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Damien Hirst Relics Curator Francesco Bonami Essays by FRANCESCO BONAMI ABDELLAH KARROUM MICHAEL CRAIG-MARTIN And an interview by NICHOLAS SEROTA
Qatar Museums Authority October 10, 2013 – January 22, 2014
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Contents
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Foreword HE Sheikha Al Mayassa bint Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani
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Supernatural Aid: Hirst’s Travels Francesco Bonami
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Damien Hirst: The Early Years Michael Craig-Martin
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Nicholas Serota interviews Damien Hirst 14 July 2011
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Hirst in Arabia Abdellah Karroum
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Plates
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Chronology
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Selected Public Collections
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Further Reading
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List of Works
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Photographic Credits
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Contributors
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Index
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fig.1 Damien Hirst photographed by Michael Birt for Newsweek, March 2012
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Supernatural Aid: Hirst’s Travels Francesco Bonami
Damien Hirst is a painter. That’s not to say purely in the literal sense, but rather as someone who ‘paints’ emotive images and symbolic spaces, much like a performance on a theatrical stage. I would encourage viewers to afford this exhibition the same treatment as one would when standing before a large battle scene, such as The Battle of San Romano c. 1438 by Paolo Uccello, or works by the French painter JeanLouis Meissonier; with each room offering a detail or section of a much larger composition and vision. Different viewers will have different approaches of course – there will be those who survey the whole picture and those who focus on its details. Since his early work in the late 1980s, Damien Hirst’s intention has been to take reality and give it back to us – subverted and yet stronger, and perhaps even clearer. As with many contemporary artists of his generation, his departing station was Fountain 1917, a work by Marcel Duchamp, the father of Conceptual art and, more generally, of contemporary art. The notion is that we don’t need to create anything new: Art is all around us, we just need to extract it and show it in a different way. Hirst’s early works follow this concept and reinforce the idea, literally, by highlighting simple everyday objects – boxes, pans, the kitchen cupboard – by means of bright colours. Or by using ready-made items such as over-the-counter medicine boxes and assembling them like a grid painting. His Medicine Cabinets remind one of softer versions of Mondrian paintings or Joseph Cornell’s boxes but, in Hirst’s case, reduced to the chemical essence of our lives. Relics, the title chosen by Hirst for his retrospective in Doha, begins with a kitchen and ends with a pharmacy. Two spaces that symbolise comfort and discomfort: two borders that define Hirst’s ‘kingdom’. The Kingdom 2008 (pp.41–43) is also the title of the work destined to greet, or scare, the viewers at the beginning of their journey into Hirst’s realm. A shark suspended in formaldehyde like a contemporary Cerberus guards the entrance of this very personal underworld created by the artist, where Hirst plays the role of The Hero from an epic novel, asking the viewer to follow him into a universe of his own mythology.
fig.2 Mercurius Trismegistus, from De Divinatione et Magicis Praestigiis by Jean-Jacques Boissard, 1605, published late 19th century Private collection
Hirst’s journey essentially mirrors the cycle of life, through themes that are as ancient as humankind. Love. Death. Pain. Sickness. Beauty. Hope. Through Hirst’s different processes and languages, one witnesses the struggle between his Self and his Ego: the Ego as central to the artist’s consciousness, seeking to assert itself through the work. The Self, if presented as the whole exhibition, forms the circumference of the centre and does not need the artist’s identity or signature to assert itself. Through the exhibition one will encounter works that are bound to the artist’s Ego, and works that get closer and closer to the free Self. Hirst’s idea of art swings between tragedy and comedy in equal measures, as seen in life. Death is the only end to human life and Hirst deals with and states this tragedy, bringing with
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fig.3 After John Singleton Copley Watson and the Shark, c. 1778 The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York fig.4 Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn The Slaughtered Ox, c. 1640 Budapest Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest
