10 years pricking the art voodoo doll 2005-2015

Category: idiot art

Damien Hirst – Fish and a Failed Painter?

The following is part of a recent debate on facebook about Hirst’s Fish piece:
Matthew Collings included it in a Design album then contested its meaning especially with Paul Gladston. I joined in at this point.

hirst_swimming
Isolated Elements Swimming in the Same Direction for the Purpose of Understanding: 1992

I would like to put to one side the contest between ‘modernistic’ thinking and the ‘deconstructive’ approach ( I simplifying here but a brief read through the blurb for Mr Gladston’s book Art History after Deconstruction suggests he believes that it a false dichotomy and that deconstruction is essential to all art history (I am sure he will put me right if that a glib analysis). If we are looking at formal principles only then the most striking element for me is that firstly this piece is a reworking of the shark (1991-2) with smaller items which also echoes pharmacy and secondly that the fish selected are not native British species at all which suggests they imported. Lacking definitive knowledge of this ( the Gordon Burn book doesn’t tell) suggests that there is no order or meaning in the fish of themselves apart from a slightly exotic selection.

The Burn book shows that Hirst basically failed as a painter (he exhibited cardboard boxes covered in household paint at Freeze in docklands before he switched tack entirely)- the spot paintings revamped a Schwitters influenced colour collage phase he went through on Goldsmiths M.A. before leaping into the contained sculptures specifically the head and flies.

lekaythisismybody-1987

John LeKay. This is my body, this is my blood. 1987

John LeKay who Hirst finally met in 1992 had been doing similar work throughout mid- eighties and from then on Hirst pretty much apprenticed himself to LeKay in intellectual terms. A quick look through LeKay’s catalogue shows a far more interesting and thought out set of works. Indeed Hirst interviews LeKay in PIG magazine (LeKay’s magazine) and it master and pupil in tone. Hirst himself describes the change asputting a fucking box round everything after Cornell ( which where pharmacy taken from) .

Seen through the lens of a painter who influenced by Patrick Heron who was berated at Goldsmiths one can see that Hirst has never really succeeded in that area and that the spot paintings and swirls come from that and his lack of confidence as a painter…ending in the farcical Courtauld show which pretty much showed his ability starkly. However as a barrow boy he was fly enough to see that spectacle was required and he would fail with the paint/collage approach.. also those around him were succeeding in sculpture not painting and that what he provided. I agree with Matthew’s take on exhibitionism and display he tapped into a spectacular increase in office and retail space the Thatcher legacy of service and supply to me Hirst is a perfect analogy for an economy going through final post-empire convulsions. Just like his ‘fucking boxes’ the docklands he used for Freeze was contained and shipped and finally empty again LeKay and Hirst in that interview in Pig

  • Damien Hirst: The work seems on the one hand to be very chaotic and on another level very organized
  • John LeKay replies Well there is a definite order in chaos and an indefinite chaos comes out of order,  is that what you mean? PIG 1993

Alone Yet Together containing 100 fish   was created in 1993 and to me is a perfect example of organized chaos there is no order but that is presented in an ordered way hence the same direction. It could have been worms or birds..I even suspect that visual readings are irrelevant and that Hirst may have placed dark against light..etc but in the end does that really matter as the fish were probably sourced randomly even random placement can create harmonies just like collage.. It my belief that without Thatcherism….Saatchi and Craig Martin Hirst would be a provincial colourist of minor repute now but he surfed in on a flood of post Hong Kong money and power shifts. He will never be able to paint ….he could however put stuff in boxes.

Parts of the piece were broken up and sold individually so that to me negates any more profound structural approach and fits with his minimalist approach to effort.. http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/news/hirst-hopes-to-revolutionise-art-market-with-golden-calf-851034.html?action=Gallery&ino=3

Hirst himself from Idler..

  • HIRST: What I really like is minimum effort for maximum effect. Like with Picasso’s Bull’s Head a bike seat and handlebars making up the bull’s head. Such a brilliant thing because it takes that tiny amount of effort to create .

Hirst gave a fish shop in Leeds a fish. It was two years before Damien won the Turner Prize [in 1995] when he was just beginning to be a bit known.
We saw some publicity about a work of his, a whole lot of fish titled Isolated Elements Swimming in the Same Direction and we joked that it would be nice to get something like that for the shop.

