Damien on Damien on Damien - The Analysis
What follows are a few observations about this video. I shall be analysing it alongside Julian Stallabrass’s book ‘High Art Lite: The Rise and Fall of Young British Art’ to demonstrate that many of the concerns and features of Hirst’s art, as highlighted by Stallabrass, are present in the video.
In doing so I hope that Lawrence Lessig’s notion of remix video culture as a new, important and meaningful form of literacy comes into play and that what follows might help us to understand more fully what he is talking about and how it might fit into art criticism.
The analysis will generally be structured thematically except in the first instance where I shall begin at the beginning.
The video begins with a subject apparently central to Hirst’s art – death. Stallabrass is highly suspicious of the mortality theme in Hirst’s work, considering it to occur in only the most vaguest sense, ‘Mortality is a big subject, but simply to say that a work of art gets you to think about it is a small claim.’ Hirst is well known for this pronouncements on death. One need only look in the current issue of Flash Art (Vol. XLIII No. 273) in which he says, “Anything that you can’t avoid, I want to confront in my work. And that’s probably the biggest of all these things.” for evidence. Hirst has now been trotting out the same bland, non-committal statements for twenty years.
Damien Hirst - Away From The Flock
The effect of all this, the installations which supposedly relate to human mortality, (but are invariably comprised of animal carcasses) and his dubious death related utterances, is to trivialise the issue. Hence the opening of the video in which he refers to himself as being “90% death”, a device which makes a mockery of those utterances as well as reducing the concept of death to a humorous mathematical abstraction.
After this opening the video largely pays little attention to the death theme, except for one instance where Hirst talks about his legacy and crucifying himself. This takes Hirst’s questionable death cult to its absurd conclusion trivialising the notion of death in terms of Christian redemption where he contrives to present himself as the saviour of man. However as I will argue later, this section of the video contains other implications of more importance and that it relates to Hirst’s suspect preoccupation with death is of less significance. So, I argue, the video disposes with the death theme fairly rapidly, considering it to be somewhat of a red herring, and moves straight into the nitty gritty of Stallabrass’s interpretation.
Stallabrass’s central argument is that Hirst is essentially an effective media figure. His art is so entwined with his reputation as a celebrity – his perceived drunken antics and vigorous socialising, as well as his work being instantly accessible for reproduction in style magazines – that it is drained of meaning and merely becomes a sign of his media life. In all this the art is lost as what becomes important are drug and drink fuelled anecdotes taking place in this or that trendy bar. As is well known the Groucho Club was Hirst’s favourite hang out. Furthermore Hirst explicitly courted celebrity by associating himself with celebrities. When Hirst appeared in the mainstream media he was invariably named checked with Alex James from Blur and Keith Allen. This too meant the art was relegated to the status of wandering indeterminately in between lines of cocaine, VIP sections and Sunday supplements.
Hence the video proceeds along these lines. There is one instance where an actual artwork appears – a work from the ‘Blue Paintings’ series – but apart from that Hirst is presented as a media figure with the work appearing only incidentally. For the most part the footage is from television or news interviews and Damien’s face is the all encompassing, inescapable focus. The video is unequivocal; what is important is what he looks like, says and does. We need only consider the art as an visual analogue to the media image. Stallabrass mentions this aspect of Hirst’s media image citing a Time Magazine article in which “a full-page illustration was devoted, not to any work of art, but to an iconic image of of the artist with shaven head, sucking on a fag”.
The video is peppered with celebrity references. Damien talks of being “on holiday with Bono in the south of France” and name checks Prince and Mick Jagger, saying “he liked one piece that I made”. In the case of Jagger the name isn’t just checked but directly related to the work, the implication being that celebrity validates the work. Indeed Hirst precedes Jagger’s name with the words “what I need is…”, suggesting that celebrity is a requirement of the work. The choice of celebrities here is also significant. Bono and Mick Jagger are two of the most famous people on the planet and the video ridicules Hirst’s vacuous celebrity pretensions whilst mocking the relatively insignificant celebrity of James and Allen. The shallow quality of Hirst and his celebrity seeking art is further emphasized by his engagement with that most banal of leisure pursuits, the Mediterranean holiday .
