The Mail accused him of “making barbarians of us all”. Charles Saatchi described him as “a genius”. Fellow artist Michael Craig Martin explained, “he wants to be king of the world”.
It could only be Damien Hirst, artist, entrepreneur and controversialist. He’s recently brought his New Religion exhibition, first shown in 2005, to new east London gallery Wallspace. The gallery is housed in a converted church, which is either a fitting venue for Hirst’s meditations on belief and death, or yet another example of his heavy-handed, unsubtle approach. What you believe depends on which side of the Great Hirst Divide you are on.
Hirst has traditionally been known more for his audacity than his art. He’s been causing admiration and consternation in equal measure since his ground-breaking 1988 exhibition, Freeze, which caught the attention of art grandees Charles Saatchi and Nicolas Serota. He was a second-year university student at the time. Stories of Hirst’s fabulous capacity for drink and drugs and his disregard for the art establishment are handed down like legends, often overshadowing his extraordinary career. A quick CV recap: Hirst has sold an artwork for 12 million dollars (the highest sum ever paid for a work by a living artist), created a simple colour design to help orient the Beagle 2 robot that landed on Mars, had two hit singles, directed a music video, written books, launched a pharmaceutical-themed restaurant in Notting Hill… His exploits have made him a very rich man, who buys art as well as making it and winters in Acapulco with his wife and children. It’s an unconventional rags-to-riches tale that has earned the artist a combination of bouquets and brickbats.
Hirst’s public image is almost that of a snake oil salesman, a symbol of everything that’s difficult and silly about modern art. Since the beginning of his career, he’s been accused of a lack of seriousness – he’s a showman with his eye on the bottom line, say his detractors, more concerned with spectacle than art. But New Religion is characterised by a disarming sincerity that teeters on the brink of naivety. With each new work he seems freshly outraged by things that most of us simply accept: death, the ludicrous claims made by religion, physical fragility. Rather than read Hirst as a cynical charlatan, it’s possible to see him as waging war against cynical charlatans everywhere. He’s been repeatedly accused of lacking subtlety, but bombast is a crucial part of his work. New Religion’s blood and guts, skulls and pills, like the famous shark-in-a-tank, simply shout, “Come on people! We’re all going to die one day!” and then sit back to watch the reaction. Hirst’s preoccupations are not uncommon – think of Sam Taylor Wood’s Still Life (2001), a four-minute video in which a fruit bowl slowly rots in speeded-up, cinematic time – but the brashness and provocation with which he embraces them demand a far more visceral response. No wonder he’s both loved and hated.
Predictably, the New Religion exhibition has already caused a bit of routine, humdrum controversy, with Christian groups expressing dismay over Hirst’s choice of venue and his borrowing of Christian iconography. Justin Thacker of the Evangelical Alliance recently commented, “You could be offended at seeing a great symbolic event in Christianity reduced to a headache pill… although both pharmaceuticals and Christianity provide relief from physical or emotional pain.” It’s a very mild rebuke, indicating perhaps that Hirst’s ideas aren’t as ground-breaking as he might think. He’s described the pieces in New Religion as interrogating the idea of belief – do you set spiritual store by religion, or art, or medicine? – and exploring the conflicts and intersections between religion and science. But in a world where Creationists battle it out against stem cell advocates and Richard Dawkins’ furious polemics against religion are aired on prime time TV, surely there’s more to say about religion and science than can be usefully explored in a piece comparing the Eucharist to a painkiller?
Perhaps the public’s mixed feelings about Hirst reflect Britain’s confused ideas and class and success. Hirst cultivates the swagger of a self-made man, a hard-done-by working-class boy made good. Much of the art establishment is essentially genteel: it’s an old money business, conducted by the rich in prestigious institutions. The Young British Artist movement of the 1990s, of which Hirst remains emblematic, took on the relationship between art and money head-on. Hirst is famously unapologetic about his business acumen. In an interview with Gordon Burn, Hirst reflected on the artist’s role as “a conduit from art to money”, concluding, “If money becomes king, then it just does. But there’s a point where you’ve got to take it on. I’m not afraid of that.” He has made it his job to make his audience confront unpleasant truths. Death and pain exist, and artists, far from being pure, untainted aesthetes, are just as involved in commerce and money as anyone else.
Although Hirst and his art can seem so deliberately upfront and confrontational, he remains apparently ill at ease with this image of himself. With an odd poignancy, he told Burn, “I don’t want to affect the world that directly. I want to affect the world obliquely. I want to be on the wall for 200 years, rather than in your face for five minutes.” The fact is, as Hirst’s monuments to mortality point out, none of us will ever know whether or not he gets his wish.
New Religion is at Wallspace, All Hallows on the Wall Church, from 7 March till 4 April 2007
