DAMIEN Hirst’s newest exhibition, ‘The Death of God Towards a Better Understanding of Life Without God Aboard the Ship of Fools’, takes as its arena a magnificent building in the oldest part of Mexico City. The choice is apt. Such a building embodies the remains from the past that bind this country’s complex history – its blood-curdling romantic drama – to the celebration of the Dead. Mexico City resounds with the silent echoes of mourning and grisly resurrection.
Hirst is no stranger to death, and his ‘resurrections’ have become icons of debate around the values we in the West place on our respect for the Dead. Hirst in Mexico, one might say, was inevitable, a kind of fated encounter. Fate, in fact, is central to Mexico – its hybrid cultural fusion of native religion and Spanish Catholicism celebrating a close proximity with the spirits of the Dead that reminds one of pre-Christian Rome. But if Mexico accepts Death as irreversible, Hirst suspends us in a macabre spectacle of intermediate death, celebrating, if that’s the word, the quasi life drawn from Mary Shelley’s demented laboratory, one held in an indefinite suspension of time in glass vitrines filled with formaldehyde.
But Mexico, not surprisingly, is a paradox, and Death performs here in the parodic mode. What is remarkable about Hirst’s new work is that he has embraced this parody to the fullest, as though Mexico has provided him with a key to unlock the sterility of northern European secularism. And the result is a ghastly vaudeville, with animal corpses – flayed save for a few centimetres of skin around the tip of a nose for instance – playing out religious roles such as the crucifixion of Christ (In the Name of the Father, 2004-5 and God Knows Why, 2005) or a catholic priest in prayer: in Hail Mary Mother of Grace (2005) and Our Father Who Art in Heaven (2005), the sheeps’ hooves are bent back in a shocking perversion of their natural poise and forced into a travesty of prayer, reminiscent of Goya’s savage last paintings.
But Hirst is not Goya, and on entering the gallery courtyard one passes by a group of painted bronzes (The Hat Makes the Man, 2004-5) mimicking old wooden door frames, like cacti in the desert wearing urban hats or a three dimensional Magritte painting abandoned at the foot of the steps. And having ascended the long wide steps through the glass entrance doors, one is confronted in silent astonishment with that universal symbol of peace: a dove, suspended in mid flight in a formaldehyde vitrine above a human skull (The Inescapable Truth, 2005).
In this exhibition, the viewer is confronted by Hirst’s well crafted mechanisms that have been developed over the last two decades, and is maybe lulled into believing that the progression within his work has almost come to a grinding halt. On the contrary, shock is no longer the only dominant mechanism that hooks the viewer into engaging with the work. Hirst, at this stage of his career, is constantly rewriting the works through extensions (rosaries in the hands of dead praying sheep), amalgamations (uniting the earlier spin paintings with the objects series by placing human skulls in the middle of the spin), and connections between his various earlier series of works. The new work is finely tuned, executed with precision, and the vitrines are more sophisticated. Even the photorealistic paintings are more accomplished, understood, and notably contextualised within this recent body of work.
Again, Hirst’s occasional forays into the most forbidden aspects of sexuality (territory exploited tediously by innumerable artists) never celebrate the unification in sexuality, birth, love or life. Instead, death and separation always dominate. In Hirst’s Mother and Child Divided (1993), which won him the Turner prize in 1995, he presents the trauma of separation and division. In August of 1995, Two Fucking, Two Watching was to involve a dead cow and bull copulating by means of a hydraulic device, but the piece was to be left to rot away rather than be preserved in formaldehyde – it was never actually made because it was banned from exhibition in New York by public health officials. In the Mexico exhibition, The Sacred Heart of Jesus (2005) – a bull’s heart punctured with needles and scalpels in a glass vitrine – could hardly succeed as a valentine card, and in Adam and Eve Under the Table (2005), the skeletons of the bride and groom, surrounded by cigarette butts and empty bottles of alcohol, depict death rather than love and marriage and the beginning of life between man and woman.
Perhaps the reference to Goya, the court painter gone wrong, is appropriate for another reason. Hirst, after all, has for many – and perhaps for himself – arguably become a contemporary avant-gardist version of a court painter. The international art public has grown to expect Hirst, to assume him. It is impossible to avoid acknowledging him as an exceptionally important contemporary art figure, a celebrity in the mould of Andy Warhol in his successful incursion into every day life beyond the confines of the international art world, through advertising, marketing and the implementation of factory procedures (the numerous spot and spin paintings). Hirst has always used four out of the five traditional genres in art’s history: Sculpture, Painting, Drawing and Photography (he has yet to venture with conviction into film or video), but until now the question as to how these different disciplines aid and abet each other within his repertoire remained unanswered. There had been no clear interconnection between the different earlier series of paintings (spot, butterfly, spin and recent photorealist paintings) and the three dimensional works. Now the photorealist paintings and objects are clearly interrelated and informative of each other, and their relationship, along with the objectification of the spin paintings, is used succinctly to articulate the grammatical cadence of his most recent exhibition. But Hirst’s increasing dissatisfaction with this branded success is well known, and this exhibition clearly establishes that dissatisfaction in the register marked by Mexico’s particular fascination with extreme intervention, with existential pastiche. Hirst here offers a pastiche of his own history as it could only be discovered by a traveller in a strange land, one that is at the same time a masterfully autobiographical self-contained artwork, and a Gesamtkunstwerk that reads like an ethnographic observation, representation and reconstruction of a terrain that is both his own, and never could be.
This is a remarkably refreshing exhibition that manages to concisely profile Hirst’s entire career. Cynics may wonder whether this is another marketing strategy, or some middle-aged, born-again interest in religion or ‘absolute truth’. But what is important is that this artist, Damien Hirst, has the uncanny ability not only to continuously extend his repertoire, but also to critically reappraise his creative process. To appreciate the power of this work it is not Damien Hirst we must consider, it is the artist that wants to be Damien Hirst whom we must respect, the artist that came to Mexico to place a rosary in the hands of a sheep at prayer.
TORIE BEGG IS AN ARTIST LIVING AND WORKING IN LONDON, PANAMA AND FRANCE