After four years in the wilderness, Damien Hirst, the hooligan genius of the art world, is back
Gordon Burn
Four years ago, for his last major show, at the Gagosian Gallery in New York, Damien Hirst made a piece featuring a giant beach ball bobbling on a column of air.
The ball was multicoloured and the box around the air supply was also brightly painted and carnivalesque. It was a sculpture that suggested playfulness and buoyancy and barmy insouciance and all the things that people already associated with Hirst. He was the recognised ringleader and alpha talent of the most startling artistic development in Britain in what we must now call the last century.
Now he has produced an uncomfortable new piece which relates to his earlier works the way the fresh-faced young friend from one’s youth relates to the stranger with the frail, wintering, chemotherapy look, passed unexpectedly in the street. All the colour has been leached out and the optimism has been replaced by what seems to be an overt acknowledgement of ominousness and even dread.
The beach ball in The History of Pain is white – ectoplasmically white and precarious; the top of the box above which the ball is suspended is pierced by several dozen rasped and hungry Sabatier knives. The briefest choking of the air supply and the ball will be punctured and instantly shredded. The fragility of existence has been Hirst’s big theme from the beginning. The action of the world on things. It’s why he puts things behind glass, and in formaldehyde in big steel and glass cases: to hold off the inevitable decay and corruption; as part of a futile effort to preserve them.
A friend misheard The History of Pain as The History of Fame and went on referring to it by this title. Which gave Hirst the idea of tweaking the original sculpture into a second version. The cloned work will be identical in every detail: same bubble-like inflated ball, same fierce long knives. The only difference is that The History of Fame will have an audience track – rumbles of anticipation when the ball drops close to the knives and appears to be in danger of bursting; groans of disappointment when it floats clear of the daggers and the carvers.
The period of neglect for an avant-garde artist has shrunk for each successive generation of artists in the past 100 years. It is no longer possible – or it seems no longer possible – for an important avant-garde artist to go unrecognised. And artists are no fun once they have been discovered.
Having soared so high, so fast, and having struggled with what he calls “a difficulty with art” for the past four years, Hirst knows he has arrived at a crucial point in his life and his career. He says that if his adventures in the catering trade and his other excursions have taught him anything, it is that if he’s not an artist, he’s nothing. But he believes he has been hearing the grinding of knives for some time now.
“The art world’s very shallow,” he says. “The art world lets you down. It’s very shallow and very small and it’s very easy to get to the top of it. And then you burst through the top of it and you’ve got no idea where the fuck to go. You know, they’ve all been waiting for me to die.
“Now they’re all phoning up. I’ve got so many people on my back trying to get me to make things, pushing in the wrong direction. It’s a constant effort telling people to just go away. I mean, everyone’s your friend.”
We arrived at his studio at a time when Damien is often just falling into bed. There is a new piece called Looking Forward to the Total and Absolute Suppression of Pain, in which four TV monitors simultaneously and at ear- splitting volume play four different commercials for Nurofen, Solpadeine and other headache tablets.
It’s a vast building. There’s a conference room and a dining room, a gallery and a kitchen with a walk-in freezer. Inside, when the lights did finally come on, the immediate impression was of menace. There were (real) skeletons and blood; (prosthetic) human body parts arranged on shelves and bagged in binliners; surgical instruments and corpses. And towering above it all, the sculpture that Hirst refers to as “the big guy” – a 6m, 10-ton bronze cast of an anatomical children’s toy that Charles Saatchi was four days away from buying for o1-million to add to his collection. The whole of it the fruits of two years’ labour and a million-plus dollars.
Over the past 50 years the vocabulary of art has expanded towards the inclusion of everything. Everything seen in a certain way becomes art, is art.
Children’s plastic toys and cheap domestic detritus are scattered through Hirst’s new work. It was seeing his son Connor, who’s five, playing with the figure from Humbrol’s Young Scientist series that made him decide to cast it in bronze. “I might even get sued for it. I expect it. Because I copied it so directly … I wouldn’t have done it with a teaching hospital one. This is much happier, friendlier, and more colourful and bright. Like plastic! The paint on it’s like skin. It’ll decay. I liked it for that reason. Eventually what you’ll be left with is the paint hanging off and this big, fucking grand iconic sculpture.”
