This past October, the super-famous, 13-foot, 22-ton formaldehyded shark (“created” in 1991 by a British supernova in the art world, Damien Hirst, when he was a mere babe) blessed with the brilliant surreal title The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living came to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for a three-year visit. Director Philippe de Montebello welcomed the shark to the museum by saying, “It should be especially revealing and stimulating to confront this work in the context of the entire history of art” — which was a way of washing his hands of the entire matter.
Now comes Hirst’s newest work, School: The Archeology of Lost Desires, Comprehending Infinity, and the Search for Knowledge, a morbid (literally) menagerie in the lobby of Lever House in midtown Manhattan, on view through February 16, 2008. (In Carol Vogel’s International Herald Tribune review of the exhibition, there’s a good picture of the artist seated in front of his work in the Lever House lobby.)
Consisting of one small, dead shark, 30 dead sheep, two sides of beef, 300 sausages, a dead dove — all floating in tanks of preservative — and two live, chirping parakeets in a cage, the Lever House piece was commissioned by Aby Rosen, an art collector and real-estate developer who owns Lever House, and Alberto Mugrabi, a Manhattan art dealer.
I’m an abstract painter with ferociously narrow taste. And I’m squeamish when it comes to killing animals and eating meat (I can subsist for days on nothing but peanuts and wine). I make it a point, however, to see notoriously edgy art like Hirst’s. Actually, I saw my first Hirst shark in the early 1990s, at Larry Gagosian’s gallery (before it went from rich to mega-rich and moved to Chelsea). At the time, there was so much hype about the shark that crowds waiting to see it stood in line outside the gallery.
Over the intervening years, I’ve reached some conclusions about Hirst’s art. First, there’s nothing lastingly or deeply controversial about it. Mass culture’s embrace of offensive or taboo subject matter has made controversial art, as I understood it back in the 60s and 70s, an almost quaint idea. Second, Hirst’s protestations that he is “preoccupied with life, not death,” to the contrary, the guy needs to get a life — or at least get a bit of life into his art. He’s obsessively morbid and looking at his art is like walking into the coroner’s lab on Law & Order. Hirst makes art for people whose senses are deadened. There have been artists who have had death on their minds — Bacon, Grunewald, Munch — but they move us not by appealing to our morbidity, but to our mortality. Finally, Hirst has too much money at his disposal (the Lever House exhibition cost around a million just to install). A lone pickled shark is astonishing; dozens of dead pickled animals are tedious.
Here’s an exegesis (heavily borrowed from the Lever House press release) of Hirst’s most recent installation: The hairless, headless sheep carcasses, lying inside clear glass tanks with plastic tubes feeding into them, have been placed onto autopsy tables. They are a metaphor for deadened schoolchildren passively learning their lessons in a technologically driven age. Lining the glass lobby of Lever House are several medicine cabinets filled with empty medicine bottles—Hirst’s usual fare. These stand for the myriad ways in which modern man fights off death.
The clocks above the medicine cabinets are all running backwards, reminding us that trying to turn back the clock is futile. In the tank containing the two sides of beef, Hirst makes direct allusions to the artists Francis Bacon and Magritte. There are obvious references to other modern artists throughout the installation. All of them pay tribute to the history of modern art. (By the way, in case you’re wondering, Hirst says he didn’t kill anything for his art—that “everything was destined for food.”)
The exhibition, it turns out, is about the spiritual crisis of modern human beings. The art, alas, looks as if it’s part and parcel of that crisis. Paul Cézanne said it all much better. Walking into the countryside to paint a landscape, he stopped to ponder a soap factory that was under construction. “Life,” he said, “is terrifying.”