Damien Hirst - The Sleep of Reason
Stallabrass demonstrates that the themes of YBA in general are thoroughly connected to the concerns of the mass media. The work often takes as its source sensationalist mass media interpretations “of death or drugs or sex or junk culture”. So the video shows Hirst boasting about doing “enough drugs to last a lifetime”, a satire on media preoccupations about the quantities of drugs people, especially celebrities consume, whilst also being a reference to Hirst’s medicine cabinets which also play on that same theme.
Sex is not a theme terribly visible in Hirst’s art. To suggest that his insect pieces, in which flies for example, are born and then die are in some way about sex is shaky to say the least. In any case this reading can probably be dismissed due to its distance from mass media interpretations of sex. So whilst sex is not a theme specifically of Hirst’s art it is feature of YBA art and therefore finds its place in the video. When Hirst entreats some identical twins to ‘phone him up’ he is immediately evoking tabloid obsessions with sexual perversion. ‘Artist in three in a bed twin romp’ might very well be the newspaper headline. A more overt example comes where Hirst says he would like to see ‘three boys shagging’, conjuring up the nightmarish tabloid fixation with paedophilia.
Another vague theme running through Hirst’s art is religion, Heckler and Cosh being the prime example where a series of bull’s heads have the name of one of Christ’s disciples under them. (Judas appears in the black frame, the others white). Quite what this is actually supposed to mean is unclear but it contains in it notions of blasphemy and poking fun at Christian mythology, concerns quite appropriate to the mass media. Take for example the media furore over Jerry Springer the Opera and it’s near obsessive interest in the image of Jesus in increasingly ridiculous places – on a slice of toast, on some pancakes, in the hair of a dog.
Hence in the video Hirst is seen to take this media centric view of religion to its satirical conclusion where he plans to crucify himself – somewhat shocking but mostly amusing. Both the artwork and video display religion as it is portrayed in the media, in the artwork’s case to reduce it to farmyard quaintness, in the videos case to elevate it to grandiose stupidity. The effect is the same.
For Stallabrass a defining characteristic of 1990’s British art in general is a profound ambivalence to its subject matter from the artists. Hirst is no exception “in seeking only to present, never to comment.” The effect of this is to claim ambiguity as a virtue of the work. Hirst’s ambivalence is manifest in the video trough his repetitious ‘uming’ which makes up much of the first quarter. Incapable or unwilling to make any detailed observations about his work, the artist is reduced to a series incoherent noises. The fact that these ‘um’s’ take up so much of the video is testament to how central ambiguity is to Hirst’s work.
It is entirely proper therefore that the ‘ums’ in the video can be read a number of ways. A feature of Hirst’s work, particularly his canvas output, is repetition. It is however a specific form of repetition of which the spin and spot paintings are prime examples. Stallabrass explains, “Both sets of paintings [spin and spot] are collectible items in an endlessly variable series, not editions but unique works that are nevertheless manifestations of a single idea”. It is a tendency of his art that an idea is rolled out ad nauseum in a standard format with minor variation between each individual piece. The ‘ums’ in the video replicate this repetition, with each one slightly different from the last. Hirst can make these noises indefinitely until he reaches total dilution. The fact that these ‘ums’ also represent the ambiguity of his work make them all the more resonant.
Damien Hirst - Beautiful Cyclonic Bleeding Slashing Hurricane Dippy Cowards Painting
The ‘ums’ are also part of the Hirst’s media characterization. Stallabrass notices a trend in which Hirst is presented, and presents himself, as “one of life’s innocents”. His continual ‘umming’ is symptomatic of this trend. This idea is further emphasized at the end of the video where Hirst considers it an important point that books “all look the same”. Stallabrass continues by characterizing Hirst not only as a ‘mental innocent’ but as a ‘class primitive’, his accent being one register of this trend but also his mention of ‘a mill up north’.
