William Feaver : Style
News of construction gangs working on a Damien Hirst pop-up book has been joshing around in the art world for some time. Paper sharks leaping off the page have been rumoured. Sniffer footnotes. Paint sachets and spinning-tops. Would there be blister packs of meaningful pharmaceuticals?
The specifications (334 pages, over 700 illustrations in full colour, seven pop- ups, novelties and 14 special features) were an admission of compromise. Yet, after a rather worried introduction, the book delivers. It soon catches up with its title I Want to Spend the Rest of My Life Everywhere, with Everyone, One to One, Always, Forever, Now and gets to startle.
The title may sound like the upsurge from an Oasis encore but theres calculation behind it. Always, Forever, Now, in Hirst reality, means going into details. Shots of a slit throat and gunshot wounds, to be precise.
A study of a bottle of Harveys Choicest Old Pale Sherry, done in 1978, when he was 13, heads a section in which Hirst shows that he was no loss to painting in the conventional sense.
Pull the tab on page 247 and the spots change colour. Hirst runs words and images together like web-site tailbacks. Follow his quips and pretty soon you get to realise that paradoxes laced with rhyming slang can serve as a philosophy of life. Lifes a remix.
Hirst loves an extrapolation. His sayings are not exactly meant to be taken neat. Thus a hammer and peach is The problems with relationships: True or False? Another is The cow is the most slaughtered animal ever. Where does that leave sheep? The double-spreads have the glamour associated with Calvin Klein ads, visual shocks overlaid with sharp quotes. The look is nicely handled. Pull the tab on page 295 and a sad, formaldehyded lamb disappears behind black ink. This commemorates the celebrated spoiling of Away from the Flock at the Serpentine Gallery by another artist.
The originality of Damien Hirst rests on his attachment to the one Big Idea: Life is. Death just isnt. That and the transmigration of function. If paintings can be sculpture, then sculpture can be a monograph.
Given stickers and transparent panels, tipped-in reproductions and a 3-D Judas, its unreasonable to complain about lack of organic inserts. A real squashed Chinese fly in the endpapers would have been nice, though not, perhaps, in keeping with the Damien hirst startle-plan.