it the sad pain of the realisation of this ultimate truth. But he does not subside under the pain of truth. Many of his works have the ability, as in comedy, to find joy alongside pain; this is often revealed by his titles such as Beautiful rotating murdering mating dance of a peacock painting 2007 (p.121). Whilst being utterly incomprehensible, it simultaneously contains many of Hirst’s subjects entangled together yet made visible; something he has been consistent with from the start. The young Damien Hirst made that clear with a photo from his teenage years taken at the Anatomy Museum of Leeds University Medical School in 1981 – which seemed to portend the kind of journey he was, subconsciously, embarking upon. The photo, printed in 1991, shows a young man grinning next to a severed head of a man who appears seemingly annoyed by his presence. With this image Hirst, as a young hero, was crossing the first threshold to enter the physical world where the struggle or dialogue between life and death becomes central for any human being. Very simple, but at the same time an almost impossible challenge. The image of the lively guy next to the dead man makes it clear that either you play with death, almost mockingly, in order to distract it – or you fight it, to seek immortality. Hirst didn’t take long to understand that the latter option was the better one. His work would soon begin to strive toward the ultimate boon: immortality through art. To this end, Hirst allows himself to be swallowed by that whale that is his entire body of work. He is a contemporary Jonah or ‘Dhu’l-Nun’ in Arabic who, from inside the belly of an enormous fish, ponders the outside world and its physical boundaries. Physical impossibility, while part of the title from one of his most infamous artworks (The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living 1991), is also a central issue of Hirst’s development in his works. The same may be said for his Spot Paintings, which manifest for the human eye a push beyond the realms of possibility, in their infinite variations of size and colour. The Spot Paintings relate to the idea of drugs and their capacity to transform themselves in accordance with the mutations of human needs and diseases. A futile race where true healing is always postponed by the appearance of a new drug. The spots, and the drugs that they arbitrarily refer to, express another physical impossibility: that of the human body not to decay. Damien Hirst has created a new system of symbols and a new mythology. He does not invent anything new, but simply follows the set of rules and the grid within which the culture of humanity has operated, in order to create a unique religious, social and cultural narrative. He applies his own system of signs which are always, however, borrowed from life. In this new template Hirst inserts one of the most archaic subjects, the mother, the universal goddess, to whom he immediately imposes the ultimate timeless trauma – separation. In
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Mother and Child (Divided) 1993 (pp.100–101, 103), which shows a severed cow and her severed calf, Hirst seems to visually quote Rembrandt’s The Slaughtered Ox, c. 1640 (fig.4) while alluding to emotion in the context of modern psychoanalysis. Here, Mother and Child are divided in multiple ways, both from each other and within themselves: the Ego and the Self. A space in between the bisected animals allows the viewer to intrude and break the primordial union and intimacy between a mother and her child. The theatrical and immediate effect of this work once again conveys the physical impossibility of remaining as one in the course of our life, and more poignantly, of remaining bound to the womb that generated us. Hirst, as the hero of his own epic, expresses the tragic awareness that once sliced in two, the physical and spiritual world cannot be reunited again, at least naturally. That only through illusion can a certain unity be regained. The more we venture into Hirst’s macrocosm, the more we discover his extreme efforts to strengthen such illusions. To discover ways and tools through which we can reconnect with the microcosm of our spirit and soul. Hirst feels the responsibility as an artist to answer the viewer’s quest for the loss of unity. Again and again, physical impossibility returns as a central issue in Hirst’s challenge. A challenge that becomes even stronger when confronted with failure.
fig.5 Vincenzo Camuccini The Death of Julius Caesar, 1798 Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte, Naples
Horror at Home 1995 (p.105) is a monument to mortality, both with its creepy title and its sheer dimension of devastation. A cigarette butt becomes a body voided of its soul. We move from the position of viewer, to that of witness. The work was created the year the Bosnian War ended and mass graves began to surface. Horror at Home, while not overtly political, inevitably brings to mind the images arriving from Srebrenica, where more than 8,000 people were killed with the same natural attitude in which a chain smoker stubs out a cigarette, one after the other. Whether the work’s conscious chronicling of these events is obvious to the viewer doesn’t matter. Hirst is able to touch, in a very exact way, a theme that the Western world desperately tries to remove from its collective consciousness: death. But death cannot be moved to the side, and history shows us that it can knock on the doors of our civilisation in brutal ways. Hirst pins down both the denial of death and the fear of it. Loving in a World of Desire 1996 (pp.106–107) and The History of Pain 1999 (pp.108–109) are works that each present a ball suspended in the air. One ball is colourful and playful; it could be the monument of denial. The other ball is white, floating dangerously above a bed of knives. If the jet stream stops, the ball falls and is ‘punctured to death’ by the knives. As William Shakespeare does in theatre, Hirst is able to communicate weighty issues of the human condition in very simple and explicit ways. The two balls could also be seen as symbols of comedy and tragedy. ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ and the assassination of Julius Caesar. Or we could
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fig.10 Passport photo of Damien Hirst, 1982
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Nicholas Serota interviews Damien Hirst 14 July 2011
Nicholas Serota: I think we should start, not quite at the beginning, but a long way back. Why did you go to Leeds Art School?
and sticking it back together the other way round, and saying, ‘Get in the bar’, and all that kind of stuff. So who introduced you to Kurt Schwitters?