At home in Devon he has a fish tank with fish in it swimming around in rubbish. One fish is from the village pet shop, the other’s from the fair, and they share their tank with a pair of false teeth, a model shark, and an old beer bottle. “It’s like the bottom of a beck [a stream]. All trash in it.”
In his studio near Stroud he had two fish tanks, each room-size and each with a gynaecologist’s examination couch in it, which must rank among the best – certainly among the most mysterious – things he has made. Lost Love and Love Lost are two complete gynaecologist’s offices underwater. In one, hundreds of jewel-like African river fish swim around the forceps and past the coat-stand and through the stirrups of the couch. The fish in the other are big, black carp that have already started to impose themselves on their surroundings. In time, everything – the adjustable stool, the white examination coat, the advanced technology – will be coated with green algae.
These are clearly works that cry out for prolonged critical analysis and deep psychoanalytical investigation. “If you’ve got a gynaecologist’s office underwater with fish swimming about,” he says, “then there’s something fishy going on. An’ fishy fannies come straight after that. I think. In the logic of it.
“I quite like the idea that the doctor’s had to take his watch and his rings off [they are part of the furniture of Love Lost], so that you get the doctor’s personality into the hand that’s going to finger about with you down there. The woman’s got her shoes on the floor, and there’s the coat and the handbag. So there’s a hugely sexual element to it. An’ women smell of kippers.”
Hirst once said: “I find myself becoming more and more yobbish when I expected to become more intellectual.” He has always drunk and drugged. But he has also always been a ham.
“It’s about expectation,” he says. “It’s theatre. It’s about raising expectations and lowering expectations. I’ve always done that. Regularly, when I used to go to openings, I used to go in looking like a tramp. Then I’d go in in a suit, then I’d go in like a tramp … So people would just be going, ‘Damien’s losing it, oh wow, he’s really on top of it, omigod, he’s losing it, no he’s on top of it …’ And they never know where the fuck they are.”
Hirst has always been able to charm his way out of things that would get other men done over or put away. The hooligan genius of recent Soho legend seemed, through his innate taste and acute intelligence, to be incapable of putting a foot wrong. Sometime during the making of this current work, though, a subtle shift occurred.
He was banned from the Groucho Club after complaints from members. He dropped his trousers in the bar of his hotel in Dublin last month, where he was directing a Samuel Beckett play for television, and a female guest is persisting with her threat to sue after he inserted a chicken bone in the end of his penis. More recently, Norman Rosenthal, the exhibitions secretary of the Royal Academy, arrived at the Colony Room in Soho and found Damien trouserless at the piano.
‘So what’s new! Will you tell me when I
haven’t done that?” he says. And then: “I think I’ve spread myself so thin. I was just drinking too much to be concentrating hard … overnight I turned into a babbling wreck. It was completely overnight.
“I’ve spoken to Maia [his partner] about it. It happened like that … I started to blow gaskets and pop rivets. I mean, it’s been incredibly hard work not doing anything for four years, in terms of the art world. And I haven’t done anything for four years because until now I’ve not felt it was any good. There’s a kind of hunger. Well, you just have to starve people. You have to convince yourself that the art world’s not going to go away if you go away.”
Since his last major gallery show, he has concentrated his energies in the commercial arena. He went into partnership with Marco Pierre White at Quo Vadis in 1996; then he opened Pharmacy, a restaurant, with Matthew Freud and others at the beginning of 1998. He believes now that maybe the restaurants were more effort than he admitted. “It just wasn’t art at the end of the day.
“Doing Pharmacy made me realise why you’re not allowed to touch art – why it says, ‘Do not touch’ in art galleries.”
A Hirst joke. Question: “What’s the biggest thing you’ve ever killed?” Answer: “My career.”
He says this is the clue to the lipsticked inscription “Stop me B4 I kill again” in the brilliant binbag sculpture. “I thought it was quite funny to have that, as a kind of cry to the public … It comes from The Shining, where he writes ‘Redrum’ on the mirror.
“And in The Exorcist when she’s possessed and it’s inside her, she writes on her chest ‘Help me’ from the inside. Like trying to get out of your predicament. I said the other day to Maia that I feel a bit like I don’t want to be Damien Hirst, and it’s too late to do anything about it. I don’t like being ‘Damien Hirst’, I’ve decided. But you can’t avoid it. So I think on the next mirror I’ll write, ‘Help me.'”
Pause. Switch to camp delivery. “I’m just trying to make the best of a bad job, really.” Prolonged laughter.