That was a Trevally.. a Pacific predator. The unusual thing about the collection is they not the usual tropical fish ..has anybody analysed their types and reason he used them? The Shark was ordered and caught probably through Joplin maybe these were ordered too.

There were two cabinets source art newspaper online: –

  • In 1991, the same year in which he made his original shark, Hirst did a series of sister works of fish in formaldehyde, which are amongst his most elegant natures mortes
  • Isolated Elements Swimming in the Same Direction for the Purpose of Understanding, for example, consists of six rows of individually encased fish in two cabinets and was once described as a static ballet in an absurd movement toward nowhere.The first formaldehyde work to be shown in London (in a group show at the Serpentine), it too was purchased by Saatchi, travelled with ‘Sensation’, and then was bought back by Hirst in a £6m-for-12-works deal in 2004.
  • Hirst continues to produce exquisite works of suspended fish. One of the most dignified pieces in the ‘Beautiful’ sale was a cruciform stainless steel cabinet containing fish skeletons on one side and fish in formaldehyde on the other. However, the ‘Beautiful’ sale also contained a near replica of the iconic Isolated Elements wall-piece titled Can’t Live With You, Can’t Live Without You. It had 12 shelves rather than six and the fish were smaller but, formally, it was the same work.
barnum.jpg

again Hirst puts it beautifully

  • Am I a sculptor who wants to be a painter,he asks, or a cynical artist who thinks painting is now reduced to nothing more than a logo?..

Sorry Matthew but I firmly believe in the second statement :-)

source: Sarah Thornton http://www.theartnewspaper.com/article.asp?id=16269

In and out of love with Damien Hirst | The Art Newspaper

www.theartnewspaper.com

Craft V Concept 2: In conversation with Wayne Burrows and Jezz Noond

SDB
The Goldsmiths show was too painful to watch all way through – did any of them show a high level of thinking and making? I doubt it….a bad idea (e.g.rainbow jumpers) however well made remains a bad idea but a genius concept badly executed is equally dodgy…a certain shark and tank come to mind….( only that wasn’t genius just advertising).

WB

The thing that gets forgotten (on both sides) is that an idea, a concept, is itself something that requires a high level of craft to produce: look at the elegance in the work of Duchamp, Joseph Kosuth or Sarah Lucas, for example, or the craft that goes into something like Spiral Jetty. An idea is something that needs to be *made* in exactly the same way a pot or painting is.

SDB

Indeed there is internal ‘elegance’ just as there is in say a beautiful theorem..or passage of music..however the point I trying to make is that in my opinion it is ‘honed’ through contact with its formal ‘construction’…the elegance of the Duchamp (apart from readymades?), Lucas and Smithson occurs in its creation? Ideas free of these constraints… See more are swimming around us in the artworld these days and the constraint has gone….thus inelegant and in some cases just poor and flabby….my thesis is it is the contest between thought and form that creates beauty..back to aesthetics…away from pure immature philosophising…

how many ‘great ideas’ badly made have we seen lately….how many bad ideas well made probably even less 🙁

Jez Noond

Spiral jetty is an elegant ‘concept’ and ‘thing’, but its construction will have been necessarily brutal.I think Cragg’s work kinda gets the balance right too.

SDB

will check but I was thinking there must have been quite a few drawings or blueprints? Then a lot of bulldozers you are right..see here http://www.robertsmithson.com/drawings/spiral_jetty_300.htm

JN

oh yeah – but the bulldozers are part of the elegant conception of the piece – the elegant thinking…
The relationship between Oldenburg’s maquettes, drawings, notes and final large pieces is interesting. Although, I think most of his final big pieces are failures. Batcolumn is about the best. With him, I think its all in the drawing anyway.
I have a tiny book of his drawings (Notes in Hand, 1971) – theres a page in there I’ve looking at for over … See more30 years (jesus!) – his design for the NYPD uniform – its basically a clowns outfit…heres a link to another page:
http://www.nqpaofu.com/2002imgs/oldenburg-notes2-386.jpg

WB

Maybe I think of it from the perspective of a writer, ie: the concept and the medium of language are materials in themselves, and shaping them into ideas is craft as much as hammering bronze or manipulating paint on canvas is. Hence an idea has form, shape and craft. I’d say Duchamp, Kosuth and Lucas all do this in the making as well as conception… See more… in Lucas, the way a thing is made supports the idea behind it perfectly, in Duchamp the level of craft in Etants Donee or Female Fig leaf is very high indeed. Where would you place folk arts or unconventional painters like Lowry or Dounier Rousseau? Does the failing in correct perspective and technique undermine the work, or become the source of its appeal? Where do you place someone like Tapies – amazing craftsmanship at the service of an illusion of complete informality…same thing with a fine painter using automatist methods, or a current trompe l’oeil artist like Susan Collis.

