Damien Hirst: A new kind of hope

Damien Hirst’s current exhibition at the Tate Modern has had mixed reviews, almost inevitably. As Richard Dorment of The Telegraph points out, this may well be due to Hirst’s insistence to present himself as something of a fraud, producing works which are the result of a whimsical idea. How are we supposed to approach an artist who makes so much money and is a poster boy for the YBAs – a movement which no doubt will come to define contemporary art in our era – who behaves like an obnoxious, if creative, teenager, with a hefty bank balance to back up his ideas.

Do not be fooled. Hirst is a serious, and sometimes brilliant artist. The exhibition is not utterly inspiring; but I think that is more because the exhibits shown were mainly pieces which have for a long time existed in the British public’s consciousness. We knew the spot paintings, the pharmacy concept is a guaranteed exhibit in all the large modern art spaces in the country, the animals in formaldehyde are old friends. The butterfly room is a delight (especially when you find yourself in there with several charming children on holiday from Virginia), and you can still trick yourself into a thrill in your gut when you stand before the open jaws of the larger shark and pretend you are not in a gallery and that you actually have a live monarch of the sea just inches from you. But are these just cheap tricks to make an exhibition fun and engaging?

I would argue not, and my evidence is that at the heart of this retrospective is a longing and an uneasy weighting put on the role of art as hope.

Death and religion, two driving forces for art are the central themes again in Hirst’s work. He was raised a Catholic, but has no faith in God himself. Yet the pieces that he produces are icons, and often distinctly religious in tone. He admits in an interview shown at the Tate Modern that his faith is indeed strong, but it is entirely placed in the deity of art as opposed to a higher power.

Hirst’s most famous work (the shark) holds the intriguing title: The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, a phrase which he originally coined in an under-grad essay and which stuck with him. This is a phrase which could in fact be the tag-line for the exhibition. It is an idea and a truth which runs throughout the exhibits, in almost every room literal death is presented. The corpses of butterflies, fish, sheep, cows, sharks and a dove form the art, and in A Thousand Years we experience the life cycle of a fly; the birth is hidden in a large white box, but the death we witness on the fly catcher positioned above the severed cow’s head which provides the insect’s food. In most of these works the presentation of death is crude and obvious, but non-the-less voyeuristically compulsive viewing.

These earlier ‘stunts’ by Hirst are brought into focus by the later more philosophical pieces. It seems that somewhere in the 1990s a preoccupation with death gave rise to one about hope, an idea which is an infinitely more interesting philosophical struggle.

The truly stunning works of art from the exhibition are the ones in which he arranges the wings of deceased butterflies to form ecclesiastical shapes of rose and gothic pointed windows. These are given titles like Faithless which seem ironic given the exceptional delight and hope which is inspired in the spectator. This is something extraordinarily beautiful emerging – essentially – from death. There is no light behind these pieces and yet, because of the iridescent qualities of the butterflies’ wings, they seem to radiate. Painstaking skill is apparent in the way in which these works are constructed, and the effect serves to highlight another major theme for Hirst: that of colour. This is present throughout his career, beginning in the spot paintings, but extending through his monochrome butterfly paintings and in his colour arrangements of medicinal drugs. The emphasis on colour in these hugely spiritual works suggests that colour itself is a religious idol for Hirst, in which hope and worship are concealed.

This idea is accented further with an abrupt change in the room following the butterfly ‘windows’ with Black Sun. This work comprises of a black disc, measuring about three metres in diameter, mounted on the wall which confronts the spectator as they enter the room. Our guide booklets inform us that this surface is thickly covered with corpses of black flies; it is of a bigger scale than the butterfly works, and blocks the hope and joy from the previous room with a complete and aggressive deadness.

The room is cleverly curated. The space is almost a perfect cube and therefore feels like a small corner room of a house where one might visit to pay final respects to a corpse. The wallpaper continues the theme from the previous room with pale blue butterfly wings arranged, making clear that this space also carries the intense religiosity of the previous room, while also providing a shocking juxtaposition with the work mounted on the wall. A black sheep in formaldehyde sits in the centre, a piece which could have been omitted in order to emphasise the idea of the black disc as some kind of religious icon. This small room contained hundreds of thousands of corpses, but what is really interesting is that the visitors to the exhibition tend to move through the room as quickly as they can, pausing only to express revulsion at the flies. I believe that so many of the pieces in this exhibition relate back to one of the original works, and here is my evidence. In the shark Hirst argued The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, and here – as the spectator is confronted with a black hole of death – we are unable, and therefore unwilling to engage with what so much death could mean.

In 1915, Kazimir Malevich believed he had achieved the full stop in art with The Black Square. This was a black canvas, which he exhibited across the corner of a room, which was the place in the house where the religious icons would hang. Black Sun alludes to this. It is undeniably an icon, blatantly religious, but an aggressive confrontation of death and hopelessness, and as such it is entirely black in a counterpart to the colour of the previous room; a representation of Hirst’s own despair.

Hirst’s work is not difficult to translate, but always there is an ambiguity. He claims that ‘In an artwork I always try to say something and deny it at the same time.’ This is what protects his art from becoming a clique, but in essence he uses universal vocabulary to communicate fears and hope which resonate with every creed and faith. He is almost a Universalist. He insists that his only faith is in art itself, but in the final room of this retrospective Hirst brings himself in line with anyone who has ever craved peace and hope. The final room positions another formaldehyde animal to confront the spectator, but this time it is unutterably beautiful, graceful and poignant. The Incomplete Truth presents a dove with her wings raised to the typical position of angels’ wings. The title provides the customary ambiguous edge to the work, but arguably it refers to the various symbols of the dove: does this piece present the Holy Spirit or secular peace? Both are expressions of ‘truth’, but both are incomplete in their understanding. Actually to the wider world a stationary dove in flight as a visual stimulus delineates another universal feeling. Behind the bird hangs a monochrome white spot painting and the whole spectacle proclaims a salvation; the dove is strong yet sensitive, she is regal in the space. Standing close to the tank and looking up through it, the formaldehyde ripples at the surface like life pulsating through the piece. This work is not about death.