Damien Hirst: It was called Jacob Kramer College at the time. Harry Thubron did the logo. It was like a piece he’d made with a kind of off-centred spot, a combination of a square and circle, a wooden piece. I never really looked beyond Leeds – it was where I lived. I’d been unemployed for a year or so; I didn’t know what to do. I just thought, ‘I’ll go to art school.’ I did a one-year foundation course in Leeds, which was kind of mind-blowing. I remember on my first day being allowed to smoke, and thinking, ‘It’s unbelievable! You can smoke at school!’ At the end of that, I applied to St Martins and Cardiff. A friend of mine, Marcus Harvey, was at Goldsmiths, and I visited a few times, but I never thought to apply there until later. But you didn’t want to get away from Leeds? No, I liked it. I just didn’t quite know what to do. I knew I wanted to make art, but I never really believed you could get paid for doing it. I was having a lot of fun, but I needed to work out what I wanted to do with my life.
On my foundation course I was trying to paint and I couldn’t really paint that well. I used to get lost in the infinite possibilities of it all. And then one day, I just sort of started collecting stuff from around the college. I did a collage, and was painting on top of it, and it was all fitting together and it looked quite good. And then somebody said, ‘You should look at Kurt Schwitters.’ I thought he was an American artist. And then I looked at the work and I thought he was like one of the Abstract Expressionists – because he was a bit like Rauschenberg – so I figured he was the same sort of generation. It’s quite a good leap. I think that was the thing about our generation, we got our whole history of art from books. I remember at college they were saying to us, ‘You must go and actually see these works’, and I remember thinking, ‘Why bother? I know what that Rothko looks like from a postcard.’ Did you actually see any Schwitters, or were you only looking at reproductions?
Did Harry Thubron teach you? He had left Goldsmiths by then, but his wife, Elma Thubron, taught me. I missed him, but I was really into his collages and I’d heard lots about his teaching techniques. He taught Marcus Harvey, maybe four years before me. I’d heard all the stories about him going round and ripping students’ work up
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Yeah, later we jumped on trains and went all over Europe to see art. You couldn’t keep still when you were InterRailing – forty quid and you could go anywhere in Europe on trains. You’d arrive in Holland and go to the big museum there and look at these works, and then think, ‘Shit, we’ve got to go somewhere else. Let’s go to Paris!’ Then you’d go to Paris. You
fig.11 Damien Hirst photographed by Rankin, 1997
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Hirst in Arabia Abdellah Karroum
Je commencerai par la mer pour parvenir à une goutte d’eau par l’écriture pour revenir au blanc Ne mange pas de pain mais de la bougie pour éclairer la pénombre du ventre Abdellah Zrika1 Collage came to me instinctively as a way to make sense of the world. Damien Hirst2
Damien Hirst – the artist and his work – could be considered a product and reflection of the paradoxes encountered in the late, crisis-ridden twentieth century: the richer we are, the poorer we are, and the more we know, the less knowledge we possess. In his artistic practice, Hirst has often placed greater importance on an artwork’s relationship with the viewer, than on the actual work created – in order to reveal ‘something that they [the viewers] already have’.3 The body of work presented in Hirst’s Doha exhibition reminds us that animals have always existed in the imagery of the Arabian Peninsula: camels and bees, ants and scorpions, flying snakes and cows being a recurrent presence in literature, as well as in daily life. Featured in the tales of natives and foreigners who have captured and conveyed the history of the Arabian Peninsula (al-jazeera al-ärabiyya), it also draws attention to civilisation in these parts as having been built, historically, on the axis of commercial and cultural exchange, and travel. The symbolism contained in figures of the winged horse (al-buraq), the dove and the eagle, for example, although belonging to more spiritual spheres, extends its influence to a larger scope by stressing the importance of the relationship between iconography, the imaginary, and the social and political realms. Such relationships – and the significance of animal symbolism therein – are also seen as being at stake within Hirst’s oeuvre. Through diverse attempts to attain notions of ‘eternal life’ in his work, the artist adopts a conceptual process in search of the secret of life, in a manner that borders on the spiritual. It is the knowledge and consciousness of trying to capture the hidden mystery of eternity which, in life, is held beyond the visible. Humans cannot grasp what is beyond, because our consciousness is limited to life. The phrase, ‘No one but Allah knows the absent things’4 is a spiritual concept, alluding to the human condition trapped in a continuous space-time of pursuit: that whenever one discovers something, the absence of understanding increases, with an ‘elsewhere’ always moving beyond the already-produced knowledge.5 A new generation of artists emerged in Europe in the last decade of the twentieth century, whose innovative language developed from, and within, the unique political context and consciousness relating to the importance of change. We saw this with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 but in reality, if we were to look at the traces and graffiti on that same wall, it had fallen much earlier. The period of contemporary art is historically located between the post-war era – the time of the West’s separation into ideological clans – and the end of the West’s two postmodern projects. Even if these changes were based in older premises, the symbolic events in 1989
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fig.12 A Royal Hunt, Iran, c. 1590–1600, folio from a Shahnama (Book of Kings), by Firdawsi, Persian School, 16th century Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
The Kingdom, 2008 Glass, painted stainless steel, silicone, monofilament, shark and formaldehyde solution 214 x 383.6 x 141.8 cm (84 1/4 x 151 x 55 13/16 in.)
