In the 1990s the term of conceptual art has become increasingly linked with the idea of the far out or crazy where outrage and scandal was being a strong artistic expression and a certain way to get the attention of the media. This new phenomena worked perfectly with Damien Hirst the most provocative known of the 1990s in the group Young British Artists, who had the habit to cutting up animals displaying them in formaldehyde, an ingenious conflation of the readymade with the memento mori.
“Art’s about life and it can’t really be anything else. There isn’t anything else.”In his whole career, Damien Hirst, born in 1965, is almost always dealing with life and death and he came to it in a way after the works of Francis Bacon and Andy Warhol, his two major heroes. He approached his first works prominently inspired by their works, Bacon dealing with man as flesh and meat, Warhol dealing with logo like of sharp punchy elements. Hirst manages to combine the two together and constructs a whole philosophy around the dichotomy of life and death face to face.
Even in his very early years, the artist opened his own career with the confrontation of life and death with the photograph
With Dead Head realised in 1981 while Hirst, only sixteen at this time, poses with a severed head at the morgue in Leeds where he was studying microbiology. In fact, it was the study of this special branch of biology dealing with function and structure of microscopic organisms that brought him to the science and study of diseases and death. This photograph is one of the most iconic images of the artist ever taken, it was surely rejected by a wide range of people and critics, and nevertheless it was the best way to a confrontation between life and death. This photograph reveals the future fascination of the artist for corpses and his idea of how they can be both visually horrific and beautiful at the same time.
With
Forms without Life Hirst arranges a selection of ornate shells purchased in Thailand inside a cabinet creating an installation which resembles a museum display case and presents a reference to the nineteenth-century tradition of collecting natural specimens. Thus, in this work Hirst alludes the certain rejection by conceptual artists of his generation of museum’s system by evocating the idea of death in a totally different way. Indeed, the work is not a simply allusion to the collecting system of museum but rather the idea that by collecting these items, by removing them from their natural habitat simultaneously provokes their death. Such an approach is comparable with the concept of killing them to preserve them.
One of the first time he developed the idea of disease went in 1992 with his
Pharmacy, a room-sized installation representing a pharmacy initially shown at the Cohen gallery in New York. It contains four glass apothecary bottles filled with coloured liquids representing the four elements: earth, air, fire and water, which seems to remain ancient practices of treating the body. The counter fronts three desks, covered with an array of office equipment and stationery, and three chairs.
As Hirst himself said
“I've always seen medicine cabinets as bodies”, all those pharmacy packages which are for the living used as a bareer toward death, represent in a way the whole body (as some are classified on the shelves according to their function on the body) facing and unifying itself at the same time with death. Once again, Pharmacy is connecting the idea of the museum or gallery space with the laboratory or hospital both domains providing a belief system which is sometime illusory. This work could be seen as a representation of the multiple range of philosophy where, like medicine, art bring us to think that life or death are eternally doomed to failure.
Five years later, Hisrt created a restaurant in Nothing Hill, London in association with Matthew Freud, keeping this idea of a pharmacy-like place, he called it
Pharmacy. The windows displayed pillboxes and packets of haemorrhoid cream, the bar stools were shaped like aspirins; there was also a molecular structure of Hirst's DNA. The restaurant closed in September 2003 as the Royal Pharmaceutical society of Great Britain claimed that the place could confused people looking for a real pharmacy and it was auctionned to Sotheby's.
Obviously, the career of the artist was closely linked with the collector Charles Saatchi who offered him in 1991 to fund whatever artwork he wanted to make. The result was showcased in 1992 in the first
Young British artists exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery in North London . There hirst exposed
The physical impossibility of Death in the mind of someone living, a shark in formal dehyde in a vitrine which became the iconic work of the artist, a symbol of british art worldwide and a nomination for that year's Turner Prize.
The work took part of his "natural history" pieces featuring dead animals floating in vitrines full of formaldehyde. As the shark looks alive but is dead preserved completelly intact in formaldehyde (which is its principal function), Hirst completelly entered in his increasing reference to life and death. Both are violently exposed to the audience facing them, as the glass tank is both a window and barrier, both seducing and horrifying the viewer. Best known for this piece and
mother and child divided (1993), his work recast here again fundamental questions concerning the meaning of life and the fragility of biological existence.