SDB

I’d class any naive artist as having intuitive craftsmanship…I wouldn’t use ‘failing’ to describe their art more a pre rennaisance sense of space.

Collis is a very interesting example though as she is using conventional notions of ‘craft’ to create objects that deny that craftmanship but surely the beauty there is in their actual precision despite their nondescript illusionism?

To me it similar to the exquisite beauty of the Blashka natural history exhibits which more than just illustrations but to me are art in their own right…….

http://www.ucd.ie/blaschka/dublin_coll.htm

WB

In that sense, then, the idea of craft as it’s usually defined (in a rather limited way) is as flexible as that of the ideas themselves…I agree on the Blashka glass pieces, scientific models, and art, at the same time. But what if I then took a ‘non-art’ object like a Blashka model (or an x-ray, or NASA mapping of the surface of Venus) and represented is as art, in some other context: does that nullify the craft of the object being shown? An example of someone who does this beautifully is Cornelia Parker – her craft is often in the matching of techniques to ideas and concepts (often philosophical or poetic rather than formal), and much lies in the way she frames and presents the objects she finds. This to me is where the idea that there’s an inherent distinction between craft and conceptualism comes apart – there are just good and bad examples of art using both (or neither), but rarely only one or the other.

SDB

I saw the silver pans piece by Parker at Tate and I’d say she fits neatly into the Cragg assemblage process methodology. i.e. she is using common implements, objects but assembles in a precise and ‘crafted’ way. I’d compare that with Mr Hirst’s really rather boring and aesthetically dull medicine cabinet where placement is immaterial…..might as well visit Boots…

Also Hirst’s ‘spun’ paintings show little craft as any fool ( and he employed people to be his fool) could and did do it….ditto Warhol….is he a craftsman?

He certainly came from a craft/design background which shows in what he ‘allowed’ others to print for him. There a degree of afore-thought there which some neo-conceptualists heaping there retro objects together haphazardly sadly lack…

Warhol is the defining moment for me in this debate. He instigated the Fordism model as he came from an advertising background. Look at a Ruscha, Dine, Johns etc and you still in fine art and craft tradition …after Warhol it’s hell in a handcart for that tradition despite people like Hoyland, Stella and Smithson et al hanging on for dear life.

p.s. Tapies……I visited his foundation in Barcelona and there not a drip or molecule of sand that isn’t crafted in that work. Like Bacon’s ‘accidents’ every slippage is selected/ processed and thought through…..hence its calm beauty.

My problem is with works that assemble, display with a complete disregard to these ‘aesthetics’ and I could name a lot of ‘contemporary’ work that slips into this category especially amongst the college leaver crowd and my contention is that to undo somethign one first has to understand how it can be done.

I saw the silver pans piece by Parker at Tate and I’d say she fits neatly into the Cragg assemblage process methodology. i.e. she is using common implements, objects but assembles in a precise and ‘crafted’ way. I’d compare that with Mr Hirst’s really rather boring and aesthetically dull medicine cabinet where placement is immaterial…..might as well visit Boots…

Also Hirst’s ‘spun’ paintings show little craft as any fool ( and he employed people to be his fool) could and did do it….ditto Warhol….is he a craftsman?

He certainly came from a craft/design background which shows in what he ‘allowed’ others to print for him. There a degree of afore-thought there which some neo-conceptualists heaping there retro objects together haphazardly sadly lack…. See more

Warhol is the defining moment for me in this debate. He instigated the Fordism model as he came from an advertising background. Look at a Ruscha, Dine, Johns etc and you still in fine art and craft tradition …after Warhol it’s hell in a handcart for that tradition despite people like Hoyland, Stella and Smithson et al hanging on for dear life.

p.s. Tapies……I visited his foundation in Barcelona and there not a drip or molecule of sand that isn’t crafted in that work. Like Bacon’s ‘accidents’ every slippage is selected/ processed and thought through…..hence its calm beauty.

