Timespotting: Damien Hirst’s Finite Jest. by Tom McGlynn
Damien Hirst : The Complete Spot Paintings 1986-2011 , opening at multiple Gagosian galleries worldwide January 12, 2012.
As much as I wouldn't like being an art “handler”, Damien Hirst’s multiple simultaneous arrivals at Gagosian galleries worldwide could do with some unpacking. As his “Spot” paintings sat on the gallery floor in Gagosian’s West 24th St. location yesterday, ready for installation along with similar works in 10 other locales from London to Athens to Hong Kong, the phenomenological reality of Hirst’s grand gesture was brought home to me. In this as well as the other spaces, these large hand- made objects would be fixed in a specific time and place against the asymmetry of random experience. With his technical orchestration, Hirst minimalizes rational chance by maximalizing a kind of irrational uniformity. Like the form of the paintings, which are fixed symmetric grids of contrapuntal multicolored spots, a tension is felt between this controlled experiment and random life. His is a subverted Newtonian physics. The apple falls predictably straight down, dappled sun is sieved through a prism to reveal its constituent color wavelengths, but all of it happens in freeze frame.
“Anyone looking around for a simulated icon of the deity in Newtonian guise might well be disappointed” McLuan from The Medium is the Massage.
Was it Stalin who was purported to have made up exact replicas of the same room across Soviet Russia so that wherever he happened to be traveling a sameness of mis- en -scene was established? It’s not too difficult to figure out why a controlling despot would want to maintain the illusion of stopping time. But why does Hirst want to? I don’t think it’s a Dorian Gray scenario. Despite his grandiose artistic ambition I’ve never viewed Hirst as a strictly old school narcissist.
But getting back to the Age of Enlightenment, I’ve always seen Hirst’s projects as conceived under an empirical lens. The late 18th and early 19th century theatricality of his prior installations from the shark tank to the vitrines filled with vivisected bovines and clinical displays of pharmaceuticals smack of the curiosity cabinets and studies of learned amateurs. The casts of Enlightenment men were basically alchemists morphing into men of modern science, amateurs in the sense that we would see them in relation to the professional research class we presently maintain. In retrospect there’s a bit of an endearingly awkward, home- made quality to their experiments and models left behind. It is this pathos, of the innocence of old- fashioned empirical investigation, which imbues a lot of Hirst’s work .
With regards his place in contemporary art I would say Hirst is a reactionary against progressive Modernism in the sense that Picasso was also a reactionary against it. While Picasso may have wanted to re- enchant modern painting with a primitive animus by appropriating African artifacts from an anthropological museum, Hirst virtually loots the curious cabinets in studies and libraries of 18th and 19th century manor houses. Both artists have felt compelled to slow down, stop, or even reverse time in order to avoid the searching clinical light of what Baudelaire once referred to as the “gloomy beacon” of the New.
All of this is relevant to what I would call his present jest-ture of presenting a series of symmetrically conceived paintings in a simultaneous environment. In these shows Hirst’s latest conceptual cartwheel (remembering those notorious spin- art paintings) retains the model of the projection of empirical belief while capitulating to the failure of it promise.
That’s him, the professional amateur, in the spotlight, losing his religion.With Hirst's career you get the sense that he's just trying to keep up a competition that has already run its course. He represents a brand of the institutionally condoned avant-garde, which, by a strict definition of that word, isn’t transgressive at all. There was some poetry in his early work but this recent tactic is a mirroring of a desperate market. He's more of a professional apostate for a religion established by the money changers kicked out of the temple of high modernism. Hirst’s bad faith is augmented by some of the changing social realities of contemporary life and is probably the most interesting aspect of his work in general. The fearful symmetry of his Spot paintings installed in multiple locales worldwide is not the kind that illuminates the tangled network jungles of the post- modern night. Instead it creates a network overlay that functions as an amusing but purely technical representation, like the automata that delighted the pre- revolutionary courts of Europe. His punch card pathos slots too neatly into the crystalline structures of virtual social space that have come to dominate our current cultural and political reality. Our present- everyday- now is far from being physically possible but nevertheless makes claims upon our old- fashioned, empirical reason. In this wide world Hirst could be our most accurate representational artist.
Enter, stage left, a true post- modernist, Guy Debord of the Situationist International, who had some very timely advice of his own to offer, in his day, about cultural spectacle. Here he delineates the function of what he calls “the recuperator” which I think is an apt coda to this essay.
“ Time scares him because it is made up of qualitative leaps, irreversible choices and once in a lifetime opportunities. The (recuperator) disguises time to himself as a mere uniform space through which he will pick his way, going from one mistake to another, one failing to the next, growing richer.” Debord from The Real Split in the International.
Tom McGlynn copyright 2012
