From Ping-Pong to Painting

Damien Hirst: Five Years Later

What could sound worse than a facile, fashionable lightweight who becomes a museum fixture? How about the same artist who cannot help insisting on matters of life and death?

Damien Hirst has worked as a painter and a parody of a painter, with deliberately dull abstractions churned out at parties. He has worked as the prototypical Young British Artist who just happens to serve up obvious retreads of American shock art from many years before. He has aspired to turn the gallery into a natural-history museum and parodied his own art as trash. And all along, he has considered this a deadly serious commentary on what happens when art enters the world and the museum. He means to mix the postmodern questioning of the museum's space outside of time with an old-time, academic focus on "subject matter."

Could he function simply as the ultimate British establishment figure after all, with a mix of style and literary pretensions going back at least to Thomas Gainsborough? Consider the same artist five years apart. In one exhibition, he re-opens a huge Chelsea gallery with half a dozen rooms of fish tanks and Ping-Pong balls. Five years later, he returns to painting, as a commentary on society and mortality. Which stands for Damien Hirst? One may not be able to tell them apart after all.

The doctor is really in

Hirst has always played with the very idea of raw art while wallowing in Britain's traditions of high seriousness quite as much as a paradoxical conservative in new media like Tacita Dean. As one entered Gagosian's fashionable new Chelsea space for his 2000 exhibition, one saw a huge anatomical model—male, of course—called Hymn. Hey, man, get it?? If the nudge sounds silly, that, no doubt, is the point. Hirst loves playing games about art-world games. When, a few years later, he may have had his own London exhibition taken out with the trash, convincing the press that the janitor had made a mistake, had he added to one's cynicism about art—or merely about him?

The rest of the show makes the artist into a member of the medical profession, like a bad parody of art therapy. Pills, knives, dead bodies on stretchers, skeletons—Hirst surrounds them all with the detritus of long days and nights, from newspapers and cigarettes to, all to often, his signature vitrines. A balloon floats precariously over surgical knives. Elsewhere, the magic trick of air suspension gives a skeleton Ping-Pong balls as moving eyes. Still elsewhere, one could stare at nothing more than two vitrines of those balls scattering in the moving air.

Hirst makes a doctor's daily dealing with death a part of the carnival—the same art-world carnival that delights and disturbs in the hands of others from Yoko Ono and Nam-June Paik to Pipilotti Rist. In the same breath, he tosses off associations with eighteenth- or nineteenth-century cabinets of wonders, the movies' cabinets of horror, the banal domesticity of fish tanks, and the pious glass cases of contemporary art museums. Vitrines also recall his own dead cows, as if the circus animals have deserted him, leaving behind only the fame. He piles metaphor upon metaphor for the ways one tunes out the terror in day-to-day life. He evokes the artist, peeling back layers and piling on cow dung to get ever more raw, all the while caught up in the entertainment business.

For some, art keeps alive the comforts of the active imagination and a place to call home. For others, it means the rawness of discovery. Paradoxically, Hirst confront viewers with their numbness and yet insists on inducing it. Gallery-goers crouch in long contemplation of the Ping-Pong balls, as if no sense of meaning or fresh experience could tear them away. I stumbled into the party exhausted and sweaty from a jog by the Chelsea Piers, the perfect yuppie but without the cash, and I fit right in.

I know no artist more glib. I know few with more stupid throwaways than his paintings based on color charts and color wheels.

Hirst has one saving virtue: I know few, too, so conscious of how the art's weakness annoys me—and so prepared intellectually to incorporate it into the work. I want something less smug than that, too, but can he maintain at least that sensible start? Look again five years after the carnival, and step into legitimate theater. Unfortunately, Hirst himself gets to treat it as high tragedy.

Swallowing the pill

For some hard-core fans, Hirst's most impressive new work comes in a long back room, at Gagosian once again for 2005. Over several panels, a woman deteriorates before one's eyes, from reasonably pretty to haggard to seemingly close to death. The ambition of a work over several frames certainly contributes to its impression. So does the harrowing theme, reportedly a portrait of cocaine abuse, and, conversely, the comforting high ground of its moral. So does perhaps the biggest shock of all: Hirst is painting again.

No, really painting this time, give or take a passel of uncredited assistants. Of course, he has turned out canvases before, hundreds of them, like the pair in the UBS collection concurrently at the Modern. Formerly, however, he let abstraction take care of itself, less as process painting for the masses, like graffiti for Rudolf Stingel, than as an artifact of a highly exclusive party. Friends laid their colored dot down for him or helped spin out splashy circles. Now he has taken on English painting's sacred ground, realism. My English friends would be appalled.

It sounds more of a change than it is. For one thing, as the UBS context suggests, he was always aiming for ubiquity, if not eternity. One can think of his midlife crisis in paint as one more play for artistic status, right up there with recent installations such as Mortuary, which offered up its own pretend chills. For another, Hirst's casual but more or less competent realism reflects the same calibrated mix of cavalier, shocking, and terribly well intentioned. (Do say terribly with the right accent.) Like the preserved specimens that made him famous, they get under one's skin quickly, risk boring one soon after, and then earn respect or, more likely, consternation as one realizes that he means ever so seriously to grapple with mortality.

Here, too, one feels first the cheap thrill and a genuine physical revulsion, before still less fortunate feelings intrude. Images include medicine cabinets, chilly hospital settings, and needles under the skin. I suspect he intends the ambiguity, in what could represent either controlled substances or ordinary medical practices, to evoke the shock of transgression and the dread viewers may feel confronted with their likely future. Along with the usual games with the status of art, Hirst also remains a recycler of 1980s' Neo-Pop, even if it recycled Warhol and others who themselves recycled Dada, which in turn would happily have appropriated the Young British Artists given the chance. Only this time Hirst is recycling Eric Fischl instead of Jeff Koons. He must love that his show hangs almost adjacent to Mary Boone's gallery—and that Boone happened to be exhibiting Fischl.

As usual, Hirst's shocks quickly become trite and trivial, his serious aims approach the stale or pretentious, and his ambiguity come near to meaning nothing much at all. Perhaps the woman does bring home the effects of cocaine, but you knew all about that, probably when it reached epidemic proportions way back in Koons's heyday. Besides, one had a whole show about the East Village this winter to think it over. In reality, however, you must take the gallery's word for what the work shows, especially given Hirst's limited skills as a realist. The panels might represent different women, or they might represent pretty much any generic ailment. I prefer to think of it as Lucian Freud disease.

It does not help for me that representing his own medical imagery on canvas cannot by itself add a layer of self-reflection. It does not help either that Hirst brings his serious concern not just to a truly silly statue—at the Lever House in midtown—of a pregnant girl, her innards exposed to anyone in need of another anatomy lesson—but to prose as well. As for his poetry, on sale at the desk, it offers duly ponderous pronouncements about "withering . . . truth." Hmm. I bet the neat rows of colored pills allude to those dot paintings after all.

jhaber@haberarts.com

Damien Hirst filled the Gagosian downtown space through December 16, 2000, and again through April 16, 2005.