In the darkest hour there may be light
"In the darkest hour there may be light" by Emily Falvey, Summer 2007, p. 80
Damien Hirst is best known as the artist and curator who effectively launched the YBA (Young British Artists) phenomenon. After a decade of almost mythic personal financial gain from sales of his art, Hirst has also become an ambitious art collector. He recently presented a selection from his “murderme” collection at the Serpentine Gallery in London. The exhibition—whose title Hirst derived from a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale—ultimately represents the artist’s desire to laugh in the face of death. Indeed, the cover of the catalogue features a tattoo of the Grim Reaper designed by the artist Banksy, who has replaced the traditional skull with one of those ubiquitous yellow smiley faces.
Included among the more than 1,000 pieces in Hirst’s collection are substantial works by the 20th-century icons Andy Warhol and Francis Bacon, as well as his YBA compatriots and younger contemporary art stars. Of the 60 works on display at the Serpentine, some of the best were by Angus Fairhurst and Sarah Lucas, whose sarcastic, sexually precocious subversions of the everyday are brilliant. Also worth mentioning are Banksy’s Modified Oil Painting No. 7 (2004), a found, kitschy landscape painting into which he has cleverly inserted police barricade tape and an appeal for witnesses, and Tim Lewis’s fascinating automated sculpture Mechanic (2006), which uses a strobe light to create the illusion of a tiny figure running on a treadmill.
As a whole, though, the exhibition was a bit of a mess, which may be in keeping with much of the work, which, like its collector, seems largely obsessed with death and dismemberment. That said, the works were awkwardly crammed into the space and, in some cases, became almost illegible. John Isaacs’s surreal installation The Incomplete History of Unknown Discovery (1998) was displayed in a room with works by Jeff Koons, Sarah Lucas and Andy Warhol. The large work features three alarmingly realistic latex chunks of bloody whale flesh, which lie on the floor in front of a video projection of people standing on a subway car. At the Serpentine, however, the projection was reduced to a 20- inch TV monitor.
Interviewed by the Serpentine co-director Hans Ulrich Obrist for the exhibition catalogue, Hirst described his collection: “It’s like stuff washed up on a beach somewhere, and that somewhere is you. Then when you die, it all gets washed away again.” This haphazard, rather avant-garde approach to collecting is slightly at odds with Hirst’s lifestyle (he owns a Gothic mansion in the Cotswolds), which rests on a personal fortune estimated at between $50 and $100 million. Infatuated with the relationship between money and death, Hirst frequently uses expressions like “you can’t take it with you” and “there are no pockets in a shroud.”
Not cursed with modesty, Hirst once told a journalist that “I’m operating at the top end of the art world…So I can come in and you’re not going to think ‘It’s a fucking birthday card’. So I can take a birthday card and re-represent it to you, and you’re gonna go, ‘Fucking hell, that’s gotta be important if it’s been put here’.”
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