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Barium Carbonate-13C, 2005–2008 Household gloss on canvas 246.4 x 246.4 cm (97 x 97 in.) (1 inch spot)
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Acetophenone-Methyl-13C, 2005 Household gloss on canvas 42.2 x 60.3 cm (16 5/8 x 23 3/4 in.) (Variable spots)
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2-Methyl-3-Buten-2-Ol, 1999–2008 Household gloss on canvas 83.8 x 114.3 cm (33 x 45 in.) (3 inch spot)
Lauric-1-13C-Acid, 2013 Household gloss on canvas 304.8 x 548.6 cm (120 x 216 in.) (24 inch spot)
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With Dead Head, 1991 Photographic print on aluminium 57.2 x 76.2 cm (22 1/2 x 30 in.) (Edition of 15)
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Spot Painting, 1986 Household gloss on board 243.8 x 365.8 cm (96 x 144 in.)
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Anaesthetics (and the Way They Affect the Mind and Body), 1991 Glass, silicone, acrylic, polystyrene and formaldehyde solution Two parts, each: 45.7 x 68.6 x 45.7 cm (18 x 27 x 18 in.)
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Stimulants (and the Way They Affect the Mind and Body), 1991 Glass, silicone, acrylic, polystyrene, sheep’s heads and formaldehyde solution Two parts, each: 45.7 x 68.6 x 45.7 cm (18 x 27 x 18 in.)
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Away from the Flock, 1994 Glass, painted steel, silicone, acrylic, plastic cable ties, lamb and formaldehyde solution 96 x 149 x 51 cm (37 13/16 x 58 11/16 x 20 1/16 in.) (Artist’s proof for an edition of 3) (detail overleaf)
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What Goes Up Must Come Down, 1994 Plexiglass, hairdryer and ping-pong ball 30 x 30 cm diameter (11 13/16 x 11 13/16 in. diameter) (Edition of 30/XV for Parkett 40)
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Horror at Home, 1995 Fibreglass, cigarettes, cigarette packaging, tobacco packaging, cigarette papers, matches, tissues, sweet wrappings, crisp packets, swizzle sticks, drug paraphernalia, paper and ash 69.9 x 243.8 cm diameter (27 1/2 x 96 in. diameter)
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Loving in a World of Desire, 1996
Painted MDF, steel, air blower and beach ball 74.5 x 249.5 x 249.5 cm (29 5/16 x 98 1/4 x 98 1/4 in.)
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The History of Pain, 1999 Painted MDF, steel, steel knife blades, air blower and beach ball 96 x 251 x 251 cm (37 13/16 x 98 13/16 x 9813/16 in.)
Beautiful, cheap, shitty, too easy, anyone can do one, big, motor-driven, roto-heaven, corrupt, trashy, bad art, shite, motivating, captivating, over the sofa, celebrating painting, 1996 Household gloss on canvas and electric motor 365.8 cm (144 in.) diameter
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Lapdancer, 2006 Glass, stainless steel, steel, nickel, brass, rubber, medical and surgical equipment 103.3 x 241.1 x 92.1 cm (40 11/16 x 94 15/16 x 36 1/4 in.)
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Rapture, 2003 Butterflies and household gloss on canvas 213.4 cm (84 in.) diameter (detail on previous spread)
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