be used to make art rather than letting it pile up.)

The making of the skull itself is outsourced to Bentley & Skinner, a jeweller's at 55 Piccadilly Street in London, whose employed are shown in the Tate's short film drilling holes into the platinum frame and then placing the crinkly diamonds — there are 8,601 all told — in them. At the forehead of the skull (which is a cast of a true old skull) there is an enormous tear-drop shaped diamond, fringed by middling-sized ones, as an ornament like a comic book deity's 'mindstone.' It and the music in the background of the video and the richness are oddly reminiscent of Karl Lagerfeld's Paris-to-Bombay fashion collection in December — which was at once the height of awkward taste in a time where the questionable solvency of Greece, Italy, Spain, Portugal, etc., were vexing the souls of Europe, and Britain across the Channel was already suffering under budget cuts to alleviate the tremendous government debt, and the United States was still twisting under its own financial shortcomings and political budget debate, all of these things being the metaphorical skeleton at the feast — and strangely compelling.

So it is helpful to hear in the video what Hirst was thinking, by and large, when he conceived the divers installations.

Painting: Magdalen with the Smoking Flame (ca. 1640), by Georges de La Tour
in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, via Wikimedia Commons
It is arguable by prejudiced persons like me that Hirst's memento mori is in better taste than this rather kitschily dramatic though often-loved painting, which is one of several with the gloomy candle-phile Mary Magdalene motif.

SOMETIMES I think he evades responsibility for defining a meaning in his art too much. Obviously it is highly tedious to pretend that everything has a profound meaning, and then to have to match one's profundity against that of every critic or rival artist whose competitive spirit is thereby roused. Besides, as Ann Gallagher pointed out to him, equivocal elements are part of his style: "you like all these works that say one thing and then deny it at the same time."

Still it is not really necessary, for example, to allow (albeit with some discomfiture) the curator to read a religious message into "Mother and Child Divided." This work is a cow and a calf suspended in liquid, divided from each other and divided themselves by being cut in half and prepared so that a cross-section of the internal organs can be seen, beige and brown and looking unhealthy as anything pickled or preserved that was once alive tends to look, in separate tanks.

It's all right for an artist to put questions to the public, but I think it should be clear what that question is. To set something out into the world and take credit for its intellectual and emotional reactive processes alike even if they barely relate to one's own creative process, seems too lazy or indefinite and at the same time too accepting of blame.

In literature, the work that goes into writing a book is far more important and central than its reception after the book is published. Perhaps because it is a longhand medium, it carries the interpretation of its matter in it and does not just present the matter unprocessed, except in the hardiest of realist or naturalist works.

On the other hand, a reception is the very premise of the art installation and the happening. Even in figurative art, there is an element of reliance on a public response: Jacques-Louis David's paintings of French revolutionaries or a Roman emperor's public building project, etc., like all direct or indirect propaganda, were presumably intended to call forth a specific response, as are even the noblest portraits of wealthy Renaissance patrons or Baroque mistresses.

Sometimes, too, the reaction of the public is an indication whether an artwork functioned or not. Hirst mentions that gallerygoers were puzzled when he first set up his arty pharmacy, and thought upon setting foot in it that they had gotten the wrong floor. He suffered a similar implicit criticism or disregard in October 2001, when a London gallery cleaner got rid of the detritus of his exhibition's launch party, which Hirst had spontaneously arranged into an installation.

(The editorial milieu of the Guardian sarcastically praised the temporarily lost artwork — "Observe the way the toilet roll hangs menacingly from the artist's tripod, hinting at the post- fin de siecle malaise of mankind" — and unironically welcomed the ordinary custodian as the new unacknowledged legislator of the art world. Another article described the crime against art in a less snide and very amusing manner: "The next morning when Mr Asare arrived for work, he decided to clean up the mess straight away by putting it all in bin bags. Mr Asare said: 'As soon as I clapped eyes on it I sighed because there was so much mess.'" Such aesthetic impulses have affected other artists too — even Joseph Beuys.)

ANOTHER common criticism of avant-gardey art is that the artists are too interested in being superficially provoking. Is one right to be provoked or does the art only provoke us if we hold unreasonable prejudices?

The shark in a tank — there are two sharks in this exhibition; one of them (The Impossibility Of Death In The Mind Of Someone Living) was exhibited for three years at the Metropolitan Museum of Art — was inspired by Jaws. It is supposed to invoke the atavistic horror of the film, in which a cold and vicious animal steers toward you through the weighty and turbid mass of seawater with its toothy maw agape. Insofar as a small YouTube screen can convey it, the replica appears to work. But even the shark in the film had an unwieldy papier-mâché effect at times (if I remember correctly); the shark in the Tate gallery looks obviously dead and therefore pitiful, like any inhabitant of a formaldehyde jar whose flying or swimming or walking days are over.

Is this pity justified, or is it a self-consciously romantic impulse? Is it right to dislike dark art or art which uses animal corpses out of sympathy for its victims or antipathy for the nihilistic way in which the dead are presented (even though the animals in the artworks are past suffering); or for having a cold and spare aesthetic? Is it wimpy to be afraid of something that only represents a real experience? (This is the same debate I have with myself about disliking horror and suspense films, even though the characters are imaginary.)

In fact it seems that artists or filmmakers whose works are disturbing are not necessarily opposed to the public feeling provoked on those grounds; they are often implying that precisely this reaction is reasonable and right. Hirst agrees, for instance, that the clinical instruments of medicine and anatomical study are inherently perceived as frightening, without ridiculing it.

So perhaps what is left to argue is whether the provocation and the probable reactions to it are particularly original or worth raking up again. The greatest artists and authors have found immense success when they strike archetypes and present them in an accessible form. But I think that beyond this lies the province of the highest art: to find and present new truths, or to hoist known truths to a previously unexplored level of noble complexity or depth.

Photo: "Зал с акулами в галерее "Пинчук-Артцентр", г. Киев", by Agent001 (July 7, 2009)
via Wikimedia Commons

AS FOR the reviews of Damien Hirst's exhibition, they have been severe according to the mid-atlantic Art Newspaper's summation. Adrian Searle (or his subeditor) gave it 3 out of 5 stars, which I would deem not too bad, for the Guardian website. He describes the memorable Hirstian classics with much enthusiasm and then laments the "cloying ostentation" of his later artworks. He reads these latter a bit as a surrender to traditionalist tastes, even though the surrender comes obliquely in the form of subtle ridicule: a resculpted marble angel and the dove soaring through formaldehyde. But of course surrender or ridicule or any reference to traditionalism at all may not be what Hirst intended, though a turning of perspective has certainly occurred; in the film for the Tate he said, for instance, "I think I've become a religious artist, haven't I? — Although I deny it all the time." At any rate the critic concludes:

My problem with Hirst is not the money (Picasso made lots, and nobody cares), nor the vulgarity he has opted for, but his capitulation as an artist. He could have been so much better.

Yet the Telegraph's Richard Dorment (or his subeditor) gave the show 4 out of 5 stars. "As an artist," he writes, "his [Hirst's] work is indeed difficult to take - not because it is dumb, but because no one in his right mind wants to think about the painful subjects it deals with."

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"Damien Hirst Walkthrough with Ann Gallagher and Damien Hirst" [YouTube: Tate] (April 4, 2012)