Mother and child divided could be placed in one of his most controversial work comprising four glass-walled tanks containing the two halves of a cow and a calf bisected and preserved again in formaldehyde with sufficient space between each pair that a visitor can walk between them and view the inside of the animals. This work was created for the Venice Biennale of 1993 and was the focal point and winner of 1995 Turner Prize.
The aesthetic of Hirst's tank became his most famous signature, he commented himself that the vitrines:
" first came from a fear of everything in life being so fragile’ and wanting ‘to make a sculpture where the fragility was encased. Where it exists in its own space. The sculpture is spatially contained." Central to these work is the preservation in the face of death, which is approached ironically when whatever we do to protect bodies they will desintegrate and die. And here, instead of representing the sanctified unity of the mother and child, he celebrates them only separated from one another.
Hirst continued to use his animals in tanks as a metaphor to religion with
Away from the flock, created in 1994, another natural history works, featuring a sheep floating in formaldehyde. Again, the lamb looks alive but is dead, but Hirst enters into a new level of thinking when it references the religious theme of the lamb of God. This strong christian connotation joins the theme of life and death and the idea of believing. When before he was controversing the way that people believe in medicine and not art, he does here the same with religion when it is also a way to barrier and rule devoting life and death. Whilst it was exposed at the Serpentine gallery in London a visitor poured black into the tank and retitled the work Black sheep.
Religion is also explored further away in the large tryptich work
Trinity - Pharmacology, Physiology, Pathology in which Hirst joined together medicine and religion as one can replace the other as a tool barrier on death and a way to prolongating the faith in life.
Then, entering in the years 2000, Hirst add a human-death presence in his concept with the work
Hymn, a polychrome bronze sculpture revealing the anatomical musculature and internal organs of the human body on a monumental scale. Something which atteined its climax four years later with Virgin mother, a huge sculpture representing the internal and external anatomy of a pregnant woman. As he made the same with animals here visitors can see both external and inside of the women figure and the foetus she is holding in her womb. No clues are given to her living status as we may think that she is dead. With this work, closing in a way the series of bisected features, Hirst claims that we can learn more about living bodies by studying dead bodies something from what he was accused of plagiarism by an educationnal brand of toys.
Here is one of the climax that the artist atteined throught the development of his works and philosophy from the 1990s to the present day.
The british artist is also renowed for his paintings including his Butterfly paintings, as for instance the large diptych
Monument to the living and dead (2006) using butterflies as a metaphor for mortality and traditionnal symbols of the soul. That is how in 1991, he filled a London gallery with hundreds of live tropical butterflies, some of them growing from chrysalises on monochrome canvasses hung on the wall.
In 2007 came his most provocative work calle
for the love of god, a life-sized platinum cast of a human skull covered entirely by set diamonds, something without any precedent in art history.
The work is clearly a traditional
memento mori, where an image or object serves to remind us of our mortality, as if he unveiled the skull of his severed head of 1981 and covered it by diamonds. The anecdote about the idea which came into his head is a response to his mother who told him
"for the love of god, what are you gonna do next time?". It resulted the priciest work of a living artist.
“I remember thinking it would be great to do a diamond one — but just prohibitively expensive,” he recalls.
“Then I started to think — maybe that’s why it is a good thing to do. Death is such a heavy subject, it would be good to make something that laughed in the face of it.”Here Hirst reach the idea of death in a more ironical way, compared to the sadness of vanitas scene, the diamond skull is glory itself, as the death's victory over life.
Obviously, as there is no work of art made by Damien Hirst which is not directly or undirectly related to Death and Life, he developed a whole phylosophy on the subject throught is entire career and continues it on the present day. When his materiality and the prices of his pieces could be in opposition to certain conceptual ideas, his approach to the realisation of a work of art is clearly conceptual.
"Art goes in your head, it comes from everywhere. It's our response to your surroundings" he said, an art which gives priority to the idea, delivering a powerfull message and challenging the tradition of the work of art.