Hirst is often seen criticizing his own work – accepting, even emphasizing a negative reading claiming this to be a virtue of the work. Stallabrass singles out Hirst’s comments on the titling of his work as an example: “I really like these long, clumsy titles which try to explain something but end up making matters worse, leaving huge holes for interpretation”. This Stallabrass notes this is a “claim to originally”. Now if Hirst is after originality through criticizing his own work, this finds its logical conclusion in the video where he unequivocally states the atrociousness of his art: “I hate that more than anything” and “abhorration (sic)”. And yet this passage of the video also plays on the constant ambiguous posturing of Hirst. Mixed in with all the negation Hirst says “completely amazing, one of the greatest” referring to his own work. This is a well known strategy deployed Hirst – deliberately contradicting himself to force the burden of interpretation on the viewer. This strategy may find approval from those who wish to claim the genius of Hirst but in the video it is presented as facile and banal, on the one hand he says his work is excellent on the other he says it is terrible.
The myth of Hirst the businessman is a well known characterization which has its roots in mass media interpretations of his persona. This interpretation is less about the art itself, the theme of money and its relation to the art world, is a topic absent from Hirst’s work and has more to do with the artist’s constructed media personality. Damien is a successful artist we hear, because he is a good salesman. Hence Hirst as businessman is essentially a subsection of Hirst as celebrity. As Stallabrass notes the work is “reduced to the status of a corporate logo” where what is of interest to the media is how much brand Hirst is worth. This of course reached its peak with the media furore over For the Love of God and you get the impression from Hirst that he sees his art in specifically monetary terms. Spend a lot of money making something and you will produce something of greater value or the ‘money makes money’ credo is essentially the idea behind much of Hirst’s work.
Damien Hirst - For the Love of God
There are references to this side of Hirst in the video. When Hirst talks about his legacy he says he would like to be remembered as a businessman, adding “of course” as if this is self-evident. The repetition of the word ‘money’ describes Hirst’s infatuation. To simply repeat the word suggests someone uninterested in the function of money but rather its obsessive collection. Hirst is essentially an investor in his own brand – pouring money in with the considered zeal of a venture capitalist in the knowledge he will increase his profit margin. The video parodies Hirst’s obsession with money and yet it is not beyond the realms of possibility that Hirst actually and naively considers himself a businessman first and an artist second.
There is also a sense that the business theme when coupled with the crucifixion idea relates to Stallabrass’s point regarding the “death (and resurrection of the author)” where the content of Hirst’s work is lost through its constant replication in the media and is then followed by the resurrection of the artist as a pure media figure in which the art functions as a cipher of the personality. The crucifixion is a clear expression of this theme and in the video is coupled with Hirst claiming he is a businessman which, as we have seen is a part of his media profile. Here Hirst elucidates exactly Stallabrass’s point – the author dies and is resurrected as a celebrity, immune from all the tedious necessities such as interpretation, responsibility and accountability.
I end with a point regarding the mechanics of the video and the means of production of Hirst’s work. Stallabrass’s notes that the vacuous quality of Hirst’s art is a consequence of the method of its manufacture: “This emptiness [in Hirst’s work] is a product of the simple collage of ready-made elements, brought together not to build meaning but to throw opposed ingredients into unresolved opposition”. The video is after all just that, a ‘simple collage of ready-made elements’, which, on the surface ‘throw opposed ingredients into unresolved opposition’. That it mimics Hirst’s actual works lends it and extra layer of parody and seen from a critical perspective is contrary to the emptiness of Hirst’s art in that it does indeed ‘build meaning’. Here it is meaning of an analytical type.
So much of Stallabrass’s interpretation is mirrored in the video. That is not to say that the video does justice to the text, indeed much is omitted, but I argue there is at least some potential in the remix video format to be part of art criticism generally. A big question however is whether the remix video can stand alone as a valid form of writing in the world of art criticism or whether it will always need some form of textual support. When Lessig talks about this video and says it’s more powerful than any op-ed in the New York Times we know exactly what he is talking about. The problem comes in that describing art is so much more complicated than describing politics and to produce critical and meaningful remix videos for contemporary art might prove beyond the medium unless it’s accompanied by some form of textual justification.
The only way to find out is to keep producing them.
N.B. The text is not properly referenced. In its current form it is meant as an exploratory text which I intend to develop further in due course.
