REVIEW: Damien Hirst at the Tate Modern

Last month saw the opening of Damien Hirst’s retrospective exhibition at the Tate Modern, displaying some of his most notorious works. 

Among them, selections of his spot paintings, medicine cabinets, and of course the product of his innovative use of formaldehyde: The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, 1991, the legendary ‘shark in a tank’ which in the public mind has come to epitomize Hirst’s work. His notoriety for shock art and astronomical prices (For the love of God, a diamond encrusted human skull ostensibly sold for £50m) will no doubt make the Tate’s blockbuster exhibition a sell-out with the British public, but even so it appears that the tide of critical opinion in the art world is turning against Hirst.

Critics seem to have become jaded by Hirst’s work over the last few years, and the show has attracted a mixed reception. Craig Raine writes in the New Statesman that ‘there are only two remarkable works in this Damien Hirst retrospective’. The problem is Hirst appears to have developed a formula for producing work that will sell for extortionate amounts of money to the Charles Saatchi’s of the world.

Get yourself an animal, any animal (preferably dead). Then find some original way of preserving and exhibiting its decomposing carcass which complies with the health and safety regulations of the gallery environment (bonus points if the gallery visitor can watch the animal or insect in question suffering its demise). Finally, give the whole thing a pretentious, ironic title, possibly making reference to a classic pop song, well-known biblical iconography (because you like, totally have something profound to say about religion), or a historical tit-bit. Also try to create some general allusion to the theme of death (so that people think you’re deep duh).

It does seem that Hirst relies on word-play and visual jokes to sell his work. Crematorium, 1996, is an example of Hirst’s poorer pieces; consisting of an oversized white ashtray filled with burnt cigarettes, ash, and empty cigarette packets, it seems to have been made in the sloppy, impetuous spirit of ‘Oh God, they want more art? Here, give them this.’ The exhibition handout describes Crematorium as ‘a contemporary memento mori, a reminder of the inevitability of death’ but it feels more like a condescending slap in the face (dude, cigarettes are like, really bad for you).

However, despite the occasional stomach-churning gore (silver cabinets containing unpleasant, Victorian-looking medical equipment and a cow’s rotting head both feature in the exhibition) and the clinical repetition and presentation that is Hirst’s trademark, a delicate kind of poetry shines through. The installation In and Out of Love is perhaps the most appealing and child-friendly of Hirst’s musings on life and death. In this room, the walls are hung with plain canvases out of which hatch live butterflies that flutter about the room, feeding on potted plants and fresh fruit laid out on a table. There is a serenity and tranquillity in this work not found elsewhere in the exhibition.

Similarly, the ‘butterfly paintings’ made from butterfly wings in arrangements made to look like stained-glass windows are enchantingly beautiful and yet frightening when one considers the volume of living things sacrificed to create them. It seems that cruelty and poetry are reverses of the same coin.

This balance is everywhere in Hirst’s work and he seems continually concerned with the fragility of life; on entering In and Out of Love visitors are warned not to tread on the butterflies. But it can’t really be said that Hirst is for those of lyrical disposition. So go see Hirst for the thrills (for this is about as thrilling as contemporary art can get) and for the absurdity of a diamond skull and a menagerie of departed animals.