My problem is with works that assemble, display with a complete disregard to these ‘aesthetics’ and I could name a lot of ‘contemporary’ work that slips into this category especially amongst the college leaver crowd and my contention is that to undo something one first has to understand how it can be done.

I saw the silver pans piece by Parker at Tate and I’d say she fits neatly into the Cragg assemblage process methodology. i.e. she is using common implements, objects but assembles in a precise and ‘crafted’ way. I’d compare that with Mr Hirst’s really rather boring and aesthetically dull medicine cabinet where placement is immaterial…..might as well visit Boots…

Also Hirst’s ‘spun’ paintings show little craft as any fool ( and he employed people to be his fool) could and did do it….ditto Warhol….is he a craftsman?

He certainly came from a craft/design background which shows in what he ‘allowed’ others to print for him. There a degree of afore-thought there which some neo-conceptualists heaping there retro objects together haphazardly sadly lack…. See more

Warhol is the defining moment for me in this debate. He instigated the Fordism model as he came from an advertising background. Look at a Ruscha, Dine, Johns etc and you still in fine art and craft tradition …after Warhol it’s hell in a handcart for that tradition despite people like Hoyland, Stella and Smithson et al hanging on for dear life.

p.s. Tapies……I visited his foundation in Barcelona and there not a drip or molecule of sand that isn’t crafted in that work. Like Bacon’s ‘accidents’ every slippage is selected/ processed and thought through…..hence its calm beauty.

My problem is with works that assemble, display with a complete disregard to these ‘aesthetics’ and I could name a lot of ‘contemporary’ work that slips into this category especially amongst the college leaver crowd and my contention is that to undo somethign one first has to understand how it can be done.

e.g. Picasso and Braque….

WB

Would tend to agree about the Warhol line, not because it’s ‘conceptual’ instead of ‘crafted’ (there is craft in the silkscreen process, just not Warhol’s own, by and large – and his 1950s illustration and advertising work is beautifully made in a very traditional sense) but because the concepts are usually fairly thin, and the work itself rather ‘… Seem more flat’, with no great physical presence (I’d except his early – late 60s films from this, to some extent, as these are genuinely original as films – not necessarily as ‘art’ – and more philosophically interesting than his paintings – Kitchen, Chelsea Girls, the Screen Tests etc). Similar feelings about Hirst – the craft is there, but he buys it in, and the finished works are hit and miss – in any room of 25 or 30 Hirsts, there’ll be 3 or 4 really good pieces, enough that you can’t completely dismiss him, not enough to suggest consistency or even a single ruling concept, of the kind you find in Warhol. Don’t agree that Warhol destroys that tradition of crafted making, though – whether you like their work or not, during the Britart years, for every Hirst there was a Glenn Brown or Jenny Saville, and for every bad conceptual, video and installation based work, there are others that are more interesting and much stronger – yes, not sure about some of the more obviously Warhol-influenced types who’ve been around, and the Pop Life show of post-Warhol stuff at Tate Modern demonstrated the weakness of much in that line – but draw up another list of concept-led artists like Jeremy Deller, Roger Hiorns, Anya Gallaccio, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Annette Messager, Susan Hiller, John Newling, David Hammons and even some of the better (Archimbolodo-influenced) work by Noble & Webster and you’ll find a lot more craft in both the ideas and the making than I think the simple distinction of ‘conceptual’ and ‘crafted’ tries to suggest. But crucially, maybe, it’s the work coming from the poetic and surrealist lines of descent within modernism, or those with strong links to full-strength philosophical investigation, that do this most consistently…
Wayne Burrows is editor of STAPLE magazine and a poet

http://wayneburrows.wordpress.com

Jezz Noond is a short short story writer currently on a creative writing course at Nottingham University he plays a mean bull fiddle

Damien Hirst revealed as bad painter….

Fake artists, patient fake academics..a sad low, doctor dishonest decade (to paraphrase Auden) of infantile, greedy pseudo intellectuals…
and here the best of them all…greedy bankers, brit artists, mps expenses….spot the difference?

I can’t stop laughing at Hirst’s ‘paintings’ what next Tracy Emin starts on bronze-casting? can’t wait….to hell with the whole sad bunch of fakes….

Almost every review shows him up as a fake but this beautifully precise in its derision….

http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2009/oct/18/damien-hirst-no-love-lost

If you’re going to ‘quote’ Bacon Damien at least try and do it well not like a clumsy sixth former who been reading too many Salvador Dali books ..